The Iliad was written after the classical era of Bronze Age Egypt, so no classical age mummy could be buried with the Iliad because it didn't exist yet.
I think the point was that it would be a lot more interesting had it dated to a time prior to people for whom the Iliad was part of their culture were present in the region and when such artifacts would have been normal-ish
Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.
Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.
Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.
The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
It doesn't help when a political candidate campaigns on promises of "radical transparency" and breaking up "corruption" and "the deep state" in DC and then gets in power and is even less transparent, more corrupt, and filling the DC bureaucracy with more yes men than the person before him.
How are you supposed to build trust with those kinds of outcomes?
Nothing you said is true. The fact that you didn't name a single person is an example of the style of reasoning that has increasingly shaped USA discourse over the last 60 years. If you don't have specifics then you are simply giving into the trend towards distrust. Since 1960 every institution in the USA has been made more transparent and more directly democratic and yet this has done nothing to increase trust in those institutions. The distrust comes first and the distrust does not reference anything in reality. If Americans are more worried about corruption when corruption is decreasing then something is going on in the minds of Americans which does not have a correspondence with any external reality. Likewise, Americans are increasingly convinced that crime is increasing when every statistic we have shows that the crime wave lasted from 1960 to 1990 and has been in decline since 1990. Again, that Americans are more worried about crime when crime is decreasing shows that the concern about crime is being driven by something other than crime. The distrust comes first. The distrust shapes people's perception, separate from facts. The distrust shapes people's narratives, in opposition to the facts.
I think it's more than that. I have never seen a new technology so explicitly promoted -- even vastly oversold, in my opinion -- as "we're going to take every single white collar job". Replacing humans. That seems to be the all-encompassing vision of what execs are pushing for AI.
Now, from my stance, this grab bag of machine learning technology that is thrown under the "AI" banner is not even remotely good enough for this. It is "slop"-y and "hallucination" prone. Attempts at "creative" efforts are monolithic, without a distinctive voice, often with bizarre errors. The technology can alternate between being extremely helpful to being maddingly a waste of time, in the later case given you 10 solutions for an issue that are all wrong.
And yet, the C-suite types from Anthropic and Microsoft and others are preaching, again and again, their vision that all white collar jobs will be wiped out in 18 months and similar (just one example -- https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...).
Certainly, such banter has noticeably impacted entry level hires at the moment. But beyond that, one gets the impression that current tech execs are misanthropic and generally give two flips about humanity, all the better (at least, so they think) for their profits. It seems like, rather than promoting the use cases for machine learning which will improve and help advance society (I certainly can think of some things that have and might be done), the entire point of the giant amounts of capex being spent is to destroy jobs (the foundation of current capitalism) and make things worse off for everyone.
I agree that institutional trust has declined over the last decades, and unfortunately current technology execs are playing a part. I am old enough to actually remember the Google "Don't Be Evil" days. What happened?
Grants operate differently over here. You have to write a submission, proposing works and budget and generally justifying. It is assessed by a committee. Politics gets involved. And a few people get larger chunks of money and the people holding the purse strings retain control on what is produced. It is essentially work on commission for the government, except you rarely get 100% of your costs covered.
Whereas in this Irish program, it is less money for more people chosen by lottery. The only editorial control is who is qualified to enter the lottery. It is also subsidizing the artist and not the art work, with artists working in cheap mediums receiving the same as artists dealing with high costs. So you are still going to need a grant or commission if you work in monumental bronze.
Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection -- this totally makes sense if you assume they believe that the future of human connection is with an AI friend.
That https://character.ai is so enormously popular with people who are under the age of 25 suggests that this is the future. And Meta is certainly looking at https://character.ai with great interest, but also with concern. https://character.ai represents a threat to Meta.
Years ago, when Meta felt that Instagram was a threat, they bought Instagram.
If they don't think they can buy https://character.ai then they need to develop their own version of it.
Character.ai over raised, the leadership team left, and there's no appreciable revenue AFAIK and have heard. Kids under 25 role playing with cartoons are hard to monetize.
Then there's also the reputational harm if Meta acquires them and the journalists write about the bad things that happen on that platform.
