colinmorelli (u/colinmorelli)

colinmorelli commented on OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-p... · Posted by u/badprobe

isx726552 · 2 months ago

This feels like a narrative being pushed. Tech oligarchs these days are flexing by showing off how much they are able to bully government, and Altman wants to get in on the game by spinning things this way. I’m not convinced they really bent the rules for OpenAI any more than usual given they only employ a few hundred people.

colinmorelli · 2 months ago

OpenAI has over 5,000 employees. In addition to their headcount, they are now the highest valued private company in the world.

They're going to have some leverage.

colinmorelli commented on EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections earthjustice.org/press/20... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

trimethylpurine · 3 months ago

You've lost sight of the comment I responded to, in which the poster asserts, in so many words, that there can be no explanation for easing any restrictions other than for profit and authoritarianism, etc. Right? Clearly there is an explanation if you search for a few minutes. So I stand by my allegations of bias against that comment specifically.

Here, you've read and revised the approach to the issue. This last comment does not warrant any allegation of bias, and I make none about it.

The bigger picture is that both parties are interested in clean drinking water. I guess that's obvious to me, and I'm shocked that's not obvious to everyone. Look how many people on this thread actually believe that the Trump administration is literally trying to poison them. That's not crazy to you? It is to me.

colinmorelli · 3 months ago

Fair, but I'd like to clarify that in my comment I had asked specifically for any sources indicating that the PFA limits were put in place by the prior administration, since you had made the claim:

> Trump's EPA created these PFAS rules

Your response was what I perceived to be a snarky comment that if only I had bothered to look, I'd have found the evidence, followed by a link that didn't say what was suggested.

> Look how many people on this thread actually believe that the Trump administration is literally trying to poison them. That's not crazy to you?

The claims made all over the place are insane to me. Yes, I doubt the Trump administration is actually trying to kill me. The world is not as polarizing and extreme as people on the internet want to make it sound like it is. Most people are far more docile in the real world, but the collective hive of the internet exacerbates tension. I have no clue what side of the political aisle you're on, but my guess is we probably agree about more things than we disagree about, if we could detach bullshit labels from it all.

But FWIW, the allegation that I wasn't bothering to learn or see if I'm wrong just raised tension further. I was genuinely trying to determine if the claim was true, the evidence I had found suggested it wasn't, and it seems like it in fact wasn't quite true, but perhaps that wasn't the point you were trying to make anyway.

All fine. My hope is that we can all turn down the tension and hostility a level or two. Might be the only hope we have.

colinmorelli commented on EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections earthjustice.org/press/20... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

trimethylpurine · 3 months ago

Absolutely.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019- 02/documents/pfas_action_plan_021319_508compliant_1.pdf

Trump's first term. February of 2019. Andrew Wheeler's EPA.

You'll also notice that the document lays out planned action dates bleeding generously into Biden's term, and for which Biden later took credit in the document you shared. This is shameful, and sadly normal presidential behavior, taking credit for their predecessor's wins.

If you'd truly like to learn if you're wrong, it's recommended to seek information that disproves your hypothesis rather than proves it. Both this and the previous article I shared were very easy to find and within the first 2 or 3 results.

colinmorelli · 3 months ago

> If you'd truly like to learn if you're wrong, it's recommended to seek information that disproves your hypothesis rather than proves it. Both this and the previous article I shared were very easy to find and within the first 2 or 3 results.

Firstly, this is a completely unnecessary comment. My searches were specifically regarding finding the enactment of specific PFA limits. I will acknowledge to not spending that much time looking at it, as you claimed to already have a source and I was curious to see what it was.

But to the point, this document does not outline or set limits on PFAS in drinking water. It's an action plan for measuring and creating limits, but does not itself enforce anything. In fact, every subsequent search I've done has shown that the 2024 Final Rule was the first point at which any limits were put into action.

Quoting directly, the document states that one of the steps being taken is:

> Initiating steps to evaluate the need for a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS);

In other words, it outlines a plan for the research that is used to 1) determine if MCL should be set, and 2) what, if any, it should be set to. Notably, it does it not itself set that limit or come to a conclusion about what it should be.

Further, this research appears to be a continuation of research released in 2016 [1], which was the first time that a guideline (but not a mandate) was set. This would, of course, be prior to Trump's first administration. This is suggested in the document itself, where it outlines that this document is part of a series of actions beginning in 2015/2016, as well as callouts to specific research in the 2016 article linked below.

So the facts seem to show that: 1) The first guideline was set in 2016. It was not a law at this time. 2) Research continued to identify next steps for setting a standard, which were codified and shared in the 2019 article you linked 3) The 2024 Final Rule put a MCL into action for PFAS.

Take from that chain of events what you will, but the initial accusations of "political bias" seem unfounded here.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/documents/pf...

colinmorelli commented on EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections earthjustice.org/press/20... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

trimethylpurine · 3 months ago

Trump's EPA created these PFAS rules. Now re-read your comment and look how politically biased you are so much as to be seen as crazy.

