And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms. Until then he's a hypocrite.
Isn't the view that people having extra homes used 5% of the time a very well-known and common criticism, and there has even been legislation enacted in a number of places to discourage or penalize such homes?
(For SF, it appears:
- Tax rates for >1 homes are higher under the Homeowners' Exemption
- There was also an 'Empty Homes Tax' but it was struck down by the court in Eric and Andrew Debbane v. San Francisco)
Context and amount matters deeply. People like Sam Altman often like to refer to utilitarian principles, when it helps further their goals. Whether that is really their true motivation can be seen in small things like whether they apply the same principles to the same decisions of their lifes.
So... San Francisco?
Maybe it is a wrong observation, but ideological consistency is less and less a thing these days.
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¹: Of course Sam Altman is the person who alone can judge what RAM ought to be used for so it is in all our best interest /s
Not by Sam Altman, surely. Hypocrisy is an individual sin, you don't get out of it because everyone else thinks you're wrong.
To murder the humor: the joke is funny because the idea that we should centrally plan resource usage for the benefit of society as a whole and discourage/disallow individually driven use of those resources for individually popular but socially wasteful applications is... communism, basically.
You can repeat this analysis for pickup trucks or cross-continent travel or desert agriculture, ad nauseum. And we do. And people like Sam Altman tend very strongly to be on one side of the argument. Until they need more DRAM, then it's all "let's pull together comrades".
But that is not an example of hypocrisy, correct, as it's an area completely separate from what Altman said was badly inefficient? For example, if someone said "fast fashion is badly inefficient", but then cut down a bunch of trees to build their home, or sometimes wasted food, that would not be an example of hypocrisy, not unless the person said we should never negatively impact the environment, or never waste, etc. Merely pointing out that something is badly inefficient does not mean that they are a hypocrite if they themselves do something bad in an area completely separate from what they talked about.
Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most (pulling a number perhaps out of his ass) 5% of the time.
You referred to using a home at least 5% of the time. If I live in only two rooms totally 150 sq ft of my 3,000 sq ft house for 19 days of the year than I use 5% of the house for at least 5% of the year.
I trust you see those two 5%s are very different things.
Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. I 100% of the time use the RAM on the desktop, even when I use just over 5% of the RAM.
Note also that Altman said nothing about how often people use less than their entire RAM. If I have 32 GB because I regularly use 28 GB and want some in reserve, then knowing that I only need the extra 4 GB about 5% of the time doesn't mean it's worthwhile to take away 4GB and have my code crash 5% of the time.
1. No, I think you changed it - I just re-listened to that section, and I don't hear any mention of "at most", nor any mention of "all of the computer's" DRAM, nor any mention of "32G" - what are the timestamps you are referring to? The only other piece he mentioned was that he was speaking in terms of "a global allocation perspective".
> Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project
2. The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon - are you actually using a 32GB PC w/ 2 GB for the desktop and donating the rest to a distributed computing project, or are even you not doing the scenario you laid out? Are you commenting on HN using a ≤2 GB RAM OS w/ the rest donated? Regardless, the 2GB desktop out of 32GB + donated scenario seems like an incredibly uncommon one that is not at all representative of the norm. I'd guess a far more common scenario than that is a device that was bought but only got a little use before being abandoned, etc.
I chose 32 GB as the high-end of that range, so I could have something concrete.
We are indeed talking the same quote: “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,”
I'm fine with having misinterpreted it, but, what does that 5% number mean for global DRAM allocation, how is it determined, and how do you apply the same measure to extra homes?
I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?
> The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon
I was trying to demonstrate how there are at least two very different ways to define what '5% of the time' means. The inspiration for that was a friend who donated processing time to GIMPS, but I don't know how much memory GIMPS needs these days, and the details were beside the point.
I also don't have a 3,000 sq. ft. house.
If you're looking for a transportation analogy, I think a far better analogy would be if there was an incredible shortage of rubber for vehicle tires, with possible allocations of each tire including either a bus that would be used ~24x7 for a large number of users simultaneously, or for a car that would be used by 1 person a relatively small percent of the time. And I understand that people would disagree about desired outcomes there as well. Also, what do you mean by 'why should that change anything?' - is your question about why someone might say allocating limited resources to a use that is used by large numbers of users simultaneously 24x7 is different than allocating the resource to something to be used 5% of the time by a single user?
(Also, how would the bike analogy work - what's the shortage of and what's the alternate use of the constrained item would serve a large number of users simultaneously ~24x7 if it wasn't instead being used for your bike for 1 person ~5% of the time in the bike example?)
> is your question about why someone might say allocating limited resources to a use that is used by large numbers of users simultaneously 24x7 is different than allocating the resource to something to be used 5% of the time by a single user?
No. The whole point of gruturo's top-level comment which started this thread was that Altman clearly does not apply the same logic to housing, any generic "limited resources" logic cannot be what he is referring to.
Even if it were, I don't know what those numbers are. How many users? Where does the 5% number come from? How does it compare to other forms of allocation (eg, housing, or personal car ownership vs. mass transit) where we've long since decided that an unequal level of access is well within reasonable cultural norms?
As far as I can tell, this is a made up scenario to justify his use of centralized data centers, and it implies a strong centralized planning state should be preferred over a (well-regulated) free market.
In war time we know the government decides where rubber goes, how food is rationed, and can enforce travel restrictions. But this ain't war time, and Altman isn't the War Production Board to decide these matters.
If the question really concerns the ~24x7 use for a large number of users, vs. the limited benefit of a few, then use that centralized planning state to cut CO2 emissions so the next generations of humans will not suffer so much. That's another clue how we know this point isn't really about generic concepts of resource allocations.
Is that supposed to be an example of hypocrisy? Or why did you specifically type that up in your comment? Regardless, are people required to not be hypocrites in any other way for it to be acceptable for them to say something else is badly inefficient? Actually, I am not even sure any of your comment is an example of hypocrisy, unless you're saying that someone can't say a completely different thing is badly inefficient, unless that person is personally efficient in (all?) other unrelated dimensions as well (for example, RAM, while being inefficient in terms of kidneys, lungs, and homes)?