so how long have you been following elon musk? how long have you been paying close attention to him? cracks are showing now more than ever before? this implies you have been looking for cracks for at least ten years. or perhaps you are yet another casual onlooker who, after reading a few articles about elon musk in the washington post over the past three years, doesnt know what the hell they are talking about?
> takes credit for all the hard work the actual [employees] do
he literally addresses this exact sentiment multiple times in many interviews, gushing with praise and admiration for the thousands of engineers who make tesla and spacex possible. literally yesterday he stated in an interview "it would be impossible for me to [build rockets] without my employees [...]." but you dont know any of this because, surprise, you dont know what the hell you are talking about.
> absurd fantasies about industries he has LITERALLY no experience in
ie automobiles and rockets?
> hyperloop
did you even read the white-paper?
oh, im a musk fan-boy. good thing too, because you might have had to use critical, logical thought instead of dismissing me. saved you some energy.
before i or anyone else heard of elon musk or the roadster, i was an electric vehicle person. i was an advocate for electric vehicles. everyone in my small camp knew that an electric vehicle revolution (like the one we are experiencing today) was possible but nobody seemed to get it. then elon musk came and did it. did it despite facing intense resistance, criticism and pushback, being called a carpet-bagger (ahem) and even having the new york times sabotage him. back when nobody knew who elon musk was, i had a front row seat to his first rodeo with "the haters." he is single-handedly responsible for getting EVs to where they are today. none of the manufacturers were doing it -- they were in fact sabotaging progress intentionally. and if anyone counters with "nissan leaf," they are only betraying how little they know about electric vehicles. sorry but he did amazing work and he has earned the right to not be subject to inaccurate facts and characterizations. i dont like everything elon musk does. he cheated on a married man for example. but he has earned the right to factual consideration of him and his activities.
burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.
well AMP was the death rattle and this is the flat-line. Google is officially dead. Another corporate zombie. if you want to be plugged in to new and exciting things, look elsewhere. What a crazy ride its been.
almost all of the predictions were totally wrong, mostly intellectual masturbation, and the one comment that was nearly bang-on was one of the least up-voted. nothing has changed.
AGI is not the next iteration of humanity because it will not resemble humanity in any way besides being sentient in some capacity. you will feel quite silly if you get to see it in your lifetime.
i say this with respect and humility, but i am very surprised at the naivete with which John addressed the subject of AGI. he is so casual about it -- not only the idea of working on it but also the idea of it existing at all. he seems oblivious to the gravity of that discovery. it is not just "very valuable," it will be earth shattering and probably wipe out humanity. and its his side-project. and his son will help out.
John is the perfect representation of what is wrong with peoples attitude toward AGI. aloof and naive.
for the same reason theranos used to come up all the time. because investment and hype didnt appear to align with the true value of what the company in question was offering.
well there is something wrong if you want the company to be run well. if leaders of a company are selected by any other trait than merit, then the company will under-perform. if the company has a monopoly, that means a long and drawn out period of that particular market not achieving what it could or maybe even damaging peoples lives if the market is important.
what is a retailer? does this mean that if i make a website to sell my small indie game, i have to follow all the ephemeral accessibility rules or else be sued?
whether or not all the accusations are based in reality, i am glad to see this happening to richard. all he did was bake his own personal political beliefs into popular software. it was totally unnecessary and counter-productive. people like to worship open-source people like richard and sdr. i dont get it. he was also a huge autistic asshole.
the more i think about it the more i dislike him. on his personal website he has pages about why not to use popular services like airbnb. one of his reasons is because they use proprietary code in their app. another it because you have to register with identifying information. hes an annoying zealot who will literally never be satisfied. a person who draws purpose from the act of contradicting and belittling other people. a person who has no sensibility whatsoever when it comes to society, the big picture or the subtle insights of social grace. good fucking riddance.
so he was mostly unresponsive but could still feel pain. they were doing stuff with his tubes with no pain meds for almost two decades. that has to be one of the most horrifying things ive ever imagined.
im very glad to find a person who shares my feelings. every time i open my feeds and i see a headline about some kind of machine learning or ai breakthrough, i feel physically uncomfortable. every time i open one of those links there is a chance that it will change the equation of life.
