You're out of date. The chats that found new Riemann conjectures were "look for a solution to the Riemann conjecture", followed by a bunch of "you can do it" and "I believe in you". The same goes for other breakthroughs, where the people involved didn't even know the math.
It's for the simple reason that the scale of their infrastructure outlay makes marginal cost to serve an additional gig basically zero. In that case, the rational thing is to give as many people in the world a free taste because some % of them will graduate to paid users.
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.
I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.
There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?
That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.
For a lot of people, they wouldn't say it's a hit piece on her; more on someone near to her. I also wouldn't call it a documentary fully. It really is hard to watch the movie, and come to any solid conclusions. I'd like to say also I'm not questioning her guilt, and specifically called out that that's not what the provocation is about in the movie. So apologia may be the wrong term her? It's more about how can you understand someone and the motives of their actions.
The fatality rate of an accident includes all parties involved. Most often when a Tesla hits someone, it kills the other guy, since it's basically an ultra-dense block of mass that can do 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, very quietly and without launch control[1]. Teslas are incredibly safe for the people inside the Tesla.
[1]Lots of other cars have technically faster times than Teslas, but most of them require launch control, good tires, and sound like the engine's about to explode. You can floor the Tesla at any time and the software will deliver however much power it can without slipping.
I love being asked "what made you go into that line of work?" because I can answer with "mostly the money" (which is a very honest answer yet socially somewhat inappropriate), and their reaction to my answer immediately gives me a signal into whether we're going to be close or not.
Some people act so shocked when you tell them you did something because it would make you richer and not because an angel came to you in a dream and whispered in your ear to save the disenfranchised underclass (and all the cats) by writing code, or whatever's the current faux na pas reason to pursue a vocation these days.
I think the reason they act that way is because you're signaling to them that you dislike your job. Which is fine, but ideally you'd find some gratification in it that isn't just monetary, since it's what you spend most of your time doing. Money can only compensate so much for a shitty job.
It’s considered socially crass to just care about money in life (see: Ebenezer Scrooge), but everyone does a job for money - very few jobs are actually altruistic. There are many jobs that few would do if not for the high income (eg Lawyer) or is just difficult or boring. It’s a given that the income is a motivator in a high earning job.
Answering why you picked this particular path to high income is more interesting of an answer to the person asking and carries the conversation. Did your parents do it, did you have a professor that captured your attention, did you just google “easiest job to make a lot of money?” and pick the first one?
Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you. Etc. It’s the XY problem and from the other person’s perspective, you’re answering the wrong one.
> Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you
This is too simplistic. Someone might ask that for a million reasons. Also, you will be judged not only by your answer. Being so direct might show you are not on autopilot in the conversation, your humour or that you only care about money, depending on a lot of other factors. It might make one more memorable as well. I personally would read it as light humour, unless it is accompanied by a dead eyes stare.
No, and I'd also judge the interviewer hard for asking that question. I don't like interview questions that are really just cues to start spewing rehearsed bullshit.
I'm worried that although you might build up a big group of acquaintances that you hang out with on a regular basis this way, none of those would quite fit the definition of "friends".
A friend to me is someone with whom you can drop the mask of social propriety near-completely - share unpopular opinions, make racist jokes (directed at them or others), talk about the opposite sex (assuming hetero), gossip about other people, talk about your own relationships, give honest feedback, do borderline illegal stuff like smoke weed etc. Because this is what intimacy means.
If I meet my friend after a bad haircut and he doesn't immediately go "what the fuck is wrong with your hair?", he's not a true friend, just someone I hang out with.
I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university. I suspect some people have never had a friendship like this.
I think the cool thing about this, especially as an older person (40's), is that it creates a low-stress, high-interactivity scenario. So while some of the people may just be acquaintances that come to one or two potlucks, some will inevitably click and become more than just once a month dinner guests.
Forming friendships after schooling isn't hard, but it takes work. That said, I've had a good number of small social interactions that usually don't even lead to an acquaintance over the last decade, and even those feel good just to get out of my shell. Then there's the people I'd recognize if I saw them again and maybe remember their names. And a small but close group of about 12 and counting have become incredibly close friends that have recently begun mingling with my prior set of really close friends (different states, so we have a couple yearly gatherings).
If it is indeed always hollow rather than perhaps just usually hollow, you may find a common denominator in your mirror.
No one's just going to become a lifelong friend of radical candor bumping in to you waiting in line for coffee for the same reason that you're not going to become someone else's lifelong friend of radical candor when you bump in to them waiting for coffee.
The schoolyard friends you mentioned didn't just automagically happen either. You were thrust in to an environment with lots of variables. You remained in that environment for a significant period of time. There were some you vibed with on perhaps just the first day, and some of those continued to vibe with you in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Some of them went different ways over the years, and perhaps you stuck with one or two for the entire time, but that cohesion is effort whether it feels that way or not. It requires the right initial conditions and for the conditions to continue to be correct over time.
The bestest greatest friends of all time can fall to simple geographical distance if one or both of the participants isn't fulfilled by the new long-distance nature of the relationship. The conditions must remain sufficient for the relationship to endure.
The only way to see if the conditions are sufficient is to meet people and cultivate relationships with them. You as you are will naturally filter many or most just as many or most would filter you, but where's the harm in that? No one's friends with everyone, and not every friend need be some platonic soul mate.
I think you don't realize how hollow the initial interactions were with the people you consider friends now. You have to start somewhere. It's just when you are younger you do not have a baseline of what a really good friend is.
Often it stops there, that's what I mean. A big group of people to hang out with could give you the illusion of having friends when it's not really friendship, because it lacks the deep intimacy that comes with a good friendship.
