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#2 cannot be understated


Was the golden boy for a while? What shifted? I don't even remember what he did "first" to get the status. Is it maybe just a case of familiarity breeding contempt?


It is starting to become clear to more and more people that Sam is a dyed in the wool True Believer in AGI. While it's obvious in hindsight that OpenAI would never have gotten anywhere if he wasn't, seeing it so starkly is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.


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Damm this is smart. I like it


Someone else said it first here


it's even worse than that and i hope people recognize that it's not that he's a True Believer (though the TBs are often hilarious)

it's that he has no ethics to speak of at all. it's not that he's out of touch, it's that he simply does not care.


Why would him believing in AGI make people dislike him?

He is clearly disliked by a lot of tech community, I don't see his AGI belief as a big part of that.


Well, in the world where AGI is created and it goes suboptimally, everybody gets turned into computronium and goes extinct, which is a prospect some are miffed about. And, in the world where it goes well, no decision of any consequence is made by a human being ever again, since the computer has planned every significant life event since before their birth. Free will in a very literal sense will have been erased. Sam being a true believer means he is not going to stop working until one of these worlds comes true. People who understand the stakes are understandably irked by him.


Well, he made mistake many billionaires do, he opened his mouth with his own thoughts, instead of just reading what PR department told him to read


All the manipulation and lying that got him fired.


He is a pretty interesting case. According to the book "Empire of AI" about OpenAI, he lies constantly, even about things that are too trivial to matter. So it may be part of some compulsive behavior.

And when two people want different things from him, he "resolves" the conflict by agreeing with each of them separately, and then each assumes they got what they wanted, until they talk to the other person and find out that nothing was resolved.

Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.


He was once a big pin in Y Combinator (I think kind of ran it?)... Paul Graham thought he was great for YC.

Interesting that he's got as far as he has with this issue. I don't think you can run a company effectively if you don't deal in truth.

Some of his videos have seemed quite bizarre as well, quite sarcastic about concerns people have about AI in general.


> He was once a big pin in Y Combinator (I think kind of ran it?)... Paul Graham thought he was great for YC.

And today it seems everyone will at YC hate him but pretend not


Saw Empire of AI in a bookshop recently but held off buying as wasn’t sure if it was going to be surface level. You’d recommend?


Understandable worry, but it's not surface-level at all. Karen Hao is a great journalist. Highly recommend.


It's sort of two books combined into one: The first one is the story of OpenAI from the beginning, with all the drama explained with quotes from inside sources. This part was informative and interesting. It includes some details about Elon being convinced that Demis Hassabis is going to create an evil super-intelligence that will destroy humanity, because he once worked on a video game with an evil supervillain. I guess his brain was cooked much earlier than we thought.

The second one is a bunch of SJW hand-wringing about things that are only tangentially related, like indigenous Bolivians being oppressed by Spanish Conquistadors centuries ago. That part I don't care for as much.


Not a case, society call them sociopaths. Witch includes power struggle, manipulation and physiological abuse of the people around them.

Example, Sam Altman and OpenAI hoarding 40% of the RAM supply as unprocessed wafers stored in warehouses bought with magical bubble investors money in GPUs that don't exist yet and that they will not be able to install because there's not enough electricity to feed such botched tech, in data centers that are still to be built, with intention to punch the competence supply, and all the people of the planet in the process along two years (at least).


> Really not a person who is qualified to run a company, except the constant lying is good for fundraising and PR.

For a brief moment I thought you were talking about Elon there


He is a sociopath. It's ok to say it.


Yep the various -path adjectives get overused but in this case he's the real deal, something is really really off about him.

You can see it when he talks, he's clearly trying (very unconvincingly) to emulate normal human emotions like concern and empathy. He doesn't feel them.

People like that are capable of great evil and there's a part of our lizard brains that can sense it


Sounds like when people are politicking he just takes a “whatever” approach haha. That seems reasonable.


No, that's not what he's doing.


Cringey to watch their interviews.


*Overstated


oops, yup.


Indeed. Sama seems to be incredibly delusional. OAI going bust is going to really damage his well-being, irrespective of his financial wealth. Brother really thought he was going to take over the world at one point.


Scariest part is it probably won't, and he'll be back in five year with something else.


Do you see Sam Bankman-Fried getting reinstated?

I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.


People lying to everyone lie to themselves the most


flawless is a wild take.


lol indeed, since iOS 26 my GPS is broken on Apple Maps and Google map. It’ll just freeze the updates very few minutes making it almost useless for driving


Nice. Yours didn't work, yet mine did. Sorry mine works, bro.


This is an absurd comparison - you (presumably) made a commitment to your wife. There is no such commitment on a public blog?


Is it that absurd?

