Seriously, these people have zero solidarity with their fellow humans. If they had any they wouldn't be working at one of the most evil companies on the planet.
If you can't appreciate or understand what a substantial effort it was to reduce poverty in China, then you aren't a serious person worth paying attention to. It's literally the economic question of the century and something we should seriously study because we have the potential to lift the entire world out of poverty too.
It's really not that complicated. The government banned people from trading causing extreme poverty and famine in one of the most fertile areas in the world. Then they reversed the ban and let Chinese people trade again. At the same time western companies setup factories in China causing massive capital inflows.
If it's really as simple as allowing trade with the west then why are many other developing countries either stuck at the middle-income trap or not developing quite as fast as China? You're not gonna tell me Chinese are smarter, are you?
"At the same time western companies setup factories in China causing massive capital inflows." This was an intentional policy to split China off from the Soviet union it's well documented the same thing never happened for other countries.
"You're not gonna tell me Chinese are smarter, are you?" No I'm not, but I will say culture does play a massive role, China was not a bunch of roaming tribes living off the land. Turn the clock back a couple of hundred years and it would be peak civilisation. China was literally thousands and thousands of years ahead of somewhere like North Sentinel island.
Calling China a developing country is actually pretty absurd, it's much more like a rebuilding country. GDP was the only undeveloped part because the communist party was terrible at running the economy. Art, science, poetry, fashion, literature, philosophy, culinary arts it was all present and pretty cutting edge up until the communist party ruined things.
It's the same reason Japan, German and the UK bounced back after WW2 except instead of it being war ( Japanese invasion and Chinese civil war aside ) it was self inflicted.
Also I don't think China has escaped the middle income trap. China to this day has horrible wealth inequality and pretty bad social mobility. I actually think this is an intentional strategy they have an underclass of cheap workers for a reason, the government doesn't force a high minimum wage for a reason. Then they have a rich upper class that gets to study in the west and buy a Porsche something that is completely unreachable for the rest of the country.
> Art, science, poetry, fashion, literature, philosophy, culinary arts it was all present and pretty cutting edge up until the communist party ruined things.
You are really, really overselling the state of the late Qing and the Republican era. My wife's grandparents are older than the PRC, and things pre-communism were not as you describe, to put it lightly.
> I actually think this is an intentional strategy
I think you need to look into why it's the poor rural population and not the elite urbanites that overwhelmingly support the communist party.
You can actually do it. If you don't live in the US, you can probably visit visa free tomorrow and just talk to a bunch of rural elderlies to test your hypotheses.
The Chinese government did a terrible job of reducing poverty relative to other East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. From a similar starting point the GDP per capita lagged well behind, and even now it still does; it's around $15k, similar to Mexico and less than half of those other East Asian countries. If the argument is "it's harder because the country is bigger", then if the government care about living standards it should have decentralized into lots of smaller countries like Europe, which if didn't do.
Sorry, splitting up does not work for China, politically, geographically and culturally. Peaceful and prosperous times only come when there's a strong central government. If any current government advocates for splitting up, then they'll be toppled in no time and replaced with new guys, maybe even warlords, who strive for a united China. "The land, long divided, must unite. The land, long united, must divide."
I mean the logic is simple but people don't want to admit it, you must pay the vig if you want in on the action. Before this type of naked corruption would take the form of boardroom seats/book deals/speaking gigs after you leave office but now it's more open so others will take note.
It also helps if you bust a few kneecaps in the process to show what happens if you go astray.
People are doing something, the issue with you two's extremely poor thinking is that lack of inaction means no one cares. What it actually represents is the massive growing disparity between the political class and average Americans.
There is >70% public support universal background checks for all firearm transactions, safe storage laws, and crisis intervention. Just the same that there is also large public support for things like public jobs programs, medicare for all, universal childcare, or free university; there is a very real obstacle that the political class in this country are adamant about stopping all progress towards better lives and not strictly caring that the elites extract more wealth or corporations get more welfare.
I'm very sorry, but I've heard that "there's large public support for X, Y, Z" for decades. If there's no real action in achieving such things, my assumption is people don't actually care about it.
Personally, when I "care about something", I try to act on it. My list is not long, and I'm very grateful that I don't have to spend a single minute of my life to think about school shootings.
You clearly missed the part about the divide between the political class and everyone else.
Most people in the US are just trying to pay rent and maybe one day save up for a house by the time they are 40-50.
If you don't see this you are either 1) making enough money you are part of the problem 2) don't actually live in the US so have a completely unmoored understanding of reality on the ground here
I obviously don’t live in the US. My entire point was that people say that care about school shootings and etc., but unless they do anything about it, those are just words.
Given the voting record of the majority of the population, I tend to believe that an average American cares more about SPX. Which, honestly, is fine by me. Every nation and culture is different, freedom and etc. etc.. But it would be hard to convince me that an average citizen cares about it, because, once again, nothing has changed in decades.
