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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#201

Post by ip26 »

Jevon23 wrote: post #28
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…

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 suppose I assumed “choosing your battles” had to be a skill they were also good at. Only 24 hours in a day.

Re: Careless People

#202

Post by HexPhantom »

benterix wrote: post #100
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…

I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.) So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logi…

When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.

Re: Careless People

#203

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

rsynnott wrote: post #164
binaryturtle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called the Streisand Effect. :)

It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.

After reading the article, it seems plausible that they were advised against this and, well... didn’t care.

(Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they did not think it would manifest but that’s not a fun play on words.)

Re: Careless People

#204

Post by hermitcrab »

piva00 wrote: post #145
hermitcrab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Amen to that. Thanks for the reading recommendations. However my book backlog is a bit out of control. ;0)

Re: Careless People

#205

Post by latency-guy2 »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

> Does anyone actually believe

> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.

Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.

Re: Careless People

#206

Post by ajb »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.

Re: Careless People

#207

Post by lolinder »

diggan wrote: post #37
grunder_advice wrote: post #8

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.

Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases. Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models? And if the answer to that is no, why is tha…

AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.

Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.

The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.

Re: Careless People

#208

Post by HexPhantom »

DragonStrength wrote: post #130
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…

No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares. The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1…

Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.

Re: Careless People

#209

Post by hylaride »

hermitcrab wrote: post #108
cess11 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity. Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretion…

>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on. That sounds more like a cult than a company. I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.

> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that

To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"

"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0

Re: Careless People

#210

Post by pixl97 »

vintermann wrote: post #31
ryandrake wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.

There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are. N…

You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".

I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.

In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.

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