Is this seriously trying to portray OpenAI/Altman or Nvidia/Huang as unlikely everyday dudes who reluctantly take up a challenge and rise to become heroes? I never stop being amazed at how people love to present rich, well connected, people as underdogs and turn them into heroes.
If you read about Huang's childhood it's quite surprising:
> At age nine, Jensen, despite not being able to speak English, was sent by his parents to live in the United States.[15] He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand.[16] Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,[16] mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school.[17] In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.[18]
> When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory.[17] Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm.[18] Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English"[17] and was frequently bullied and beaten.[19] In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis,[b] joined the swimming team,[21] and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14.[22] He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,"[22] how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.[17] In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".[22]
I grew up around that area, and this story has serious stench of PR crafted mythical origin story. Oneida Baptist Institute is a prestigious private school, not one of those child abuse mills, we've had a governor and a state rep attend that school.
Child labor is super common around these parts, especially on family farms. I grew up working on my family's tobacco farm just like pretty much everyone else. My uncle was even nice enough one summer to give me $20 a week for weeding and bug removal from a 5 acre farm. I thought it was so much money. I remember saving up to buy those bargain bin "300 Games" type CDs at Walmart.
I resent the conflation of child abuse and child labor. There's actually a healthy dose of labor for kids that we've all but disallowed from polite conversation
Labor in the sense that it's abuse is exploitative. It's extractive. Child labor seeks to use the children for the profit of the adults running the operation. There's certainly _work_ that children can grow from doing. There's certainly work that looks like labor that children grow from doing. They just actually have to grow from doing it, and that must be the motivation. If you start making money off of children, then your care for the limits of the "healthy dose" starts diminishing real fast.
Yep this, children are the most vulnerable class. If the capitalist system had the power it had in the past, we'd just throw them into factories at age 6 or 7 again and damn them to the terrible life of a factory worker with no rights so some adult can have slightly more.
I wasn't attempting to create that conflation in my post, if you read that, I wasn't clear enough.
I personally think it's fine for children to work on their family's business as long as it doesn't impact their schooling or normal childhood activities. It is a fine line to walk, I don't believe I missed out on anything like after school activities, but that was largely because there aren't too many of those opportunities deep in the mountains in Kentucky. I say it's a fine line, because it's easy to see a scenario where children are put to work in, say a family restaurant, and prevented from doing after school activities like sports or clubs, and miss out on part of the well rounding of an education.
I certainly don't support children working for third parties that then profit off of their labor. In those cases, there is no way to align the incentives to protect the child.
Interestingly enough, the other Nvidia co-founder (Curtis Priem) ended up cashing out decades ago and has been donating pretty much all of his wealth to his (and my) alma mater, RPI. Also an interesting story, see this from ~2y ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2023/11/26/this-nvidi...
If by "we" you mean US popular culture, yes. It's not universal, and definitely varies by country.
In the UK we don't tend to idolise the rich so much. Not to say it doesn't happen, but in popular culture positive depictions tend to be limited to period portrayals of idealised aristocracy (and even then it's rarely shown as heroic), with contemporary wealth usually treated as a dubious virtue.
Yes. Good point. This is a pretty US specific cultural phenomenon.
Probably rooted in the 'self made man', 'rugged individualism'. Go West to make your fortune. We forget the US is pretty young, and still has a lot of culture based on colonizing the west, taming the wilderness to find your riches.
The point is to cover your tracks and making sure no one will be able to repeat that. They want to send you in a random direction, even, if you only want to try.
Came here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?
What exactly sucks about it? If it's integrated well enough, why do you care? If anything, it's nice to know it's sandboxed by default.
The installer could pull the images, create the stack and run migrations, then shut down. The app could then up the stack, show a loading screen that would likely be shorter than any Adobe program, then open a webview. When the last window is closed, down the stack.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And what is the difference exactly? Most big apps are composed of multiple components doing IPC, it just so happens to be TCP/IP here.
