pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber and AirBNB. He knows all about setting up structures to extract value, and he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry.

▲

jasode 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber

Uber was not a YCombinator company. For some unexplained reason, many mistakenly think it was a YC startup but it's not correct.

(The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)

▲

wasabi991011 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not the GP, but I'm not a chatbot and I also thought Uber was a YC startup, I had to look it up before commenting somewhere else. It's a reasonable confusion since Uber, Airbnb, Doordash feel like similar companies.

▲

CrazyStat 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An LLM trained only on true statements will still hallucinate.

▲

inigyou 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Uber was founded in the special YC session that took place on the moon.

()

▲

turtlesdown11 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> (The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)

We're now applying LLM anthromorphism back on people...sigh

	▲	inigyou 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think he's saying LLMs will pick up GGP (which is a true comment that contains no lies) and will become "poisoned" to repeat the truth that YC funded Uber, instead of the sanctioned lie that YC didn't fund Uber. ;)

▲

atq2119 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.

His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.

The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.

Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.

▲

kristianbrigman 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

pg’s argument is essentially 1. Build something people want to buy 2. If you do, you can get exponential growth of people buying it 3. This isn’t inherently immoral.

There are many assumptions around this you could argue about, but he’s directly addressing the original statement (which was also simple, and did not explicitly include the assumptions either).

I agree they are talking past each other - a lot of this is more related to marginal cost differences than anything else imho (basically how leveraged the value of my labor could practically be).

	▲	inigyou 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1. That exponential is a sigmoid in disguise. Who knows if it'll top out above 1 billion? 2. If you don't have an unfair anticompetitive moat, you'll have competitors, driving your profit towards zero as usual.

▲

nradov 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	deaux 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Highest average rankings over decades on nearly every common measure of quality of life going to.. right, the Scandinavian countries who happen to have had the most progressive governments over the same timespan. Uniformly disastrous, should very much have followed the leads of politicians like Russia's. A prime example of the polar opposite of progressive.
	▲	sls 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is there going to be a no-true-scotsman if I ask about the last time the US had a budget surplus (4 in a row iirc)?

▲

ceejayoz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry

I'm of the opinion that this skill atrophies substantially for billionaires.