> Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.
It should have become clear to all that he was an untrustworthy person when he was fired from OpenAI by its then-board. My understanding is their complaint was he was lying, untrustworthy, and manipulative; and enough stories came out at the time to confirm that.
> Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human.
> AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might.
Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then?
> Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit.
> There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit.
But conflating merit with economical value is very recent invention.
> Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case.
I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal?
It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).
The social Darwinists that ran with nature red in tooth and claw and took survival of the best fitted to mean the physically fittest and most aggressively dominant win are the ones responsible for your impressions.
>As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied.
Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not? Native Americans didn't choose to be moved onto reservations, enslaved people didn't choose to be enslaved, and colonized cultures did not choose to be colonized. And the ones making those choices always had the upper hand.
>There is no data to assert that.
What data could there be? It's not like the male leaders are going to write governing documents that state women will have fewer rights than men because we believe they will not be able to put up a sufficient fight. But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world, and women are physically weaker than men, and women would not choose to have fewer rights, then what other conclusion can be had?
> Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not?
Of nature, maybe. Of human social arrangements, not really - otherwise elites would never feel the need of justifying themselves, yet they always do.
> Native Americans didn't choose to be moved onto reservations, enslaved people didn't choose to be enslaved, and colonized cultures did not choose to be colonized. And the ones making those choices always had the upper hand.
You went from social hierarchy to interaction between societies and cultures. Slaves were almost always sourced from outside the group, and by nature of slavery they were not part of social.
> But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world
This is exactly the data we don't have. We simply don't know social arrangements of most tribes or cultures in human history.
Moreover, there is a huge gap between assertion that most societies in history had male leaders and rulers, and assertion that lack of merit always led to being left behind.
> what other conclusion can be had?
Using your spectacular reasoning one can similarly argue that it has to be necessary that males in all cultures live in polygamous relationships, because nature made sperm cheap, and optimal breeding strategy is to breed with as many females as possible.
And yet, for some reason, monogamy exists in patriarchal societies.
>You went from social hierarchy to interaction between societies and cultures. Slaves were almost always sourced from outside the group, and by nature of slavery they were not part of social.
I thought "social Darwinism" might have also implied survival of the fittest on the society level. From the first paragraph of the wikipedia link above:
>Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics.[1][2] Social Darwinists believe that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease.
>This is exactly the data we don't have. We simply don't know social arrangements of most tribes or cultures in human history. Moreover, there is a huge gap between assertion that most societies in history had male leaders and rulers, and assertion that lack of merit always led to being left behind.
I guess that would be true for all of human history, but I would have thought the data from the recent previous couple thousand years would suffice (from whenever there are written records). Also, to be clear, in this case, I would assume "merit" means might, right?
>Using your spectacular reasoning one can similarly argue that it has to be necessary that males in all cultures live in polygamous relationships, because nature made sperm cheap, and optimal breeding strategy is to breed with as many females as possible. And yet, for some reason, monogamy exists in patriarchal societies.
I am also under the impression that men being expected/able to "cheat" without much consequence was a common thing until recent history where women gained the right to assets in divorce.
Also, the sperm/breeding strategy does not necessarily imply a polygamous future, because humans could have been intelligent enough to understand that the long term benefits of stability from at least the veneer of monogamy far outweighs the benefits of out right polygamy (due to stability achieved by not having significant numbers of single men competing for women).
Going back to your original claim:
>It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case.
My understanding of "Darwinism" is that there exists a need for animals (all living things) to compete for resources, and hence whomever wins the competition wins the resources and hence can procreate and further the genetic line. So I would think competition between and amongst members of society would be the natural state, because we are living things, and while humans might have understood the folly of physically competing for resources (most of the time), that does not mean humans would not desire to compete for resources in other ways (especially to attract the opposite sex).
>People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly.
lol, lmao even.
In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.
When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.
I share the same opinion that, just because someone is or wants to be an artist, doesn't mean they deserve to make a living wage out of it. But I'm not a capitalist, far from it. I actually think people shouldn't have to work at all if they don't want to, but we're just not at all there yet.
