61–70 of 148 posts
TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are pharmaceutical companies. They peddle quick dopamine hits. We're all junkies that can't/won't pay for the hits so they wrap up the drugs they give us in ad-paper.
This analogy is cringe because it's overstretched. Argument: For example, are books considered pharmaceutical products (typically not quick--that would be like "delayed release" medicine) just because you get pleasure from reading them?
"Our brightest minds are making people click ads" ...
I've seen and heard and said this before... where is this quote from?
"Our brightest minds are making people click ads" ...
I've seen and heard and said this before... where is this quote from?
The original is an amazing poem well worth reading
The title of the job opening says computational chemistry, but the details indicate they're looking for someone with credentials in one of a few different computation / simulation specialized fields. If I had to guess, it seems possible they think those types of simulation design skills may be useful for simulating user social behavior somehow?
The title of the job opening says computational chemistry, but the details indicate they're looking for someone with credentials in one of a few different computation / simulation specialized fields. If I had to guess, it seems possible they think those types of simulation design skills may be useful for simulating user social behavior somehow?
No, it's really about material science and biology, just read further in the ad: Responsibilities • Follow the latest progress in computational science such as material and biology. • Solve real-world problems in material and biology, with computational approaches such as molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and machine learning. • Optimize and speed up classical molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry algorithms…
Tiktok/bytedance already have large ML infrastructure in place (GPU clusters), and since quantum chemistry simulation is moving towards ML based simulation, they have an edge there. Open source ML simulation software such as DeePMD-kit is already seeing contributions from Tiktok employees.
In case HN readers doesn’t know, ML based MD scales O(N) and traditional DFT based simulation O(N^3) where N is number of atoms. From first hand experience: what used take weeks with traditional DFT MD on CPUs are only taking few minutes with GPUs right now if you have trained a good ML potential. They achieved near DFT accuracy.
TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are pharmaceutical companies. They peddle quick dopamine hits. We're all junkies that can't/won't pay for the hits so they wrap up the drugs they give us in ad-paper.
This analogy is cringe because it's overstretched. Argument: For example, are books considered pharmaceutical products (typically not quick--that would be like "delayed release" medicine) just because you get pleasure from reading them?
The title of the job opening says computational chemistry, but the details indicate they're looking for someone with credentials in one of a few different computation / simulation specialized fields. If I had to guess, it seems possible they think those types of simulation design skills may be useful for simulating user social behavior somehow?
Yeah, this isn't really that different than quant hedge funds hiring theoretical physics PhDs. It's not like you're actually going to be doing Yang Mills field equations to trade some stocks. They just need a guy to run some linear regressions, and can afford to find someone really really overqualified so they don't screw up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few generations ago many of our brightest minds were building doomsday weapons to incinerate all life on Earth, so maybe this is progress.
Probably not, if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end. If you brainwash a man, forever his actions will no longer be fully his own. Plus most people view violence as something undesirable (see Vietnam war protests), but advertising still has many hawks who will never stop singing it's praises while all public spaces are consumed by corporate branding until we have no where uninfected
I don’t know about this assertion. It does not ring true to real life for me.
If you buy the theory that Bytedance is a covert operation by the Chinese government, then this fits the narrative. Use the TikTok brand to attract top global talent and perform research in areas of general interest for government agencies. They only need to build a backdoor for Chinese officials to access the research data. Sounds far fetched but I believe this is well within the realm of possibilities.
Chinese law requires companies to make provisions for representing the interests of the CCP within companies of significant size. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s routine business law. There is no need for the CCP to conspire to control businesses. They have ultimate control of business law. The idea that companies and governments are independent things is a pretty capitalist perspective. There’s a wide range of other p…