jzac

Try to be a good man

[jzac @ethicalzac]

Subscribe to Seymour Hersh https://t.co/SBVvi94Qdr

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@RnaudBertrand

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@DA_Stockman That's the key about him---he counts on people believing his lies. He is counting on stupidity and people are beginning to realize that

[“Sudden And Unexpected” @toobaffled]

“I worked at Pfizer for 17 years. We didn’t discover drugs - we discovered markets. If a drug cured asthma in 3 days, we’d kill it. Chronic disease is where the money is. Cures are bad for business.”

— Peter Rost, former Pfizer executive

That’s the business model. Not healing people … keeping them customers for life.

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@GaryMarcus We're being run by the worst kind of liars

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@DavidBCollum Tommy Gold hired him and he was another good one

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

By the way, public service announcement: if you're one of the numerous people posting about Anthropic's dystopian ways and you're thinking about getting Claude to help you write that post... don't!

Another one of their terms is that you may not use Claude to do anything that "exposes [Anthropic to] reputational harms" 👇

And, if you do, under the - extremely unusual - clause 13 of their terms (https://t.co/z43rJNkvZu), you have PRE-AGREED, by using Anthropic (and accepted their terms), that the harm you've done is irreparable, that you won't oppose Anthropic injunction, and they don't need to prove actual damage.

They can simply go to a judge in a friendly jurisdiction (and of course, their terms precise that any dispute "will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco, California") and:
a) file an injunction that shuts you down
b) make you pay for everything since under section 11 of their terms you agree to indemnify Anthropic for "any and all liabilities, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees and costs), and other losses arising out of or related to your breach or alleged breach of these Terms."

In other words, if you use Claude to help you talk shit about Anthropic publicly, their terms say you pay their lawyers to go after you and you've already pre-agreed you've lost the case.

Oh, and cherry on the cake: in the odd case the judge were like "are you crazy, this is insanely abusive, you Anthropic are the ones at fault here," according to their terms Anthropic's maximum liability is... $100.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Prediction (which I have made before and which increasingly seems likely) OpenAI is gonna fall, and take a lot down with it.

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@s_m_marandi He needs to get the price lower---he's getting desperate judging by the degree of his lies

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@chrismartenson @JackFarley96 He just increased our supply with 100 fictional barrels

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@catoletters He's too stupid to understand anything like that. He's just trying to grift as much as he can

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@RnaudBertrand But how will they extricate themselves from the grips of our financial grifters?

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@samhaselby @MouinRabbani Fragility begs for more rigid elements of control

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Also appreciated getting the chance to discuss how data centers fit into the larger collapse of value in private credit and private equity. I have so many concerns about data center debt!

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Very important point: SoftBank was pledging *all* of its OpenAI stock (worth $60bn+ on paper) to get a $6 billion margin loan. Banks turned it down due to concerns about the value of OpenAI stock. Banks clearly do not think OpenAI is worth $852 billion.
https://t.co/B9ilbd043M

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@DavidBCollum Word is beginning to trickle down that he may cut aiming for AI projected productivity gains, which should do wonders for the bond market

[Sam Haselby @samhaselby]

"It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating."

This is really good, from Yoni Applebaum, featuring Johann Neem and Jill Lepore, among others.

https://t.co/wkYOLhAmnK

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@Martina He likes to pretend that he has a high IQ but correct that is a trait of an ignorant dumb, lazy man

[jzac @ethicalzac]

@AXChristoforou Europeans are better off taking those bricks and throwing them at her

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.