> seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.
It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.
Sorry, you have read his essays and listened to interviews but don't know his companies??? That, frankly, is not believable. The article above goes into detail about the problems with his companies. Who reads essays by Thiel but doesn't know about Palantir and his hand in the creation of facebook? You know about the "meme-level comments" but don't know about what they're criticizing?
Bizarre is this passive defense of him you're doing.
I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.
Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.
Social Market Economy offers the best blend of capitalism and public benefit. I personally want separation between the regulatory body and the servicing body to maintain effective means of redress for harms, as well as mechanisms for both competition and failure. Thanks to the Germans, we can have it both ways.
Capitalist using money to buy capital and then sell services, brilliant.
Government using money to buy capital and then provide services, deadly socialism.
It's always just been about capitalists wanting less competition. That's why they don't want the market to decide and fight for laws to literally outlaw stuff like municipal broadband. If they are so much more efficient, they should be able to offer an equal or better service for the same or better price.
They have so much accountability. Everything is in public for inspection, they're subject to elections happening whether they like it or not, they have to follow strict laws and can be sued or even imprisoned, there's oversights and review boards. Depending on the position there's even television cameras broadcasting their work live. You can just walk in and sit down on them. In the federal government everything you do becomes public property and enters the public domain immediately upon creation. There's way more accountability...
In practice what the "small government" ideology actually does is get rid of these accountability mechanisms and put scammers and corrupt people in charge instead or relabels corruption as the policy through public-private partnerships.
Not everything is up to inspection; elections are about gathering votes - not actually improving infrastructure - and conflicting interest often result in heavy and broad compromises; oversight/review boards often just do the bare minimum. Get rid of intellectual property, and everything will be public domain.
Furthermore, nothing prevents applying these oversights over public-private partnerships (which is just a fancy term for outsourcing). The government decides who gets hired and on what conditions, so it can just enforce transparency requirements.
What are you talking about? I can vote out my government leaders in a democracy. I can't vote out Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk that run their organizations autocratically.
Becoming a public servant means you should have fewer privacy rights compared to the average person because of the outsized power and influence a public servant has. All the info that Kushner hid should have been in the security clearance form that he was exempted from.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
Part of the problem is also then the indiscriminate hoovering of any and all data by LLMs. If they kept their own trusted data sources instead of stealing from anyone and everything, then poisoned data wouldn't be an issue. The data poisoners are at fault, but so are the LLMs trusting anything and the companies thievery of human labor. Once the LLMs bring up this data, it's now on Anthropic and OpenAI for editorializing and saying "this is true".
Except for the fine print. LLMs are to be used for entertainment purposes. lol
> If they kept their own trusted data sources instead of stealing from anyone and everything, then poisoned data wouldn't be an issue.
If they didn't, they'd be unable to compete with their competition and also we'd get worse models that can't reason about many domains or do that much due to limited training data/generalization. I don't think we can put the cat back in the bag or mandate only non-problematic training codebases without shooting ourselves in the foot.
Now, if those AI orgs were mandated to properly compensate everyone whose data they've mined, to track which neurons get invoked and to pay accordingly based on what was used to train them... ehh, that's about as unrealistic as stopping. Kind of a bad situation all around, unless you abandon the idea of any sort of copyright.
Sucks to be them but they deserve this for what they did to train in the first place. Nothing good enough to outweigh the bad they will produce will come from LLMs.
"Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain." in response to a post about how Facebook helped enable ethnic cleansing makes you look sociopathic. You just said "this tech is worth the deaths of thousands!!!!"
If it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you murder to make a slightly better compression algorithm?
If you outsourced the murder to someone else, how many people would you be OK with murdering?
Wouldn't it be better if we didn't continue to support corporations who enable genocide around the world?
Now, ultimately I'll still end up using zstd. I'm not happy about it's ties to Facebook. But it's code that exists out there now, I don't see the reason to not use it. But I'll still try and avoid giving Facebook any money or praise. I don't give praise to Facebook engineers, at least not ones recently working there. They're massively paid in blood money, and they should already understand that by now. Their products hurt societies around the world, and they don't actually change.
Not currently, no. But when I do, I do bother actually trying to check sources. The last things on my feet were sandals purchased from the people who actually made them.
> Every purchase is an atrocity by proxy.
I mean, I understand tHeRe Is nO eThIcAl CoNsUmPtIoN uNdEr CaPitAlIsM. Sure. But when you know a specific supplier is a bad actor, has been pointed out as a bad actor, and refuses to change, do you continue to support that bad actor when you have tons of options? Do you continue choosing to champion them on forums online, despite knowing their entire product line is "we're going to throw kids into an emotionally damaging blender, sow discontent in your community, help ruin mental health globally, support genocidal maniacs overseas, spread massive disinformation, and overall damage everything you care about!"
Do you just pour your used motor oil down the storm drains because, hey, the environment is fucked anyways, or do you at least try to reduce your impact?
And once again, I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
So once again I ask, if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed, since you seem perfectly OK with trading human lives for compression algorithms? Or would you argue we shouldn't be trading lives for compression algorithms in the first place, and we should press on those corporations who do make money off such things to stop doing so instead of arguing we should just accept it?
