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X is losing money everywhere

It put a cooperative president in power. What's that worth?

A "cooperative" president who could be manipulated by everyone, which is why he promoted Tesla cars in front of the White House but also reduced support for them, reduced fleet MPG requirements, thinks clinate change and renewables are scams, etc.

And then Musk had his falling out when he left DOGE.


Currently they are saying lovey dovey things about each other and Musk is having far more success working with regulatory agencies.

Think of it as the opposite of something like public transportation, which doesn't need to be profitable because it's a public good.

Public evil?

Maybe they should consider pulling out (from Earth) then

Yeah I reckon that's the only way to be sure

Press X to doubt...

If you sincerely think X/Twitter is turning anything remotely close to a profit then you are in a tiny minority.

It's always been a daft novelty thing really

I suspect very few people have more than one!

Just as an aside, I always like bumping into one of your contributions on HN and especially so when it's something Scotland-related!

Deep-fried pizza is originally an Italian thing ("pizza fritta") and would have entered Scottish cuisine through the Italian community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Scots). It's become its own thing now - a pizza crunch doesn't really resemble a pizza fritta - but it's originally Italian

I'm actually from Scotland and grew up in an area that laid claim to their invention - near Stonehaven - around the time they popped up.

They're basically a silly novelty equivalent to "deep fried butter" is in the USA but they definitely came from Scotland. I've never had one and know only a handful of people who did, I suspect they came about as a sort of pre-internet way to grab attention and go "viral"

They're not exactly a delicacy or something that we should be proud of, mind ...


See this is one of the reasons I struggle to get on board the AI hype train. Any time I've seen some breathless claim about it's capabilities that feels a bit too good to be true, someone with knowledge in the domain takes a closer look and it turns out to have been exaggerated and meant to draw eyeballs and investors to some fledgling AI company.

I just feel like if we were genuinely on the cusp of an AI revolution like it is claimed, we wouldn't need to keep seeing this sort of thing. Like I feel like a lot of the industry is full of flim-flam men trying to scam people, and if the tech was as capable as we keep getting told it is there'd be no need for dishonesty or sleight of hand.


I have commented elsewhere but this bears repeating

If you had enough paper and ink and the patience to go through it, you could take all the training data and manually step through and train the same model. Then once you have trained the model you could use even more pen and paper to step through the correct prompts to arrive at the answer. All of this would be a completely mechanical process. This really does bear thinking about. It's amazing the results that LLM's are able to acheive. But let's not kid ourselves and start throwing about terms like AGI or emergence just yet. It makes a mechanical process seem magical (as do computers in general).

I should add it also makes sense as to why it would, just look at the volume of human knowledge (the training data). It's the training data with the mass quite literally of mankind's knowledge, genius, logic, inferences, language and intellect that does the heavy lifting.


Couldn’t you say the exact same about the human mind though?

No you couldn't because the human mind definitely DOES not work like an LLM. Though how it does work is an open academic problem. As an example please see the Hard problem of consciousness. There are things when it comes to the brain/mind which we even have a difficult time in defining let alone understanding.

To give a quick example vis-a-vis LLM's: I can reason and understand well enough without having to be 'trained' on near the entire corpus of human literary. LLM's of course do not reason or understand and their output is determined by human input. That alone indicates our minds work differently to LLM's.

I wonder how ChatGPT would fair if it were trained on birdsong and then asked for a rhyming couplet?


The thing is, we genuinely are going through an AI revolution. I don't even think that's that breathless of a claim. The contention is over whether it's about to revolutionize our economy, which is a far harder claim to substantiate and should be largely self-substantiating if it is going to happen.

If OpenAI saw an imminent path to AGI in 6 months (or in 5 years for that matter) they would not be pivoting to become a banal big tech ad company.

Short AI and tech, and just hope you get the timing right.


The crypto train kinda ran out of steam, so all aboard the AI train.

That being said, I think AI has a lot more immediately useful cases than cryptocurrency. But it does feel a bit overhyped by people who stand to gain a tremendous amount of money.

I might get slammed/downvoted on HN for this, but really wondering how much of VC is filled with get-rich-quick cheerleading vs supporting products that will create strong and lasting growth.


I don't think you really need to wonder about how much is cheer leading. Effectively all of VC public statements will be cheer leading for companies they already invested in.

The more interesting one is the closed door conversations. Earlier this year, for example, it seemed there was a pattern of VCs heavily invested in AI asking the other software companies they invested in to figure out how to make AI useful for them and report back. I.e. "we invested heavily in hype, tell us how to make it real."


From my perspective, having worked in both industries and simply following my passions and opportunities, all I see is that the same two bandwagons who latched onto crypto either to grift or just egotistically talk shit have moved over to the latest technological breakthrough, meanwhile those of us silently working on interesting things are consantly rolling our eyes over comments from both sides of the peanut gallery.

That’s a common thing from these AI companies - hyping themselves up by claiming to be terrified of their capabilities


You may want to take another look at that list. Proudly declaring you’re only the 16th worst per-capita (already very high!) when ahead of you are tiny places like Pulau, New Caledonia, Gibraltar and Curacao is really quite funny.


Facts are neutral, when someone says something incorrect it’s worth pointing out the truth.

UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Russia, and Australia are mid sized countries that emit more CO2 than the US per capita but you need to come up with a new metric to get that list. CO2 emissions by countries with more than 10m people or whatever. Perhaps bump it to countries with over 100m people so America is #2 on a list of 16 countries, or 300m so America is #1 on a list of 3 countries.


A lot of HNers are quite puritanical about alcohol and think it cannot ever be enjoyed responsibly, and that anyone who has ever overdone it a bit has a serious problem.

As you and others have said, this is maybe a bit much to have over 3 hours, but doesn't necessarily mean anything on its own. This is roughly six 500ml beers (plus one half), at a rate of one beer every 30 minutes. The bigger issue would be fetching the beer and going to the toilet - you'd be up and down constantly.


This is exactly correct. That said, I'm quite surprised how many people struggle to understand how progressive tax bands/brackets work. It maybe doesn't help that the (right wing) media often portray them dishonestly (i.e. claiming that a 50% tax band starting at $100k/year means you would pay $50k/year in tax if you earn $100k/year)


> portray them dishonestly

Tangentially, the same motivated-disinformation occurs with Social Security.

It's best-understood as an insurance-policy (OASDI is literally named that way) against dying poor and old/orphaned/disabled. With an insurance policy, it's normal for my month's premium to be spent on somebody else's current tragedy, it's normal for me to expect no cash if the Bad Thing never actually happens to me, and it's normal that there's no asset for me to pass on to my heirs.

However wall-street bankers can't make tons of profits competing under that model, so instead they try to trick citizens into misunderstanding what the model is. They want people to think it's a government-managed investment account instead, where every person is filling an individual bucket of "their" money that will someday be tipped back out for them.

With this deception, their job is much easier: They just need to say that they'll be a nicer manager of the accounts than the government is, because they'll give you more choices for managing "your" money. It's dishonest because the two things are fundamentally different in how they work and what they're good for.


It is insane how the UK seems hellbent on implementing the things that are shit about the USA


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