"More Choice for Consumers"
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
1,189 karma · joined October 9, 2013
A truly laughable fig leaf for the non-existent anti-trust regulators.
Transplanting 'English Manor' grass and lawn practices to a desert creates an unbridgeable adaptation gap. This kind of lawn cannot survive without draining every aquifer in a 300 mile radius. Texas lawns, in particular, yearn for death, you can watch them die in real time.
Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off.
They'd rather have dying sickly grass most of the year, and pay yearly to to replace, than allow a single 'weed' to be a part of their landscaping.
Be sure to still dismiss any legitimate complaints or concerns as envy or fomo though.
You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.
You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.
Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?
Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.
Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.
Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.
There's no male or neutral voice.
All examples are of white male software engineers talking to what I assume will be ultimately marketed as a 'girlfriend' bot (or used for love scams).
The single paragraph hand waving at the importance of 'safe AI empathy' doesn't dissuade me at all.
Sell your idea as what it is, yet another 'perfect' woman shaped object a hypothetical man can own and use how he likes.
But yeah, natural monopolies with inelastic demand (power, water, healthcare, shared infrastructure) should be publicly owned, imo.
We are social!
Violent Individualism, Solipsism, Alienation are (primarily) socially constructed and we can choose to live another way.
You can build solidarity and community in the US, despite the odds. But if your social skills and belief in others have atrophied; You'll have to be the change you want to see.
Strike up conversations with your neighbors, pick up new hobbies, volunteer, say yes to things, go outside your home every day, host events, even when it's weird and awkward. Set good boundaries, there will be setbacks, but decent people will stick around.
This kind of thing is harder around wealthy, workaholic adults, but it's still possible, and people are desperate for genuine connection, but their social habituation is atrophied too (COVID made everything worse).
> I keep opening my mouth.
You also might need to practice communicating differently if everyone misunderstands/rejects? you when you try to reach out. This might be something to work out in a safe environment. Also, if you are expecting another rejection, it can be easy to assume other people hate you when they don't think that (or don't think about you at all).
As to the justice system... well, it can be repaired or reformed, but that will take a sociopolitical movement. I recommend joining something.
These are the people that gave us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering after all.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
A [free, or discounted] pardon awaits every member of the trump family.
Tobacco consumption still causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year (439k). That number won't start going down (due to alternatives) until 2030, according to AJPM. Phillip Morris ($PM) is near an all time high, despite killing millions.
It killed both my grandfathers, it's likely killed someone you knew and loved, please get your facts straight.
And on your other point, fat people already get a lot of social 'friction', from people exactly like you who call them 'people of walmart' who eat 'garbage'.
A fat person who has exercised more and eaten less than you, and lost weight every day for a year will still be called a 'lazy fat-ass' by a person like you until they actually reach the promised land of 'normal'. (and before you ask to invalidate my opinion. No, I am not fat).
On France, Paris is a delightfully walkable city. US cities are car-or-else (excepting NYC). We're the ones who made our people sedentary.
You are on HN, most people here are hacking the attention economy to keep people seated and glued to screens.
Are you willing to vote to give up your car and a part of your future compensation to be surrounded by fitter people?
The social changes you have imagined are forms of shame/intolerance maximization (governments should not do this!), rather than designing our world around good food, human movement, and healthy habits (a thing governments can and should do!)
Regardless, GLPs are an absolute win, and once most people are a healthy weight I hope you will dial back on you reflexive disdain.
Fasting does too, for that matter.
Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.
The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.
Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.
Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.
But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.
Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.
Mathematics is collaboratively and publicly produced, it is vetted for free by peers, and results are publicly available. There is no 'market' and no 'price'.
These results, like the invention of LLMs, are often used by private companies for the generation of private profit.
"Open" AI used a private, unreleased, for-profit model to generate those papers.
What, precisely, did the mathematics 'oligopoly' gatekeep you, or anyone, from?
> their slice of the pie
There's very little money in academia, and even then, its a struggle to get any funding at all. What are you even talking about?
Final point, 'knowledge' is socially produced as well. Until the papers are accepted, they are machine artifacts that might be knowledge, but that same system you disdain will be what incorporates and validates those insights.
> It's time for the social fabric [of math] to be ripped up
This is the attitude of a social arsonist. You can, and should, integrate changes without maximizing destruction for its (or Altman's) own sake.
> an industry being disrupted.
This is the SV euphemism for law-breaking and monopolist practices in a country that has forgotten how to prosecute those with the most power and privilege.
