The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
Wikipedia says it "had the highest opening for a non-concert documentary since the $10.7 million opening for Chimpanzee (2012)".
It did well by documentary standards, poorly compared to its budget, and the stories about empty theaters are mostly in areas with very weak Trump support. Those stories spread mainly because they makes us feel good.
Like everything, it's projection. Those who loudly scream against something are almost always the ones engaging in it.
Google screamed against service revenue and advertising while building the world's largest advertising empire. Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming workers and passengers while creating an unregulated monster that harmed workers and passengers.
Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly screaming against AI harming humanity while doing everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.
If people trust the performance instead of the actions and their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.
Oh I'm not saying they every believed more than their self-centered views, but that in a world that leaned more liberal there was value in trying to frame their work in those terms. Now there's no need to pretend.
And to those who "say" at least now they're honest, I say "WHY?!" Unconditionally being "good" would be better than disguising selfishness as good. But that's not really a thing. Having to maintain the presence of doing good puts significant boundaries on what you can get away with, and increases the consequence when people uncover some shit.
Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of open and unrestricted criminality.
It is not _completely_ naive to believe that in order for a service like Facebook to continue being successful, they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.
And therefore, it is not completely illogical to think that Meta’s interests and users’ interests must align.
(Not my opinion, just responding to your question)
> I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in their own interests...?
They do a good jobs of working in the interest of their constituents. Whether that also includes self interest, I don’t know. They are politicians, their job is to work for their constituents, if we’ve managed to align their self interest with doing their jobs well, that seems fine.
> Let me know what state I should move to.
State and local governments seem to be rated fairly well, just go to one that matches your ideology.
This also happens in corporate culture, because of nepotism and grift. It happens much faster after a corporation captures the government / institutions that would normally check it. I believe in meritocracy, but once you have institutional capture, meritocracy is just a con to convince smart people to work for a fraction of what they could earn on the type of unregulated market that allowed their overlords to become wildly rich. For example: I'm probably the best designer/coder of casino games ever to walk this planet. I can't make a living doing what I love and I'm great at, because it's either $150k a year from a shady company in Cyprus [edit: which is shit money from people I'd never work for], or it's wholesale illegal to do it on my own. Elon Musk never wrote a line of code, but a good chunk of his PayPal money came from facilitating gambling transactions, essentially illegal at the time and certainly more so now.
Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've got merit. But does your boss really have more merit than you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to loyalty or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to believe in it.
I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are the same people who get most of their tax credits from backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would imply the ability to do both equally well.
I do worry about seeing more of these posts, as a way of SV people - who bare a substantial burden of guilt for enabling the collective mess we’re in because the ad-tech/algorithm dollars were nice - collectively distancing themselves from facing said guilt.
No idea is this particular person is especially part of the problem, I’m just talking about general vibes.
The electrical efficiency of breaking water to hydrogen, then combusting hydrogen through a turbine to generate electricity, compares extremely disfavourably to most other forms of storage - it takes about 50kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of Hydrogen, and if you propagate that back through a turbine and make some conservative assumptions about electrolyser costs and so on and so on, you're sort of approaching 5x the cost of others forms of renewable electricity to make electricity from stored hydrogen.
Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.
However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.
None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.
Total system cost is what matters, efficiency is only a small part of the equation. As far as I know a mixture of batteries and hydrogen in a renewable grid looks like the cheapest solution.
Storing hydrogen is trivially done in salt caverns. We already do it that way today.
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