But if we play six degrees of separation, everything is tech related.
I flagged this. There are a million places on the internet talking about it: Twitter, news outlets, Instagram… even my loony relatives have all weighed in on Facebook.
No need to add this forum to that list of places talking politics - it’s against the guidelines for HN anyway.
> Personally I'd love to go to the Arctic or Antarctic as a civilian as it would be an interesting challenge.
This is actually possible! Friends of friends have done it (with NSF I believe).
Research expeditions to the arctic sometimes take civilians as support (janitors, IT, cooks, medics, etc). It can be a cool way to spend a few months aboard a boat in the arctic.
That also seems to be a risk with most centralized social networks these days as well.
Our LinkedIn profiles have been scanned by scrapers, Instagram photos used for facial recognition training, Twitter / FB posts replicated in a bunch of downstream places, archives, and search indexes. Not to mention data being sold to third parties.
At this point, I assume if I post it publicly online, it is no longer in my control where it ends up downstream and I assume it will be online somewhere forever.
I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases for AI.
Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.
Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used. Similar for “what temp should I cook chicken to?”
It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.
> Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
Search operators had already solved this problem before Google decided to start ignoring them. When I genuinely came up with nothing it was usually because I didn’t have the vocabulary to make the search in the first place; this is where LLMs really shine. I often resolve technical issues by just asking the LLM what to do and responding “Didn’t work,” until I get something more helpful. It feels like smacking the top of a TV to get better reception, and it doesn’t always work, but it works often enough that I find myself using my LLM of choice quite a bit more, and Google quite a bit less.
AI browsers are great for defeating dark patterns too. I can go into ChatGPT Atlas and tell it to cancel my Adobe subscription and it'll eventually figure it out despite all their attempts to make it difficult. Love that.
ChatGPT/Perplexity don't make an AI browser for Linux :'( so I'm stuck with BrowserOS for now. I'll have to spend more time with it to get to know what it can do.
> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.
Brilliant insight.
Reminds of me this, from Theodore Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic:
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I know people who have talked that talk, never dared walk it. I am happy with myself that I have walked that walk—many times. Most of the time they have not ended up how I had hoped they would in my imagination. Other times, they did. Regardless, in all cases, I am not left here now wondering what would have happened if…
Getting a game I wrote published in 1989 or so was one that worked out. Hitchhiking from Alaska back to the Lower-48 when the salmon season closed was another.
Quitting Apple to write games for the iPhone was a big fail. When I realized it though I applied and was hired back at Apple. Until that little experiment though I had been watching apps skyrocket to the top-10 while I unable to submit an app of my own (Apple policy, of course).
I had an idea for a great fantasy novel in my head for years. Only when I finally forced myself to start to write it did I realize I really didn't have an idea for a great fantasy novel. I had part of an idea for a great fantasy novel. And then there's the middle of the story you have to write, has to be interesting…
But as I say, in all cases at least I'm not stuck in Walter Mitty's [1] shoes for the rest of my life.
It is always the "what if" when looking back at the opportunities that presented themselves in life that eat at you. Things that might have been were it not for the lack of courage to try.
I rarely regret the things I did that didn't work out, it is always the things I could have done but didn't do. Reducing the number of compelling yet unexplored branches in life significantly increases life satisfaction.
> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.
It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.
A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do, then gives up on. I wait a few months before telling people I’m doing something so I’m fairly confident it’s something I will carry on.
> A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do
IME over years, when you're talking about doing something your actually doing it is thwarted. I've noticed that that both with myself and with others.
Keeping mum and going about it privately, then sharing it when done, seems to have much higher success rates.
I've tried to reason through it in many different ways: talking about it satisfies you and you don't seek satisfaction from the actual implementation of the idea; talking about it "dissipates the energy"; and a number of other attempts at explanation.
But beyond explanations, the anecdata seems to suggest that doing much precede talking about. Even when you're developing something (say, software) in public, first you do then you talk about it in the commit message.
