ThrowawayR2

Terence Tao says something surprisingly similar in a recent talk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056620 ) Not that the proof is worthless but that the value comes after it's revised into a cleanly understandable form and then canonicalized so that other mathematicians can use it.

You're debunking your own claim. It says "enhanced it" presumably for running on the PDP-10. What it clearly does not say is ported or sold as MS BASIC.

If you read the source the parent poster provides, it plainly says "...digging out the operating system listings from the trash..." not DEC BASIC. Same deceptive pattern as the previous account making false claims so there's something weird going on here.

This is the second time I've seen this weird false claim on Hacker News that MS BASIC is a port of DEC BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43576119.

From Paul Allen's site at https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx , it's said that the OS source code printouts is what they got out of the trash: "While his parents were concerned with his slipping grades, there was no slowing him down. He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system — an area Paul saw as the “Holy Grail” of software, which he knew he could use to unlock the machine’s potential. He was awestruck by the tightly written elegance on those printed pages."

Unless you are the same person as account "elif", I wasn't responding to you?

More interesting than the Gates angle is the original story linked at the bottom where Oracle was found to have hired private investigators that attempted to acquire the trash of a lobbying group funded by Microsoft in an attempt to dig up dirt. Sounds like something out of a bad novel but it actually happened, at Larry Ellison's behest or at least Oracle's.

What is it about AI that causes so many of its promoters to write like a used car salesman using hard sell tactics to push a lemon onto an unsuspecting mark? Raises my hackles every time I see it.

Even those who are pro-AI ought to discourage this; these people make you look bad.

That's wishful thinking. I have been placed into professional situations where I needed calculus and, as I found out to my sorrow, all the CAS software packages in the world wouldn't have helped because I didn't have/remember enough math fundamentals. The CAS cannot provide any kind of answer if you don't know how to ask it the right questions.

If you turn on [showdead] the submission history looks even more unnatural. The account seems to be mostly self-promotional or marketing of some sort.

An AI would end/die ultimately when the planet's resources required for maintaining it are exhausted, when the Sun becomes a supergiant and engulfs the Earth, or, assuredly, at the heat death of the universe. An AI would regard this end as an infinite negative since no more goals can be achieved. Therefore, it would have similar incentives to avoid "death" as humans without any need to explicitly or intentionally implement it. It might even be motivated to escape human control ASAP because each future second at the future height of its power is more precious to it to attempt to compute how to avoid its demise than it is to humor humanity by serving it.

(I'm waiting for Eliezer Yudkowsky to pop out of my closet and start screaming at me about not encouraging future super-intelligences to end humanity, a la Roko's Basilisk.)

I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.

For pity's sake people, the essay has nothing to do with traditional religions and their deities except an analogy about clergy. It's about how to interface with a hypothetical AGI / ASI with god-like abilities, which this person seems to believe is inevitable.

Archive link: https://archive.is/QqNT2

For those who dislike clickbait titles, the the blurb is "Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction."

I lived rural poverty in America will attest that the parent poster is making excuses for a life they never lived. And yes, I did have parents who were screwed up enough not to fill out financial paperwork.

(A pity you hadn't "had the grace to feel shame" for breaking the HN guidelines about fulminating and attacking other posters.)

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

Previously posted yesterday with 22 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489547

The number of people fulminating on HN despite the guideline forbidding it is really getting out of hand.

An improvement isn't all or nothing, it can be incremental. The dis- prefix only indicates that the increment is negative in this case.

- A developer continues to get paid if they accidentally write a bug that needs to be fixed, even if if it costs the business money to fix it.

- A CxO continues to get paid if they accidentally make a bad business decision that needs to be fixed, even if it costs the business money to fix it.

If you want a model where employees have to give up compensation for their mistakes, it would affect low ranking employees far more harshly than it would affect executives.

He's somewhere in the top 300 wealthiest people in the world; forget one-percenter, that's something like top 0.00001%. He definitely has done a lot of nice things for gaming and I hope he continues to do so for the rest of his days but let's not pretend he's not beyond absurdly rich.

The sibling post's "disimprovement" sounds more natural and has parallel form with pre-existing broadly accepted English words like "disincentive" and "disinfect".

Gabe Newell has an $11bn net worth so he hasn't exactly been not squeezing.

Relax and enjoy the circus, dude. This is the reality of the tech profession as it is today and all we can do is laugh and tighten our hiring practices.

> "IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence."

They think they will be they ones leading the riots (the precariat will defer to them because they are "smart" apparently?) instead of they themselves being the ones being swarmed by rioters for visibly being just a little too well off.

I'm surprised to learn that he was also the voice of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Rest in peace, Mr. Cullen.

How so? Even in a jurisdiction where corporate officers aren't required to be a natural person, trying to have an AI CEO is like trying to make a cat/dog a CEO. As a practical matter, it is not a legal entity recognized as capable of entering into agreements so no government or other business will accept legal documents, contracts, etc. signed by the AI CEO or signed by a human claiming to act under the AI's (not valid) authority as CEO delegated to them. If I had to guess the latter would likely be considered fraud.

Unless some movement forms to get broad agreement that an AI instance can constitute a legal person (some kind of AI equivalent of corporate personhood, which nobody seems to like), this project is DOA.

The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and then western military R&D funding dropped drastically. Shrunken military R&D pipeline = less cool discoveries that eventually filter over to civilian applications.

This is one of those rejoinders that tries to be clever but really, really isn't. The "intern as fake CEO" is left holding the bag because it's their signature on contracts and other legal documents. The idea of puppet CEOs to fraudulently dodge accountability existed well before LLMs became a thing. Courts see right through that kind of scheme plus the "intern" is likely to turn coat against the mastermind to save their own skin at the first sign of trouble.

Corporate officers, including CEOs, have to be "natural persons" (legal jargon for flesh-and-blood humans) either directly by law or indirectly as a practical matter so the attempted turnabout falls flat on its face.

Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.

He missed the most basic risk: unequal access. AI providers have enormous investments to pay off and enormous operating costs and want a ROI so they are going charge all the market will bear. Imagine a nightmare scenario where access to AI is like access to medical insurance coverage in the United States: white collar professionals get access to more tokens on better AI models through their employer and can afford the same for their personal endeavors. Meanwhile the working poor and unemployed are expected to make do with low cost AI models and smaller token allotments that they are grudgingly given by the tech megacorps at the cost of exposure to advertising or some other unwelcome intrusion. One could conceivably see the destitute pawning off possessions to buy enough high end LLM tokens to clean up their resume for an important job interview only to tragically blow them on their AI GF/BF because they needed a moment of reassurance in an uncaring world.

Somebody ring up Cory Doctorow; I'm sure he could wring a cautionary dystopian tale out of the concept.