This isn't a problem with "rockstar" AI devs. This is a problem of management. Who would let someone come in and rebuild the core infra of their business without any planning or review?
Personal vendettas between the world's most powerful psychopaths playing out in the stock market while everyone else suffers does seem like the current meta. So it makes sense.
I'm all for it, let them attack each other and hopefully the backlash will elect a labor President to turn the final screws on knee capping big tech for the next 50 years.
Democrats being only slightly less beholden to corporate interests and functioning as controlled opposition is exactly how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'd like to be optimistic and say that the backlash from the second Trump catastrophe will be a full 8 years of simmering authoritarianism rather than the current rolling boil, but that wasn't even true after 2020. I think media saturation has gotten so strong that people are just so much easier to lead around by the nose. For example look at how many continuing hardcore Trump supporters there still are, even in the face of appalling abject failures like his choosing to simply give away the Strait of Hormuz of Iran. They've got ever-shifting rationalizations streaming into their brains 24/7.
If you want to help these new Democratic candidates, many are primary challengers that could use your help. I work on several Senate and Congressional campaigns, you wouldn't believe how impactful something as a simple well designed static site can be. There is a dearth of tech skills in these campaigns because they simply don't know alternatives.
Lots of low hanging fruit and very few people in the tech world can say they've worked on projects to improve the material lives of everyone by helping elect people that will implement medicare for all, universal childcare, and free school lunches.
Why did we knee cap CIA/NSA/DOD from nominally operating on Americans when the Soviet Union continued to push forward with it?
For what it's worth, our once-and-(hopefully)-future allies the European Union are already on board with reigning in the surveillance industry (leading by example, even). So your question is more like how can we constrain our domestic technological authoritarians when China continues to embrace theirs. And the answer is that it's not a "how". The "how" is straightforwardly enforcing longstanding concepts like personal information, antitrust bundling, unauthorized access (backdoors in sold products), etc. So your question comes down to more of a why, and the why is because it is in line with our values based around individual liberty.
IMHO: when an emerging technology threatens the livelihoods of millions, it's responsible and ethical to step away from seeing this stuff through a purely competitive lens.
Out of the three big geographic players, the US and China are jockeying for "most performant" models (whatever that means) with two separate approaches; the EU is trying to develop models that work best within their privacy, human rights and labour rights frameworks and laws.
All of these have have merits, though arguably the US's (de-facto) strategy of market dominance at any cost with as few restraints as possible will be the worst for society at large. The prudent thing to do would be to first determine if this is something that will actually live up to the hype (which IMO is still very much in the air), and then if it does, turns this into an international collaboration rather than a competitive enterprise.
It's not lost on me that this is a terminally naive point of view.
God why do people frame things in such extremes? Neither person is a psychopath. If anyone is closer to a psychopath it’s Altman, but he doesn’t completely fit the monicker.
For all his weirdness and moral failings, I don’t see Altman saying things like whites being under apartheid in the US. And worse. Multiple times a day. Every day.
Outcomes matter, when both people are leading you to undemocratic societies why should I care about their messaging when both result in worse material lives for 100s of millions of people?
Psychopaths wear a mask of sanity but underneath they have no moral framework. Some people can hate black people or Muslims or anything like that but these qualities are very human. Things like racism has existed across cultures for more than several millennia among many people. A psychopath is a different ballgame.
A psychopath can plunge a knife into a babies face and feel no emotion. The only reason why the psychopath doesn’t plunge a knife into a babies face is because he has nothing to gain from it. The psychopath appears more sane then a racist because the psychopath is usually better at pretending to be sane simply because he is unable to comprehend the passionate yet racial hatred that the racist feels.
What I am saying is musk does not fit that archetype as much. Altman fits that archetype more. Neither actually crosses the threshold to be called a “psychopath” but if psychopathy was a gradient Altman is further down the line then musk. Much further.
That is the literal definition of what a psychopath is. You’re operating from a lack of understanding of the definition.
You’re trying to tell me, in an infinitely smug, condescending, and unnecessarily long-winded manner that you know as a clinical fact that Sam Altman is a psycopath?
They are absolutely psychopaths. These are people that will flagrantly lie to your face and feel no remorse. They cause mass suffering and feel no remorse. They don't have empathy. They don't have normal human emotions.
Gleefully boasting again and again about ruining tens of thousands of lives is about as clear as it gets for evidence of psychopathy. Along with ~0 instances of empathy.
When you're arguing the degree to which such powerful people fit the definition of psychopath, you're at extremes. You've just been in the warming pot too long to see it.
So, now we need a clinical diagnosis to call evil people psychopaths or we're unhinged? Do you apply the same high standards to any of the garbage these guys spew or to the impacts of their projects?
The people that have made decisions leading to the direct deaths of millions of people AREN'T evil! There's no clinical definition of evil in the DSM, so they can't be evil you see.
Haven't you heard? Psychopath, like Pedophile, is a mere epithet these days, to indicate a person's favoured status with the in-crowd. In contrast to the equally meaningless epithet "woke".