He described it at 'strip mining', 'rude', and said that many grad students, who are given problems like these as a part of their training, had the rug pulled out from under them (because its customary to let people know you are working on something to prevent this kind of thing).
And your whole analysis is that Tao is worried about his 'identity', status, and 'being a differentiator'.
This is projection on your part. People have values that bear no resemblance to yours and it would behoove you to learn to recognize that.
Causes:
Failure to detect and appreciate irony and metaphor
Failure to engage with core critiqueIt took the companies that survived a decade or more to recover.
You still have to pay bills while you endure inflation and the opportunity costs in the meantime.
> collective “good”
Privatized gains, public losses. Surely this is known to you? Compare this to how Norway distributed its bounties.
The US and Exxon could have been a leader of the green transition starting in the 1970's, when everyone figured this out. With a few things breaking differently, we would have been.
We'd have had the absolute edge on the solar/battery transition.
Instead, precisely because of decades of deceptive lobbying, deindustrialization, bribes, and outright crimes, we're coasting far behind China's industrial policies.
> I can’t speak for, say, lobbying efforts.
Even easier to deceive yourself if you blind both eyes.
> 1) the author has a self righteous agenda and
> 2) the award is not deserved but rather given to signal sides in a culture war.
This is psychological projection from a debased information environment.
She has been studying classics, writing, and winning awards since at least 1975!
Quote: Carson is known to be reticent about her private life, and discourages autobiographical readings of her writings.Information about her in publications is often limited to the phrase: "Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living." While not a confessional poet, her work is considered personal. Carson has said that in her work, she uses her life democratically as just one set of facts among others in the world.
You should be less online so you don't lose your whole self to bottomless cynicism.
To witness an arson and rejoice reveals an ugly kind of sadism.
The article you linked is irrelevant because it is about a DIFFERENT CASE.
_Authors Guild v. OpenAI_ is NOT _The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp. et al._
The gall of you to act indignant about 'facts of the case'.
Even if you weren't lazy or illiterate; Mike isn't a neutral party either.
> "Of course, my biases are known: I’m quite convinced that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, and I find the argument that slop books “dilute” non-slop books to be beyond nonsensical."
Even if you agree with Mike, OpenAI thought they could replace/dilute authors, and workers generally, as disclosed by their internal discussions.
Even if you agree with Mike that training, generally, is fair use, they did not pay for the torrented works they trained their models on, which is still illegal! This is why they shifted to buying and shredding books after they lost other lawsuits.
> 'AI bad'
Bay Area self-styled demi-gods bad, actually. Their products, like always, are incidental to their rapaciousness and their impunity from laws.
I was worried that OpenAI, a 1.2 trillion dollar company, would be the only party to this lawsuit that was 'bad'. Thankfully, thanks to your detective work, we have ourselves a lawyer that is also 'bad', a rare thing indeed.
Readers may be wondering if 'authors' are also bad. That's silly, they don't matter at all. This is what makes stealing from them legal (for a small fine) and profitable.
This is their theory of power, that the selected few get access to a state of exception (but you can lose it at any time, so don't slip up).
Trump and oligarchs broadly have offered this franchise to their most loyal.
But! I'd argue it is not precisely hypocrisy, because they never believed in a rules-based order in the first place. They just see a system they can exploit.
break things has always been right there in black and white.
And it should be said that most 'small' farmers in the US are millionaire scions and shouldn't need subsidies to make a profit in most parts of the US (we have abundant natural resources).
More than half of all calories produced in the US are not even for human consumption. And globally enough calories to feed every human on earth are lost to inefficiency each year.
We can all benefit from a better system of distribution and production without getting lost in the magical thinking of a public/private false dichotomy.
In this case, a system that aided the displaced workers in finding new positions and acquiring skills that are not simply doordashingfor rent (and still counting that as 'full employment').
In this latest disruption, highly skilled workers are being underemployed in low skill labour and we all lose out. PhD and JD to baristas and uber driver economy.
The federal funding and employment disruption alone will take decades to fix, if ever.
Anywho, you should notice when you participate in creating a massive disruption in many people's lives (to create super-profit for a couple of already wealthy men).
You are never just following orders, don't close your eyes to what you are doing with your life.
And before you 'what about' me. I have refused orders and lost jobs because of it. My only regret is not organizing with other workers beforehand.
Mayor denounces "radical activists" rioting and damaging city property in response to an officer-involved incident that resulted in one fatal kinetic altercation with a "loud and provocatively dressed" man.