Over2Chars

How about a simple rule of thumb: you have to actually meet or talk with a "facebook friend" (every month or more) or else delete/unfriend them.

If after a few months you have zero "facebook friends" nuke the account.

Internet updates are no substitute for good old meat space.

I'm sure the new FB AI will generate synthetic life updates that will seem just as convincing.

Does this mean I have to delete my friendster account?

It sounds mysteriously like the American medical and health insurance systems:

"disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills."

Maybe the US should inflict it's medical and health insurance systems on foreign adversaries as a "mystery weapon" to inflict disability, pain, and medical bills on them.

Just sayin'

Turtles all the way down bro.

Either you believe it's secure or you don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKgV1e-Ec8Q

Man: "Did you ever go to business school?" Ice T: "No, but I sold hand grenades before"

"complement" :-)

Unless it just has good things to say...

It may be relevant that the dash cam is owned by the driver and not the insurance company, and can be selectively used to prove others' fault, but ahem forgotten about if it shows otherwise.

@lapcat yeah, he argued in the markets or where ever.

I think I was mixing him up with Aristotle, e.g. https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/caves-...

who had some cave school or something.

but there was some jokingness, yah. But I'm not anti-intellectual, which wasn't a joke.

I wasn't making any point about his students or wealth. Education then, as now, is the plaything of the wealthy and wealthy nations.

Check out the big blue box. I think Thiel's point is spot on:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...

The big blue block is search advertising revenue:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...

the much smaller black box is GCP. Much smaller. much much smaller.

I agree that the exception is rare, but it suggests that the non-exception isn't exclusively necessary. It might suggest that the dominant paradigm of diplomas is quite non-optimal or at least optional.

Carlos Ghosn started out as a factory manager (although well educated), and in his Stanford interview the presenter noted that Stanford produced no factory managers, although it produces lots of would be global CEOs.

Perhaps it should produce more factory managers.

Musk has shown an ability to make an impact in multiple fields for which he seems quite under qualified for, for which he did not have "significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge". He read alot.

I think there are more non-celebrity exceptions that are simply not well known.

And there are lots of people in PhD programs who, despite their education, do not make credible or meaningful impacts, quite possibly not at all due to their competence or training quality, but due to wholly accidental or uncontrollable factors: industry shifts, business culture, changes in government research funding, or their entire paradigm being based on faulty assumptions that were simply not known and discovered later, or superseded by some innovation, etc.

Academics are rarely comfortable discussing the shortcomings of academia.

Top is just marketing. In Big Tech it's market cap or something, but it's not proof of anything and may be just marketing. Google is a search advertising monopoly pretending to be a "tech" company (per Thiel), but is a "top" company to work for. Ok.

And intelligence agencies are government mandated, not marketing made. Or at least I haven't heard any marketing from the NSA saying how selective they are in admissions (as if that means anything).

A simpler theory might go like this: Musk and Zuck both want to be richer, and both want a government that regulates, investigates, and fines them less.

The Republicans are the team you want to play on. There doesn't need to be any retribution or payback or realizations or switching sides.

It's a money play, simple.

If the Democrats could come up with a plausible pro-business strategy (and they could), it might not be such as easy choice.

I agree, I think it's not a deep insight, but Thiel notes (in his 'zero to one' speech he gave) that Google actively pretends not to be a search advertising monopoly, and instead pretends to be a competitive technology company, in a wide range of technology fields, to "hide" their monopoly.

Thiel is openly advocating monopolies, and says competition is for losers.

I think he's just calling GOOG out for their marketing, and noting their market strategy to deflect attention away from their monopoly.

I, for one, have never heard anyone publicly mention this besides Thiel. Have you?

Well shiver me timbers, if that isn't a hoot.

Maybe my vernacular is off, "source available" ?

ah "licensed freeware"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

I cannot. I am simply paraphrasing the leading sentence:

"The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. "

I assumed that this explicit prohibition would be a "TOS". I could be wrong. Maybe it's somewhere else or called something else.

The highly specific cases are glaring examples that the unbiased meritocracy they pretend to be is, possibly, not so.

And the "large numbers of students" covers up the possible cronyism and/or corruption of the institution.

I provide an example of a totally unqualified individual being allowed into a prestigious institution solely on the basis of his marriage family. Your response is that they mostly do a good job for most people?

