I'd say this is a fundamental misreading of Musk. He's a good hype man, who started rich, got richer and became famous. Him starting over would be simply that he's famous and so is better at being famous and generating hype than someone who isn't already famous.
The thing is - basically being a grifter is a great skill for making money for oneself and friends, but not actually a skill that helps society as a whole. And sure, advertising is a kind of expertise, but I don't think many people actually hold it in high regard as being worth a lot in terms of "deserving".
He built Paypal, then Tesla, then SpaceX. People who think that he isn't an incredible entrepreneur and operator clearly don't know anything about building businesses. Regardless of how he started out, dismissing his accomplishments as a "grifter" or "hype man" shows you have very little understanding whatsoever.
Minor correction: SpaceX came before Tesla. Elon started hanging out with the Mars Society people after Paypal. Probably more impressive to take your exit cash and go “okay, how much to go to Mars?”
I think this is slightly wrong in the other direction. How does people doing things "for the love of the craft" inherently lead to better quality "stuff"? There are plenty of examples of people doing things already "for the love of the craft" either because they're wealthy, or at least doing well enough for it to be a serious hobby. But that doesn't mean they beat our professionals every time.
Hollywood movies seem to be to be one of the least able kind of task to be done "for the love of the craft" across all thousands of people involved in a blockbuster. How does that coordination work out across everyone who's interested "in the craft"? Ever see fan productions? It can be done, but they're also often driven by people actually doing tasks for cash that was gathered via donations.
I also might point to the people who are so well liked and famous that they basically can "write their own ticket" - George RR Martin is an example. His first few books were considered amazing, but it's also considered that given no real impetus anymore - he's unlikely to finish the saga ever. As a whole then, is an unfinished saga really "higher quality" than one finished to make a buck? The answer IMHO isn't obvious.
> I think this is slightly wrong in the other direction. How does people doing things "for the love of the craft" inherently lead to better quality "stuff"?
You're correct that a passionate hobby does not necessarily translate to higher quality output. These sorts of discussions are handwavy by nature because the truth is never black and white. In fact, I can easily provide an example that contradicts my own assertion that there would be "less stuff" in a socialists/Marxists environment: Wikipedia. Before Wikipedia, when I wanted a digital encyclopedia, I purchased software from Encyclopedia Britannica. The nice thing about their encyclopedia was the articles were high quality, vetted by experts. The problem is the number of articles was limited, updates and additions were infrequent, and it cost money. By comparison, Wikipedia has a massive number of articles, frequent updates, and is freely provided by a non-profit foundation. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the same vetting as Encyclopedia Britannica and so the quality is inconsistent. So here the "socialists" Wikipedia offers consumers more "stuff" to read, albeit with inconsistent quality, than the "capitalists" Encyclopedia Britannica.
> I also might point to the people who are so well liked and famous that they basically can "write their own ticket" - George RR Martin is an example. His first few books were considered amazing, but it's also considered that given no real impetus anymore - he's unlikely to finish the saga ever. As a whole then, is an unfinished saga really "higher quality" than one finished to make a buck? The answer IMHO isn't obvious.
Why did George RR Martin lose his passion?
Was he only after fortunate and fame?
Did the dopamine hit he received from said fame outweigh the hit he received writing books?
Questions like this are far more revealing because they touch on a deeper truth.
> There are plenty of examples of people doing things already "for the love of the craft" either because they're wealthy, or at least doing well enough for it to be a serious hobby.
What makes someone a natural builder? Why aren't there more engineers like Ton Roosendaal who, when asked why he gave his creation away for free, is quoted as saying "Money doesn't mean anything. It's not interesting. I call myself a maker; I want to make stuff." Why aren't more physicians like Dr. Frederick Banting who, after discovering insulin, sold the patent for $1 because he believed "insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world."
Human nature can be less-than-stellar and economic systems like capitalism attempt to channel it into something constructive.
Is this channeling necessary and at what point does it become counterproductive?
Humans are a product of their environment and experiences. On this very board many folks idolize CEO's...but why CEO's and not folks like Ton Roosendaal and Dr. Banting? I think the real truth, the deeper truth, is the "revolution" starts with the culture itself: rather than TV shows like Shark Tank lets have programs emphasizing non-profit founders, rather than hero worshipping CEO's, let's encourage emulating folks like Ton Roosendaal and Dr. Banting, then...maybe...capitalism will fade away on its own.
