Yup. I quite literally don't know anyone who is using Bitcoin directly to pay for everyday expenses, nor even for larger purchases. It always includes using an off-ramp and going through fiat.
Or perhaps, the underlying threat is personified by Altman, in that our country has repeated and widespread institutional failures to hold the wealthy accountable for wrongdoing.
The threat of AI is, after all, driven by the people who use it.
I honestly think there's more going on here. It seems to be primarily the vain billionaires that are going off the deep end. I experimented with stimulants when I was young and I remember being shocked at how they changed my personality. I went from pretty stoic to wanting to fight people over the slightest perceived insult. I can't help but think these billionaires with their expensive implants, hair and skin treatments, blood boys, etc. are on some life-extending or performance enhancing stimulants that are affecting their state of mind.
I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
You are just moving the goalposts to criticize a position without being required to provide a reason. You could pick any phrase and mark it as beneath intelligent discourse. You are choosing “problematic” because you don’t like the implication.
Musk is easy to laugh at and to criticize. Problematic encompasses his lying, pettiness, racism, sexual weirdness, ego and fraud as well as anything. Regardless of the proportions of specific traits, as a whole, he’s a problematic individual. That’s perfectly cromulent.
IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise.
To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter.
At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
It's a rhetorical device that dates back to the ancient Greeks (meiosis). It's absolutely a lot more writing to enumerate the ways in which Elon Musk is problematic.
In a sane world it would read that way. Unfortunately, we live in a world where such nondescript descriptors (“problematic”, “objectionable”, “unprofessional”, “toxic”, “extremist”, “far-$SIDE”, a few others depending on usage) have been used, and overused, to accuse or smear people without taking on much of a burden of proof or making any statements specific enough to be falsifiable.
They now provoke instinctive revulsion when used in culture-war-adjacent contexts even when, as here, their usage is entirely legitimate (you presuppose a vague but mutually understood allegation rather than nebulously introducing a fresh one). I think only “controversial” has escaped this fate, but it might be too weak for your purposes.
(To be clear, I am only trying to explain why your phrasing might cause your interlocutor to momentarily recoil even when—as in my case—they don’t actually have any problem with the contents of your statement. What you do with this explanation is up to you: I don’t believe these terms are short-term salvageable at this point, but neither will I begrudge others their choice of hopeless cause; I certainly have my own fair share of those.)
He was always a nutcase. So unhinged he got booted out of PayPal. Then the shenanigans and retconing of him as a Tesla founder. His unrealistic promises he never realised over the years at Tesla. The pedo guy thing. The HyperLoop bullshit. It was not as obvious because he still had some filters but it was already visible if you were paying attention. Problematic is a good description of what he was.
Just because you've been programmed to associate "problematic" with "liberals" and then further trained to think that people who use the word "problematic" are in fact problems, that's on you, the larger zeitgeist you don't see, and the people programming you.
I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
It also makes no sense! "Fuck this, it doesn't matter - but I'll happily spend effort communicating that to others, because apparently making others not care about something I don't care about is something I do care about." Wut?!
Well, I say it makes no sense. Alternatively, it makes a lot of sense, and these people actually just wanna destroy everything we hold dear :-(
Then do something about it. Vote for better politicians. Donate money to causes that you think are important. If you think you can do it better, and this isn't meant to be facetious, run for political office.
Being fatalistic can be a great excuse not to do anything.
I cannot. I can only vote better politicians if they are there. That is without even going into the minefield of what is "better". My implication is that I have no confidence whatsoever in any current politician in my state.
> Donate money to causes that you think are important.
I have no money.
> If you think you can do it better, and this isn't meant to be facetious, run for political office.
I have no money, no visibility and no connections. Even if I was magically given tons of money, I would still need a strong network to attempt any real change, even without taking into consideration the strong networks already in place preventing it.
Telling random citizens "run for office" is facetious, whether you mean it or not.
> Telling random citizens "run for office" is facetious, whether you mean it or not.
Hard disagree. At least where I live, "random citizens" run for local office and succeed all the time.
Also, complaining that you "have no network" is a you problem, not a system problem. I'm truly sorry if you feel you have no friends, but you'll be better off at least trying to get some (independent of politics). And if that's something you've tried and failed at before, I do feel pity. But I don't think hope is lost for anyone. And even if it were lost, please don't actively spread the misery!
You are kind of proving my point. You are actively justifying doing literally nothing about what bothers you and acting indignant and self righteous about it.
I didn’t mean that you should strive to do as little as possible; rather that if you have 2 choices, do more or do less - then I would be biased towards doing less.
Of course not always a realistic option
You can probably find a million situations where doing less is terrible.
I think first step would be to define for yourself what doing less actually means - it could mean taking a walk instead of chasing dopamine -> doing less but you move more.
But whatever it’s a philosophical question and there aren’t any right or true answers
It's fun to pet the cat. It's not fun to rage against an unstoppable force. Well, maybe it is for some people. But I find people often underestimate the detrimental effects.
Yes, of course. Do you prefer to die? Those are the only two alternatives, and a decision that you don't want one is a decision that you prefer the other.
No, there is no alternative. Everything eventually dies, so you better make peace with it. The only people who believe that they won't die are religious people who believe in an afterlife (which is a preposterous position) and the people who have their heads or whole bodies frozen because they think they are so special that the future will honor their contracts and revive them.
Both of these are bound to lead to the exact same outcome so it doesn't really matter what you believe but it may guide you to wiser decision while you are alive to accept reality absent proof to the contrary.
I'm sorry to hear that you don't want to exist in the future. I do. I have thought about it extensively, and there is literally no scenario in which I consider not-existing better than existing.
There is an essentially infinite amount of creativity and interesting complexity available in the richness of interactions with other people and the things people create. What, exactly, are you "horrified" about?
Well I read the article discussing pypi packages but I think for a lot of people it’s more single use tools. My little apks are ugly and buggy but work for me
This happens every time non-technical users get their hands on technical tools.
Just go look at some HyperCard compilation CD: all stacks were horrible, ugly and buggy, but if the author massaged them the right way, they kind of worked, held by spit and prayers. "How to sit people at my wedding" type of garbage. The only good quality HC stacks were the demo ones that came with the program, made by professional developers and graphic designers working at Apple. In the decade HC was a product, maybe 15 high quality stacks emerged.
Same with the horrible mess that "users" manage to cobble together if you give them access to Office(TM) macros. Users don't seem to know about Normal Forms when they begin to create tables in Access. The horror.
An education in Computer Science is necessary when systems have to interact reliably. One-off "I vibe coded a dashboard for my smart watch" are in the same category as Visual Basic with the server paths hardcoded all over, breaking on empty directories and if two PCs happen to run the same macro, then half of the files in some shared directory get wiped for good. You are welcome.
Well, I've been a software developer for 15 years (and cut my teeth on BASIC well before that...) but sometimes I just need something quick and dirty that works. Most people do, actually. And I no longer give a crap about Beautiful Code when I actually just want "like Anki but it let's me watch tv in between quizzing me and I'll delete it when I'm fluent"
They were not. The rule now is that they have to go into a special bag that cannot be opened while school is in session. Before they could be left in a backpack and snuck out or used between classes.
The legislature (of states and the federal government) routinely passes laws explicitly giving the head of state the power to make decisions like this without passing a law. The most recent one in Oregon about schooling was SB 141.
I suspect that the author is in a pretty drastic minority here.
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