I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.

But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.

I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.

Please, I beg everyone, stop posting AI slop.

Also, imagine a scenario where a foreign power attempted to occupy a country? There is probably an optimal number of armed citizens to deter that kind of activity. As we have seen in recent years, foreign powers often do want to capture and hold foreign territory. The chance of this is small, but clearly non-zero.

I'm a scientist. Believe it or not, I believe in substantially more than prediction and I think its rather trivial to come up with examples where mere prediction is insufficient to meet a normal person's notion of an account of a thing (eg, pre-copernican planetary motion). I'm not saying you are wrong, per se, just that the idea that "it was prediction all along" is a very specific idea of what human beings are interested in and what we are up to.

> that we glean insights into nature of the simulated phenomena

That is right - most people believe that there is a simulated phenomenon "out there" that we learn about. I think there are strong reasons to believe this having to do with how models are related to predictions. The wrong ontology can make prediction very hard and the right one can make prediction substantially easier. Arguably, we are in that situation right now with language models - we just threw a lot of parameters at the problem and now we are able to predict but we still don't really understand. This is perhaps inevitable in the case of language, but I don't think we should look at models with tons of degrees of freedom and the ability to predict things as a death knell for the very idea of deeper understanding.

The fact that they do not do this reveals that phone makers are sort of market makers between app makers and customers, creating an environment which, in a certain sense, is a neutral ground between these two types of "users."