There are more people LARPing as friends than are actually friends these days. Then I can see why many people reject "friendships" completely. Just dressing up and doing stuff with a few people is tedious unless it's mainly just about the thing you're doing (such as sports).
I mean sure, you could use casual meetups to meet new people, but friendship really develops and exists in a 1:1 context. I re-read the root comment and it seems like the person has the right approach initially - meet at a meetup, invite for 1:1 coffee afterward.
But then he invites them to his potluck and I think the friendship dies there. That potluck is like a graveyard of all his potential friendships. It just becomes a "hangout group" i.e. fake friends. Also, every other month is too infrequent.
Personally I think the best way to make friends is at places where you might meet them in a context that gives you sufficient and regular 1:1 time. This is almost always school or work.
I think you're missing the "slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they (I) make friends with the regulars at dinner party" and wrongly assuming that the potluck is the end of the road.
They don't say that they don't then go on to develop deeper friendships outside of the potluck, only that the potluck is a step in the road. It provides a low-stress low-stakes scene of congenially likely like-minded people in which people who are relative strangers can pair and group off if they choose to.
Approaching someone at a potluck like this, or chatting to your dinner neighbors, is way easier and likely more fruitful than chatting up strangers at a bar.
It is far easier to develop a friendship with someone who you can see interacting positively with your other friends. Easier to see more facets of an individual as they interact with people of slightly differing opinion.
I really genuinely cannot conceive how you're seeing it as a graveyard rather than a garden. Like...throwing a potluck is so vastly much more effort than showing up to someone else's event. They are putting genuine effort in to regularly surrounding themselves with people they enjoy. There's just no way that any of those people are "fake friends". They may be but mere acquantances, but even then these are people that are chosen to be invited. Everyone there is there because they were wanted and wanted to be there. If the host feelt they were fake friends, they wouldn't be invited, would they?
Compare this to a monthly coworker dinner where the only reason everyone's there is because the boss said so. Where everyone agrees Janice from accounting is always trying way to hard to laugh at everyone's jokes and Bob from QA just didn't quite grok the message behind "How to Make Friends and Influence People" and so uses everyone's name in every sentence because he figures that's important.
To me, being close with someone does not involve being insulted, insulting them or making racist jokes. I also dont particularly care about other peoples haircuts, one way or the other. I do have friends I spend 1 on 1 with who I am completely open with.
> I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university.
When I was younger, I was never open with people who would be insulting to me or found it important to make racist jokes. I would simply not tell them what I think to avoid conflict or insult. They were assymetrically open, I was not.
But I genuinely did not cared about their haircuts either.
I hear you but maybe not everyone wants this. It sounds great but it's also high investment/high effort and sometimes hurts and disappoints. I think some people are fine with having shallower relationships than that.
There is mean-spirited racist humor and non-mean-spirited racist humor. Would you say Russell Peters is a racist?
True racism is about exclusion. If you'd never meaningfully associate with a person of some certain race(s), you're a racist. Doesn't matter if you're the most polite soul in the world.
There are people who have traveled the whole world, eat ethnic food all the time, do yoga, vote left etc but would never make friends with someone not of their own race. They are the real racists. Racism is simply defined as whether you consider race to be a meaningful way to classify people.
You did a quick calculation in your head in which getting up to get a glass of water now instead of 1 hour later just made more sense.
You can do chain of thought without verbalizing it. The LLM can't. Now you might broaden the definition of "token" to include whatever nonverbal pre-verbal impulse your brain produces. But then the definition doesn't mean anything. All state machines of any sort are doing "next token prediction".
A valuable company wasn't created in the end, but all kinds of value spewed out of this endeavor. The co-founders almost certainly walked away filthy rich. A few hundred people got 6-figure paychecks. A few early investors probably made a profit selling to greater fools.
It is rumored that their last round valued them at $6B.
accrete means grow or make larger/greater; this is the opposite were a bunch of value moved around, some was lost (from an efficiency / opportunity cost perspective) and a bunch was concentrated into the hands of a few. That's not value growth.
True, I meant to say value was ejected from this i.e. there were some peripheral winners. I had a totally wrong definition in my mind of the word "accrete" (I was linking it to accretion discs around black holes).
I've found that capabilities are only "peaky" in GPT models (including 6 Astra). On Claude models (particularly Fable 5 and Opus 5.5), capabilities are fairly well-rounded. I'm astounded at how good Claude is at writing, storytelling, sociology, psychology etc.
I wonder if Karpathy has also let his opinion about frontier LLMs be informed a bit too much by OpenAI's models instead of exploring the other ones. It's not Coke and Pepsi at all.
At my own little sociology benchmark, if I'd rate Fable's performance at 7/10 (subjective scoring), Astra would be 2/10. They're that different.
I stand corrected. Then more broadly, there is a level in the "funnel" that comprises of people who have only tried ChatGPT and not Claude.
ChatGPT also has much stricter guardrails and will avoid going anywhere near large swaths of human knowledge.
I'd strongly implore anyone who uses ChatGPT for domains other than programming to try the same prompts in parallel on Opus 5.5 (Extra) for a few days. The difference is often staggering. ChatGPT is mostly just a coding and automation LLM.
Not AI/LLM. A secure voting web app where verified voters can make proposals to create/amend/withdraw a law, vote on it and legislate without the middleman known as "representatives". The case for representatives have been that it is not practical for everyone to vote to make laws and that it only works in small scales. With internet and secure application, large scale voting and consensus is now feasible. Direct democracy better than indirect democracy. I like the swiss canton style direct democracy.
This is what Terence Tao's ChatGPT chats look like: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed.... Can a layperson prompt the LLM like that?
"Garbage in, garbage out" is a polite way of saying the LLM's output is a reflection of the prompter's own intelligence.
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