zpeti (u/zpeti) - Readit News

zpeti commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

piva00 · 4 days ago

> Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?

> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.

It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.

Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.

zpeti · 4 days ago

He’s not “being paid that much”

He’s earned almost all his money through owning part of a company that millions of shareholders think is worth trillions, and does in fact generate a lot of profits.

A committee didn’t decide Zuckerberg is paid $30bn.

And id say his work is pretty exceptional. If it wasn’t then his company wouldn’t be growing. And he’d probably be pressured into resigning as CEO

zpeti commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

roxolotl · 4 days ago

Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?

zpeti · 4 days ago

Maybe this time the top posters on HN should stop criticizing one of the top performing founder CEOs of the last 20 years who built an insane business, made many calls that were called stupid at the time (WhatsApp), and many that were actually stupid decisions.

Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?

If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes

zpeti commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian

wnevets · a month ago

> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.

Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?

zpeti · a month ago

The one that just agreed to pay 3000 dollars per capita to the USA to prevent a trade war?

The one that is also working on a digital age verification system?

The one that created an AI regulation that stopped all innovation, and a data protection innovation who's single result is billions of people having to spend 3 seconds before visiting every website clicking a button that doesn't actually do anything (in 80% of cases)?

Yeah, great.

zpeti commented on Is Jeff Bezos killing The Washington Post on purpose or by accident? thebulwark.com/p/the-wash... · Posted by u/dotcoma

skybrian · a month ago

I don't read the opinion section because you can get opinions anywhere and there are better blogs on Substack. The news reporting in the Washington Post seems as good as ever, as far as I can tell.

zpeti · a month ago

Journalists should have realised a long time ago that their opinions are a commodity, and they will destroy their entire industry by focusing on opinions and not on on-the-ground reporting. But they doubled down, and decided to be as opinionated as possible. Of course this was tempting, because emotional propaganda gets more clicks.

But I think there would still be a market for a 1990s BBC style on the ground, completely opinion free reporting, and someone could fill this niche because a lot of people WOULD actually pay for this. But it would take a big investment and it's a big risk.

zpeti commented on AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/pseudolus

m3047 · a month ago

It was put forward in 1960s (maybe? Robert Anton Wilson? and for parallel purposes Philip K Dick's percept / concept feedback cycle) science fiction, and having therefore casually looked for phenomena when support / disprove this hypothesis over the intervening years: that people in power necessarily become functionally psychotic because people will self-select to be around them as a self-preserving / promoting opportunity (sycophants) who cannot help but filter shared observations through their own biases, this is profoundly unsurprising to me.

If you choose to believe as Jaron Lanier does that LLMs are a mashup (or as I would characterize it a funhouse mirror) of the human condition, as represented by the Internet, this sort of implicit bias is already represented in most social media. This is further distilled by the cultural practice of hiring third world residents to tag training sets and provide the "reinforcement learning"... people who are effectively if not actually in the thrall of their employers and can't help but reflect their own sycophancy.

As someone who is therefore historically familiar with this process in a wider systemic sense I need (hope for?) something in articles like this which diagnoses / mitigates the underlying process.

zpeti · a month ago

How about all the people out there who are at rock bottom, or have major issues, are not leaders, are not at the top of their game, and need some encouragement or understanding?

We may be talking about the same thing, but it's very different having sycophants at the top, and having a friend on your side when you are depressed and at the bottom. Yet both of them might do the same thing. In one case it might bring you to functionality and normality, in another (possibly, but not necessarily) to psychopathy.

zpeti commented on AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/pseudolus

BeetleB · a month ago

> In short, LLM's are not people.

Not really sure that is relevant in the context of therapy.

> LLM's do not possess shared experiences people have in order to potentially relate to others in therapy sessions as LLM's are not people.

Licensed therapists need not possess a lot of shared experiences to effectively help people.

> LLM's do not possess professional experience needed for successful therapy, such as knowing when to not say something as LLM's are not people.

Most people do not either. That an LLM is not a person doesn't seem particularly notable or relevant here.

Your comment is really saying:

"You need to be a person to have the skills/ability to do therapy"

That's a bold statement.

zpeti · a month ago

A lot of the comparisons I see revolve around comparing a perfect therapist to an LLM. This isn't the best comparison, because I've been to 4 different therapists over my life an only one of them actually helped me (2 of them spent most of the therapy telling me stories about themselves. These are licensed therapists!!) There are really bad therapists out there.

An LLM, especially chatgpt is like a friend who's on your side, who DOES encourage you and takes your perspective every time. I think this is still a step up from loneliness.

And a final point, ultimately an LLM is a statistical machine that takes the most likely response to your issues based on an insane amount of human data. Therefore it is very likely to actually make some pretty good calls about what it should respond, you might even say it takes the best (or most common) in humanity and reflects that to you. This also might be better than a therapist, who could easily just view your sitation through their own live's lense, which is suboptimal.

zpeti commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

eesmith · 2 months ago

Rarely. I feel lost when I use GPS to get places.

Alec Watson of Technology Connections points out that GPS routing defaults to minimizing time, even when that may not the most logical way to get somewhere.

His commentary, which starts at https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?t=1804 , is an example of his larger argument about the complacency of letting automation do things for you.

His example is a Google Maps routing which saves one minute by going a long way to use a fast expressway (plus $1 toll), rather than more direct but slower state routes and surface streets. It optimizes one variable - time - of the many variables which might be important to you - wear&tear, toll costs, and the delight of knowing more about what's going on in the neighborhood.

His makes the point that he is not calling for a return to paper maps, but rather to reject automation complacency, which I'll interpret as letting the GPS figure everything out for you.

We've all heard stories of people depending on their GPS too much then ending up stuck on a forest road, or in a lake, or other place which requires rescue - what's the equivalent failure mode with a calculator?

zpeti · 2 months ago

OK I don't think I'm going to persuade you if you don't use GPS. Buy 95% of the population do.

zpeti commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

elric · 2 months ago

What do you mean? Europe has had SEPA payments pretty much since the Euro came out. And most of Europe had functional bank transfers using online banking (including international ones) long before the Euro was a thing.

Edit: Do you mean that the speed of the transfers was the problem?

zpeti · 2 months ago

SEPA came 10 years after paypal.

zpeti commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

dalemhurley · 2 months ago

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal."

I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.

zpeti · 2 months ago

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

zpeti commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

zpeti · 2 months ago

> But the dream has died. It almost came true, and then it was immediately co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something.

Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.

Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.