You'd have to bite the bullet that most human posters are also parrots by that definition I think. It's certainly taking input from what others have said, and it's not coming up with new ideas. But it's answering many questions same as human posters online would, by combining stuff they heard elsewhere into a coherent text post.
Given that the output essentially is similar to what human posters online are doing in many many cases the term isn't useful to distinguish between the two.
It's certainly not working like Eliza where there are specific programmed response trees to choose from. It doesn't seem to be just copying sentences and pasting them into the output.
I'm not well versed in GPT, I've only recently been using ChatGPT 3.5. For scripting I was blown away. In some ways it's better than I am. But I also strongly believe so far you need to be well versed enough to know what it's doing and to safety check and massage its output. I am also regularly using Neeva paid search which has AI responses that cite its sources - a useful feature compared to ChatGPT IMHO.
With both of them, I'm very underwhelmed with "use it like a forum" or "ask it a tech support question". Maybe because my "tech support questions" tend to be much harder than my "scripting questions", but it's not super useful. Anything it finds I actually find "better" because of context and screenshots just using a traditional search and clicking through to the blog or whatever that's talking about the issue.
Ok, now to the "It's just a parrot". I disagree strongly with that. It's no more a parrot than wikipedia authors are. Many of the Neeva AI search results read like an autogenerated Wikipedia page, complete with the source links.
Philosophically - I think a lot of people either aren't bringing philosophy and some sci fi knowledge to these arguments or don't know of them. Many of the "it doesn't understand anything" seem to be somewhat substrate chauvinist to me - I'm not sure if Data from Star Trek showed up in front of them that they'd admit he's intelligent or a person, simply because he's not organic. And you're also right - people claiming it "doesn't understand" can't or won't define what "understand" means in this context. Other terms, like "intelligence" also have changed over time. I'm pretty sure if in 1800 you asked if a machine could do calculus if it was intelligent - people would say yes. However by the 1960s computers were enough of a thing doing math that we decided math was no longer a marker of intelligence for a machine to do. Now we claim that GPT is just advanced autosuggest. Well, I guess an iPad is just an advanced calculator - but I'd argue it's transcended being a calculator in practical use. And I think GPT has transcended next word suggestions. My phone keyboard suggests 3 options for the next word, but it can't write the next paragraph for me coherently, nor does it take directions or questions and output pretty reasonable responses.
So I think I'm in the middle here - I don't discount GPT3.5 and 4, but I don't think the're Star Trek level AIs either. I don't think they are magic as it were.
I will say that GPT-4 is miles ahead of 3.5 The best use for it is to provide a sample of code, then ask why an issue is occurring within those few hundred lines OR ask how to add / start new functionality from that sample.
I will agree that it's by no means Star Trek level, but it is about the most fascinating piece of technology I've seen in my lifetime.
And yes, that sounds silly! But therein lies my reason for writing this post.
I disagree. I think because the incremental cost for another copy of some already written software is 0, the perceived value is 0. It's the general problem with copyright IMHO.
It's not like a widget, that there's a value intrinsic to each widget - the value is all in the creating the initial copy of the software and in any ongoing changes people want.
And while for a singular person, perhaps writing FLOSS is charity, but for companies it might well be more payment in kind - i.e. cooperation on making it do things each company wants makes it more valuable for everyone.
Sure. However I don't think he's promoting security through obscurity so much as figuring out his threat model and risk acceptance. For most businesses and end users who love Zoom, everything else they've tried has failed to do the thing acceptably. Like, they probably are more secure in so far as not enough people can successfully use them, so doing no video conferencing is more secure than doing some video conferencing.
And to be honest, most business stuff is by unencrypted e-mail, so I don't see how a TLS encrypted Video Chat increases their exposure.
Finally, the chance of someone, even zoom, recording and analyzing all the video conferences ever to somehow get important info from a video conference seems pretty low anyway. Unless you're worried about the NSA, and even then, it seems like they'd have a way into WebEx etc also, so even on risk.
At this point, it seems reasonable to go by what works for people. And Zoom works.
Me too. I swear they are stretching "vulnerability" to the point of stupidity. So, if a Hacker gets into your Zoom Meeting (itself a problem) and sends you a link, and you click it, bad things happen? Why, send out the hounds to any thing that has clickable links. Better boycot web browsers too while we're at it. Because the problem here isn't a clickable link, what if someone copy pastes it? Is that a zoom vulnerability too? The issue is Microsoft allowing SMB to the internet by default, or bad IT config allowing it to the net by default. The password problem is Microsoft STILL using insecure auth mechanisms there. NONE OF THIS has ANYTHING to do with Zoom or e-mail or a web browser IMO.