Here is the statement from the organization pushing for this.

It really wasn't hard to find either.

https://www.awwa.org/AWWA-Articles/epa-announces-changes-to-...

colinmorelli · 3 months ago

It seems like the PFAS rules were set in prior administrations [1]. In fact, even in the article you've linked above, the text states:

> retaining its maximum contaminant levels for PFOA and PFOS but pulling back on its use of a hazard index and regulatory determinations for additional PFAS

Key word being "retaining," indicating the maximum contaminant levels were already in place prior to the change mentioned here. Putting aside allegations of "political bias," can you point to a source which clearly indicates the PFA limits were put in place by the current administration? Would like to learn if I'm wrong.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration...

colinmorelli commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

carlosjobim · 4 months ago

> it's extremely unlikely anyone would have been able to get close enough to him with a knife to kill him without someone noticing.

What do you mean? If you go to any public place in the world, you can get very close to hundreds of people in a very short time. Knife assassinations happen all the time.

colinmorelli · 4 months ago

> in this specific case

You could have quoted the beginning of the sentence, where the point was about this specific case, and how in this particular case, a gun clearly allowed an assassination that would have been challenging to pull off with a knife.

That is not a way as saying killing someone with a knife is impossible. It's a way of saying that guns allow you to kill people in ways and distances that knives do not.

colinmorelli commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

vlovich123 · 4 months ago

While true, Australia reclaimed ~650k guns by 1997 and then another ~70k handguns in 2003. By comparison the US is estimated to have around 400M guns, with law enforcement alone having 5M guns (as the “fast and furious” scandal showed, law enforcement guns often end up in the hands of criminals as well).

I don’t know what the answer is for reclaiming the guns, but I think logistically it’ll be hard to implement in the USA even if there wasn’t bad faith attempts to try to thwart regulation (and arguing that there’s still violence with knives and guns aren’t the problem is definitely bad faith/uneducated arguments)

colinmorelli · 4 months ago

Yeah I'm not suggesting the same process could apply in the US, I'm just trying to aggressively refute the point that guns are not the problem (or, at least, a major component of it). We need to be creative about solutions, but people have to want to find a solution to be creative about them, and right now many do not.

colinmorelli commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

colinmorelli · 4 months ago

This narrative isn't helpful. Even in this specific case, it's extremely unlikely anyone would have been able to get close enough to him with a knife to kill him without someone noticing.

Guns allow you to kill 1) multiple people, 2) from a distance, and 3) with nobody aware of the imminent threat.

Of course other weapons can also be used to harm people. Of course no solution is perfect. But it's absolutely incorrect to say "the problem isn't so much the tools." The tools undeniably and irrefutably play a role in every study that has ever been conducted on this topic.

See here for the impact of Australia's gun buyback program, which saw zero mass shootings in a decade after their removal, after 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior the removal, as well as an accelerated decline in firearm deaths and suicides: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365

colinmorelli commented on AI Bubble 2027 wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble... · Posted by u/speckx

bubblelicious · 4 months ago

Really hard to believe articles like this and even more hard to believe this is the hive mind of hacker news today.

Work for a major research lab. So much headroom, so much left on the table with every project, so many obvious directions to go to tackle major problems. These last 3 years have been chaotic sprints. Transfusion, better compressed latent representations, better curation signals, better synthetic data, more flywheel data, insane progress in these last 3 years that somehow just gets continually denigrated by this community.

There is hype and bullshit and stupid money and annoying influencers and hyperbolic executives, but “it’s a bubble” is absurd to me.

It would be colossally stupid for these companies to not pour the money they are pouring into infrastructure buildouts and R&D. They know it’s going to be a ton of waste, nobody in these articles are surprising anyone. These articles are just not very insightful. Only silver lining to reading the comments and these articles is the hope that all of you are investing optimally for your beliefs.

colinmorelli · 4 months ago

I'll take a shot at rationale for this perspective, which is similar to a peer comment:

The tech is undoubtedly impressive, and I'm sure has a ton of headroom to grow (although I have no direct knowledge of this, but I'd take you at your word, because I'm sure it's true).

But at least my perception of the idea that this is a "bubble" presently is rooted in the businesses that are created using the technology. Tons of money spent to power AI agents to conduct tasks that would be 99% less expensive to conduct via a simple API call, or because the actual unstructured work is 2 or 3 levels higher in the value chain, and given enough time, there will be new vertically integrated companies that use AI to solve the problem at the root and eliminate the need for entire categories of companies at the level below.

In other words: the root of the bubble (to me) is not that the value will never be realized, but that many (if not most) of this crop of companies, given the amount of time the workflows and technology have had to take hold in organizations, will almost certainly not be able to survive long enough to be the ones to realize it.

This also seems to be why folks draw comparison to the dot com bubble, because it was quite similar. The tech was undoubtedly world changing. But the world needed time to adapt, and most of those companies no longer exist, even though many of the problems were solved a decade later by a new startup who achieved incredible scale.