disqard

Either this thread is full of "temporarily embarrassed billionaires", or there's a lot of arguing in bad faith going on.

One human having a billion is like somebody weighing 1000 pounds. It's hella unhealthy for them (does anyone here imagine that Elon Musk is happy?) and it's catastrophically bad for the rest of society to have to deal with these people throwing their weight around.

Where do we "draw the line"? I dunno, could we consider something like 200 million? Judging by some of the responses here, probably not.

You're doing it wrong.

You need to be a billionaire, and then you need to threaten to sue anyone who dares to ask you to pay.

I think you are (rightly) pointing out that "quantity has its own quality".

As an analogy, this is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit.

To GP: It's less "no one should have any mass". It's more "Billionaires are like Black Holes, and therefore should be avoided" -- yes, it is a value judgement; no, it's not a blanket statement about money.

Kentaro Toyama wrote that "Technology acts as an amplifier of human intentions".

We really are very susceptible to living in "default mode".

Thank you for writing this, and making it available online!

When researching+writing this, did you find it useful to look through McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" lens? If so, what are the "message" implications of this ouroboric/circular/whirlpool medium?

TIL, thank you for sharing that.

Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not.

Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)

I checked out the links in your profile -- kudos to you for building useful things and putting them (and yourself) out there!

Getting from 0 to 1 is the hardest part, and you're at 6 already. I hope you keep at it, for years, and see monotonically increasing numbers. Doing something like this (sustainably) would be fantastic success.

Best of luck!

I see you engaging in good faith in this debate. I'm also heartened by your self-awareness about how HN hijacks your brain. FWIW, I'm in the same boat, and I still come back here.

I'll share something that might mitigate some of your turmoil: with any ascendant (and disruptive) technology, the only way to criticize it is by leveraging that technology.

Socrates' lament on the dangers of literacy is known today because it was written down (yes, by Plato... but it was written down).

A bit late to this discussion, but your comment really reminded me of this Stewart Brand quote from his 1985 interview with KQED Focus magazine:

"Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."

I liked your analogy, and it sparked a thought -- employees are like fingernails: tools to be used, and trimmed/filed down when not needed.

Of course, your analogy is better, because when corporations conduct layoffs to save money to do stock buybacks, that is really much closer to amputating body parts for the sake of a "weight loss" metric.

Eric Schmidt said so, and it caused a giant uproar.

To me, it's just "more of the same", but apparently he said the quiet part out loud, which was somehow verboten.

(Edit to add: I'm not saying "I think this is okay", but rather "this is Standard Operating Procedure for startups" -- even Reddit was seeded with fake accounts and content, to give the appearance of an active online community. This sort of hustle is a core part of SV culture, and I don't think this is going to change in a hurry.)

Excerpt:

...in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor, and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music. What you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.

It's a step change, for sure.

I'm seeing signs that they might be propelling us into a post-literate society.

I think you can s//g that in various ways, and it would be true:

* Music, musicians

* Publishing/journals, academics

* (and more that I can't think of right now)

Maybe they're referring to TFA (where the person did DIY an effective solution)?

I'd like to believe you, but has there actually been any "official" capitulation from Meta on "the metaverse"?

AFAIK, they have not publicly announced any pivot/shift in priorities.

Not sure if it'll help you, but do read this:

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Wishing you luck with your personal writing journey!

Corporations are "people".

Corporations "eat" money.

Entities that can feed a corporation, are treated as peers, i.e. "people".

Thus, on shitter, if you can pay, you are a person (and get a blue checkmark).

I just checked out your website -- what a beautiful labor of love!

Thank You For Making And Sharing :)

Indeed, this is what I likened to a "Dark Forest":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42459246

I'm with you (I use Claude Sonnet, but same difference...).

I do wonder if we're the last generation that will be able to effectively do such "course correct" operations -- feels like a good chunk of the next generation of programmers will be bootstrapped using such LLMs, so their ability to "have that insight" will be lacking, or be very challenging to bootstrap. As analogy, do you find yourself having to "course correct" the compiler very often?

This is an amazing feature! Thank you for sharing it!!

> 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :)

As the parent of a 4 year old, this is spot-on, especially the 30-second context window. My kiddo will often embark upon a sentence with no idea of how to choose anything beyond the next few tokens, and then continue reaching for new stuff, merely to keep the sentence going.

I say this as someone with a deep respect for Humans. However, I also think most of us tend to operate in "default mode" (in the sense that David Foster Wallace described in his "What is Water?" commencement speech).

Overall, LLMs are a stark reminder to us that without careful and intentional living, we are in danger of being more like LLMs than we'd like.

Your comment sparked a thought -- maybe this is the "Dark Forest" of the Web:

Either your site's content stays hidden behind discord, or an LLM's bot/minion scrapes all your content and makes visiting your site superfluous, thereby effectively killing your site.

On mobile, that page loads up a ginormous ad, covering >50% of the page.

Garbage.

This is, IMO the kind of "Accelerationism" that I can get behind :)

System is broken, therefore let's make it 100% obvious that it's broken, so it can be totally rebuilt.

I discovered (and thoroughly enjoyed reading) the book thanks to that interview!

Thank You So Much :)

I really don't understand why you are being downvoted.

I'm baffled at folks wanting to overlook that a Chinese-controlled brainworm is even more dangerous than a US-operated brainworm.

Yes, we should steer clear of all brainworms, but we should be exterminating the brainworms run by adversaries ASAP.

Thank you for sharing that!

I use nabucasa's RemoteUI (which provides a secure remote connection): https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/

(and I pay for an account, so that I can help support this project)

Am I missing something obvious here?

Did you mean to write "non-legible" ?