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Apologies, it is possible that I mistook you for another zealot. I obviously don't really disagree, but I find the holier than thou stance difficult to approach neutrally.
<< if it took you pulling the trigger, how many people would you personally murder to have zstd be financed,
This doesn't square with your "Zstd is worth a lot of other's people's pain" earlier statement. So what is it, you just don't care to actually be the one to inflict such pain? You're entirely OK with the idea that by championing zstd and telling people "its worth a lot of other's people's pain", knowing that by other's people's pain we're talking genocide, suicide, and deaths due to misinformation, so long as its not you specifically having to do that? Why is that?
You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
<< I even mentioned I'll continue to use zstd. I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. But acting like "hey Facebook is great and its perfectly fine tons of people died directly to finance zstd's development" is IMO a bad take on the whole situation.
Then, based on your line of argumentation, you are simply a hypocrite; very pedestrian ( I am personally disappointed ). You are perfectly ok with using zstd knowing that it indirectly supports company and the evil deeds it bestows upon the world while knowing it to be true AND lecturing others about the evil deeds they do.
<< You've already stated its definitely worth it. Just not worth it for you to pull the trigger, but worth it enough for you to champion somebody else to pull the trigger?
Again, are you using a computer terminal to type those letters in? Are those letters worth the lives that made it possible for you to have this philosophical treatise on why you feel morally superior to me?
Yes? Then maybe you shouldn't, because you explicitly are not.
You are just like all the other kids out there unable to actually stand by what you claim to believe.
Me? I just live it.
<< Personally I'd never say a compression algorithm is worth a genocide.
You know.. I have rather fascinating realization. Maybe it is true that you would never say it. That is simply not done. You would just let it happen should the compression compressed enough. How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
> I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things.
I'm not supporting Facebook by using a library that's freely available on the public internet and hosted by others. I'm not out there saying its worth the genocide. I actively try and avoid giving Facebook any amount of actual value from me and the things I touch. If you can point to how me using a package pulled from some debian package host is actively supporting Facebook, I'll try and reduce my consumption of the library.
> You are just like all the other kids out there
Ah, an ad hominem. I didn't expect better.
> you are simply a hypocrite
I am no perfect person and agree at times I am a hypocrite. I acknowledge the basics of the concept tHeRe iS nO sUcH tHiNg As eThIcAl cOnSuMpTuIoN uNdEr cApItAlIsm, and ultimately almost every product I buy can probably trace some amount of its lineage to the suffering of others. I do think to a certain extent some of that amount of suffering is inherently impossible to avoid in the world of globalized supply chains, and ultimately I will end up consuming something connected to it. But if there's a choice of company A that causes X amount of societal damage and company B that causes 2X amount of societal damage, and you can freely choose between them, which do you choose? Do you go online and directly argue company B's products are definitely worth the extra human suffering?
> How do I know? You already stated you will continue to use it.
I use it because its there, open source, and freely available. Because, sure, you're right, it exists regardless of the suffering at this point. If they charged even a penny for a lifetime license I wouldn't use it, because I don't want to support Meta or companies like them if I have the choice. Same goes for lots of other corporations which I feel are directly bad actors, have been called out for being a bad actor, and I can actually choose a different supplier or eliminate such a thing from my life.
Using an open-source library already in the public space isn't the same as supporting a corporation. Going on a forum and saying their products are worth genocide and excusing their bad actions is supporting that corporation. Do you not see the difference? Is installing MariaDB supporting Oracle, as some amount of the code traces a lineage to codebases now owned by Oracle?
> Me? I just live it.
You're not "just living it" though. You're actively saying a compression library is worth a genocide, so long as you don't have to pull the trigger. If they came to you and said "we'll make you a better compression algorithm, but we'll support a genocide on the other side of world to finance its development", would you choose to take that trade? Is such a thing is OK with you, that it doesn't really matter to try and push suppliers to be better, because its worth it? If not, please do correct me, but that's definitely what I'm understanding from our conversation.
Ultimately if they came to me with that choice, I'd say no. Please stop supporting genocide and social unrest around the world would be my response. I'll continue with whatever compression library I already have, or maybe go try and get someone else to make a better one. I wouldn't just think "hey its worth it to trade human lives for financing software development".
Sometimes talent decides to just make money and scam people into thinking talking with AI versions of celebrities as something worthwhile and positive for the world.
It's a roleplay app, an AI version of the old RP forums, or RP private chats. Anyone sane and slightly mature understands they're not being encouraged to do anything IRL. The main problem I see here is a lack of parenting.
When YOU see a plot like this. And that YOU see this says a lot more about YOU and your preoccupations with another person's sexuality. If you would just be honest and say "i don't like LGBT people", we'd save a lot of time.
It's a techie creating the torment nexus but the imagination version. No need to picture in your mind the invisible cities! Time to make them visible!!!
Talk about missing the entire point of the piece of literature.
That to me reads like "he breaks the laws and doesn't care about regulations because he thinks he's more important than the state and others".
Interesting is a boring, neutral word. Seems like you support him but don't want to say it.
"Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism."
reply