whack

> Why did we consent to live in a system where the worth of our bodies and lives were so negligible as to be exchangeable for dollars?

> polling showed that a third of Americans who had faced claim denials said they viewed Mangione positively. Some saw this reaction as sociopathic, but its extremity was the very point. How far must someone go in order to be taken seriously by those who adjudicate access to life itself?

> there is no justification, ever, for denying a sick person care

Everyone above is justified in their outrage, but they have picked the wrong target.

For-profit companies exist for the purpose of making profits. They will never offer services that produce sustained losses. It's weird to blame the CEO for this - he's just doing what the shareholders hired him to do. Blaming the CEO for denying you healthcare is a bit like blaming a real estate agent for not giving away an empty house to a homeless man.

You're better off blaming the shareholders for being selfish... but that too is a bit like blaming every single person you meet who chooses to buy an iPhone instead of putting that money into a GoFundMe for a sick patient.

The real blame lies with the government. It is the government's job to give everyone a baseline level of healthcare. Taxes exist for the express reason of overcoming collective-action problems like the above. And yet, our government refuses to provide better healthcare, because a large fraction of voters prefer lower taxes over better healthcare access. if you're looking for someone to blame, blame them

> When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to... The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.

When was the last time you hired an Uber driver and they suddenly decided to drive you to a hotel? Uber drivers don't do anything until you ask them to. Therefore, they aren't autonomous. If your Uber driver decides to drive through a red light and kill someone in the process, the blame is on you for hiring them. You should not seek to flee from your responsibility

> ...the festival I helped invent 36 years ago. Curiously, I get this interest even though I haven’t set foot in the Black Rock Desert since 1996.

Not doubting the headline conclusion, but I would have expected a better source than someone who hasn't been to Burning Man in literally 30 years. AFAICT, Burning Man was still very well regarded ~20 years ago, long after this founder stopped attending

Can't this also be used to justify things that are obviously nonsensical. Like for example: "I possess an immense undetectable sphere. How can I prove this? Well, any proof I offer you would by definition violate the undetectability of the sphere. So there's no way for me to prove it, I guess you'll just have to trust me bro."

Funny how you're echoing exactly what the author said in the article

> This is not precisely 2008. GPUs are not houses; take-or-pay contracts are not mortgage-backed securities; OpenAI is not a subprime borrower in Stockton, and artificial intelligence may well be the most consequential technology of the century, which is more than anyone could ever say for a McMansion in the Inland Empire.

> The bear case in this piece is not that artificial intelligence will fail, or that the demand is fake, or that the technology disappoints. It is narrower: that the financing structure can break before the demand arrives, because the obligations are fixed and front-loaded in commencement while the revenue is variable and back-loaded in adoption - and a fixed obligation meeting a lagging revenue stream is a solvency problem regardless of how transformative the underlying technology turns out to be.

> The industry will spend the next eighteen months debating whether artificial intelligence is a bubble, which is the wrong question, asked at the wrong layer. The technology is real; so were the houses. The question is narrower: what happens when instruments underwritten at the teaser meet their reset schedule, and who is holding the paper when the obligations cannot be met as written

Ie, if you spent $10M buying a house, it doesn't matter if it will be worth $100M in the future. If you're unable to make your mortgage payments in the interim, you're going to lose everything

Wow, that thread is a piece of work

> Gofmt was written to reduce the number of pointless discussions about code formatting. It succeeded admirably. I'm sad to say it had no effect whatsoever on the number of pointless discussions about syntax highlighting, or as I prefer to call it, spitzensparken blinkelichtzen.

> When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

I sincerely hope Rob Pike was being sarcastic/ironic, because otherwise, he sounds insufferable

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain

"Just flip a coin to pick a random synonym. Who cares?" - AI Labs