We have many expectations in society which often aren't formalized into a stated commitment. Is it really unreasonable to have some commitment towards society to these less formally stated expectations? And is expecting communication presented as being human to human to actually be from a human unreasonable for such an expectation? I think not.

If you were to find out that the people replying to you were actually bots designed to keep you busy and engaged, feeling a bit betrayed by that seems entirely expected. Even though at no point did those people commit to you that they weren't bots.

Letting someone know they are engaging with a bot seems like basic respect, and I think society benefits from having such a level of basic respect for each other.

It is a bit like the spouse who says "well I never made a specific commitment that I would be the one picking the gift". I wouldn't like a society where the only commitments are those we formally agree to.


I do appreciate this side of the argument but.. do you think that the level/strength of a marriage commitment is worthy of comparison to walking by someone in public / riding the same subway as them randomly / visiting their blog?

They seem world's apart to me!


I find them comparable, but not equal, for that reason.

Especially if we consider the summation of these commitments. One is obviously much larger, but it defines just one of our relationships within society. The other defines the majority of our interactions within society at large, so a change to it, while much less impactful to any one single interaction or relationship (I use them interchangeably here as often the relationship is just that one single interaction) is magnified by how much more often it occurs. This does move towards making the costs of losing some trust in such a small interaction as having a much larger cost than it first appears, which I think further increases how one can compare them.

(More generally, I also like comparing things even when the scale doesn't match, as long as the comparison really applies. Like apples and oranges, both are fruits you can make juice or jam with.)


That is how illustrations work. If someone doesn't see something, you amplify it until it clubs them over the head and even an idiot can see it.

And sometimes of course even that doesn't work but there has always been and always will be the clued, clue-resistant, and the clue-proof. Can't do anything about the clue-proof but at least presenting the arguments allows everyone else to consider them.

This fixation on the reverence due a spouse is completely stupid and beside the point of the concept being expressed. As though you think there is some arbitrary rule about spouses that is the essense of the problem? The gift-for-spouse is an intentionally hyberbolic example of a concept that also exists and applies the same at non-hyperbolic levels.

The point of a clearer example is you recognize "oh yeah, that would be wrong" and so then the next step is to ask what makes it wrong? And why doesn't that apply the same back in the original context?

You apparently would say "because it's not my wife", but there is nothing magically different about needing to respect your spouses time vs anyone else's. It's not like there is some arbitrary rule that says you can't lie to a spouse simply because they are a spouse and those are the rules about spouses. You don't lie to a spouse because it's intrinsically wrong to lie at all to anyone. It's merely extra wrong to to do anything wrong to someone you supposedly claim to extra-care about. Lying was already wrong all by itself for reasons that don't have anything special to do with spouses.

This idea that it's fine to lie to and waste the time of everyone else, commandeer and harness their attention of an interaction with you, while you just let a robot do your part and you are off doing something more interesting with your own time and attention, to everyone else who isn't your spouse simply because you don't know them personally and have no reason to care about them is really pretty damning. The more you try to make this argument that you seem to think is so rational, the more empty inside you declare yourself to be.

I really can not understand how anyone can try to float the argument "What's so bad about being tricked if you can't tell you were tricked?" There are several words for the different facets of what's so wrong, such as "manipulation". All I can say is, I guess you'll just have to take it on faith that humans overwhemingly consider manipulation to be a bad thing. Read up on it. It's not just some strange idea I have.


I think we are having a fundamental disagreement about "being tricked" happening at all. I'm intelligent enough to follow the argument.

I see that, in the hyperbolic case, you are actively tricking your wife. I just don't agree that you are actively tricking randomly public visitors of a blog in any real way? there is no agreement in place such that you can "trick" them. Presumably you made commitments in your marriage. No commitments were made to the public when a blog got posted.

It's equally baffling to me that you would use one case to make the point of the other. It doesn't make any fucking sense.


Why was it wrong in the wife case? What specifically was wrong about it? Assume she never finds out and totally loves the gift. Is purely happy. (I guess part of this also depends on the answer to another question: What is she so happy about exactly?)


oh my god. I am a fucking idiot.

I thought we were talking about BUYING THE SECRETARY A GIFT. E.g. breaking his commitment to his wife through some implied/emotional cheating?

Having the secretary buy the gift? My god who cares. I have no argument against that at all.

Sorry I feel like I should delete all my comments but.. such is the internet.


There are many discussions of what sets apart a high trust society from a low trust society, and how a high trust society enables greater cooperation and positive risk taking collectively. Also about how the United States is currently descending into a low trust society.

"Random blog can do whatever they want and it's wrong of you to criticize them for anything because you didn't make a mutual commitment" is low-trust society behavior. I, and others, want there to be a social contract that it is frowned upon to violate. This social contract involves not being dishonest.


Norms of society.