For the record, I have nothing against Americans, you guys are a lovely bunch. But it is what it is.
We literally can't do anything dude, what are you advocating for? That we have an armed rebellion to legislate the people's laws under a workers tribunal?
I'm really curious what country you live in because it's one that's clearly not a democracy. Not saying it as an insult either, but surely even in countries run by authoritarians there is an understanding that leadership is sometimes completely divorced from the people?
I also personally have a hard time blaming voters for anything, in America we have two corporate powers that have been neglecting the material needs of workers for nearly 40 years now; when you have two corporate parties power tends to be unstable for any meaningful legislation which tends to only benefit the elites + corporations whereas workers require constant legislation to help them and guide the country to benefit them.
When you see very little material outcomes you will vote for more extreme candidates. I honestly believe this is the real lesson how fascism can flourish, and I think this is something that can easily be predicted with extreme accuracy too. You look at the Weimar Republic, it was one of the most advanced and democratic governments on Earth; yet it failed to stop the threat of Nazis, mostly due to the ineptitude of politicians that also rejected the material needs of a nation.
I know this is a huge tangent but I think it's useful to write, because I'm really curios on your upbringing. I'd think understanding power, corruption, and out of touch governments to be universal human experiences but maybe not. D:
Indeed, the more accurate way to say it is that people in the US don't care enough about mass school shootings to do something about it besides thought and prayers.
If you're not American, one thing that you have to keep in mind whenever you hear "there's large public support in the US for [insert vaguely left-wing thing here] but nothing gets done about it" is that the US's system of government is really only vaguely a democracy. It gives a disproportionate amount of power to conservative rural voters at the expense of everybody else.
This is exemplified in the Senate, which is the least representative legislative body of any democracy I am aware of. Each state gets 2 votes regardless of population, so Wyoming (population ~550,000) is given the same amount of votes as California (population ~39,000,000). Any remotely controversial piece of legislation needs to pass the Senate with a 60% majority. This means that 21 Republican states making up ~20% of the population can block any bill they don't want to pass. Senators are also elected for 6 year terms, which limits how accountable they are to their constituents.
If a bill gets past the Senate, it makes its way to the president, who has veto power over all legislation. The president is elected by electors selected by the states rather than individual voters, and the number of electors is not fairly apportioned either. For example, there are ~728,000 people per elector in California, but ~196,000 people per elector in Wyoming.
In effect, this means that public opinion has essentially no impact on the legislation the US government passes. A 2014 Princeton study ( https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... ) found that "When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
If you're interested in why the system was designed this way, I highly recommend the book "The Framers' Coup" by Michael Klarman.
This is a poor way of framing the question, a better one would be can you find me another world power that is misallocating trillions of capital in vaporware with very little to show for it?
You need to read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Just because these leaders convince their workers to toil away their lives under some fake auspice doesn't mean it's what they all believe. Just a small subset.
The vast majority just care about money + power, let's not make it more complicated by bringing in delusional fanatics into the picture.
We're still acting like this is major turning point in society when these tools can barely find a market outside of turning $5 into $1, the leaders of these companies are now at the stage where they are trying to orchestra a national bailout under the guise of sovereign wealth fund lunacy when the vast majority of society hates these tools, companies, and people working for them.
Well that's the neat thing about this, it paves the way towards that yes. We may be finally able to smash Silicon Valley + the SF VC mind rot for good, these entities have been far too damaging to society and they should have never been controlled by individuals consolidated in a single city (mostly).
LLMs have already been used to bomb school girls, chilling is absolutely the operative word to use here. Especially since these delusional fools want to incorporate LLMs into everything.
Forgive my ignorance, but were LLMs involved in that decision? I don't remember hearing anything to that effect, but we're so bombarded by news these days I guess I could just be forgetting
Yes our government purportedly used technology to work up a list of targets in the Iran debacle as well just not with a LLM a distinction that to me just isn't that meaningful
Shouldn't companies figure this out before wasting tens of millions in budget + working hours? All I'm reading is that corporations are not taxed enough if they are okay with such opulent waste.
Knowing what to build (and that it hasn't already been built or bought elsewhere in the company) requires bits of information / person-to-person networking / visibility into the state of the company that not all managers or VPs have.
In fact, most people don't have that knowledge, because they're busy with existing or "local" problems , or because they didn't know to ask Davis the DBA or Kris the Kafka Cluster Manger or Alex from accounting if we have <resource> our team can plug into and use. "Oh, yeah, El has one under their desk they kick occasionally, ask them to hook you up!"
If you solve this problem in a turnkey way Fortune 500 companies will write you very large checks to help them prevent such duplicate waste, and will in turn become the 15th system they need to integrate....