I don't think this is a great article, as I think it focuses too much on the Washington Post, but there are some issues that will have to be addressed in American democracy.
National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.
About local democracy:
1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.
2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).
3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.
4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).
Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.
Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.
There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.
They went from $559.36 to $132 a month on Hetzner, and they seem happy about the performance. This matches my own experience as well, I have been stunned regarding Hetzner and how cheap it can be.
Why do volunteer firefighters rush into a burning building to try to save children from some family they have never met before? Every day we afforded examples of people sacrificing their personal interests for the benefit of others.
But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.
In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded:
"In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to outsource work to Brazil or India. Here in New York City, I am seeing an uptick in outsourcing. The work that remains in the USA will likely continue to be office-based because the work that can be done 100% remotely will likely go over seas."
He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it".
In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem.
In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.
He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work.
I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.
Wether or not OpenAI is sustainable or not is only a question that can be answered in hindsight. If OpenAI is still around in 10 years, in the same sort of capacity, does OP become retroactively wrong?
My point is, you can agree that OpenAI is unsustainable, but it's not clear to me that is a decided fact, rather than an open conjecture. And if someone is making that decision from a place of ego, I have greater reason to believe that they didn't reason themselves into that position.
The fact they are not currently even close to profitable with ever increasing costs and the sobering scaling realities there is something you could consider, and if you do believe they are sustainable, then you would have to believe (in my opinion, unlikely scenarios) they will somehow become sustainable, which is also a conjecture.
Seems a little unreasonable to point out “they are still around” as a refutation of the claim they aren’t sustainable when, in fact, the moment the investment money faucet keeping them alive is turned off they collapse and very quickly.
No, it's a question answerable now. If you're losing twice as much money as you're making, the end of your company is an inescapable fact unless you turn that trend around.
What Zitron points out, correctly, is that there currently exists no narrative beyond wishful thinking which explains how that reversal will manifest.
I don't think he's right about everything. He is particularly weak at understanding underlying technology, as others have pointed out. But, perhaps by luck, he is right most of the time.
For example, he was the lone voice saying that despite all the posturing and media manipulation by Altman, that OpenAI's for-profit transformation would not work out, and certainly not by EOY2025. He was also the lone voice saying that "productivity gains from AI" were not clearly attributable to such, and are likely make-believe. He was right on both.
Perhaps you have forgotten these claims, or the claims about OpenAI's revenue from "agents" this year, or that they were going to raise ChatGPT's price to $44 per month. Altman and the world have seemingly memory-holed these claims and moved on to even more fantastical ones.
I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular order):
- Successfully navigate a convoluted and onerous relationship with Microsoft, one that exists both as a lifeline and a direct source of competition.
- Raise more money than any startup has ever raised in history, and continue to do so at a pace totally unseen in the history of financing.
- Have a significant technological breakthrough such that it reduces the costs of building and operating GPT — or whatever model that succeeds it — by a factor of thousands of percent.
- Have such a significant technological breakthrough that GPT is able to take on entirely unseen new use cases, ones that are not currently possible or hypothesized as possible by any artificial intelligence researchers.
- Have these use cases be ones that are capable of both creating new jobs and entirely automating existing ones in such a way that it will validate the massive capital expenditures and infrastructural investment necessary to continue.
I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain it, and training these models is equally untenable, both as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of theft) and the amount of training data necessary to develop them.
He is right about this too. They are doing #2 on this list.
Is he right on the AI stuff? Like, on the OpenAI company stuff he could be? I don't know? But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
I generally don't agree with him on much; it's just nobody really talks about how much money those companies burn, and are expected to burn, in bigger perspective.
For me 10 billion, 100 billion and 1 trillion are all very abstract numbers - until you show much unreal 1 trillion is.
Attach your name to this publicly, and you're a clown. I don't know why the world started listening to clowns and taking them seriously, when their personas are crafted to be non-serious on purpose.
It's not invisible, because some people can see it. It is illegible because the leadership of a large company won't know how to interpret it. This particular usage of "illegible" has been around for awhile, but is probably best known from the book, "Seeing Like A State":
