erikerikson

Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies.

The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity.

To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.

Emotionally or psychologically it is significant but that's the traditional bar and blindspot.

To be fair those are consummate and thoughtful politics. The industry is rife with those but that was part of why in leaving it.

Or

s/conquered/discovered/

...

I'd be sceptical of that claim. Public health interventions often have long time frames. For example the fairly successful campaign against tobacco.

> implies that they're leaving out

Maybe. Or they are just summarizing.

You seem to be working hard to find nefarious efforts in this public health messaging.

> 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods.

So the rights would be not to put health labeling on the front of their products, advertise unhealthy food to children, and be untaxed for the health externalities their products create.

Maybe the rest of the article when I read it will give me the same experience but starting to read it after reading your comment, this stuck out like a sore thumb.

[edit: nope, it's a straightforward report on cross border behaviors of food companies]

Sincerely though, can you explain?

As your respondents point out there's also been the pattern of clever algorithms being classified as "AI" until they were understood. That differentiated those selling snake oil from the serious.

I did not claim we coined AGI in response to marketers.

I can't believe no one had posted this yet.

To be fair, I am quite certain he was an outlier.

Regardless, this story about the situation, especial if true, seems less likely to support them in seeing a richer tapestry of considerations and perspectives.

One could get closer to your wonderful suggestion with the far more indulgent "Maybe I'm right but not yet thinking about a contextual factor or value that might be important. What could possibly be important enough that they don't care about my correctness?"

There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".

[edit: perhaps it got darker and more cynical after I left. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. I left in 2013, post Enron style accounting fraud, pre sale to Broadcom]