I made no commitment that says I won't intensely stare at people on the street. But I just might be a jerk if I keep doing it.

"You're not wrong, Walter. you're just an asshole."


Illuminating that you think the illustrated problem has something to do with a commitment.


I can't tell if this is a genuine question or not but if it is.. deploying a Ruby on Rails app with a pile of gems that have c deps isn't fixed with static linking. This is true for python and node and probably other things I'm not thinking of.


You can’t expect anything that isn’t in the original agreement. If you want to sell software, sell it!

If you don’t want a megacorp using your software, don’t give it away. Or license it such that they can’t do what you don’t want them to do.

This retroactive take backs shit is so, so bad for everyone involved.


cmd-tab does this. what are we missing? cmd-tab, cmd-tab. terminal, browser. browser, terminal. has for years.


That switches between apps, not windows. Open two browser windows and two terminals. Try to switch between one terminal and one browser without bringing all the other windows to the fore. You can't do it.

Windows (and most Unix WMs, I don't know where it actually originated) style alt-tab maintains a stack of recent windows. So you can hit alt-tab repeatedly to swap between the two most recent, or hit alt-tab-tab-tab to bring up only the 4th most recent window, etc.


ahh sorry I didn't understand. I'm so used to cmt-tab, cmd-` but I'm not at all claiming that's "most" efficient. makes sense why people would want that. I wish Apple would "just" add a fucking checkbox somewhere for that. Seems like a thing people really want.


My guess is that we (I am also a user of git) won't even notice.


I will leave this here for the future:

  $ ldd /usr/bin/git
          linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f69c2d64000)
          libpcre2-8.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpcre2-8.so.0 (0x00007f69c2c81000)
          libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007f69c2c67000)
          libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f69c2616000)
          /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f69c2d66000)
  $ ls -alh /usr/bin/git
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0M Aug 25 11:40 /usr/bin/git
I did not measure but it does not take long on my old hardware to compile git from scratch either, for now.


Ok, I'll bite.

While we are on Hacker News, this is still an enormously obtuse way to communicate.

Are you saying that as users of git we will be negatively affected by deps being added and build times going up? Do you have evidence of that from past projects adding rust?

Why not just say that??


Git is already an uncomfortably large binary for embedded applications. Rust binaries tend to be even more bloated.


Why would you want to run a VCS in an embedded application? Any halfway usable development platform (even VIM) will be much bigger anyways.


It is sure convenient to be able to use git (and vim!) on embedded Linux. You can get by without them of course...


Yes, Hello World is 10MB in Rust even when optimizing for size. Hello World in C is 16kB, even after static linking everything including GNU libc, it's only 810kB. I really wonder what that large program does.

This program is still dynamically linked:

     linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe6d8fd000)
     libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fb0a62c6000)
     libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb0a60f2000)
     /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb0a636d000)
     libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fb0a60d0000)
     libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fb0a60ca000)
Not sure, why it needs all these dependencies, this is C Hello World:

    linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fffea181000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007faebae6a000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007faebb087000)
And I think the C binary is already bloated.

To stress it again: The Rust Hello World program is 2.5-times larger then the whole Git executable with functionality of 20 years!


No need to bite. :P

We will see!


See what? Why are you vague-posting?


We will see how larger the binary will become, we will see how many more (if any) shared libraries it will depend on, and we will see how long it will take to compile.

Clear enough for you? It is a note to myself, and for others who care. You might not care, I do, and some other people do, too.


can you imagine allowing this into your house? who is this for? I guess maybe if they give the fridges away.. oh god don't give them ideas.


No, they won't give the fridge away. It will be like Smart TVs. They will be slightly cheaper (allegedly) because they are "subsidized" by ad dollars.


Don't give them ideas you say?

What if they develop an iconic fridge and dial up the brand recognition to 11 via an intensive and prolonged ad campaign.

Introducing...

  The KAGE
No embedded ads yet. Then they wait for the reviews in all the usual places to be released.

After the dust has settled, they push the ad update remotely.

You don't connect your fridge to the internet, like some kind of Luddite?

No worries, they thought of that and bundled a sim card with it.


I'll take the free fridge and jailbreak it


Careful, they will likely make you sign an agreement that you are not going to reverse engineer, jailbreak or gain access in any unauthorized way to the electronic systems. At least car manufacturers are doing that.


I'd love to have a system where I could run a script from the command line to randomly choose an episode from my collection and airplay it to my tv.

Are those API's available here? anyone know?

Cool!

edit: Without full mirror mode. I use Airflow for this right now and I love it, but would be more fun with automation.


There used to be a world where you could get INTO the investment with almost free money. You can't get a 2% loan and dump it into the stock market. Well you can't do either anymore but you used to be able to :)


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