This seems to parallel the old dictum that ideas are easy, while working to realize them is the actually hard part. Who'd have thought.
I've worked for a few bosses/ceos like this. Far more interested in being seen as someone with a particular title or company and far less interested in what it takes to actually make that worth something.
> It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.
From my experience, you have to do both otherwise someone else takes what you do, markets as his own and you get scraps. It keeps happening to me, since I don't generally like to talk about what I do. And I think fundamentally it's a big difference between European and American culture.
Might be more of a difference between what to do in your working (employee) life vs in your private life. In your private life, you can't get scraps because it's generally work on things you own, like a business, personal fitness, skills, etc. In your employee life, you're generally working on things that you don't own for recognition to get a promotion or raise. There the recognition is the entire point and people may not look too deeply into who did what, so you may need to be more overt about things.
I notice that if you get to the point you could be doing something any extra thought is probably counter productive but to talk about it might even end it.
The entrepreneurial spirit isn't visiting you to talk about things.
>> But from now on, I'm either gonna be a successful founder, or I'm not. And if I'm not, I'll have to deal with having broken with the expectations that people had of me.
Don't worry, they expected you to fail. They hoped you'd succeed, but expected failure. Statistically most businesses fail, and failure rates are faster when your customers are VCs not users.
I say this as encouragement, not criticism. Accepting that failure is (by far) the most likely outcome is both realistic and freeing. The anxiety of failure is gone.
Frankly, your lack of marketing experience would worry me. Without the ability to reach users (much less customers) how can you do anything but fail? New businesses are not bounded by technical ability (especially in the age of AI) they are bounded by Marketing.
Leaving aside for the moment yesterday advertising and marketing are very different functions (advertising is easy, marketing is hard);
If your target customers are "VC funded companies" then sure, getting in bed with as many VCs as possible is certainly one marketing approach (and probably a good one.)
Certainly you're are a lot of products targeted at businesses who are flush with cash and eager for kit like fancy chairs.
The important part of marketing is knowing who your potential customers are, and the best way for them to get to know you.
This kind of warrior ethos outside of fantasy books or games is a huge turn off to me, it feels so anachronistic. I don’t understand why it seems so prevalent in the US, especially as a country built on Christianity that has Jesus coming as an harmless lamb to teach compassion, humility and love. Courage, devotion, perseverance, sure. Victory or defeat? No thanks.
i used to shun this kind of rhetoric when i was younger, preferring to think of myself a scholar among the Simon the chipmunks of the world, but I've come to accept that humans are made to fight. i dont think its wrong to venerate the warrior - im the farthest thing from a US citizen or a Christian, but my culture still has their folk heroes. look up lieutenant adnan if you'd like a stirring of the spirit
Yeah, I’m in agreement here. I get how this mindset might be off-putting, but we’re still in a phase of human development where if you don’t fight, you’re going to lose to people who will.
Trump is an example of someone who wants to fight, and now all of us who just want to get along are now playing catch-up, trying to figure out how to respond.
Sure those are the things Jesus advocated for in society, but it's not as if a warrior ethos isn't warranted for Jesus considering the attitude towards his message at the time. Especially when you gauge it in the light of what eventually happened to him. The ultimate message in Christianity is the necessity of perseverance in pursuit of goals. The world in general isn't immediately receptive to a message that priorities acceptance over lament.
Your complaint is well warranted, yet know as one on the other inside, Americans are apathetic and dejected. It is the mob that professes these self delusions as their own. And Americans are not self aware enough to distinguish the mob heads from their own and in the heat of exchange.
The individual American goes along with the strongest voice in their head. There have been a valiant few, this is a time of self satisfying rhetoric. Sweet lies over bitter truths, on all sides.
Now, the seeds of hypocrisy long since sewn, blossom into a mass mind sickness of self identity we see today. On all sides. Every side, even those twelve sides deep you would not recognize.
