I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:
Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.
Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working
Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.
I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
Look up email alias service or something similar, if you aren't looking to self host. I can't recommend the service I use, because I'm grandfathered in to my plan, and their current plans for new customers suck, but there's enough providers out there that you should find something competitive.
If you want to 'self host' on a provider, I thing cheap/free options are available from cloudflare, Google, and similar enterprise companies.
If you want to truly self host, I don't have experience, but this guy who does gave a great thorough answer for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073510
> hatred of Microsoft interferes with people's ability to think logically
100%. I fall in the 'I hate MS (and Apple, and Google, and...)' crowd myself. I lose brain cells every time I have to use MS products, so I definitely make nonlogical statements about these companies sometimes. I admit that my biasies are strong and one can't fully trust my opinion when I talk about these companies. But I do try to lace mostly truth, even if I exaggerate.
I have almost exclusively used the downloads folder since a late teen, because I realized it was the only place where I could trust microslop to not mess with my stuff.
Now I mostly use my self hosted cloud, but I do still have all of my short term things in downloads that don't need a form of backup
> alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features
Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.
Alcohol and cigarettes are bad for you but we've decided that when you turn 18 you have the freedom to ruin your own life. (But not with LSD, for some reason)
We fear that these drugs have developmental impacts but beyond that we also forbid them in restaurants and indoor environments quite generally even for adults. So adult usage is tolerated in their own home or in the outdoor public environment (although some further restrictions apply here).
I am sympathetic to the idea that social media may also have social development impacts separate from their negative social impacts, but my experience in life is that actually people appear to socially degenerate with overexposure. Thus we probably need some regulation analogous to forbidding smoking in restaurants but for social media or limiting gambler's access. But indeed, maybe on top of that we also need bans for minors.
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.
Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)
My grandpa was upset that I never bothered to memorize trig tables. Tried to argue that I am not useful when there isn't a calculator around. I can think of several rebuttles to this, but didn't care to use any. He'd already been retired for some time so I didn't expect him to understand why even a pocket calculator is useless in modern engineering analysis, so memorizing trig was no more than a boring party trick performed by the out of touch nerd.
> since there is no testable theory of consciousness
I can't argue with this, so I acknowledge that my interpretation is as bunk as anyone else's.
> my current assumption is that insects are not conscious
Some species act as hive-minds (like bees! How convenient for your example), so I imagine the hive as the consciousness, making each bee individually lacking conscious but collectively so. Like a single neuron is not consciousness alone, but the brain is... For some reason. Kinda like how you use different physics at different levels; Newtonian physics is always there, but negligible at quantum levels, so effectively not present at all. Even a human is a collection of minds, but only one conscious. My gut biome is independent biology and can even be removed and transplanted, but I don't believe my gut bacteria is conscious. So long as it is in me, it is nonetheless part of me, and I am one conscious. I also don't exist only at my brain, eyes, or hands (deaf/blind people have expressed to me that they feel like they are located at their hands in the way I used to think I was located behind my eyes), but as my whole body.
With this perspective, I still don't believe LLMs are conscious despite modeling thinking so well. At best, it is a highly accessible modeling software, like goat simulator but if it were so good that someone thought the goat was real. You are still steering the goat/LLM, and it doesn't exist when you aren't running it. I guess the missing piece for me is the lack of autonomy that a conscious has.
Then you can go into an argument on whether we actually have choice or it is an illusion, but that is a whole topic on its own.
The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks
Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.
Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working
Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.
I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
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