FaceDeer

Almost all medications start out as a luxury for wealthy classes.

When insulin was first discovered as a treatment for diabetes the first Americans to be treated with it back in 1922 were James D. Havens, son of former congressman James S. Havens, and Elizabeth Hughes Gossett, daughter of the US Secretary of State. I can just imagine the Reddit threads at the time decrying how diabetes research was only benefiting the “elites.” But nowadays insulin is manufactured in bulk and anyone can have access to it.

Same here. It bothers me how many people have come to worship the Dragon-Tyrant and consider this guy to be somehow “selfish” for attempting this.

If he hits on an effective anti-aging treatment from his efforts then he’ll help billions that way instead. Pretty much everyone eventually suffers from aging if they live long enough.

If the tests aren’t being done on anyone else yet then he’s not going to delay anything by trying it himself.

Frankly, I admire his daring. When people pilot experimental aircraft or climb a mountain nobody’s climbed before they’re considered to be adventurers, he’s doing the pharmaceutical equivalent.

Won’t someone pleeeeeease think of the children!

Elon Musk started his companies in America.

If you want to judge Americans by global standards, then basically every single one of them is “born into wealth” because most of the people in the world live below the American poverty line.

After reading the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer I came away with the feeling he really wasn’t a pretty good self-made businessman.

Going from a $30,000 seed investment to $400 billion dollars would tend to suggest otherwise.

Call him a terrible person, sure. You can’t buy a good personality. But as a businessman the numbers seem pretty clear.

The references there talk about them having tens of thousands of dollars to spend on things. That matches with what I linked above.

Prove it

…

I don’t feel the need to prove musk was born into wealth.

I hardly need to point out the double standard here.

Certainly he was above average. But that’s not “born into wealth.” $28,000 is the price of a modest new car. There are huge numbers of people who are able to get seed money like that from friends and relatives to start a business, but clearly Elon did something more than those people to grow that to the $400 billion his current net wealth stands at.

The problem is that Musk has become such an intensely politically and culturally polarizing figure that saying even the remotely “positive” thing about him - such as “he’s actually a pretty good self-made businessman” - gets interpreted as “boy howdy do I ever love Trump and misogyny!”

This article on the company describes his funding sources, with citations for each claim.

Can you prove the contrary, that he was “born into wealth?”

The seed money he got from his father for his first business - split between him and his brother Kimbal, whom his father liked much better than him - was $28,000. After Elon and Kimbal had already raised some funds from other investors, too. Everyone seems to think Musk was born in a vast emerald-encrusted mansion. His family were by no means poor but he’s not “old money.”

Hate Elon Musk for real reasons, not made up ones.

Are we, though? Newer models almost universally perform better than older ones, adjusted for scale. What signs are you seeing?

You are speaking of “model collapse”, I take it? That doesn’t happen in the real world with properly generated and curated synthetic data. Model collapse has only been demonstrated in highly artificial circumstances where many generations of model were “bred” exclusively on the outputs of previous generations, without the sort of curation and blend of additional new data that real-world models are trained with.

There is no sign that we are at “the peak” of AI development yet.

Except it’s not denying service, so it’s just a D.

And yet the synthetic training data works, and models trained on it continue scoring higher on the benchmarks than ones trained on raw Internet data. Claim what you want about it, the results speak louder.

Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of “synthetic data” to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.

Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It’s one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.

I have little to say about this because it’s basically nonsense.

The top 100 accounts already own 35% of the network and rising … that would give Lido and Coinbase a combined 51% of the stake

These two statements are completely incompatible with each other, for example. Also, the top 100 accounts only holding 35% of the network is remarkably good. And Lido is not controlled by a single individual or organization. And holding 51% of the stake means nothing on Ethereum, it works differently from Bitcoin. And the Gini coefficient is something that applies to national economies, not to blockchains. And I could go on, but this is just nonsense and you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

There are lots of uses that don’t depend on external data. The general “digital payments” use case, for example, just requires tokens to be transferred between two accounts on the blockchain itself. People then make use of that information externally however they like.

There are also ways to get external data onto the blockchain in a manner that is reliable enough for some particular purpose or another. A lot of game theory goes into that sort of application. Stabletokens have price oracles, there are prediction markets, “proof of personhood” protocols, etc.

The important things to consider are:

• Blockchains are not ideal for every single application, and that’s perfectly fine. Use the tool that’s best for the job.
• On the flipside, if you’re not familiar with a field then there are probably a lot of nuances and existing applications that you’ll be unaware of. So don’t be too quick to dismiss it either.

This applies to pretty much every field of technology.

Admit what? There are a huge range of possible designs that could be called “Proof of Stake”, and some of them could easily have that flaw. You can always design something poorly. Ethereum, the most widely used Proof of Stake token, doesn’t have that flaw in its design.