Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Careless People

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 575 posts

Re: Careless People

#131

Post by immibis »

exe34 wrote: post #99
diggan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people. Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all thi…

> crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people Melon should fire his!

Probably did.

Re: Careless People

#132

Post by giraffe_lady »

laserlight wrote: post #95
js8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.

> this insecure I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.

It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.

And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."

Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.

What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.

Re: Careless People

#133

Post by schmidtleonard »

imiric wrote: post #89
schmidtleonard wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bill Gates Chair Jump is another great example of this. https://youtu.be/YUGk30Wy8vU?t=175

What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip. Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a cele…

It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.

Re: Careless People

#134

Post by hermitcrab »

>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.

I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).

Re: Careless People

#135

Post by jrpelkonen »

rottc0dd wrote: post #87
Jevon23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.

I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Re…

I’m pretty sure Gates went to Harvard, not Princeton.

Re: Careless People

#136

Post by stackbutterflow »

foobarkey wrote: post #5

Its a good book I read it, the only thing that she messed up though is not letting her exec level shares vest and be quiet until then imo :)

Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.

I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.

Re: Careless People

#138

Post by ImprobableTruth »

diggan wrote: post #113
caseyy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community. The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable…

I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software. But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in…

I think the fact that all (good) LLM datasets are full with licensed/pirated material means we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition. Open weight + open source code is really the best we're going to get, so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply.

Re: Careless People

#139

Post by moolcool »

xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.

Re: Careless People

#140

Post by RiceRichardJ »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?

It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.

Post reply on HN