fmvab

I agree it's on the journalist -- just wondering which statement is most suspected to be untrue.

Which part is false?

As someone who’s changed careers, I value HN for the wide variety of intellectual topics and often insightful commentary. I think in recent years it’s actually moved further away from the ‘$N raised by $X from $Y to build A for B’ headlines that I used to hate. It still takes some digging to find stuff I like, but not long. The classic web1 design helps.

Every community on the internet has its problems. Every community has its own circlejerk customs. And n-gate.com is all that needs to be said about HN’s problems (hope he comes back).

I’d be curious to hear from people here about other communities or news aggregators of the same quality or better

I’d say that’s a feature but what I’m talking about is real in-use projects

What’s your counterexample?

Another point I’d add: isn’t it telling that we haven’t come up with use cases for crypto that aren’t in some way speculation in the last decade plus?

This is literally addressed in the second paragraph:

In electromagnetism and most other fields of physics, imaginary numbers are merely a mathematical convenience. All the relevant phenomena can still be described using nothing but real numbers.

Perhaps the outcome was better for Britain in the end, but I object to glorifying Soros on the grounds that his intentions were clearly to take money out of the system, and breaking the pound with a coordinated attack just doesn’t seem very ethical.

I also think that when people characterize moves like this as ‘brilliant’ it does a disservice to the word. I think many folks, if they tuned their attention to opportunities like this, had the big name firms in their Rolodex, and had questionable ethics, could have made this move. Maybe I’m missing it, but this seems like a pretty straightforward way to take advantage of the system.

“If it hadn’t been exploited by this person, someone else would have”

I’ve only ever heard this line of reasoning used to justify something unethical.

And in the case of software, we don’t admire the black-hat hackers that take advantage of exploits, do we? In fact, in that case it’s not even legal…

I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted.

If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)

I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.

My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.

I do think so. I think wealth disparity has enabled intellectual folks to, very quickly, propel themselves into the upper class, by essentially being part of the money machine that keeps rich people rich (hedge funds, ads, etc.). I don’t have any data to support this but I believe this was literally impossible before some decades ago. Certainly was not available to Einstein.

More evidence: people literally write songs about wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. We live in a disgusting age.

My point is, it doesn't matter whether you or I consider it a "bad definition". To say that these things are not pyramid schemes "in any way" is unnecessarily pedantic and not useful considering the context (the implications of their terms of service).

Or really, any stimulants.

It comes from the office of the NYS attorney general. https://ag.ny.gov/consumer-frauds/pyramid-schemes

Please send them an email elucidating the finer points of what scheme is what.

‘A pyramid scheme is a fraudulent system of making money based on recruiting an ever-increasing number of "investors." The initial promoters recruit investors, who in turn recruit more investors, and so on. The scheme is called a "pyramid" because at each level, the number of investors increases. The small group of initial promotors at the top require a large base of later investors to support the scheme by providing profits to the earlier investors.’

Come on, many crypto projects don’t seem like this in any sense?

Okay, it may not be a pyramid scheme in the exact technical sense, but combined with the other items on the list, "get-rich-quick", etc., I think pump-and-dumping shitcoins counts, right?

Because there is money to be had, and people like money.

Wait, isn't that exactly a pyramid scheme?

Thank you — that is definitely encouraging. It doesn’t sound like a killer app yet but it certainly seems to establish deep learning’s place at least as part of a modern software stack.

I think this is unfair. Tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars have gone into deep learning and, as I understand it, most effort consists of scaling up this golden goose and presenting its "new" successes in the best light possible. Every time throwing scale at the problem produces an impressive result, billions more dollars flow in, thousands of more people are nudged into the field. We got the first orders of magnitude of scaling "free" from GPUs, but the rest are going to come at considerable cost.

Whether or not there is a better alternative, if deep learning is in fact as over-hyped as the author claims, this could be a tremendous waste of money and intellect that could be spent on literally anything else, not just machine learning (maybe they could put those resources into crypto instead /s). That alone is enough reason to want intellectually honest skeptical takes, whether or not the author has a better idea. In addition, within AI, it makes it much harder for people for people to do anything else.

If there is a contraction in the field it will likely cause another giant AI winter. Somebody should start thinking of a use for all that compute.

The internal combustion engine did not require as much of a drain on resources before it produced results. Is deep learning actually making significant amounts of money, funding and valuations excluded?

Can you provide more context on how MIT spent most of its integrity and soul to build its brand? I went to MIT over a decade ago and I always appreciated how honest, hardworking, and genuinely curious the student body was. Professors always seemed brilliant as well.

Haha. I thought this too but I can’t quite place my finger on it. What exactly made the protagonist so insufferable?