Whenever these kind of articles pop up, I always think how sad it is that PyTorch, Llama and many widely used opens source projects are tied to Meta.
Be thankful they are open source at all. See OpenAI for the alternative.
Careless People
141–150 of 575 posts
Re: Careless People
#142> 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…
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.
> 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.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Re: Careless People
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist. As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
Re: Careless People
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything. Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about…
These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.
Re: Careless People
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything. Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about…
You might find this recent talk on neo-liberalism, by journalist and activist George Monbiot, interesting: https://shows.acast.com/rhlstp/episodes/rhlstp-book-club-134...
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
Re: Careless People
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist. As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
To me that is the biggest win in public discourse from capitalists: conflating markets with capitalism, as if free markets could only exist under unbounded capitalism. Which, as you say, is incompatible. Capitalism does not want free markets, nor foster free markets, the best end result for a capitalist is the abolition of a market under the control of a monopoly.
Markets are fundamental, and a natural result of human socioeconomic order. Capitalism not at all.
Re: Careless People
#147Earlier 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.
> 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. Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Some people view rigging the game as a part of a larger game.
Re: Careless People
#148Earlier 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.
> 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. Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
Re: Careless People
#149Earlier 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.
> 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. Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There is no real game in the fog of business development. You invent your own and see if it works.
Re: Careless People
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are right. I should have looked it up.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.