- LeCun has a history of getting mobbed by "AI ethics" types on Twitter, and in the past he was very deferential to these folks, and even left Twitter for a while. I wrote about some of that here: https://www.jonstokes.com/p/googles-colosseum

- The MIT Tech Review, which is the author's main source here apart from Twitter, is techlash rag, and they went through a long phase where they only published anti-AI stuff from the "AI ethics" people. Most of those writers I used to follow there on this topic have since moved on to other pubs, and the EIC responsible for this mess has moved on to run WIRED. But it seems they're still publishing the same kind of stuff even with new staff and management. They have exactly one and only one editorial line on AI in general and LeCun in specific, and that is "lol AI so racist and overhyped!" It's boring and predictable.

- LeCun has a longstanding beef with Marcus, and the two treat each other pretty poorly in public. Marcus seems to have a personal axe to grind with LeCun. Given that Marcus has been leading the mob on this, it's not shocking that LeCun got crappy with him.

- Emily Bender, Grady Booch, and the other folks cited in the MIT Tech Review piece all, to a person, have exactly one line on AI, everywhere at all times and in all circumstances, and it's the same one I mentioned above. You could code a bot with a lookup table to write their tweets about literally anything AI-related.

- Yeah, LeCun is a prickly nerd who gets his back up when certain people with a history of attacking him come after him yet again. He should probably should stay chill.

- "AI so overhyped" is a pose, not an argument, an investment thesis, or a career plan. But hey, you do you.

Anyway, I hate to be defending anything Meta-related, but this article is slanted trash, its sources haters who have only one, incredibly repetitive thing to say about AI, and the author is a hater.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21952759

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But you know what? My kids aren't babied. My oldest and I just went to a two-day rifle shooting clinic, and the two oldest have knives of their own that are very sharp and that they can use whenever they want.

They hike in the woods by our house, unsupervised, and they ride horses and swim. They climb trees. They camp in a tent in the woods by the house.

As for their peers? Those poor kids have never even touched a sharp knife, much less been given one of their own. My kids are well aware that they're allowed to take a lot more risks than their peers, and that they're given more responsibility for their own safety.

They're not babied. Rather, the kids who stay indoors on a gadget are the ones who are babied and stunted. They're the ones whose parents have infantilized them.

A kid doesn't "deserve" a smartphone. What they deserve is a childhood. They deserve to be bored for long stretches and to have to make up their own games and stuff to do. They deserve the privacy of their own thoughts, and to not be tethered to a gadget that they can't put down. They deserve flesh-and-blood relationships, instead of jerky pixels and audio. They deserve a life, and not just an existence.

Anyway, the public-spirited side of me sees responses like the ones here and is depressed, but my secret inner libertarian sees them and thinks: "Score! My three kids will have attention spans and social skills, and will out-compete the smartphone-addicted children of these fools in every arena of adult life. So by all means, cripple your kids by handing them one of these pocket slot machines. Mwuahahaha"

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071478

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844183

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19361914

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076523

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https://freebeacon.com/issues/gun-rights-activists-posted-gu...

I'm a journalist and have seen a screencap of the takedown that Amazon issued to the Firearms Policy Coalition, which started and maintains the censored site (CodeIsFreeSpeech.com). The takedown erroneously cited a temporary restraining order issued against an entirely different site (defcad.com) as the reason for the sudden, no-warning booting of the site from AWS.

And as you mentioned, Azure just now threatened to pull Gab.ai off its platform over a pair of anti-Semitic posts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-gab-azure-cloud-an...

So these infrastructure providers are absolutely involved in censorship right now.