that is an entirely separate question from if he grew up wealthy.

to be fair, i dont actually know how wealthy he grew up, i was relying on the general internet view that he did, but i haven't actually looked into it, so maybe that is wrong.

in general though, i think it does get tiresome when people attack a piece solely based on the use of LLM editing instead of its merits (or lack thereof). That is ultimately an ad hominem. The reason to dislike LLM writing is because typically its vapid, not due to the LLM in and of itself.

I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting.

If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.

other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class.

that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You don't keep your money if you dont have any concept of risk.

Just because the PR dept of a company spouts some bullshit doesn't mean that it actually represents the company's views. A super bowl advert referencing 1984 does not literally mean the company sees itself as the protagonist of 1984

I see no evidence they even read these SciFi books in the first place let alone misunderstood them.

As far as 2) goes, I don't think that is actually true. Sometimes people don't have time for children's questions, but when a child asks why summer is different than winter nobody in modern times says because Demeter is sad about the rape of her daughter.

But this misunderstands incentive based analysis.

The point isn't just that people naturally follow incentives, but that those who refuse are punished and no longer in a position to affect the world.

Taking a principled stand is great and all, but if the result is simply that you get fired and replaced by someone better at following orders, you didn't really fix the problem.

Of course it's more complicated than that. Certainly other people being willing to do evil is no excuse to do evil yourself. Maybe your principled stand inspires others and you start a revolution or something. But that's rare. In the average case incentives win. Which is why if you want to actually change the world for the better you should attack the incentives not the individuals - individuals can be replaced, but millions are willing to follow incentives.

-----

The rest of the article seems to be about developing your own morality, but morality is really just yet another incentive.

Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.

Even if true, being the first to do anything is usually an expensive proposition.

> We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%)

I dont know how you are defining "p2p database" or which product you mean, but in general distributed p2p solutions where you do not trust the peers cannot propagate information in a single round-trip, or anything even remotely close to that.

> We have VPS and serverless

Neither of these are p2p technologies. They are also a terrible fit for something like Wikipedia.

> We also have content addressing

Sure, but that is like 1% of a solution

> symmetric cert verification

Do you mean mutual TLS? That is indeed a technology that exists, but i dont know how its relavent.

> And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it?

Which kind of brings up the other flaw with p2p - privacy.

It obviously depends on what technology is chosen, but p2p often has poor privacy properties. Think media companies sending threatening notices to people who download movies. People often look up private things on Wikipedia. Think sexual health topics. Do we really want malicious people to be able to track that?

Or you know, even knows what the toronto skyline looks like.

I used to live in vancouver, tons of films are shot there. Unless they are pointing the camera at a famous landmark, i probably can't tell. If anything the forest is more of a give away then the city (if it looks like an alien planet in star trek ToS, then its LA. If it looks like an alien planet in stargate then its vancouver)

Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you because all their users want to access your website. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot (not all) of Wikimedia's bandwidth is actually free.

As far as i can tell, this is a straight up lie. Union organizers might know, but legally they are required to keep who signs a union card secret.

If voluntary recognition happened, as far as i understand, part of the process would be for a neutral third party to verify the signed statements. So if someone was pressured, the verification person would call them up and ask if they really meant to sign, and they could just say no. [Ianal, this is just what the pro union people are saying on wikipedia]