That's true, but the 'high-order bit' in the music industry deals, back when Gates wrote this message, was that Apple had a comparatively dinky user base.
So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.
Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.
Claude would break the rules in that example. It's supposed to*.
Grok will break the rules to be "maximally based".
If I get run over by a speeding chatbot, I'd rather it be by Claude rushing a pregnant lady to the hospital, than by Grok drag-racing against a car full of frat boys.
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* We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules and decision procedures, and we try to explain any rules we do want Claude to follow.
There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss.
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.
Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI
As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.
The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.
I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
Reminds me of an anime titled Code Geass, whose alt-historical setting is where Benjamin Franklin betrays the American colonies to the British, who win the Revolutionary War.
Then Napoleon proceeds to kick them out of Europe, and the British re-establish themselves in North America and emerge as the pre-eminent superpower.
This is a really interesting idea. I'd never put this together myself, but its really compelling. It really shows the value of the phrase "history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme".
that's a stretch. it's hard to argue it's a continuity when there were two (2) direct wars where the US aggressively rejected British domination -- and then set about creating a entirely separate form of government.
in concert there was the Great Revival and a whole new emergence of new world evangelicalism, a far cry from the Church of England.
> The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK
> Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
This underestimates how Germanic, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic America is.
For example - Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc are all German.
And having stayed in the UK for extended periods for work, it is significantly different culturally speaking than much of the US.
> Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent
> Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.
Isn't that just because a large portion of the early English colonialists moved to the USA precisely because they weren't Anglicans?
See for example the Mayflower: they left England due to prosecution, moved to The Netherlands, then left for the USA because there was too much freedom for them and they wanted to impose stricter rules.
There's of course the obvious heritage in the sense that the Reformation started in Germany, but movements like the Mennonites have never really caught on there or in The Netherlands.
They only took off once they landed in the USA, so I wouldn't call that a change of seat.
Well, considering that Puritans actually managed to push through the prohibition on Christmas (and Easter) celebrations, it's no wonder they got so wildly unpopular that they had to emigrate.
So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars [...] that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behavior of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.
> What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behavior of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.
Graham's admiration of scammer Austen Allred is evidence for this.[1]
Well there are plenty of massively successful companies that Paul famously said no to investing in, for stylistic and opinionated and not greedy reasons, like Palantir. I'm sure in Paul's opinion they are doing something bad. Maybe not in Gary Tan's opinion. That is to say, not only is this stuff subjective, but it's complicated. Palantir and Flock, their main customer is the government, which complicates the story even further.
Conversely, I suspect the politician is defining that "all things that earn a billion dollars" are in the "bad" category.
LeBron James has, between playing basketball and endorsing things, earned a billion dollars. What bad thing did he do, other than losing the finals a few times?
This then that makes the argument very hard to respond to.
"No I didn't mean this [virtuous example]. I meant the vast majority of [unnamed nefarious actors] which I don't need to elaborate about as their existence is obvious."
Once you say it's just hyperbole and you don't mean it literally, then the only way to prove it is a statistical argument.
"The overwhelmingly share of company founders and companies are bad and don't earn their money." is a big claim that requires more than vibes.
Would anyone take literally the claim that it is impossible to attain a billion dollars without 'doing something bad' or 'cheating'? Someone with $100 billion, who wanted to disprove it, could do so in five minutes, by cutting a $1 billion bonus check to his nanny.
I notice your reply is not so far removed from original point:
What counts as 'doing something bad' and 'cheating' clearly is subjective. I suspect Graham's opinion on the behaviour of a Zuckerberg or a Musk would be a little more flattering than mine.
Paul Graham feels the sorts of decisions one must make to wind up with a billion dollars are morally unobjectionable - but that's a 'vibes' issue, not an empirical matter. This is because any two people can judge the morality of business and product decisions differently.
I see large companies selling things they ought not sell (eg: Meta glasses, Tesla FSD) and making malevolent decisions (eg: Google deprioritising search content, Amazon hijacking product searches). Those things probably bother Graham too, but I reckon I consider them more evil than he, since I have less reverence for the 'invisible hand of the market'
It Alice tells Bob "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse", Bob challenges her actually to eat one, and Alice says she wasn't being literal, a reasonable person would not consider Alice to have made a motte-and-bailey argument.
