Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#811

Post by senordevnyc »

psd1 wrote: post #665
siva7 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you say it’s valid and not a war crime for the US to assassinate former political Iranian figures and their families for aiding the new regime and therefore becoming enemy combatants in the eye of the US Military, it’s also valid to assassinate Altman and his family for doing the same to the other war party. Sam isn't a political leader, so this comparison is flawed. What the hell, are we really arguing about if…

He is a leader and a political figure. This blogpost is political (as well as sharing a family photo, which is itself imbued with a political message in that context). Engineer archetypes hate politics and refuse to think about it. For most engineering, there is negligible political dimension. But culturally-transformative technology is inherently political to the degree it's transformative. Altman recognises this. H…

This waters down the definition of political leader to the point of absurdity.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#813

Post by burnte »

teachrdan wrote: post #86
burnte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Sam's full of crap and the way we tackle that is with conversations, not violence. He deserves to grow old like anyone else, violence isn't an answer.

> the way we tackle that is with conversations, not violence I think the breakdown here is that conversation seems to have no power. To only be a bit hyperbolic, the only language with power is money -- or violence. To the extent that ordinary people cannot make change with "conversation" (which I interpret here to mean dialog within society, including with lawmakers), they feel compelled to use violence instead. A n…

Then we move to regulation and law, that's still talking. Bombing his house isn't cool.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#814

Post by burnte »

tyre wrote: post #83
burnte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Sam's full of crap and the way we tackle that is with conversations, not violence. He deserves to grow old like anyone else, violence isn't an answer.

It's pretty amazing to observe people experience the past ten years in American history and continue to think that we can out-talk the bad people in the world. Michelle Obama's, "When they go low, we go high", is some of the stupidest political advice and a generation has lost so much because of it. (The generation before got West Winged into believing the same thing.) When you look to the right, you have a stolen el…

I don't think street violence solves anything. I don't think Michelle was right, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, but you don't fight words with literal firebombs.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#815

Post by inquirerGeneral »

array_key_first wrote: post #789
etempleton wrote: post #422

It is fair to be critical of Sam and other tech leaders regarding AI, but he has done nothing to begin to justify violence or even the threat of violence against him or his family.

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#816

Post by johnfn »

ninkendo wrote: post #740
dang wrote: post #575

I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News*. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. * Edit: It would have been clearer to say "I've never seen a mob dynamic this bad on Hac…

Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course. The tech scene isn't the small, tight-knit thing it used to be. This site is now enormous . Discussion quality seems to have sort of "regressed to the mean"... the larger HN gets and the more people join the discussion, it starts to resemble the median social media site more and more. At some point it sorta los…

If you want to delete your account you can just set your noprocrast to some absurdly large number like 99999999.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#817

Post by senordevnyc »

whateveracct wrote: post #523
senordevnyc wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't he famously have zero equity in OpenAI?

directly, yes. indirectly ..no

Can you elaborate? I’d be curious to know how much of this “indirect equity” he holds, and whether that has any bearing whatsoever on whether Sam is trying to amass as much for himself as he can.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#818

Post by hax0ron3 »

techblueberry wrote: post #257
happytoexplain wrote: post #32

Historically, was it always so common for powerful or famous people to seem to purposefully garner hatred like he, and others, have been for the past decade? To speak in a petty, self-important, "trolling" manner, to a very broad audience? To embrace traits that are intrinsically negative? Or are we living in a rare time?

We are in a fact still in the tail end of a uniquely measured and peaceful time.

Yes, but when it comes to politically-motivated murder attempts by random people, part of this is because surveillance technology and policing effectiveness have gotten to the point that it is very difficult to get away with such a murder attempt. See how Luigi Mangione was caught, for example. Many murders are unsolved every year, but when there is a high-profile politically motivated killing, the police seem to really go all-out to solve it.

If it wasn't for the effective policing, I think that such incidents would be more common.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#819

Post by hax0ron3 »

dang wrote: post #601
mystraline wrote: post #328

[flagged]

WTF? You can't post like this here, regardless of whose "removing" you're advocating. Obviously we ban accounts that post like this - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . As I explained to these other users*, I'm not going to ban you right now because this thread is a mob, and mobs derange people and I don't think that any of us (including me) is immune from this. But please don't ever post anything…

Would I not be allowed to post that removing Khameini or Putin would be good for the world? I find that hard to believe, and people do it all the time. And if it's just a matter of who it's ok to advocate for removing, then where is the line?

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#820

Post by senordevnyc »

klik99 wrote: post #49

Genuinely surprised at the extreme comments against sama here. I don’t think he’s a good steward of the technology, but I don’t think violence is funny or justified. I also don’t think it’s justified for him to use it to say that a negative article about him is correlated to this event. Seems to imply that an “incendiary article” led to this and that criticism is tantamount to calls to violence. He drives the convers…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN