Bear with me.... Leverage and Insurance. Leverage against whom? US govt.
Maybe VCs and Private Equity funds represents what is essentially oligarchs. They are oligarchs as institutions. Everyone knows this already. US has certain liking to captialism as long as it is represented trough institutions and not individuals. Controversial I know, but standard oil, billy boy gates and monopoly trials, musk and spacex being public companies. It is just America.
So, NVIDIA figured out an interesting play. NVIDIA is playing a risky game where US govt can anytime say "fuck you, I hate you now". But if they embroil themselves in enough foundational businesses across america saying fuck you to them is difficult. Startups are " think of the children" corporate America.
They have become part of the oligarch class, they have invested where politicians childrens are working or lets be clear founded startups. This is not curricular economy, it is nvidia buying insurance. If they were read blooded America it would have been leverage, but this is insurance. Saying fuck you to them is progressively getting harder.
Any way my legs are frozen that is enough conspiracy theories I can write from the stall.
People are downvoting you because they don't want to think of the implications of letting this system run for another 20-30 years. Look how bad its already gotten through monopolistic behavior and blatant government corruption. This thread is filled with evidence that oligarchs are literally buying up every successful startup but no one wants to recognize that having a few individuals control vast swaths of economic growth will lead us to ruin.
Everyone on HN too obsessed with getting their own bag to see the problem.
Voting is a chore. You have to set aside a block of time, drive to a polling station, stand in line, and vote. Gas is expensive. Time is expensive. Groups of people who are agitated gathering in the same place is risky. The return on that investment of time, at a personal level, is practically nonexistent. From an individual cost-benefit perspective, voting does not make much rational sense.
So you have to appeal to something beyond rationality. Emotion. You need someone to be so swayed by what you say that they forget to think critically and simply go out and vote.
Committees have approved these ads. They understand that the system is not driven purely by rationality. And they have engineered these messages to influence people into making irrational choices voluntarily.
In some states, sure. In many, you simply fill out a form and drop it in your mailbox. Takes approximately ten minutes, which you can do on the toilet if pressed for time. No driving, no waiting, no money spent.
If your state doesn't allow this, it's time to vote in new representation and fix that.
Voting makes absolute rational sense, what are you talking about. It's just that it makes sense in aggregate, but for that to make sense everybody must do their part.
Looking at history, one person choosing to vote is statistically useless if the goal is to influence the outcome of a presidential or congressional/senatorial election in the USA.
The chance of one vote being the difference between a tie and a win for a candidate has been approximately zero. And in the extremely rare times when there has been such a one vote difference, there have been re-counts that conclude with a margin that is larger than one vote [0][1].
Mathematically/statistically this makes intuitive sense. One might ask: what's the chance that a vote ends in a tie when there are 10, 100, 100,000... 10 million voters? As the voting pool increases, the chance decreases.
The most common objection is along the lines of, "if everyone decided not to vote because their vote didn't matter, then no one would vote!" Yep, that's correct... but that doesn't describe reality: clearly people vote a lot.
Voting because one enjoys it, gets satisfaction of some sort from it, feels that they are doing their "civic duty" and discharging a responsibility, etc... that's fine. But don't vote because you think you're gonna change the outcome.
This is like asking, "if pigs could fly, what happens?" -> all sorts of things... but pigs can't fly.
"if nobody votes..." is a hypothetical that has never been true because people DO vote. I don't know of a good reason to believe they'll stop voting. Obviously the futility of voting to change the election outcome isn't stopping them so far.
> It's just that it makes sense in aggregate, but for that to make sense everybody must do their part.
I don’t understand that. The fewer people vote, the more impact your vote has, so the more sense it makes to vote (up to a limit, of course. If too few people vote, revolution gray be around the corner)
> Voting makes absolute rational sense, what are you talking about.
Try to do an expected value analysis of your vote.
Say the difference between your candidate winning or losing is worth 1000 USD. Multiply that by the odds that your vote will cause them to win. Take that very small number and see if you'd drive 2 minutes for that or just calculate if the lead used up on the pencil is worth that.
It's "we" as a society. Not pushing our governments to pass laws that could make Nvidia open up its hardware. Of course it's not your fault or mine, the problem is money in politics and uneducated voters.
As we speak, there are numerous projects being worked on that you have no idea will be immensely useful to you in 10 years, and the people who are working on these projects are more likely than not motivated by the potential of future profit. 10 years from now, when you have recognized the value of these projects, you will take them for granted and demand you get them for free. CUDA was one of those projects 10 years ago. “We” can choose to start the precedent of scavanging CUDA today, but the price will be that those projects 10 years down the road won’t materialize.
Ahhh, epistemology... Does any academic researcher even care about these things anymore?
If you're in academia, you've probably noticed a major shift recently. Research production at an industrial scale through AI.
Grants have "always" been awarded to professors based on quantity multiplied by quality. Now, some professors are churning out 1–3 papers a month with the same group of co-authors. All the grant money goes to them. Grant givers are just only counting the numbers of papers being published.
The Industrial Revolution has hit academia, and some academics are busy arguing for the artisanal value of research while some are creating factories for research.
The problem is the systemic disincentivation of true science, the pursuit of truth and knowledge unencumbered by greed.
When you speak favorably of "factories for research", you adopt the position of a mindless consumer, relishing the prospect of "abundant" products of science.
You fail to notice, livestock lives in abundance as well.
True Scotsman fallacy. No meaningful argument was made above due to taking the stance of "true".
If "false" scientists end up getting all the money, resources, and social status from spamming LLM-generated papers, and the "true" scientists are shunned as slow idealists with 0 value, the first one is more of a scientist in the eyes of society than the latter.
Nobody will speak favourably about the factorization of anything.
The "publish or perish" culture is going through what is essentially the same transformation brought by the invention of the assembly line. Academia, "as an industry", is experiencing what the automobile industry went through a century ago.
Grant approvals are public. Just go through them, and you will see a pattern emerge.
The argument I keep hearing is, "AI is good in the hands of a good researcher."
5–7 papers based on the same dataset? 5–7 papers on the same core topic, published within a six-month period?
They tell me that this is their core specialization and that I simply don't understand how science works.
Science is a self-governed, self-serving, and artificially defined concept.
You conflate a host of different issues and ultimately miss the point.
Science is an ideal, the pursuit for knowledge for its own sake. Science is a boon for humanity because it provides an unparalleled degree of prediction and control of the natural world.
But it doesn't tell you what to do with that.
A "capitalist" will seek personal, short-sighted gain from it, socializing repercussions, no matter how devastating. They will gladly poison society and the planet and sell it to you as "your own fault". Their life-span is limited still, so what do they care?
Technological capability exceeding human wisdom is the core issue here.
You need scientific understanding on your own side in order to know and judge the alternatives beyond what vested interests feel obliged to tell you.
I think the actual truth may be more important than we give it credit for. For instance I've noticed that most propaganda consists of lying about factual information, rather than what to do with the information.
The decision about what to do only becomes relevant if the underlying information is true.
Well, what to do and why it will accomplish what you (and everybody else) want and nothing else is the point. The facts being actually true is a necessity to pull that off.
Think of AI as a magic wand or a genie that makes your wishes come true.
While that sounds great at first, actually thinking it through reverses that mirage completely.
Whom would you want to have one? Who should get to decide? How do you control the whole matter and prevent it from going horribly wrong?
Being irresponsible doesn't work already when you're a grown-up human with only your bare hands.
As you said, "Science is an ideal." I think you and I have fundamentally different views of science. You are an idealist, whereas I am a practical person who has seen how the sausage of science is actually made.
You're talking about academia, society's attempt to gain economic utility from science. You assume, I didn't know about it based on what?
Exploiting science for economic utility alone misses the incurred second order effects, as I posited above. You completely ignore that crucial part, despite of it being the whole (very much practical) point here.
Still there's something to the notion of people who prefer Academia to Industry. As much as I tend to agree with your broader points that it's a game and people love the prestige game and they now can pull levers to accelerate their winning in that Prestige game.. still they chose a path that is less about money and more about ideals than industry. It may be less and less ideal driven and less and less of a cloistered monastery but it's still a place for people who chose against industry. I say that as an industry guy who can just feel when I speak to academics that they are driven by something different than those of us industry. And to be clear those resident industry are not only driven by money we're also driven by building and changing the world but it's still different
I've seen a modest increase in productivity in bioinformatics. While the field is computational, it's ultimately about analyzing physical processes. The biggest bottlenecks have always been figuring out what makes sense to do and getting the data you need.
You can of course try new ideas and make software tools much faster now, but software is much like meetings. They can be productive if properly motivated, but they can also be a way to pretend you are working without contributing anything of real value.
Theoretical computer science and mathematics have changed. I'm not sure if they will remain active fields of research in the future. If they will, I would guess that theorems and proofs will eventually become things you include as supplementary data rather than in the main paper. Outside some rare exceptions, people may not consider them publishable results anymore.
Which is why there is this disorientating feeling. We are all facing now with an ongoing challenge to epistemological trust, like
Someone suffering a mental disorder.
The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.
Moreover, every branch and division across the US government recognizes one thing... the public market is plateauing. It is not a numbers thing; it is a sentiment thing. The post-pandemic tech boom needs to continue, at least be stabilized. AI's expectation to hit the public market is largely keeping a lot of the momentum going.
If Anthropic does not enter the public market, it is going to be a major distressing event for SEC who make money from regulatory fees and a shit ton of fees from publicly listed companies. There is zero incentive to stop them. The SEC tries its best for the benefit of publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokers, institutional investors etc. who all benefit from the IPO.
I trust that this is not the case. Check out both the authors. Micah's company was acquired by Cloudflare, and both of these guys actually bring good expertise around this area.
The question is less about "vibe coding" the product, and more about how their acquired teams function. For most products they have released so far, they are backed by a company they acqui-hired. They will usually rebrand the product and absorb the team.
You would not be surprised if this release was from a product for a startup company rather than a large enterprise company.
Cloudflare hired a bunch of folks for sure, but they also fired a lot of folks. What they are doing these days is building products by buying out entire companies, giving them nearly independent authority to build a product like they would build a company.
Do names really matter? Half of all Canadian universities has a building or a faculty named after "Schulich". Most people do not know who that person is.
I have worked in GTM/PM consultancy for some time now. This is the patterns I often observe:
- Have a vague understanding of the problem
- Architect an overcomplicated solution thinking of all possible contingencies
- Pitching the overcomplicated solution to someone else
- Ask them to come up with a simple solution. Ask questions to "birth" to the solution.
- Not providing any feedback as that would mean need you to be accountable for the work
- Trying to convince them they should work out the solution because they are the expert and much smarter then you
- Taking credit for solving the problem
Yes, I think this is an anti-pattern is similar to the one I often see, basically getting the order wrong like this:
1. Define the problem.
2. Gather information about the problem.
This seems reasonable. "We need to know what we're trying to solve, not boil the ocean."
But it is really common that the information tells us that the problem definition is slightly or really wrong. Hence the importance of gather information, then define the problem... and iterate.
"First define the problem" also feels reasonable because picking the right problem requires a lot of context and experience. Some would add "taste." So in group discussions, people often suggest bad problem definitions. Others then want to get focus and traction. That impatience often results in committing too early to the problem definition.
I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.
But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.
> I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.
I’d be ducking away from an issue that had just got someone fired.
Tangent: The irony in Microsoft making a product called ‘Teams’. It works about as well as their teamwork.
I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.
Maybe VCs and Private Equity funds represents what is essentially oligarchs. They are oligarchs as institutions. Everyone knows this already. US has certain liking to captialism as long as it is represented trough institutions and not individuals. Controversial I know, but standard oil, billy boy gates and monopoly trials, musk and spacex being public companies. It is just America.
So, NVIDIA figured out an interesting play. NVIDIA is playing a risky game where US govt can anytime say "fuck you, I hate you now". But if they embroil themselves in enough foundational businesses across america saying fuck you to them is difficult. Startups are " think of the children" corporate America.
They have become part of the oligarch class, they have invested where politicians childrens are working or lets be clear founded startups. This is not curricular economy, it is nvidia buying insurance. If they were read blooded America it would have been leverage, but this is insurance. Saying fuck you to them is progressively getting harder.
Any way my legs are frozen that is enough conspiracy theories I can write from the stall.
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