Not sure if your serious? I don't want a fucking SaaS stack running on my macbook for a small graphics tool? It's about the resource, the power, the battery, the heat, the CPU I care about. I don't want that.
What SaaS stack? The backend and frontend are just doing their job, so they're about as heavy as they would be if it was, let's say, an electron app, and the only other services are minio (a glorified web server) and Postgres, which a "normal" app would probably replace with sqlite and save a hundred or two megabytes of RAM. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if using Postgres was more resource efficient than having your engineers come up with a custom ad-hoc datastore.
All in all, the overhead would probably be equal to two tabs in Chrome.
And calling it a "small graphics tool" is just nonsense. If you're doing UI/UX design, this is THE thing you spend your time in. It's like Premiere for a video editor or AutoCAD for an engineer. If it takes 30 seconds to load and eats half your system memory, who cares, it's what you bought the computer for.
Besides a specific subset of programmers that only use Vim or Emacs, every other professional is used to giving whatever tool they're using to do their job all the resources their computer has. You don't see video editors complaining Davinci Resolve runs a whole PostgreSQL instance in the background.
Good that it works for you. I don't care about it enough to run a bunch of docker images (which need docker to run) which have a bigger impact on performance than two chrome tabs for sure.
davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
Imagine you're running a local supabase stack, zed, chrome and then try to spawn this thing on a regular laptop. It's not about postgres natively.
> davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
You're really focusing on the docker part, huh? You know containers are just a four namespaces in a trenchcoat, right? They don't actuall, have meaningful performance overhead... The only waste is some disk space.
> Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places.
Saying "progress is progress" serves nobody, except those who drive "progress" in directions that benefits them. All you do by saying "has always changed things" is taking "change" at face value, assuming it's something completely out of your control, and to be accepted without any questioning it's source, it's ways or its effects.
> So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
Amazing depiction of extremes as the only possible outcomes. Either take everything that is thrown at us, or go back into a supposed "dark age" (which, BTW, is nowadays understood to not have been that "dark" at all) . This, again, doesn't help have a proper discussion about the effects of technology and how it comes to be the way it is.
> I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places
I'm not surprised at all anymore.
I constantly feel like the majority of voices on this site are in favor of maximizing their own lives no matter the cost to everyone else. After all, that's the ethos that is dominating the tech industry these days
I know I'm bitter. All I ever wanted was to hang out with cool people working on cool stuff. Where's that website these days? It sure isn't this one
Dark age was dark. Human rights, female! rights, hunger, thirst, no progress at all, hard lifes.
So are you able, realisticly, to stop progress around a whole planet? Tbh. getting an alignment across the planet to slow down or stop AI would be the equivilent of stoping capitalism and actually building a holistic planet for us.
I think ai will force the hand of capitalism but i don't think we will be able to create a star trek universe without getting forced
> Dark age was dark. Human rights, female! rights, hunger, thirst, no progress at all, hard lifes.
There was progress in the Middle Ages, hence the difference between the early and late Middle Ages. Most information was mouth to mouth instead of written down.
"The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding)."
"Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of written records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages"
Technically it might be interesting, but artistically it's extremely boring. And conceptually it's just so plain... Sometimes I seems like the only references these researchers use for representing "the world" are videogames.
And let's not talk about the cultural flattening that this represents. A "medieval village" from where? When? Whom?
This is just slightly refined AI slop, but slop nevertheless.
The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name, which is a centralized system over which few people have control, and about whose workings most people have no clue about, is problematic. Also impractical, once we consider that - as far as I can understand - 8 billion people should have their own domain name.
What's impractical about everyone having a domain name? It surely isn't due to lack of domain names, because foo.bar.baz.bim.bim.bap.com is a valid domain name.
It is true that full data sovereignty isn't something most people are interested in, but this is more about a cooperative model for data ownership and access. Having your data identifier be JackDaniels@yahoo.com isn't particularly different from it being jackdaniels.is.technically.bourbon.com. In both cases another organization owns some of the path to your identifier and could potentially lock you out of it. In both cases, verizon is near the top of that list (.com).
