alpha_squared

I don't think the parent is advocating adhering to their values, but instead just talking about the relativism of ethics and morality.

Society broadly cannot function without a shared set of morals (e.g. stealing sows discord which leads to anarchy, so we outlaw stealing). However, it can get quite complex and so there are infinitely many shades of grays. The base principal would still stand and you do your best to adhere to it in order to have a stable society.

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.

This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...

And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.

Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.

This is what therapy is for.

I'm not surprised, but what is surprising is we're now in a period in which the mask is slipping and no one seems to care enough to try to put it back on.

For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.

The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.

While I agree that you don't want to punish people for making bad decisions, I do think there should be a carveout for when those decisions impact people's lives.

The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.

Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.

It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.

xAI is making a killing on renting out its GPUs, way more than "just power"

What's your evidence for this? Because from the S-1, SpaceX is largely an internet service provider that happens to launch rockets and own xAI.

If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?

- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

This is exactly the point that keeps coming up that folks are struggling to grasp, myself included. How are you measuring this? It certainly makes me feel productive, but I'm not sure I can confidently say it has actually made me more productive. It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own. The only folks I've found who confidently claim it increases productivity appear to be online (and without evidence), because no one in person is willing to claim that and show it.

Granted, I only skimmed some high-line numbers, but isn't their only profitable project Starlink? SpaceX is functionally a satellite internet company that happens to make rockets.

Because from where I'm sitting it seems like you're just operating on hopes and feels.

I hate these flippant comments. Similarly, from where I'm sitting it seems you're struggling to disentangle revenue from profit.

Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?

It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.

It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.

You're mixing up the propaganda phrases, that's Russia's stance in Ukraine. Trump's is this is "an excursion", totally different things.

All the time? This morning when I dreaded getting up so early for work. Last night when I showered. The day before after playing some board games with friends. Normal people do introspect, despite the current fad among a few oddball elites in Silicon Valley [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-ph...

Because this is ultimately a beta service. The whole industry is.

I'm pretty sure this is an attempt by both companies to shape a reasonable finance story for their eventual IPO. They need to make this look a lot better than a pump and dump (raising on wild valuations then offloading onto public investors).

This is addressed elsewhere in the comments, but it appears this is actually a direct comparison to how Anthropic got their Mythos headline results.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732322

If we start from the position of the marketing hype and even Sam Altman's statements, these tools will "solve all of physics". To me it's laughable, but that's also what's driven their outsized valuations. Using the output to drive product decisions and development, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where a resulting product isn't fully vetted because of the constant corporate pressure to "move faster" and the unrealistic hype of "solve all of physics". This is similar to Tesla's situation of selling "Full Self-Driving" but it actually isn't in the way most people would understand that term and so they lost in court on how they market their autonomous driving features.

You're perfectly free to scrape the web yourself and train your own model.

Actually, not anymore as a result of OpenAI and Anthropic's scraping. For example, Reddit came down hard on access to their APIs as a response to ChatGPT's release and the news that LLMs were built atop of scraping the open web. Most of the web today is not as open as before as a result of scraping for LLM data. So, no, no one is perfectly free to scrape the web anymore because open access is dying.

You're talking about the metadata of the files, which can always be edited and someone will inevitably try to make software to do exactly that. Also, Adobe's proposal for handling generated content is exactly this and they're not able to get buy-in from other companies.

A couple things here:

1. This should have a 2022 tag

2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.

You can be laid off at small companies too. For example, a company may be running out of runway and it's looking increasingly likely the next round of funding will not materialize in time. It needs to control expenses and extend runway an extra 6 months, but everyone's a "top-performer". Who gets laid off? It's likely going to be those adding features (e.g. product folks), not those maintaining the business (accounting, devops). We can get into whether it's a good idea to kick off the death spiral for a company in that way, but my point is that no one is immune to layoffs, not at any scale, except maybe the founders.

Something tells me you haven't been laid off before. I think the overconfidence you're displaying here will be shattered if that were to happen. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if it does I hope you remember that you are not your job.

I've attempted to take your responses as made in good faith twice now, despite evidence to the contrary in other threads. I understand if this topic is uncomfortable for you, either because it challenges your world view or because it feels personally invalidating. It appears as though you're looking for one very specific statistic or logical vulnerability in what others are sharing to refute the overall claim. However, I can only lead you to water.

You don't see how an organization founded to enforce a cornerstone of white supremacy may have a statistical likelihood of its members being white supremacists?

The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves [0]. It's well-documented [1]. We can try to argue whether modern policing carries that tradition, but case [2] after documented case [3] keeps bearing out more of the same. It's been the topic of research [4] and pop culture [5].

[0] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rodney-King

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/

[5] https://genius.com/123154

Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

I'd argue that anything insightful or well-though-out doesn't use LLMs at all. We can quibble over whether discussions with an LLM lead to insightful responses, but that still isn't your own personal thought. Just type what's on your mind, it's not that hard and nitpicking over this is just looking for ways to open up unnecessary opportunities for abuse.

Was this because they were threatened with ~a fine~ being designated a supply chain risk?

Seems like it, yes.

From what I was reading, it appears that their tools were used outside the scope of their contract with DoD via Palantir's work that also used Claude. Anthropic freaked out, DoD freaked out that Anthropic freaked out and threatened to declare them a supply chain risk. That designation would've required any company that contracts with DoD to strip out any Anthropic tooling from their business in order to continue working with DoD. It was effectively designating Anthropic a terrorist organization.

I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.

The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?

All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.

it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.

I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.