Comment by alchemist1e9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alchemist1e9 | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe it’s more intentional than people realize. Everyone assumes it’s just a personality flaw but what if instead it’s a way to purge all collaborators who have ego issues themselves.

I find him incredibly fascinating and personally suspect he is so crazy intelligent than it won’t be until decades later that people realize to what degree. It doesn’t bother me at all how he talks, yet I can understand how it does for others.

What I do know for sure after skimming this post from him, just like others of his the past. Is I need setup a Mathematica/Wolfram/his tools trial and spend at least a few weeks reading deeply what he writes. It’s probably a gold mine for anyone who can actually do it. I’m sure part of what he is doing has some marketing component as it has generated this reaction from me.

> what if instead it’s a way to purge all collaborators who have ego issues themselves.

I suppose that's possible. To me, thought, the more likely explanation seems to be simple vanity. I remember sensing jealousy in his writing when ChatGPT came out. In this post he has found a new angle ("people kept asking me about it. And over and over again I ended up explaining things about it"). I still get the feeling that he is seething over the attention that OpenAI got, especially compared to Wolfram Alpha.

I think his tendency to elevate himself to the exclusion of others around him leads to a trend where his and his company's work exists in a silo that's somewhat disconnected from the rest of computing and science. The vanity might be trapping him in a local maximum.

This is the best description I’ve seen of how I view his work. It’s interesting but it’s hard to point to cases in the wild where his stuff is actually used. Never once in my career have any of his tools been brought up in more than a “oh that’s cool” context.

I do like the idea of wolfram alpha being packaged and usable by intelligent agents as a sort of mental tool plugin. That would be cool.

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