As far as the domain name system being centralized, I'm not sure I agree. DNS is like a feudal system with hundreds of kings (top level domains) who all work together with one pope (ICANN), and various lords and ladies occupying positions under those kings. If ICANN goes completely bonkers the kings can get a new pope, some of them are literally sovereign because they are nation states. Just for fun, some of those states are ruled by literal kings, too. There are experiments to run a TLD by Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), but I think for the most part nobody really cares because the current system happens to work pretty OK. If you have an idea for a more decentralized way to organize a namespace that doesn't involve your grandmother typing in a massive UUID or onion address, and doesn't result in someone being able to domain squat literally everything; I would love to hear about it.
Ownership is probably the wrong word since the legal grant is term limited contract for exclusive use under terms of service. Selling subdomain usage grants (also under contract and TOS) feels quite similar.
Top level domains can change pricing, terms, or cease operation. Freenom is a great case study, as they previously operated TLDs. At the edges, a well-operated subdomain service could offer stronger ownership-like behavior than a top level domain.
> The fact that the AT Protocol relies on everyone having a domain name
Well, either that or someone else hosting their identity (see did:plc), which seems to be the part you say should exist?
Probably DNS is the most decentralized centralized system we have available today that most people can actually use, unless I'm missing some obviously better way of doing the same thing?
The thing your missing is ICANN is headquartered in the US. The US political situation is dire and I think this could be a real danger for the internet at large. We might end up with disagreeing DNS worldwide at some point. E.g. if you hold a domain and have a non-authorized viewpoint so your DNS entry gets snuffed.
But from a practical point of view a decentralised system should not rely on domain name ownership. Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.
> Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.
Right, but once you've generated those, then what? You need a global registry of sorts so people can lookup each others keys for example, which is why DNS kind of is the best we have available today.
I don't think there is any perfect solution here, but it's hard to come up with something that has better trade-offs than DNS. Sure, ICANN might be based in the US, but so far DNS been relatively safe to rely on, and if ends up not reliable in the future, I'm not sure social media profiles is the biggest worry at that point.
If there was no way of moving away from it, probably yeah. But since you can migrate from a did:plc to did:web, I don't feel like they're very similar situations at all.
It doesn’t really rely absolutely on domain names; at the very root there’s just a DID. DNS happens to be the best we’ve got right now as a human-readable username and address in-one goes.
> 8 billion people should have their own domain name
That is something that could be feathered in gradually -- your country, region, city, neighbourhood, etc could have their own domains, and you could be anon237@milan.italy or whatever, until you find it necessary or inspiring to obtain your own domain.
There are around 10^99 different possible domain name labels (the part between the dots), so I don’t quite see the impracticality. Even going the route of Reddit’s autogenerated usernames like Eloquent-Salad9443.net would be viable.
But what is the alternative. Systems that bind identity to the phone number give even less control. Systems that use a self generated cryptographic key (like Scuttlebutt) are even less practical.
DNS is not perfect but I think the best we have for now.
> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray.
This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about groups of people based on what "post-apocaliptic fiction" has portrayed. As an anthropologist, I just stopped taking his ideas seriously at that point.
I agree that his opinion should be taken with a grain of salt since the topic is far from his field of expertise, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to do literature review before posting an opinion to a social media website.
Maybe he wanted his point to be conveyed easily and used "post-apocaliptic fiction" as a shortcut, but probably knows it's not so trivial. I think people not versed in a particular domain can still have interesting (even if wrong) ideas, that are worth reading and thinking about.
As an anthropologist can you sketch out, for us not so blessed, an example of the higher or highest levels of existence an individual lacking any support from any larger organized groups has actually obtained?
The point OP is making is that anthropological research has done the hard work of uncovering real insights that the author presumes are learned from works of fiction
Famously homogeneous anthropological research that all pulls in the same direction with no differences of opinion, the alignment of Roger Sandall and Margaret Mead, the unification of romantic primitivism no longer slurred by designer tribalism?
I'd suggest it's fair to ask self identified experts what real insights they allude to.
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