hungryhobbit

The irony of Sam Altman's company pretending to care about what's "fair" is so very rich.

He literally made billions exploiting the intellectual work of millions of his fellow humans, yet has the audacity to whine about how the system isn't fair.

Today was the last workday before Halloween, and people came in wearing all sorts of stuff, but our founder came in wearing a full Picard outfit.

I was like "nice Halloween costume" and he responded "Halloween? I just wore this for Patrick Stewart." I almost teared up.

Plus, in long-running series like these writers (implicitly and explicitly) write for the actor. It's a bit chicken and egg-y, but you absolutely cannot (honestly) pretend that another actor would have the same lines written for them.

I mean, in season one sure, but by the time you get to "there are four lights" Stewart and Picard really are inseparable.

IDK about the "being an asshole to your face" part (my story on that, above, did come from early Apple).

But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.

That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.

Less "forgetting" and more "not as brilliantly insane as Jobs" ... but Jobs was NEVER someone that ANYONE should ever emulate.

Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.

One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.

Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."

He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.

Its the fundamental problem of our age: everyone is building pieces of a system, and almost no one is actually looking at how those pieces fit together into a system.

This is not about (just) the healthcare system ... it's the core problem with:

- our legal system (millions of laws and rulings and zero effort spent reconciling them into a good system that treats everyone equally)

- our economic system (we reward people who create true wealth in many different ways ... but those rewards are wildly disproportionate to how much true wealth they add)

- our tax system (again, millions of laws, and yet the people who should be paying the most pay the least because of how they fit together)

- our electrical system (although, due to its centralization, this one is actually catching up much faster than the rest)

- insert any other system here

I imagine it would look like a bunch of North Korean guys (probably not starving like their countrymen, but probably not looking great either) sitting in something like a cross between a NK state prison and an American office.

So yeah, really not exciting ... just sad.

They are trying!

The Japan thing just reflects the book's age.

It was published in 1992, but it was likely written in large part during the 80's ... and back then the world thought Japan was the future because of the popularity and success of Japanese tech corporations.

Their failures a few years later would dispell that myth ... but for awhile it really seemed plausible, and you'll see a similar fixation on Japan in lots of sci-fi from the 80's.

Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.

Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.

Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.

And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.

To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.

They paywalled their site. That means they don't want sites like Hacker News sending people to them.

"Cram your square pegs into this very round whole we built!"

It's evil to call Lake Ontario ... which has had that name for over three centuries (almost four) ... the same name it has always been called?

The article asks "Why so cautious?" Well ... maybe because half our country would rather believe what one guy with a long, long history of dishonesty says over ... you know ... reality?

Now, to be clear I still 100% fault Google for giving in to them (and for renaming established geographic landmarks like Lake Ontario). The "do no evil" company has become the "how evil can we get away with" company, and that's not even a recent change.

But why? That part seems pretty clear.