Judgmentality

> you can choose what reality you want to inhabit

Thank you for outing yourself as willfully ignorant. I also appreciate the unintended admission of privilege.

> That's how all financing works.

Most companies' debts are not backed by the government, which is what OpenAI asked for today. This is not remotely close to how most financing works. This isn't even how free markets work. This is a very literal shift towards "too big to fail" in a way that is unprecedented in modern history.

Name some historical examples where people only protested on the weekend, didn't go on strike, and didn't have a threat of violence or some sort of leverage behind it.

> it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible

I think it harms the cause to feel better about accomplishing nothing. You've created a morale booster, but you haven't actually achieved anything or put forth any sort of plan to enact any sort of change. Assuming your goal is to make the government function according to written laws, why would the current president give a shit about anything you say when he can just continue to ignore you? If he ignored you before, you holding up a sign isn't going to do anything.

Protests work when there is some sort of threat behind it. Most protests you read about in history aren't a few hours on the weekend, they're ongoing where everybody is already participating in a strike. And many of them have the obvious threat of violence behind them. This "protest on the weekend" shit is pathetic. I'm not going to congratulate you for wasting time while everything continues to get worse. From my perspective you are part of the problem.

You really think a bunch of people holding signs on the weekend, then going back to work the next day is accomplishing anything? What are you accomplishing?

It doesn't matter how many of you there are if none of you are willing to actually do anything. If I just ignore you, how does it change anything in my life? The only thing you're achieving is making yourselves feel better about accomplishing nothing.

I'm not telling you how to live your life. I'm pointing out that peaceful protest is pointless. And a strike without organization is also pointless.

There are no easy answers here. If you want change, expect to fight for it.

If you're American, go on strike. Nobody gives a shit about people holding signs and protesting peacefully. If you can't do anything to make the opposition care about you, don't expect them to do anything other than ignore you.

I really don't understand the timestamps on HN. I made this post days ago, not hours ago. I understand it was reposted but it's disingenuous to lie about the timestamp.

What the fuck, dang?

> but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years

This is wildly optimistic. I quit working in robotics because I got tired of all the bullshit promises everybody made all the time. I'm not saying robotics isn't advancing or the work is unimportant, but the spokespeople are about as reliable as Musk when it comes to timelines.

I doubt it will happen in 10 years, even with a constrained environment and hardware that costs well into 6 digits.

This is the most "why is this on the front page of HN?" post I've ever seen.

> Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.

Carvana is currently up more than 100x from their 2022 low.

You're right. I was being a dick.

I asked a question and he ignored it. I asked it again and he answered it. What you call haranguing I call a conversation.

[flagged]

Your evidence is that there are more billionaires when arguing there is upward mobility? We are talking about completely different things. Many of those people started out as multimillionaires and then became billionaires - almost none of them started out poor. And you're focusing on a tiny percent of the population and extrapolating that to everyone as though it's representative of anything meaningful.

> But also there is a lot of upwards mobility.

There's increasingly less in the USA. In fact, most people today will end up worse off than their parents.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/09/social-mobility-upwa...

> Personally, I could not bring myself to vote for either of the presidential candidates.

You really looked at both candidates and decided both were equally bad?

> I consistently score 5+ SD above 100

You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?

Considering the slew of warehouse automation robotics companies I've watched fail, trying to do much simpler tasks in highly controlled environments where they can be surrounded only by trained individuals, "ambitious" would be an understatement.

I get what they're trying to do. I'm pointing out that it's probably an order of magnitude harder to do than many other things that have consistently failed. This is like Elmo coming along and saying The Boring Machine will replace cars and trains. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the space and how to disrupt it while selling ambitious ideas under the guise of being clever.

So you're paying someone to operate your robot on top of the cost of the robot?

I'm very skeptical, even if this technology worked flawlessly, that this would scale towards a profitable business. I understand that not every robot would require 24x7 human assistance, but still - this is a very optimistic business model.

Robotics has always been in competition with minimum wage labor. How long could you hire a maid before making a return on the cost of the robot? And that's assuming the robot isn't worse, which it is pretty much guaranteed to be.

I've always thought of how weird it is that YouTube even exists, as much as I love it. I have tried many times to figure out how it could exist independently of Google or some other tech giant, and watched many competitors try and fail.

I'm not sure YouTube can exist outside of being a monopoly. I'd actually argue YouTube is the strongest evidence in existence in favor of monopolies, far better than anything Thiel has suggested.

I want to be wrong about this but the evidence suggests it's so.

I get what you're getting at, but that's not actually what I'm advocating for here.

I'm pointing out that multiple times a day a political post gets bounced off the front page, and it's frustrating that the conversations are being quashed. I'd just like to be able to talk about the stuff we know people want to talk about (upvotes are the simplest metric we have for this). And there's a very simple binary filter we can apply that costs very little overhead in terms of UX and engineering.

If I wanted to go somewhere else I would. I'm suggesting how we make this site better for users, or at least a sizable amount of them. And it would make almost no difference to the users who'd like to just ignore it. You can even have it off by default so only logged in members are able to see political posts and even then only opt-in.

I have zero expectation of this ever happening.

The world can remain irrational longer than you can remain alive.

Another political post got bumped off the front page again.

Not that anyone gives a shit what I think, but it seems like there should just be a filter for politics on this site. That way the people who want to talk about it can, and the people that don't can ignore it. Clearly the upvotes suggests people are interested in these topics, not to mention the actual debates in comment sections about how they're being moderated.

I think it depends entirely on what the military does. People seem to think the military will just fall in line with the president. I think a military coup is far more likely than that.

I agree with you it's likely pointless. I'm not arguing that "this information will change the election." That said, I do care about election integrity and the more evidence we have of fraud the more we can (theoretically) correct for it in the future.

I'm very much of the opinion there's going to be a violent civil war before the decade is over.

> I guess if someone comes up and shows these same discrepancies everywhere where a particular manufacturer had a footprint, I'd probably be more on board with screaming election interference.

The fact this anomaly only happens in swing states under commonly identified conditions for foreign elections with widely accepted interference isn't suspicious enough? You can recreate the Russian tail yourself with the available data. A commenter in the HN thread I linked even posts the code to do so.

I feel like suspicious voting patterns should be investigated, not that I have any belief that will happen. We already have proof of a consistent statistical anomaly.

There are some odd patterns in the voting data. I'm not saying this is proof, but it's definitely weird.

https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

https://www.thenumbersarewrong2024.com/across-the-us/swing-s...

Then combine that with all the election interference we know Elon was doing, and previous years of being concerned about the security of voting machines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlnjzzk919o

https://apnews.com/article/election-security-voting-machines...

There are reasons to think the votes may have been tampered with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293

This was previously discussed on HN before getting flagged like most political topics.