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Careless People

pluralistic.net

371–380 of 575 posts

Re: Careless People

#371

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.

Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.

The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.

The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.

It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.

But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.

All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.

Re: Careless People

#373
post #367
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around. Sorry, but that's a really bad argument, "open source" is not a relative metric you use to compare different things, it's a label that is applied to something depend on what license that thing has. No matter what licenses others use, the license you use is…

> Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around. I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source. And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mea…

> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.

No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Llama proprietary, don't you wonder why that is?

> And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.

You, and some others (including Meta) are using a definition Meta came up with themselves, probably in order to try to skirt EU AI regulations as it's different for "open source" models vs others. I'm not sure why you as an individual would fall for it though, unless I'm missing something you have nothing to gain by spreading PR from Meta, do you?

The existing definition of open source (before Meta's bastardization) is not a "idealized" definition, is the one we built an enormous ecosystem on top of, who taught a whole generation of programmers how to program and connected people together, without putting profits first.

Re: Careless People

#374
post #142

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. Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.

What does any of this have to do with capitalism?

Have you ever seen a succession struggle in eg any old monarchy?

Re: Careless People

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."

To be fair, some games effectively to force you to move outside normal set of rules eventually ( ie. Monopoly, when bank money supply dries out ).

Diplomacy encourages cheating, but only if you don't get caught.

Re: Careless People

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity. The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily. The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself. It’…

Are you sitting in a room while typing this? At the margin to reduce the odds of heart attacks, you should be at a walking desk outdoors, or ideally not arguing on the internet at all. Someone trying to "help humanity" should decide the threshold of acceptable self harm for you, just like you feel free to decide it for smokers; then after determining how you should live, they can declare that the alternatives make the world a worse place.

If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.

Re: Careless People

#377
post #373
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around. I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source. And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mea…

> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source. No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Ll…

Llama 3 license: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/LICENSE

Calm it with the ad hominem attacks. It's not the place for it.

Re: Careless People

#378
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.

Even if they got a court order (they did get partial bars on publicity AIUI) it would _still make the problem for Facebook worse_, tho.

I'm not so sure. I think there is some selection bias happening, so it's easy to say "Streisand effect!" When it makes the headlines but that ignores the times it doesn't make the headlines.

Re: Careless People

#379
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.

Corporations are commonly run as cults, at least to some extent. It could be demands of loyalty ('we're a family'), personality cult, dress code, 'teambuilding exercises' and so on.

The alternatives usually involve a threat of more uncertainty or misery.

Re: Careless People

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps? [1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, co…

> Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps? I think this is a significant contributing factor. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have any semblance of a meaningful conversation with those around me. I don't really know how to describe it other than an apparent "dumbing down" of the average person. I despise elitists, and I hate to even act in a way that might come off as elitist, but I simply have…

2000 years ago it was 'bread and circuses'. ;0)
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