That XKCD joke about "how 14 standards becomes 15 standards" also applies to the class of "one system to integrate with and report from all other systems"
ceo had invested £1 million to build a data analytics platform. "democratising data analytics" in a very specific domain. essentially, competing with someone like databricks in a niche. although they had never heard of databricks before i showed up.
For that million pounds they got a job scheduler written in pure django with a halfway finished react frontend. the whole thing was constantly broken. there were multiple race conditions throughout the product. i joined well after the million pounds was all gone. three years after i joined i had fixed the worst of the problems by rewriting massive swathes of the thing.
i eventually convinced the ceo they'd been doing the wrong thing all this time -- they should focus on analytics + specific domain consultancy services instead of software products.
the major failure was no-one ever moved on from idea V1. they never moved to idea V2. which meant they never got to idea V3. instead, everyone spent a hell of a lot of time talking about how great V1 was going to be, and how they planned to build V1 and what V1 would look like, check out this status update about our progress on V1, check out this mock up on what V1 is going to look like etc. they had an agile consultant come in to tell them how to be more agile. a scrum-master to tell them how to scrum.
3 months after joining was the first time i mentioned apache airflow. they literally could have just stuck a nice frontend on top of it and written a backend data transfer library. job done. very cheap idea V1. unfortunately, the previous team of django developers could only see their trusty django hammer. edit -- and i should add their big £1 million budget too.
multiply the budget by 10x or more. exact same thing at some big corpo. bigger budget = room for more bullshit.
Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was <500.
This obscene waste actually isn't health for society nor the economy.
I disagree, especially if we are talking about potentially hundreds of billions in waste. How much better would say software be if instead of Meta wasting $100billion on Reality Labs we gave one time $100,000 grants to open source developers? That would be helping over 1,000,000 open source developers that are actually writing useful helpful software for others.
Instead we had a corporate jobs program that benefited no one outside of Meta's offices.
Software engineering projects expand to fill the deadlines you set for them (usually going over). Same thing for budget. You'll waste a bunch of a million pound budget. People are forced to get creative and thrifty with a £20k budget.
> The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
Yes. The metaverse bullshit comes to mind. Something no-one wanted or needed, and exorbitant amounts of money spent on it.
Not the same. Every corporation I've worked at (several dozen in my career across the F500) has had numerous stories about obscene waste in regards to building things in software.
Waste at all levels. I've worked at insurance companies that spent $100million on development where only 200 customers signed up (estimated to be 20,000 at start). I've worked at telecoms that spent $25 million developing internal tools that no one used. I've worked at big tech where entire teams sole purpose is to control a single widget on a UI page.
This isn't even on the procurement side. Recently left a company where a single org was paying $10,000 a month on licenses when only 12 devs existed. I've seen organizations waste tens of millions of salesforce licenses that no one uses.
I'm sorry but the waste is rampant. SMB's can afford to waste tens of millions of failures, but modern US corporations can because there is no real competition in US markets. Just monopolies abusing each other.
I'm sure scientists would love the chance to have stupid budgets and make stupid things.
It is true that businesses tend to have more money than scientists so the numbers are bigger, but scientists pursue failed experiments that are "waste" in just this same way.
"It only got 200 users" is the business version of the null hypothesis.
No, it's best to manage your software delivery organization to reduce the cost and time of experiments so that you can quickly and cheaply figure out what to build... and then build that.
But there will still necessarily be things that you build that don't ship, and that's inherent to the problem domain.
Nothing, they are just trying to scare monger the public and prime the pump for a massive bailout when it crashes out because apparently China are the big bad meanies.
It has nothing to do with being "fine" if the PRC or anyone else for that matter get to some speculative and hypothetical ASI first. There are zero US regulations that would be effective to prevent that.
US regulations apply to US companies and citizens, exclusively. Anthropic crowding out all future potential competitors in the US via regulatory capture has no weight on what the rest of the world does.
Unless you are proposing military action over a speculative sci-fi future
PRC labs reportedly aren't even thinking about getting to ASI, much less trying. They think of AI as a technology that can provide utility across the board even without anything like superhuman smarts.
How do rules that inhibit what AI can be sold on the US market (adding additional costs to trading in that market) do anything to inhibit a competing nation from reaching ASI first? Insofar as they inhibit anyone from reaching ASI, its firms whose primary commercial interest is selling AI services in the US market, not foreign threat actors except to the extent those two categories overlap.
No, because there is zero reason to think LLMs will lead to it but we do know that the massive LLM investment has a huge financial risk for the US. Not too mention it's exacerbating the climate crisis (you know the actual thing that might end civilization, not a fantasy delusion of AGI), giving citizens cancer that live next to data centers, the extreme decrease in quality of life, and the misallocation of capital while Americans lack healthcare, childcare, housing, and education.
Also don't believe China is actually a threat to the world. That's some cold war delusional think you got there.
All the companies seem to believe is that it's okay to immiserate a large percentage for the pursuit of money, you seem to believe the lies they're feeding you.
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