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Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

newyorker.com

11–20 of 312 posts

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#11
The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates.

I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#13
> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation

I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#15

Thinking democracy's success is tied to economic growth is a pretty dim worldview. I hope he's wrong about that.

Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman

Lecture on said book http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/moral_conse...

Foreign Affairs review http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/the_ethical...

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#17

I had to change the font so I was able to read the article.

I agree, and it's very frustrating that most articles are unreadable unless I change their font or colour choices. I should have to have an extension installed that makes text readable. And, unless people speak up the people who create these broken designs will never know that they are choosing to say "fuck you" to a sizeable proportion of their audience.

But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments.

I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739

I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike-shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#18
Other than being very interesting, this article provides one of the funniest instances of the crazy humor generated by the Cloud To Butt Plus extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...):

> “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.

I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#20
post #10

This was a pretty good article -- certainly one of the better portraits I've read of SA. However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.) OTOH, a few memorable quotes: > Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman) > Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were rid…

and "upload"?

"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."

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