There are plenty of Mamdani's, the lobbyists and investor/donor class fund their opponents and use their media arms to quash them.
One of the reasons Mamdani's election was national and even globals news even though he's just a mayor in NYC is because they won't want people to see that his politics works, lest they start getting ideas and asking for the same in their own cities.
I don't think a philosopher who died 80 years ago is driving the change in how words are used in the last 20 years. It has more to do with the Internet and the cultural forces driving people to use hyperbole or make things up to make money in the attention market. This article wouldn't be on HN if it was just about Dua Lipa starting a bookstore, they added "banned" so it would catch peoples attention even if that's basically a lie.
> perfectly clear communication was always a polite fiction.
The comment I replied to is trying to argue that it's ok to call books "banned" even if they're not banned, because it's like the term "cancelled" which at one point meant someone whose content was actually cancelled but I guess they're suggesting it doesn't mean that anymore either.
I'm not arguing that words should have perfect meanings, that is obviously a strawman, but this article and comment thread are using words to mean the complete opposite of their common meaning.
Exactly, this is just application of property rights and enforcing existing consumer protection rights. You can’t tell someone they’re “buying” something if they don’t own it. Imagine someone doing that with house rentals or car leases, it would obviously be considered fraud.
“Everyone else is doing it” is a childish justification and there’s a line where this becomes fraud and a felony offense. Do you think Elizabeth Holmes should have been allowed to make up claims about their blood testing technology? Is it OK to grossly overestimate Claude’s capabilities when the US military starts using it to determine strike targets?
You should add a parallel timeline of how many times AI CEOs have claimed their next model is too dangerous to release, AGI is months away, or some white collar job will be obsolete within 6 months.
I don’t know anyone in the tech industry who thinks AGI will never happen or that software engineering and white collar jobs can’t be automated. We all read sci fi, you’re not some unique visionary for anticipating AI. The frustration is with how much the claims have outpaced reality and how poorly the investors and executives have treated their workers during this transition.
Ranked choice voting would go a long way, the two-party system is an intentionally forced false dichotomy like when parents give their kids the choice to eat broccoli or carrots so they’ll think it was their decision. Both parties are controlled by the investor class.
The money printing during COVID screwed everything up. Most of the capital was directly given to banks and businesses, fraudulently in many cases and unnecessarily in most, and everything pooled up into real estate and stocks so anyone who had already owned a large proportion of those became absurdly wealthy in the span of a couple years and everyone else effectively lost 20-30% of their income through inflation. The majority of all money was printed during COVID, no one voted for this to happen, no one bothered to even communicate how it was decided how much money would be printed and who would get it, and no retrospective has ever been done. It’s never been more clear that a small group of the wealthiest investors in the US run the show and the majority of people are wage slaves who had the ladder kicked out above them. Now we’re seeing an administration and elite class that is openly ransacking the country for whatever profits it can extract from a dying empire. I have no idea how this ever gets fixed.
Why should the skeptics be reading it? The scaling laws show diminishing returns on more training data and larger models.
From the Kaplan scaling laws paper:
> We have observed consistent scalings of language model log-likelihood loss with non-embedding parameter count N, dataset size D, and optimized training computation Cmin, as encapsulated in Equations (1.5) and (1.6). Conversely, we find very weak dependence on many architectural and optimization hyperparameters. Since scalings with N,D,Cmin are power-laws, there are diminishing returns with increasing scale.
So the skeptics are right to be skeptical of LLMs being all you need for continued advancement in this space. It seems like the believers are the ones who need to learn about the scaling laws.
> Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.