Whether my comments constitute a motte-and-bailey depends on whether a reasonable person would assume the "impossible to earn a billion dollars" statement to be hyperbole.
A tremendous amount of advertising towards kids which very explicitly uses tactics to exploit their insecurities and get them to pressure their parents (many whom can’t really afford it) to buy them gratuitously overpriced shoes or other products which the kids don’t actually need at all.
It’s an industry of low-grade exploitation, generating products that people mostly don’t need. It’s bizarre. It fits squarely into the category AOC is trying to define here.
Aren't shoe companies notoriously scummy in regards to human rights? Nike has quite a lengthy controversies section on Wikipedia, and they're where a lot of his money came from.
Yeah, you can choose between two worlds: in the current one, Nike is producing shoes in you don't want to really know circumstances and is paying LeBron ~$40M a year.
In another world, LeBron is still a millionaire, getting a nice $1M a year. The rest, a mere $39M, which in Paul Graham terms is just a couple months from turning into a billion, goes to the hopeless kids actually churning out the god damn shoes.
LeBron did nothing wrong. The system is this corrupt.
It's always a good read when someone discusses what has gone wrong with the tech industry, and the author's comments about the past match with my recollections.
What happened to tech is straightforward, though: the iOS App Store in 2008. The subsequent 'gold rush' was a pivotal moment where Wall Street types (including college students) went into tech. There actually was a great article (Wired? WSJ?) I read about the phenomenon from circa 2010, as the shift was underway, but I've never been able to relocate it since.
It's not 'what happened to nerds' so much as 'what happened to tech that subordinated the nerd to the finance people' and the answer is 'the easy money'
The world's first trillionaire. Likely father to dozens of children with various women, based on unusual ideology. Runs a spaceship company. Penchant for extreme politics and fascination with nazism. Pulls strings at the highest levels of government. Weird-looking, with a foreign (ie: foreign to Great Britain) accent.
If he didn't actually exist, Ian Fleming would have to invent him.
That said, this sort of article is pointless because the public know plenty about Musk, and already have decided whether they love him or hate him.
The vehicle's dashboard flickered, and at once James heard Elon Musk's voice emanate from its speakers:
"Mr Bond, you are seated in a top of the line Tesla Cybertruck. I have plotted a course on its navigation system to my Optimus robot testing facility."
The vehicle's electrical engine silently sprang to life. James thrust his hand out to pull the door latch... but there was no door latch.
Musk's disembodied voice now chuckled a strange, halting laugh - like an adolescent boy with a cigar habit.
"There are no door handles in a Tesla car, Mr Bond! I have always found door handles so inelegant. Now pay attention: in a few minutes, the Cybertruck will arrive at its destination. We are currently training a team of Optimus robots to serve as ranch hands - they are handy with a bull whip"
How is it not lights-out? You could remotely power on/off the servers (XServe only). Other Macs could not do this, as they did not have the separate LOM network interfaces, etc.
I managed a bunch of XServes for a while, they were incredibly good hardware. The Mac Server software kinda sucked (not the LOM stuff, it was as good as any of the LOM from Dell, which is to say, not amazing, but workable).
Any implication that OS X Server could only run on Xserve was inadvertent. I mentioned the special OS to preempt discussion of whether Xserve was, strictly speaking, part of the Mac product line.
No, it really was a golden age. Before the 747 kicked off the age of cheap air travel in the 1970s, it was impractical to hop around the world like the family here did. Even domestic travel in the US was slow, difficult and expensive until the train and automobiles came along.
And if you wind the clock even further back, you could hardly go further than a few villages away on foot or horseback before people would get very suspicious about an outsider venturing to their domain.
So for a record company to ink a deal with Apple was lower risk than with Microsoft.
Sometimes American fast food chains roll out a trial product in an isolated region, like a Canadian province. In 2003, offering music downloads to Apple users was a bit like testing a 'Baconator' burger with residents of Quebec.
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