HN user
She's not wrong at all about her rhetorical implication (being, some information requires more than simple systems can provide), but she has concluded incorrectly that a car which does not know how to avoid a busy route is useless technology, or that the problem can only be solved by inventing life.
Well, yes, because the US government has staked the future of the country's GDP on AI. They're even divesting from science as a whole and putting it into data centers.
There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.
You don't have to be self-employed to have skin in the game, that's ridiculous.
How many op ed writers have tried to have skin in the game at all? How many of them produce writing which is actually high quality and not just concern trolling about China or what have you?
Taleb made a lot of money trading, his firm failed but running a successful business is not trivial and his ideas ended up working when he took up an advisory role rather than an executive role. Unlike other financial "influencers", he actually seems to understand mathematics to a high degree.
Hardly your typical economist op ed writer.
I will do this work for substantially less money, $200 per week.
Contact me agngel@proton.me
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
You know Palantir is not an LLM company, right? Their core product is just data integration systems.
There likely isn't a Canadian Alex Karp. Karp is a unique byproduct of American culture. The specific brand of arrogance, hunger for war, and callous disregard for human life, all in service of a right wing ideological project, is simply not as present in Canada because Canada is a middle power with more liberal values who prefer diplomacy over war.
We barely have a space industry, how are we meant to compete with starlink? We need foreign investment. We also need protections against foreign investment. We also need to uplift south africans left behind by apartheid. That is the purpose of the law.
You are just wrong, the law says the local partner must be economically productive, and starlink is allowed to choose them, so if they don't contribute to starlink's business, that is starlink's fault. This is now the second time I have told you this, so you are wilfully misunderstanding me. Conversation over.
Although your claim is literally untrue as the grid has been upgraded, the answer is: mostly the apartheid government. They left the ANC with a grid that served only 10% of the population, which makes it very difficult to upgrade, especially in a country with rampant poverty leading to cable theft, corruption, and general lack of infrastructure.
You can easily look up the lies he has made about white genocide, which even white south africans have debunked.
You accuse me of deception for arguing that, in a democracy, the law must be written by averages and not by a few individuals who want starlink. Ok.
I'm only addressing those points because you're showing some signals of bad faith conversation and general meanness so I don't want to respond to anything until I know you are good faith.
You are at this point purposefully trying to misunderstand me so you can let out your anger. Conversation is over, sorry.
No you misunderstand severely, some risks are unavoidable and unknowable. You need a telecommunications industry, you can't just eliminate all risks associated with it. So instead you make them pay a kind of insurance to operate in it, just in case the leader of the country you're allowing in one day decides to target your country (sound familiar?).
Of course, another goal is just to empower previously disenfranchised groups and contribute to the economy of South Africa.
Black people decide every few years by voting for representatives who uphold these policies. There has never been a motion supported by the majority of black south africans to get rid of B-BBEE, only foreign people like you seem to have a problem with it and that is because you don't understand what it is trying to do and you (probably) hate the idea of reparations for apartheid. Or at the very least you support aggressive pro-market policies that south africans do not want.
Additionally, the owner of Starlink hates South Africa (I never said black south africans, but you know), because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here.
Again, I never said it was zero sum, but thanks for being condescending. I said it was close to zero sum. Black south africans may get some jobs, maybe some internet, but the profit entirely goes to foreign entities and white south africans (in a theoretical model).
The law's intent was never to be racist, and while outcomes vary, the effect does not actually harm white south africans on average. So both the intent and the effect is non-racist.
Economic opportunity for black south africans is close to zero sum when all the profit goes to a foreign entity and white south africans.
Separately, kneecapping starlink does a lot for our country by preventing a man who hates us from abusing our laws and spying on our citizens.
It hedges national security risk by having 30% of the profits stay within South Africa, so that if the foreign company decides to use their company to, say, spy on South Africans, they at least have to fund our key industries to do so. That is why B-BBEE applies to Telecomms and other key industries.
Why don't you guys ever acknowledge that the law is an attempt to correct the racism of the apartheid government by distributing economic opportunities to those who never had them?
No, that had nothing to do with B-BBEE abuse.
It is easy to export electricity when you only need to serve 10% of the population.
Starlink is allowed to choose who they partner with. They will go through a lengthy process to pick partners that align with their business, including value propositions.
The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.
Problem of course is that a lot of this information is junk even at scale, which is how you get people "deciding" to pollute, destroy their own health, start wars, etc.
B-BEEE exists as a kind of "national security risk insurance", that is why it is only applied to sectors like Telecomms and Mining. So my statement is not incorrect.
This is misleading, Starlink does not need to provide "30% to the state", they only have to give 30% ownership to a local company with historically disenfranchised owners providing real economic value to South Africa. This can be a private company.
Starlink is a massive national security risk, and that is one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
It's also why Starlink has pushed so aggressively to establish itself in South Africa, going as far as to hold private meetings with the Democratic Alliance and even spamming their customers with emails urging them to put pressure on the government.
But you can just give computers to each of those millions of people and propagate the information, instead of having less reliable humans doing it? That's kind of what's already happening.
Why does it say your comment was made 2 days ago, when the thread has only been up for 6 hours?