the other day i opened one of those links and it was GTP-2. besides all the insane implications of GTP-2, what bothers me is that i am no longer able to assume that any internet comment is written by a human, no matter how convincing. there are still comments that GTP-2 could not write but anyone who points that out is pretty short sighted because it wont be long before there are vanishingly few comments that could not have been generated. i kind of liked knowing that a person was typing out (almost) all those comments.
one of the biggest realizations ive had recently is that technology does not cut equally in both directions. everyone in my generation has thought of technology as a neutral entity: for every benefit of a given technology, one can point out a corresponding disadvantage. on the surface it seems like the scale dips neither for the societal disadvantages nor for the societal benefits. this is a very fundamental belief. and its wrong. its funny how people put so much faith in such fuzzy logic.
the implications of that realization are difficult to swallow. it means that with every new technology introduced into the world, there is the potential for it to harm peoples quality of life. or improve it. but there is no regulation of technology so its a crap shoot. weve been rolling the dice for a long time and we didnt even know it. and i think weve been winning. but i think that high level automation is not going to be a win for us.
besides all of that, there is absolutely no debate that these advancements in ai are to our generation what personal computers were to the baby boomer generation. without close attention, we will fall behind and our kids will have fluency in the new world of automation while we cling to very old and outdated patterns. in other words, it makes me feel very old.
people in here keep on saying that uber is not making profit. where is the source for that? i remember people saying the same thing about tesla. complete dogma. nobody seemed to understand that tesla was investing huge amounts of money into the development of other cars and expanding their factories. so what are ubers expenses? it does not pass the smell test. what is the expense that is killing them?
and people in here also dont seem to appreciate that uber can change their prices. they cant right now, but they will be able to soon. all the investor money floating around means that their competition may be able to operate in the red for extended periods of time. when the investor money dries up and everyone is surviving on profit, prices can go up. and they will go up because rideshare is the most efficient and cheapest way to do taxis -- nobody is going to come in and disrupt uber. except for driverless cars. but driverless cars arent going to happen. not anytime soon.
edit: i just looked at the chart in the document and as far as i can tell they are 3B in the red. not really sure what the units are in that chart. ok, well there are a lot of expenses where i cant tell exactly what they are, but their marketing expenses were 3B. 3 fucking billion dollars -- am i reading that correctl? thats the same amount by which they are in the red. i also see some very high numbers for management. all uber has to do is cut the fat and they will be making a nice profit.
maybe its silly but i think california will always attract lots of great people because the weather everywhere else fucking sucks. i did a huge road-trip across the US last year and the biggest lesson i drew from it was that california is paradise compared to the rest of the country. i never traveled as a kid, so i assumed that things were nice in other places too. seriously, i dont understand why anyone chooses to live somewhere else. other places are cheap but they also suck massively. and people who live in NY? its just as expensive over there, even more restrictive gun laws (you cant even carry a fucking taser) and the weather SUCKS. why someone would know about both places and choose NY over CA is a mystery to me.
> takes credit for all the hard work the actual [employees] do
he literally addresses this exact sentiment multiple times in many interviews, gushing with praise and admiration for the thousands of engineers who make tesla and spacex possible. literally yesterday he stated in an interview "it would be impossible for me to [build rockets] without my employees [...]." but you dont know any of this because, surprise, you dont know what the hell you are talking about.
> absurd fantasies about industries he has LITERALLY no experience in
ie automobiles and rockets?
> hyperloop
did you even read the white-paper?
oh, im a musk fan-boy. good thing too, because you might have had to use critical, logical thought instead of dismissing me. saved you some energy.
before i or anyone else heard of elon musk or the roadster, i was an electric vehicle person. i was an advocate for electric vehicles. everyone in my small camp knew that an electric vehicle revolution (like the one we are experiencing today) was possible but nobody seemed to get it. then elon musk came and did it. did it despite facing intense resistance, criticism and pushback, being called a carpet-bagger (ahem) and even having the new york times sabotage him. back when nobody knew who elon musk was, i had a front row seat to his first rodeo with "the haters." he is single-handedly responsible for getting EVs to where they are today. none of the manufacturers were doing it -- they were in fact sabotaging progress intentionally. and if anyone counters with "nissan leaf," they are only betraying how little they know about electric vehicles. sorry but he did amazing work and he has earned the right to not be subject to inaccurate facts and characterizations. i dont like everything elon musk does. he cheated on a married man for example. but he has earned the right to factual consideration of him and his activities.