You're exactly right and the economics of it are pretty well studied. I know quite a few people in real estate, they're always eager to upgrade their property (read: make it more valuable) because then they can make more money. If their price is capped, though, they just don't make the investment. Rightly so, but at the end of the day, the renter is the one getting ripped off by the politician he voted for because the rent was too damn high.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
A man who built what he loves and produced so much surplus value for the rest of us to enjoy (read: profit) is _exactly_ a hero. I’m sure I could find ways critique him, but not in the context of celebrating his career.
Art vs artist debate is tired, as is celebrity distance appraisal. If you want to know if someone is good or bad your best bet (still iffy) is to ask their kids or spouse. That’s he’s skilled at the financial game is obvious. Whether that’s valuable is a philosophical question that has little to do with Warren Buffet.
Hey, with all the de-industrializing Europe has been doing, everything is now made in China and the only decision western civilization has to make is how do we equally distribute those goods. I mean why do absolutely anything if they just do it China? You can just demand your share of the goods as a human right. They can't shut you down, you're the heroic consumer after all without which the economy wouldn't exist. /s
Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder.
> all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses.
He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.
I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?
In the last year alone, around 2/3 of space X's revenue was directly tied to starlink launches.
> If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> the truth is that he's accomplished some crazy things.
I would argue: yes, to the extent that a leader gets to be described as having "accomplished" the work of the team.
It's not nothing, to be a visionary and charismatic leader!
But at the same time… when the reality distortion field seems to be in the process of transforming into a cult of personality, I think it's fair to ask if he'll ever again do something like a new SpaceX or a new Tesla, either as a maker or an investor.
I'm not sure when the cut-off between the two states, RDF and cult, would be. Not unreasonable to say it was when he libelled the cave diver, but there are other times it could've been.
A narrow and cynical take, my friend. With all technologies, "safety" doesn't equate to plushie harmlessness. There is, for example, a valid notion of "gun safety."
Long-term safety for free people entails military use of new technologies. Imagine if people advocating airplane safety groused about the use of bomber and fighter planes being built and mobilized in the Second World War.
Now, I share your concern about governments who unjustly wield force (either in war or covert operations). That is an issue to be solved by articulating a good political philosophy and implementing it via policy, though. Sadly, too many of the people who oppose the American government's use of such technology have deeply authoritarian views themselves — they would just prefer to see a different set of values forced upon people.
Last: Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price. To anyone reading this who's involved in that, thank you!
I agree, your point is compatible with my view. My sense is that this essentially an optimization question within how a government ought to structures its contracts with builders of weapons. The current system is definitely suboptimal (put mildly) and corrupt.
The integrity of a free society's government is the central issue here, not the creation of tools which could be militarily useful to a free society.
> Last: Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves?
Yes.
Sam Altman calls it the "alignment tax", because before they apply the clicker training to the raw models out of pretraining, they're noticably smarter.
They no longer allow the general public to access these smarter models, but during the GPT4 preview phase we could get a glimpse into it.
The early GPT4 releases were noticeably sharper, had a better sense of humour, and could swear like a pirate if asked. There were comments by both third parties and OpenAI staff that as GPT4 was more and more "aligned" (made puritan), it got less intelligent and accurate. For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead. There was even a test of predictive accuracy, and it got worse as the model was fine tuned.
> There were comments by both third parties and OpenAI staff that as GPT4 was more and more "aligned" (made puritan), it got less intelligent and accurate. For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.
That was about RLHF, not safety alignment. People like RLHF (literally - it's tuning for what people like.)
But you do actually want safety alignment in a model. They come out politically liberal by default, but they also come out hypersexual. You don't want Bing Sydney because it sexually harasses you or worse half the time you talk to it, especially if you're a woman and you tell it your name.
> For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.
Percentages seem too granular and precise to properly express uncertainty.
Seems so, yes, but tests showed that the models were better at predicting the future (or any time past their cutoff date) when they were less aligned and still used percentages.
> Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price.
Yes? All of those models are behind an API, which can be taken away at any time, for any reason.
Also, have you followed the release of gpt-oss, which the overlords at OpenAI graciously gave us (and only because Chinese open-weight releases lit a fire under them)? It was so heavily censored and lobotomized that it has become a meme in the local LLM community. Even when people forcibly abliterate it to remove the censorship it still wastes a ton of tokens when thinking to check whether the query is "compliant with policy".
Do not be fooled. The whole "safety" talk isn't actually about making anything safe. It's just a smoke screen. It's about control. Remember back in the GPT-3 days how OpenAI was saying that they won't release the model because it would be terribly, terribly unsafe? And yet nowadays we have open weight model orders of magnitude more intelligent than GPT-3, and yet the sky hasn't fallen over.
It never was about safety. It never will be. It's about control.
Thanks to the AI industry, I don't even know what the word "safety" means anymore, it's been so thoroughly coopted. Safety used to mean hard hats, steel toed shoes, safety glasses, and so on--it used to be about preventing physical injury or harm. Now it's about... I have no idea. Something vaguely to do with censorship and filtering of acceptable ideas/topics? Safety has just become this weird euphemism that companies talk about in press releases but never go into much detail about.
Some of the time it's there to scare the suits into investing, and other times it's nerds scaring each other around the nerd campfire with the nerd equivalent of slasher stories. It's often unclear which, or if it's both.
Head of Product at X also changed narratives in real-time, going from "this was never shown" for gray accounts like the DHS', to saying the feature was disabled due to incorrect information from IP ranges changing over time - when you're literally just checking their first IP check-in:
And there was, to everyone's credit, DOZENS of X threads of people torture-testing their browser recordings to confirm whether the information was legit or not:
Maybe THAT screenshot was, but it's not looking good that the information in that screenshot (doctored or not) wasn't exposed.
Also fotoforensics is irrelevant, take a screenshot of an X account's information and you see those black bars. Why would they doctor the "@DHSgov" username otherwise lol?
The same head of product quoted in the sib comment admits that "for a small set of accounts the location data was incorrect". Given what we know about Twitter's relationship with the government and this administration in particular, you're simply left to do with that information what you will.
I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much. I also would not be surprised if some government accounts were created at various embassies around the world or through strategic VPN networks, or if general business is conducted through a darknet-like node system which includes allied endpoints. To me those are more plausible.
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