Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across as a sleazebag to me.
For no other topic have I seen so many flagged stories, and all of them are the ones that paint Sam in a negative light.
I sometimes also do other things than reading HN, but what stood out to me, was that I read nothing about the conflict here at all and anything related to it was flagged. Likely because it would evolve into a flamewar after 3 comments.
That being said, Hacker News is primarily for news, and it's tech-oriented. I would not expect Palestinian broadsides (whether for or against) to fare well.
Which I find ironic, because I’ll see the same people looking down on non technical people idolizing celebrities, but not recognize that it’s the same thing in a different field. The height of Elon worship was identical to Swifties imho.
One of Swift’s big appeal outside her media, is that she presents herself as a blank canvas for her fans to project themselves on. While I wish she used her platform for more positive advocation , it’s a lot better for her to be neutral than Musks’s aggressively negative use of his platform (especially in recent times).
Fascinatingly Taylor Swift has convinced her fans to rebuy re-recorded versions of all of her earlier albums. Not just one album either. So far it has been 4 of them with 6 in total. Her justification of this is purely capitalistic. This is kind of unprecedented, and the success of this for her has been quite spectacular.
See:
https://time.com/5949979/why-taylor-swift-is-rerecording-old...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/arts/music/taylor-swift-1...
https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-taylors-version...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372059
I don't sympathize with @sama, more so, my personal opinion of him is that he definitely shows off a lot of psychopathic traits, but that said ...
... I'm also ok with keeping those topics outside the scope of this community, which is mainly tech-related and that's what I enjoy about it. Personal affairs belong elsewhere, IMO.
I realize your perception was that all the negative ones got flagged, but this perception is most likely a function of your own preference (you're more likely to notice it when a story that you agree with gets flagged, because people are more likely to notice what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Probably Sam feels like all the positive stories are getting flagged :)
I wrote a longer explanation about how we treat story floods like this from a moderation point of view, if anyone wants to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38357788.
Edit: and this applies to the OP, which actually does contain SNI. I've turned user flags off on this submission and changed the title to be the article's HTML doc title, which is more specific.
This isn't evaluating products for use with pluses and minuses.
Attacks on reputation need to be very, very well substantiated or they are libel (business libel in this case). It's also morally wrong, it leads to the worst kinds of resentful discussions, and frankly, this is not really the place for that if indeed you want justice.
In this case, the board made a decision that broke the reliance of all OpenAI stakeholders on Altman's leadership, with no evidence and little explanation. If OpenAI was transitioned properly and with due care to another CEO, it would have been business as usual.
What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
Btw, this is the most probable reason right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?"
edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
A new headline by a journo seeking their own clickbait angle comes out and the flood of “See it was really just [black/white] position and you were all wrong” is the most classic stereotypical social media take to a now past it’s prime story, when IRL it’s as nuanced and shades of grey as ever.
I've always said that in another country, like Germany, it might take time to get to know someone and, if you don't know them, you certainly shouldn't ask how they are doing. In the United States, we say hello and ask how people are, even if they are complete strangers.
This is a generalization, not something to be used for every single person, or culture, but it's a good indication of how cultures deal with trust up front. Here in the US, we'll give you "trust credit" and then roll over you like a semi truck if you screw up later.
My wife says I should just always say good or great.
If fingerprints and faces are the same as retinas, where do you draw the line - or is there just no privacy line for you anywhere, as long as a billionaire somewhere is making lots of money?
Worldcoin on the other hand went to the third world and went through Africa offering people almost a month's wages to give up their biometrics. That, to me, should merit a deeper dive into what they are doing and why.
Given how the board handled this whole situation like an amateur hour shit show, you will be hard pressed to argue their competence and qualifications in their favor.
Rather, you are doing exactly what you are claiming from others, you’re seeing two unqualified board members, who happen to be women, and defending them because they’re women even though this whole situation displayed the incompetence of the entire board, Helen and Tasha included. The only one taking a sexist position is you.
If the board handled this situation like competent adults who had ever spoken to an attorney, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation in the first place.
There’s absolutely nothing in my comment that even implies I’m defending them and their actions, and also absolutely nothing in my comment that implies any of my statement is based on their gender.
I seem to have struck a nerve with you, though. I think the commenter doth protest too much.
> There has been a lot of thinly veiled sexism
No, they didn't imply it, and they didn't claim it was the primary motivation. They just said it was a contributor. You are perceiving a stronger claim than they made.
They said what they said, trying to weasel out of it doesn't make the case.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
He came to visit our office (YC '12 company) a few times and spoke with our team in very small fireside like gatherings. Dude always gave me a very creepy vibe. Something aint right there.
Even the worst criminal in the world should be declared "not guilty" if they were caught for a crime they did not commit for which the prosecution did not make a convincing case. In law, there no "innocent", only "not guilty" and most people surmised that sama is not guilty in this context irrelevant of a larger backstory.
In real life I use all available evidence for scoring outcome likelihoods. I score this guy high on sleazebag, and this article just increased this score.
You just don't have access to tax funded investigators working for months to figure out if the other person tells the truth or not.
So it's down to: Something's off? I'm not trusting you. Especially when you want something from me.
Did they? You should try scrolling through the original thread and ctrl-Fing [edit: removed the single word that was getting me downvoted to oblivion, my point is that people were quick to jump to very serious/troubling conclusions to explain his firing and explicitly weren't jumping to innocent] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232...
> I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.
> (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)
> I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you.
I don't know how to use twitter - is she responding to someone, or talking to herself?