Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | ralfd's commentslogin

Paul Graham is the skating coach himself, as from 6000 startups financed by y combinator quite a few were unicorns. it is olympian level, but it there is a system to it.

I'm well aware of who pg is.

I'm suggesting - and I think the politician was also clearly suggesting - that a certain point of scale it ceases to really be "earning" anymore.


It's not a reliable system if out of 6000 tries over 20 years there are only 30 instances. That looks more like gambling.

What happens?

It starts stacking a second circle

Does it ever end though?

No, and that’s what makes it a proper simulator.

If you take AI risk seriously then Open Source AI should not and must not win. Both by evil actors (biological weapons research) and the danger of unaligned AGI itself. There are some people who would never work for the military or Anduril (automatic weapon systems), but an OS AI „without asking permission“ would be the same.

If closed-source AGI wins, it is not going to be much different from a safety perspective anyway, because AI capability research is advancing faster than safety research.

Closed Source AI at least can be controlled. See the directive of the US government regarding Fable (even if one disagrees about the directive there is no doubt that it is effective in shutting it off) or the safe guards by a corporate structure (even a profit driven one). It is schizophrenic to praise Anthropic for refusing the Department of War full access to their models but at the same time root for Open Source models.

Edit: relevant Scott Alexander article from today

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-ai-opinions

> In terms of bioweapons, I expect that closed-source AIs will be heavily optimized against helping with these, and open-source AI will be banned after the first warning shot (or become economically prohibitive even before then).


Note that warning shot in that blog post means specifically a near-disaster event (perhaps one that's just barely averted) that's specifically caused by the AI. So far we've had AIUI no significant indication of open-weight AIs being problematic in that sense, whereas one can quibble that proprietary AIs have done dumb and dangerous things.

(For example, I suspect that plenty of folks would view the recently threatened mass scan of the DN42 hobby network as an instance of misaligned agentic behavior that would have wasted non-trivial resources, and I also think that most observers would pin the specific behavior of that AI on a proprietary SOTA model, not an open one. That's clearly not a disaster-level event, but it should scare you if you're concerned about alignment.)


> Most reptiles could be alive for thousands of years

How so? Snakes only live like 30 years. Tortoises are long lived, but it is low hundreds years, not thousands.


It is noteworthy that this is a German source and German culture is by default pessimism and malaise.

As per info on the site, author is not German and does not live in Germany (Russian living in Poland). Apparently, his name however is "German".

That would be more of a Russian worldview

German culture is more or a romanticist "Sturm und Drang" kind


German culture is more about extreme anal attention to details and correcting others than Young Werther! In other words Prussia won, not Weimar.

> Sidenote: 3 is actually high.

Do you mean low? AAPL has a ps of 10.


Generally < 1 is low, between 1 and 3 is in the middle ground, and > 3 is high. However, that all depends on margins, which is why people generally use P/E or forward P/E rather than P/S to compare multiples. Issue here being that P/E is nonsensical for unprofitable companies or companies with very low margins. Spacex's P/E after Google pushed them into profitability by a slim margin would look absolutely stupid.

I would also like to point out, that on a forward P/E basis, AAPL is quite overvalued compared to historical norms, but basically every tech company is right now.


Most companies have a P/S of 1 or 2, almost all have it bellow 4.

A few segments of the economy are known to have low revenue/investment ratios, and companies there get P/S up to 7 or so.

Then, very few companies have people betting on their growth so much that their P/S get as high as 15.

And then you have literally about half a dozen exceptions on the ones S&P tracks that get higher than that.


Nothing about Apple is representative of a normal business.

It’s an interesting phenomenon: being Apple is one of their key sales drivers. The brand is worth more than the business itself.

You're arguing with people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Who's arguing?

What? Can you explain?

The was a lawsuit that they only allowed favoured castes to use Python.

I think it’s about software engineers, who are supposed to be impervious about effects of caste structures and hierarchy, judging programming languages from the caste lens.

That is my interpretation, please don’t hold me against it


Someone once told me Indian software companies deliberately hold "secondary" staff like support etc under worse conditions than engineers (smaller monitors, less windows on walls, etc), because there was some law that said if they would get the same treatment, they would be eligible for same pay.

So they made sure the treatment was obviously inferior.

So, no idea but the Python restriction might have been only one more deliberate hardship on some poor folks.

If someone knows something more accurate, happy to learn.


The exact quote "python is for brahmins" brings up top links on incels.is and 4chan, so perhaps OC's character is something worth dismissing.

This is a bizarre reply? IIRC there was a law suit involved

That's how the story goes, yes.

It's satirical fiction. There was no lawsuit, just blogs saying there was.

https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...


Yes, the Onion satirized it long ago:

https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that...

> Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation

> Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that will reportedly put the 12-year-old girl hopelessly out of touch with her generation.


Lol.

> “I definitely feel out of place sometimes,” said Emma, who told reporters she will never forget the blank stares she once received upon mentioning Petula Clark. “It’d be nice to know what everyone’s talking about for a change.”

I can picture the dad lurking in the shadows.


Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).


This trope has to die. SpaceX Starship design is optimized for Mars (instead of Blue Origin NG) and the gigantic Starship Factory and multiple launch pads under construction in Texas, Florida and Louisiana (plus potentially foreign countries) only make sense with Mars.


While yes, I agree Mars appears to have been Musk's long term goals:

> the gigantic Starship Factory and multiple launch pads under construction in Texas, Florida and Louisiana (plus potentially foreign countries) only make sense with Mars.

There's a few other things that also make sense as use-cases for that infrastructure. Orbital manufacturing is already starting to get interesting. I don't want to bet either way on space-based data centres, the research I've seen from Google says that makes sense at $200/kg which Starship can only reach if SpaceX solves re-use and that's clearly difficult but I don't want to say impossible.


Or the attempt to Kessler Syndrome and Neuromancer it up as fast as possible by trying to send up 1m satellites. https://spacenews.com/spacex-files-plans-for-million-satelli...


I don't think these will be in Earth orbit. I think they will be in Sol's orbit.


And how exactly is SpaceX going to make any meaningful ROI on getting Mars orbit capability? It's not like people and govt's are raring to get there.

Scientific organizations like NASA would jump on a Mars Starship in a heartbeat, but how many missions will they want?

SpaceX is a corporation first and foremost, not a research org.


They're getting ROI on other ventures and uses those returns to finance their expansion towards Mars (and other planetary) orbit capacity. It may be rare to see a company looking further than the next quarterly report but it is nothing new for either SpaceX or some of Musk's other ventures.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: