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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

I very much dislike these threads where two people act like sockpuppets of a single not-very-advanced llm, agreeing with each other's views which are invariably exaggerated, uninformed and cynical. I've been seeing more of them recently; if you see one, downvote it.

American capitalism has lots of problems. The idea that CEOs "almost always" have no real-world experience is hardly worth arguing against: "almost always" is meaningless rhetoric and "real-world" likewise (what counts as real-world experience for Google? WPP? Northrop Grumman?). Jensen Huang is mentioned literally at the top of this thread and is an obvious counterexample.

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Sorry, I don't mean for my views to hurt your feelings.

I find it obvious from the context that they were referring to celebrity CEO:s in global corporations and not Mom or Pop in some small mom-and-pop corner store.

When I look at en.wikipedia on Huang it seems he graduated into a managing role and then founded Nvidia. By "real-world experience" I'd mean experience as a worker, but I can't answer for the person you're actually quoting.

However, it's an interesting example. Clearly Huang has managed to promote an image to you that is very different from mine. As I see it, Nvidia is a main supplier of hardware for globally fashionable grifts and scams, like large portions of so called 'crypto' and 'AI'. I also expect Nvidia to be an important supplier in the war industry, and I'm sure it is in surveillance tyranny.

Huang started as a chip designer and then founded a company developing chips. What other kind of work experience would be relevant? AI contains scams, but also obviously important real progress; your points about war and surveillance are pure mood affiliation and irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Production of chips, for example. One could argue that design is a form of administration rather than work.

I'd say so called AI is largely a scam. It's wobbly databases with non-deterministic query languages dressed up as a substitute for intelligence. Email is similarly a scam. Through mail you send someone an item, which might or might not have some script on it. Email is very different, and it's largely used for spam, even though the name seems to say it is very similar. Is this what you call progress?

No, I'm pointing out that Nvidia are supplying criminals and tyrants with the tools they need for their abusive and oppressive activities. I do not expect your mood to change from having this pointed out, rather the opposite, I expect you to already be somewhat aware of it. Personally, I try to avoid doing business with such people, and I would prefer to not be dependent on their enablers, though that is almost impossible for systemic reasons.

Scam is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, no? If by scam, you mean that a large volume of the “work” enabled by these tools is not productive to society, then fine, I think what you say follows. However, there’s a lot of good work that is done with email and other tools you mentioned. For every good email I send, there might be 100 spam emails, but the drag from the spam on society is surely much less than the value of my “real” email. Furthermore, the technology is an improvement over snail mail for many use cases. I agree that the jury is still out on whether or not AI is as good as imagined, but it seems overly pessimistic to entirely discount a new technology that has been at least personally useful to me. If we were to really run with this definition of scam, we’d soon realize that all technology is a scam. So why even get up in the morning? Might be a simpler life to mail bombs and rot in prison at that point…

No, I don't think so. Most MLM:s are arguably scams, but they still persist as corporations and do a lot of business and make a lot of money for some people.

It's the dissonance between promise and delivery that make the term appropriate in my opinion. There's nothing intelligent about AI, and you can't transfer a package to a friend through email.

And, well, yes, one might argue that capitalism is basically a scam. Instead of serfs and slaves that were traded and exploited personally, we're now being traded and exploited collectively. I think Engels said this more succinctly at some point.

In general prisons are suppliers of cheap labour, and don't allow people to actually rot in them, though some inmates aren't actually supplied as labour, for reasons. As the person you're likely alluding to shows, grudge-laden manifestos and bombs don't do much to change society. It's a better idea to get organised around mutual aid and strikes in a wide sense.

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