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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

LLMs will tell you whatever you want to hear. You subtly direct them with the way you ask the question, and then they give you the answer you want. That's basically what they're trained to do. So of course they always give you the answer you want -- but you can't just go around telling people to ask an LLM to back up your argument, as other people will get a difference answer.

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I don’t think that’s true anymore. You can ask for weak points of a position (e.g. that luxury spending is good for the economy) and they will give you a reasonable answer.

You could do the opposite - what are the weak points of the position that accumulation of wealth leads to waste and see what are the weak points there.

And then think which position can be dismantled more easily and is therefore less well founded. Or ask for a steelman version of it.

If you had ten million dollars, what would you spend it on?

I'm actually curious about why you didn't spend yours on reviving Sandstorm. If the terms of your employment with Cloudflare prevent you from doing that, then that makes sense. Or do you believe you've been building Sandstorm's true successor at Cloudflare? For a while the Workers platform didn't satisfy the self-hosted part, but I guess workerd addressed that.

For what it's worth, if I had $10 million, I currently think I'd spend it as follows:

1. Developing and bringing to market my dream open, general-purpose pocket computer specifically for blind people: https://toot.cafe/@matt/116788125409771800

2. If there's enough left, buying the ETI-Eloquence text-to-speech engine from whoever owns it now and open-sourcing it.

Note that I'm not claiming to have $10M, that was a hypothetical number for the purpose of the question.

That said, sure, I have certainly entertained the idea of retiring and working on open source, particularly on days when work is frustrating or overwhelming.

But if the goal is "recreate Sandstorm", I do believe my current work on Cloudflare OS[0] is much more likely to succeed at that than anything I could reasonably accomplish independently.

More broadly, at the moment it feels like my position at Cloudflare puts me in the middle of something really important. There isn't anywhere else where I would have more influence over the AI revolution.

[0] https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572

Immediate retirement for me and 4 more people who I like. What's that got to do with anything?

But that's such a waste! 5 whole people taken out of the economy, no longer producing value, just going around consuming resources in retirement. How is that any better than me spending to build a nice house that facilitates my family's comfort and my friends' enjoyment of getting together to play games?

Yeah I accumulated wealth and it resulted in waste.

You’re proving my point.

Is your "point" actionable? Are you recommending any change of behavior or policy?

Amazing how trained you are to connect the most basic observations about the world to politics.

No wonder you deployed all of those debate tactics.

How about a change of mindset first?

I'll take that as a "no".

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