Power is everyone’s burden, it may only be delegated irresponsibly for so long before it collapses upon itself.
Yeah but the US presidents would say that - they typically have track records of wanton destruction that are rather easy to criticise. It is notable that Roosevelt was part of a generation of global political leadership that bungled their way into first an economic then a literal bloodbath, the magnitude of which the world has not seen before or since. And US policies had a major hand in setting up 50 years of communist ascendance across a big chunk of the globe. I think he might have nuked two cities on the way through too, don't recall if it was him [EDIT].
If those were events I was involved with, I too would be giving powerful speeches about the importance of disregarding critics. The decision makers only handled the situation well if you assume that the catastrophe of the early part of the century was a bit like weather, sort of coming form nowhere in a way no-one could foresee or really influence.
[EDIT] I checked, he set the program up but it was his successor that actually dropped the bombs. If Truman had any sense he'd also be talking about the importance of disregarding critics.
Oh yes, sorry. I was thinking FDR when I wrote the comment - but happily I can leave it unchanged since the same complaint applies to Theodore Roosevelt as well with only some minor tweaks. They weren't as bad as the Europeans, but the quality of the US leadership was not good given what they teed up in the early 20th century.
It is similar to the Bush family, but from an era where the internet wasn't around to let people compare notes. These political dynasties deserve criticism and should listen to it.
There is a lovely synthesis of A and B though - looking at the Wikipedia page for the right Roosevelt, he was involved in the Philippine–American War where they occupied the Philippines in the first place (or pacified, if you prefer, I suppose they'd probably already occupied the place in advance of the war). So if you're complaining about the Japanese conquering the Philippines you'd have to agree that Teddy Roosevelt deserved some criticism for also doing exactly that?
The criticism basically writes itself. These people are very easy to criticise, they were mostly horrible. Just saying, it is easy to see why there are speeches around about how the critics ought be discounted. The track record invites harsh criticism.
The thing with critics is that anyone can be one, it's easy, especially with hindsight.
What is difficult is being in the position of ultimate responsibility over the lives of many people, making a decision and living with it. Everyone thinks they know what is best or what they would do, I don't think so.
Criticism (IMO) should always have a response on what should have been done instead, given the information at the time. Otherwise it's just playing Monday morning quarterback.
That exact line in the OP's article reminded me of that exact quote from T.R. and it's great to see another mind had exactly the same thought to post it.
That wasn't the conclusion of the article (I'm assuming you're reacting to the headline and haven't read the article).
The author's prediction is that OpenAI will get bought.
I know it sounds kind of crazy, but there actually is precedent for that: Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup after he realized there was no possible way for an AI startup to compete with the Googles of the world with $100B in cash and giant free cash flow machines given how capital intensive it is to build AI.[1]
To me, it's not that outlandish to think that if OpenAI really does need to spend a ton of money to survive, they will probably have to either raise or get bought (or find that magic money tree by monetizing their business). Because right now, they don't have the cash flow to compete with Google.
Could obviously change, but I think that's where the author is coming from.
> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments.
MIT actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.
Looks like the study refers to banning cigarettes for young adults under age 21. I was referring to a complete ban, all age groups. I doubt it will have a big impact on actual smokers, but similar effects as we saw in the 1920s alcohol prohibition. And I would imagine that a total ban would get actually more young adults to smoke (because it is illegal anyway, and dealers dont care for age verification).
I don’t think (could be wrong) the argument is don’t ban social media for children because we don’t ban it for adults… I think the argument is it is easier politically to regulate behavior of a population that doesn’t vote and is not us.
English societies have a long history of regulating the behavior of others - see English Poor Laws.
It’s an interesting perspective at least, I hadn’t thought of the social media ban in that way.
I happen to think we should still ban bad things (smoking, drinking, gambling, and probably social media) for kids. But I appreciate the argument.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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