AI is the only thing keeping the S&P afloat. You don't want to see what it would look like when all pensions numbers start going down. So far it's fake numbers from inflation and the value is decreasing dramatically, but at least they still go up.
huh? What are you are referring to is the lasting impacts of multiple years of inflation after living without it for 10 years. Those issues predate Musk v. Altman and would be happening without them.
AI build out / boom would be full bore without them.
There is no boom. There are massive layoffs, massive inflation, and massive cuts to government services - all caused by the actions of Musk, Altman, and those like them.
Saying there is no AI boom? You are either lying to yourself or not paying attention to whats whappening.
Are there problems? Absolutely - there have been problems at every single second of humanity. We will always be plagued with problems at some times worse than others. That does not mean that there isn't a boom at the same time.
There is a boom, but It's a boom for a few thousand people in the country. Everyone else is seeing their energy bills go up, and I can't get a Raspberry Pi for under $100.
He was the de facto head of an effort to drastically cut the federal government, and he's donated hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump and Trump-adjacent people elected. I ask again: do you read the news?
The Rothschilds getting news faster because they build an information network is not inside trading. Inside trading is when you have a legal and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation and are not abiding by those rules.
Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing. Stop making arguments that are just verifiably untrue.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
It’s also funny when you see their performance charted against Warren Buffet’s. Looks like Warren is a rank amateur who knows very little about the markets and buying companies for the right price compared to the likes of Nancy who must be a supreme multitasker and stock picker.
People have been strung up for less than what counts as business as usual in contemporary, rotten to the core, American business & politics.
Not really. Paul Pelosi was a tech investor. If you were heavily concentrated in META, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, etc you should have crushed the S&P and Warren Buffet too.
Famously, Warren Buffet's recent outperformance mostly came from AAPL, which was <1% of his positioning when he put it on. Imagine if it had been several percent! Such were the delights of many tech investors over the last 20 years or so.
I was picking on her but there are dozens of others who outperform Warren by multiples. And ok he’s pretty conservative but even so this chart is pretty damning.
>Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
I’m not entirely sure if you understand what fiduciary duty actually means if you read federal ethics laws and don’t make the connection. Just because you can’t control+f “fiduciary duty” doesn’t mean the concept isn’t identical. Hell, there’s literally a law that bans insider trading futures on unknown information. Not “kind of like it”, literally named verbatim.
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
You're simply not using the word 'fiduciary' correctly. You seem to have expanded it to mean any sort of legal or ethical obligation with respect to markets, and that's not what it means.
That reads markedly like contracts I’ve seen which define the basis of an individual’s fiduciary duty in consideration of their access to that sensitive information.
They do not have a fiduciary duty that is enforceable in a court of law or equity. But the trusteeship model of representative government is basically how we've conceived of the duties of elected officials in liberal democratic republics since John Locke. As a normative matter, we feel that a public official who benefits their private interests at the expense of the public trust has violated their duties to the public. That just is what a fiduciary relationship looks like.
We’ve also decided the proper way to deal with this elections due to the obvious “who will guard the guards themselves?” problems of trying to enforce this against members of Congress or the President.
I hiked and camped for three days in the Grand Canyon about 10 years ago and it was one of the high points of my life. The sheer beauty of the massive space was transformative in the way I see the world. How small we are, how big it was. I know statements like this seem overly dramatic but my time there is still something I replay in my head.
So when people dunk on the GC, I always just tell myself how lucky I was that my experience was so wonderful.
It looks like a lot of the monies in that chart are for wages and admin. That's not the worst thing. Many charities spend their money on doing things for the betterment of society and those people need to be paid a salary for their work. If there's a charity that cleans up parks, I would assume their wage expenses would be high to pay for the people doing the cleanup work.
Not saying that there's not grift in the nonprofit world, but my experience with a lot of people who work in this space is that they're good stewards of the funds and very dedicated to trying to help the world be a better place.
Indeed, what higher purpose is there except to pay oneself. At sufficiently low levels of productivity, one can consume arbitrary amounts of charitable donations. In fact, the ideal charity is a large vote bloc that is paid to clean parks. A tough job, a hard job, and one that requires back breaking labor of 4 sq. ft. a day.
I only share articles between my wife and myself. The shared articles show up in our respective Apple News apps. Never really shared an article outside of the ecosystem. Sorry that's not more helpful.
Agreed. I used to subscribe to the WSJ and WashPo and I cancelled both because I get both in Apple News. Plus I get the Atlantic, New Yorker, Wired and so many other magazines.
The user interface sucks. Sometimes I go to the actual websites to find articles and then search for them on Apple News. But for $13 USD a month, its a huge bargain and worth the crappy interface.
Another thing that kinda helped me was that Apple News doesn't give you access to the comments sections in these publications. Reading comments in the WSJ was just a huge rage-bait time suck and my life is probably better off not seeing that stuff.
Social media is not designed to keep you informed. Its designed to keep you engaged because that helps them sell ads. And the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there reporting the truth.
>I've seen in the US how social media has been used push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
And for decades before that mainstream media was used to push false narratives with absolutely no alternatives. Or have you forgotten about the Iraq War?