From experience, this seems to be a very unpopular opinion. Everyone see themselves as hard working, and hate lazy people. But since a few years ago, all of the sudden, and mostly in relation to AI, everyone thinks all artists deserve to make a living. I find this hypocritical.
If you're not providing enough value for others to give you money, that's just how things are, artist or not. Too bad the mediocre work of a machine is good enough. The day the system changes, and it will, will be for everyone, so no one is required to provide value to be able to feed themselves. Artists are not special just for declaring themselves an artist.
> Furthermore, I contributed to brainstorming the early Overlake cards in 2020-2021, drafting a proposal for a Host OS <-> Accelerator Card communication protocol and network stack, when all we had was a debugger’s serial connection. I also served as a Core OS specialist, helping Azure Core engineers diagnose deep OS issues.
What exactly are these "Overlake accelerator cards"? What are they accelerating?
> This has always been the case with the massively wealthy. They may be incredibly smart in their specific line of business, which leads them to an enormous amount of wealth and fame. ... Their own egos get inflated as a result, and a feedback loop ensues - they think everything they do is great because, collectively, our culture wants everything they do to be great.
This doesn't just apply to the wealthy, but more lowly people too: see "Engineer's disease."
People like Musk and Adreessen are getting hit by a double-whammy: they're software engineers (the stupidest and most arrogant class of engineers) AND they're massively wealthy.
Yep, STEM people asked why we need humanities. And now they are starting to hold hot debates that strangely resemble things that humanities discussed centuries ago.
One curious thing. My country was erased from maps for 123 years (Poland). During that time, universities in all three occupied parts could freely teach engineering, physics, math or biology. Occupiers didn't care, they even wanted to have access to talent pool of specialists educated on these universities. On the other hand, teaching of history, philosophy etc. was highly controlled and restricted.
One can wonder - if humanities are so useless for the society, why did they even bother?
In undergrad I had a buddy who was a political science major, and he put it pretty bluntly one day: "Do you engineers realize how arrogant you sound when you're talking about things you have no clue about?" 20 year old me just laughed and thought to myself "lol liberal arts majors" but now that I'm older and more grown up, he was totally right and I see it all around me in the industry. Especially here on HN.
> Why do they always feel like they need to pull stuff out of their butts to make themselves sound like they know what is going on?
Massive, unconstrained egos? They think they're hot shit, because they surround themselves with yes men.
I'm reminded of this:
> Beneath the grand narrative Musk tells, when he takes things over, what does he actually have the people under him do? What is the theory of action?
> He has people around him who are just enablers. All these Silicon Valley people do. All his minions. And they are minions — they’re all lesser than he is in some fashion, and they all look up to him. They’re typically younger. They laugh at his jokes. Sometimes when he apologizes for a joke, which is not very often, he’ll say that the people around him thought it was funny.
> When he was being interviewed at Code Conference once, he had a couple of them there. He told a really bad joke, and they all went like: Ha-ha-ha-ha. And I was like: That’s not funny — I’m sorry, did I miss the joke? And they looked at me like I had three heads. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
I don't know about the others, but I "hate" Electron more because I don't think the the devs of the software I use should have chosen it. It doesn't have anything to do with the Electron team (I think).
For instance: MS Teams. Microsoft has the skill and resources to develop cross-platform desktop software. They should have done that for something as widely used as Teams.
> Do you think the US has idle capacity that can be activated at a moment's notice?
I'm sure some very smart MBA increased profits by eliminating spare capacity or making cuts that would make it much harder to spin up. That's American business culture: focus on this quarter or this year, nothing else matters.
I've worked in these environments too, and I think the modern "open" office without assigned desks give a far greater creepy "liminal" feeling that old suburban cube farms.
When you have assigned desks, people personalize their spaces. It feels lived in (at least a bit). A more contemporary open office feels more liminal, even when it's full of people. And after hours it's even worse: there's no trace of human habitation.
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