291–300 of 478 posts
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Your contribution to a story about a Jewish person is that you once worked for a Jew and you didn’t like him.
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There's no doubt about Noam's abilities. But I read through that code, and struggle to see its 'magic' or 'alchemy'. Can you elaborate what you find especially good about that code? (You may assume GPU kernel programming knowledge on my end.)
Unrelated to the particular code above. There's a difference between writing code about or adjacent to a proven idea vs writing code in uncharted territory. I suspect that is what happened here. It's the same thing with say music and art. A lot of people today can play Chuck Berry.
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …
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That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture. Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy'…
Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
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The first one doesn't accuse coworkers of sterilizing children. As for saying there's no gender attribute, I disagree, but it's just his belief and not a dumb one either.
The "sterilizing children" is how anti-trans activists talk about giving trans children gender-affirming care. Framing it this way makes it sound monstrous rather than an unfortunate side-effect of a medically necessary procedure, in the same way that characterizing a surgeon who performs hysterectomies for women with ovarian cancer as "a doctor who goes around sterilizing women" would be painting them in an unfair l…
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The "sterilizing children" is how anti-trans activists talk about giving trans children gender-affirming care. Framing it this way makes it sound monstrous rather than an unfortunate side-effect of a medically necessary procedure, in the same way that characterizing a surgeon who performs hysterectomies for women with ovarian cancer as "a doctor who goes around sterilizing women" would be painting them in an unfair l…
That all assumes it's a medically necessary procedure, which is exactly what people disagree about. And again, no mention of coworkers in that quote at least, not said in a work setting either.
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the g-slur? I won't say it in case it is a slur, is that the word the jews call non-jews?
Whether or not “goy” is a slur is pretty complicated. It has pejorative uses, and outside of a strictly religious context any non-Jew is almost certainly only going to see those pejorative uses. But strictly speaking it’s a Hebrew word that means “nation,” and isn’t any more or less offensive in the abstract than Jew, Arab, Brit, etc. (To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connot…
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
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Yes, in the sense that if there's nothing interesting to say about a quote then there's no reason to copy it into the thread.
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HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)
But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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Whether or not “goy” is a slur is pretty complicated. It has pejorative uses, and outside of a strictly religious context any non-Jew is almost certainly only going to see those pejorative uses. But strictly speaking it’s a Hebrew word that means “nation,” and isn’t any more or less offensive in the abstract than Jew, Arab, Brit, etc. (To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connot…
It’s not literally a slur, but because it has developed negative connotations Jewish people tend to avoid it nowadays. Online, you are more likely to see it used by antisemites. Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247908
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986