Besides the questionable ethics of billionaires in general, I'd say Turner's biggest blunder was inventing the 24 hour news cycle, which has since been used to push a lot awful stuff that Ted himself probably found pretty distasteful.
I think there's an unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption. Ideally, we would be actively working towards making it so but what often happens is passively riding the current and calling it "progress".
it's not necessarily the case that it's junk science, but it is absolutely beyond the capabilities of a normal person or persons to winnow out the chaff.
The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
the current AI summer has been great for us dorks that prefer TUI/console interfaces. I hope it all sticks around with the inevitable cool-down in LLM hype.
I dunno if he's got a cognitive bias but he's certainly been a great example of how being a genius in one field does not make you qualified to even comment in other unrelated fields. And that's been going on for close to 2 decades now.
if internet comments are any kind of indication (which they very well may not be) I've seen lots of people complaining about win11 but remaining because they can't give up playing their favorite online hero shooter. That's acceptance to me
"good" is not important for software anymore, at least in the regular consumer market. Companies have discovered that people will just continue to accept subpar, unfinished and sometimes even partially-functioning software.
I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
It's a well(ish) known org with well known product, and they seem to have been vulnerable. If they had attacked a deli in Newark, would we be having this conversation?
That a sports league was empowered by the courts to do this in first place is buck wild to me. I live in America, so it's not like I'm unaccustomed to the government giving preferential treatment to corporations but I cannot fathom a court allowing the NFL to tell ISPs to block IPs across the entire country.
if someone is trying to use LLM tools in a project that explicitly forbids the use of LLM tools, they are not innocent.
if someone is blinding slurping up content to feed to LLMs, without checking to see if a particular source is OK with that, they are arguably not innocent either.
Neither situation is analogous to a booby-trapped shotgun door blowing off the face of a would-be burglar.
You lose little by assuming malicious intent when it comes to billion-dollar tech companies and your money. They can prove otherwise by remedying the situation.
it's been my experience that when most people say "Lisp does this that or the other", what they usually mean is "Common Lisp does this that or the other". Often there's an implicit "with SLIME" in there as well
it pushes the idea that these programs are super amazing and powerful to people who are non-technical. It also allows them to control the narrative of how exactly AI is dangerous to society. Rather than worry about the energy consumption of all these new datacenters, they can redirect attention to some far-off concern about SHODAN taking over Citadel Station and turning the inhabitants into cyber-mutants or whatever.
Maybe Altman specifically is only paying lip service to this stuff, but when a company like Anthropic is like "BRO MYTHOS IS TOO DANGEROUS BRO WE CANT EVEN RELEASE IT BRO JUST TRUST US BRO", my bullshit detector is beeping too loud to ignore. It's very obviously a publicity stunt, because if it were actually that dangerous you wouldn't be making such a press release, you'd be keeping your mouth shut and working to make it safe.
The FTC has the authority to prevent mergers and acquisitions. Now, I am not saying that previous administrations always did their due diligence in this department because they demonstrably have not. But one would assume that an alleged protectionist government would be loath to allow gigantic corporations to be divvied up amongst foreign parties.
I was thinking about this the other day, using LLM text to thwart stylometric analysis. At some point, I'd read about using machine translations to do the same thing (translating a text to, for example. Chinese then back to English). This seems to only work if the translation method isn't quite perfect so get an "Engrish" effect or the like. But you could probably feed your manifesto or whatever to one of the various modern chatbots and have it rewrite it in the style of Poe or Pynchon or maybe a generic business email. (Obviously, setting aside the issue of if the chatbot is keeping all this stuff in a database somewhere).
At least here in America, we've been offshoring coding since at least the late 90s. Often, that code isn't so great (this is not an indictment of foreign workers in general but these off-shore operations are not always on the up-and-up).
And just like offshoring dev work, we may see the rebound effect when there's all kinds of poorly written LLM outputs in production and companies are running around trying to re-hire high quality devs to fix all these fires that they themselves started.