Oh, if you're already hacked in enough to run code on MacOS, you can grab the camera with Zoom. Or, you know, use any of many methods to do that I'm sure. The problem, and the reason for HIPS / AV / security solutions is to stop running "hacker code". If I'm running arbitrary code on your Mac, I don't need Zoom to grab a password.
Now, the bad installer methods used on MacOS - yes, those should not happen and ought to be fixed. I think it's the big problem, no one gets paid for a secure system, but one that people can use. Security just causes issues sadly, and making it possible for the most incapable computer user is why everyone loves Zoom for "just working". That sadly incentivizes them to try and work around security roadblocks, which is bad.
> “evading wage and hour” laws. But that’s my point: Why do you count it as “evading” anything when you buy labor from someone who offers it as a freelancer, and that rate is under the minimum?
Working for less than minimum wage is against the law. Are you actually suggesting that minimum wage is a bad idea, and so of course the rest wouldn't hold up. In this case, a minimum wage is considered a premise of the entire decision.
I cannot see an issue about gifting people something. I do see an issue with allowing paid work at less than the legal minimum wage, which I expect is why this was framed as an evasion of the wage and hour laws.
To go very off topic, my quick reason for why minimum wage laws are desired is as follows (note I don't think any of this works as follows in real life, but this is the reasoning I can come up with):
We as a society do not actually want to subsidize businesses where they shunt the cost of their employees to the public but privatize the profits - i.e. if Walmart only "makes money" because the local governments have to pay 1/2 the employee wages in poverty avoiding benefits - we don't want Walmart to succeed. So we set a wage minimum in law where if you make that amount society thinks you wouldn't need welfare etc. It may also be seen as a moral value that an employee should make enough to survive at a job. I.e. we should treat employes "this good" in a developed country.
>Working for less than minimum wage is against the law.
No, it's not. You can absolutely set up a proprietorship, and sell labor, such that the pre-tax proceeds per hour of labor are less than the minimum. That is legal. It's just not legal for an "employer" to be the payer of that income, hence begging the original question.
That's my whole point: why does this distinction exist?
It's pretty trivial to defend any tiny part of the system in isolation. The problem is to explain why you have this employer-contractor boundary. That needs more (as justified in my original comment) than "I don't want workers to be oppressed" or "I don't like businesses shunting costs onto the public".
There's a simple reason the decision does not provide the explanation you are looking for: that's not the role of the court. The California legislature, by statute, and the Industrial Welfare Commission, established that there needs to be a distinction between employee and independent contractor. The courts have the role of setting forth a rule consistent with California statutes and IWC wage orders that courts (and, by extension, the public) can use to determine whether someone falls into the "employee" or "contractor" category. It does not matter to the court WHY that distinction exists, except to the extent that why informs what test to use to determine who is and who is not an employee under state law.
Courts commonly rule on intent, and laws generally have an intent discernable from the language of the legislation or the records of is legislative debate. This gives courts a way to disambiguate unclear cases like this one, and it's typically vital to have some intent to fall back on, since laws don't make sense otherwise.
These confused rulings are exactly what you expect in the absence of such a mooring. They can't give a reason why my rules A or B are absurd, except for whether they match some hard-to-parse guidelines.
Example: If the employer requires you to bring your own tools, that somehow makes you more of a contractor, even though that's a greater burden on the worker, but someone decided that such instances "feel" more like contractors. Exactly what confused governance and legislation look like.
Interestingly enough, at least around here, UPS is also the best delivery company. Decent prices, can get daily pickups, delivers on time, drives a company truck.
Half the time with FedEx you have no idea why a random truck is stopping to drop off a package. We also at my office always have to call them to do any pickup, the UPS guy just grabs outgoing when it delivers the incoming.
I think they would have to end up far more like ebay where Uber gets a request for a ride, puts that up for a period of "bid" by the drivers who will bid a price for that ride, and then gives that list with sorting options back to the requester to pick from.
Of course, I imagine that sort of process would make it much harder to actually get a ride and make it far less interesting to the users.
The thing is - basically being a grifter is a great skill for making money for oneself and friends, but not actually a skill that helps society as a whole. And sure, advertising is a kind of expertise, but I don't think many people actually hold it in high regard as being worth a lot in terms of "deserving".