Posted by adrianhon 1 day ago
This statement rings true.
JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to test the “people” integrity aspect of YC / Startups. It’s not lost on me both Altman and Thiel both associated with YC were useful short term only, highlighting how regular “character” evaluations are required at higher levels of responsibility.
In other words, PG had the "knack" for sometimes encouraging the right weird thing. I'm not sure it's been the same since he handed off the reins, like any other formerly-founder-led company. Nowadays it really gives off the vibe of bean-counting and hype-chasing.
I don't think it's gotten quite as bad as this [0] article suggests, though.
My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal. [0] There was another less advertised play. An established path for the Thiel “Boy Wonder Fellows”. [1]
“In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies of the last 15 years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the founders of those companies will generally tell you he has been their best source of strategic advice. He already works with a number of YC companies, and we’re very happy he’ll be working with more.”
Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3] Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could see this as an issue.
[0] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-joining-...
[1] https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-combinator-f...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/
[3] https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partn...
I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.
The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.
I hope that's not true. If it is, we live in a bleak world indeed.
I can confidently say I've never once dreamed of having billions. I've never wanted billions. Not even in a fanciful manner. What would I do with that money? Buy mansions and megayachts? That's loser stuff
Most of what I want out of life cannot be bought. The pieces that come with a price tag, like a comfortable home, do not require billions
I think only sociopaths want billions because they don't understand spending your life seeking things that actually matter, like family and human connection
That's actually the difference, most people don't want a billion
You need to accept that every generation some people are going to try and fuck things up.
Then you get to decide to stop or help them
No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).
I don't know how to define the delineation I'm about to propose. But there is a difference between overinclusivity trashing a morally-loaded, potentially even technical, term, and slang evolving.
“Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.
That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".
Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.
I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").
Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.
Sam Altman clearly has a long history of nefarious activity. But the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists with or without his presence.
I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI - unless you're claiming that an AGI would be capable of such independent actions.
AI is similar in transformative power to how the internet was a transformative power - might even be greater, if it is more commonly available for use through out the world. Whether that transformative power is doing good or bad really depends on the people doing it, not on the tech. I would bet that the future is going to be better because of AI, than to imagine a worse future and act to stunt the tech.
Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no bearing on reality.
The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.
If anything, if people hadn't invented weapons, they would not use weapons to enact violence, and this in turn will impact the practical nature of violence.
> The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.
My claim is that considering any technology by itself is pointless. There is no such thing as thing by itself. Technology always exists in structural setting, and in turn shapes this structure.
The threat of AI is, after all, driven by the people who use it.
Without Sam Altman the compute and improvements for LLMs to be a threat wouldn't have readily existed at all. He was the one who got the ball rolling because of his desperation (SVB collapsed right before the hype bubble started), ego, and quasi-religious desires.
Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I don't think anyone familiar with this community would assume positive bias towards Sam, Airbnb, or even YC anymore - it's quite the contrary, from my perspective, but of course everyone notices different things and has their own view. Ditto for political slants.
Like, I dont really expect puff pieces for ycombinator or the like to get artificially pushed to the top, but I do expect that enough people who are feel culturally or financially invested in ycombinator to flag negative things into oblivion, especially as its completely reasonable that the population of users here has a much higher percentage of those folk than any random population sampling.