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I think doublespeak is more along the lines of calling ads a "product recommendation strategy". This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.

> This was either a) a plain lie b) they're actually at their last resort.

That's thinking like a normal honest human :-) My point is that it was likely not a statement about reality (true or false) at all, but rather a phrase designed to elicit some response in the listener, such as the idea: 'Sam Altman isn't the kind of CEO who would put ads in his products unless he really had to'.

He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.


Feels like the harm of "at last resort" lie is more harmful than the benefit of "is being honest" for him.

I agree with your point. Mine was about the word doublespeak for this, which I think it's not - it's a lie in effect, but I think it is something like what you say, for which I don't know a term of. A bunch of sentences that are said in a complete disregard for truths and untruths; instead they are supposed to get you to believe something.

This also kinda fits the profile of Altman that I'm getting from what I have seen - admittedly without looking in-depth. A person who is on surface a pathological liar, but in fact in a closer look he just says things. They just _happen_ to be complete lies, because that's what you need to do to achieve the goal in the set of circumstances. It's just that because it's as morally objectionable as outright lying, some people would pause and think before doing it, while he seems to just have no qualms at all.


Ah, got it. Maybe 'gaslighting' cuts more to the point?

The word I have heard is "bullshitting". Lies at least orient themselves with regard to the truth, bullshit floats free

I think gaslighting is more sinister and deliberate, but it's in a similar spectrum of manipulative behavior. Perhaps, as his statements are less filled with the style of Musk's bravado on topic of FSD, and they feel overall mid, I can propose MID: Manipulative-Impulsive Disorder?

That's how I shall think of it from now on ^^

I mean, I get that you are trying to make a subtle point but this:

> He's not describing how things are, but how he wants you to think about them.

is just a fancy way to describe lies. I'm not even sure if it specifies some interesting subset of lies, I think it's just the plain definition.


I don't want to split hairs but I posit there is a difference because 'how I want you to think about things' could be a mixture of lies, truths, and half-truths.

'Lying', to me, implies some relationship with reality - I'm lying if I know there's no orange in my bag but I tell you that there is. What we're talking about is someone who might not know or care whether the orange or even the bag exists at all, and is just saying things to get some specific response out of the audience. The deception or not is irrelevant really.


I don't think you're making a useful point about the situation.

In the case of the orange in the bag, both Altman and his interlocutor can see the bag and the truth can be exposed by rummaging.

In the case of ads in the oAI chat feed, at the time Altman made the comment he was probably planning to puts ads in the feed. But there might not even be emails about this, just conversation. And the engineers might not solve the "how" for a while... so there's nothing to rummage for.

However, in both cases Altman wants you to think something other than what's on his mind. There's an orange in his bag, but he wants you to think there is not. There's going to be ads because he owes the investors a tonne of money but he wants you to think it wont happen, or wont happen soon, or will be "nice" ads...

The distinction is in the nature of the underlying truth, not in Altmans words or actions in the moment. In the moment, in both cases, he's lying.


>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name

If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part.

It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.


Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.

Reminds me of bunch of cases of high-profile people testing the waters of the low-quality Twitter posting.

Turned out you can ride far not only despite it, but also thanks to it.


>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.

This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.


It's been a standard feature of many Wi-Fi chipsets/drivers for over a decade.

Almost certainly patent related

I'm assuming the question should be further refined to "why does the service need to know the data". The things that you mention could be done with the service only having the encrypted blob.

Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.

Yeah, I'm sure there could be a better metric, if the metric's purpose was to check on the progress until the AGI target rather than doing business based on it (and so, hammering the metric to fit the shape of "realistic goal")

It's maybe somewhat nice conceptually, and certainly an useful added value - but the elsewhere mentioned $100 billion profit is not the right metric.

And then I think coming up with the right metric is just as subjective on this field as the technological one.


I think a stickied comment about this would be due. No idea if it's possible to call in @dang via at-name?

Looks like they changed the post link to a Bloomberg article instead but kept the comments thread. So I guess he’s already aware.

> No idea if it's possible to call in @dang via at-name?

No. Email hn@ycombinator.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html


... until you actually, like, use it and find out all the limitations it has.

How is this relevant? Human General Intelligence has a lot of limitations as well and we have managed to do lots.

This is like saying that talking about my financial limitations is irrelevant because Jeff Bezos also has financial limitations...

I think mostly the point is that it inadvertently implies that the message adds something new. A note that the same thing was posted on LinkedIn would help the ones tho did read the linked content know right away it's the same. I managed to just move on, but I did had a knee-jerk moment of "what if I'm missing something?" - I suppose for some people it's more difficult.

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