I've suggested that the research they do is not obviously beneficial to anyone except perhaps the person doing the research, possibly simply to advance their own careers (in or out of academia). Others have suggested the same.

You haven't disagreed.

"walking barefoot in the grass, planting native species in our backyards, or simply pausing to observe the life teeming around us" - from the fine article

Ok, I'll get right on it.

You tell me if for any definition of "beneficial to humanity" that all or most Ph.Ds would fit that definition presumptively/intrinsically.

I chose arbitrary fields that I suspected most readers of HN wouldn't be in, be familiar with, or necessarily esteem just to make the case more obvious. For example, a Ph.D in dance.

There are lots and lots of PhDs in all kinds of things. You can get a Phd in videogames, food hygiene, librarianship, gender studies, ancient greek, theology.

I am sure they are (mostly) worthwhile, and I'm not knocking any of them.

I don't see how they would, by default, be seen to benefit humanity. Some small number might. A very small number. Possibly an extremely small number.

According to one random website there are over 70,000 new PhDs every year.

That's a lot of assumed benefit to humanity. Or.. is it?

I'm 100% with you on the nebulous value of AI, however given the "theme" of HN I think the bias is here towards such an assumption.

I am not dismissing the value of dance or culture or social science or even event management (or farming or any of the dozens and dozens of things people can get Ph.D's in).

And I note that in my post above.

I am seriously not being sarcastic by saying it's worthwhile. Probably to her. Maybe her department. Maybe even to break dancing (well, maybe not break dancing).

But the presumption that someone getting a Ph.D has somehow "uplifted us all" as a default seems highly improbable to me.

It no doubt uplifts a number of the degree holders, if statistics bear out.

But that's like saying "If Elon Musk becomes rich, we all become rich" and I don't think that's true. Not even in some "trickle down" economics kinda way.

If Elon gets a Ph.D we have all to assume some intrinsic benefit to humanity?

Uhm, I don't think so.

Don't bother me Mom, I'm playing PoE2 on hardcore mode again, on my totally not boosted account.

I'm all in favor of intellectuals, it's academic bureaucracies I'm not fond of.

I think Socrates was a hoot, and he taught in a cave or something like that.

Priests teaching rural peasants to read in their monasteries, and collegial colleges for the public benefit are definitely meritorious.

But,I mean, there is enormous corruption going on.

How did Ren Youzai get into MIT? He was a body guard. Just because you've married into a billionaire's family MIT says "hey, send anyone you want in"?

And I'm sure MIT isn't alone in mysteriously average students who not only get in but graduate when linked to massively rich and powerful families. A recent US president comes to mind. Is that anti-intellectual?

So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you breathing room for your objective heuristics?

For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.

And... it's totally arbitrary.

Top people come from non-top schools, and lots of non-top people from from "top" schools. And some top people come from no school at all.

These rogue extensions are "surreptitiously monetizing web searches" - but doesn't Google conspicuously monetize web searches?

So it seems the Google TOS bans competition in search monetization using their "open source" browser. Isn't it odd that an "open source" browser is apparently designed to provide a monopoly on search monetization by the nice people who give it to you for free?

And being 80% or so of all searches: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...

It seems like Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company might be spot on.

There's a slew of models and different methods for recording.

The time period they record tends to be very short, but that does raise an interesting question, when do they stop recording?

Trains!

They block Brave browser cos of some crypto beef.

But Brave has some dank ad-blocking fu. Hard to resist.

I only use X/Twitter, now that Elon is in charge and cleaned it up.

Why is getting a piece of paper after sitting in dozens of classes, and writing a essay considered automatically "beneficial to humanity"?

Just pulling a random site (first hit on a search) https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx

It appears you can get a phd in dance, event management, or dozens of fields that aren't curing cancer, or AI.

I'm reminded of the Olympic break dancer who did the "kangaroo" move. She has a PHD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn

thesis: "Her PhD thesis, titled Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of B-boying" (from Wikipedia)

Now I'm sure it was worthwhile, but I'm struggling to see it as a presumptive positive move to humanity for her work.

And there's lots just like it.

I'd even go so far as to assume that it's the extreme minority of phds that actually make a difference "for humanity" and not simply a good career move for the degree holder.