6 ms·

I didn't say that. In fact, no one seems to have, according to Google

57 points by rg111 5y ago

Flankk 5y ago
I never said half the crap people said I did. —Paul Graham
- ant6n 5y ago
  Wait isn't that quote attributed to Oscar Wilde?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - stan_rogers 5y ago
    The most familiar attribution, original or not, would have been Yogi Berra.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, or Albert Einstein maybe.
- yissp 5y ago
  --Benjamin Franklin --Abraham Lincoln --Mark Twain --Albert Einstein ...
the__alchemist 5y ago
Carl Sagan, in the opening to his book Billions and Billions: > I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it. > But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I’d appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it. He’d dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelgänger, that went around saying “billions and billions” on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.)
- Gunax 5y ago
  Sometimes it's not about the literal text, but the meaningnis accurate. In this case, Sagan did say 'billions' a lot. And he also tried to emphasize the scale of the universe (something the general public has difficulty grasping). It might be a misquote in the literal sense, but the meaning is actually quite accurate, and I don't think Sagan should be upset. 'Billions and billions' is a good shorthand for that. Sometimes you have to modify a quote a bit to give it context. Just saying 'Im your father' is a bit too generic. But 'Luke, I am your father' lets the listener know we are talking about Star Wars. Same with the 'Beam me up, Scotty'. I have no idea if this applies to Mr Graham, but just needed to put my useless opinion out.
bigyellow 5y ago
What is this? Who are these people and why does anyone care about their conversation? Wow, downvotes for asking a legitimate question about a pointless, contextless discussion between randos. What a lovely and welcoming community you have here.
- zepto 5y ago
  It’s easy to Google Paul Graham.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Don't know who Sabine VanderLinden is, but Paul Graham is the cofounder of ycombinator and his tweets/blogposts are frequently posted here and discussed as a result. I'm not sure why this is interesting other than how it reflects misinformation can grow on social media?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  Paul Graham created Hacker News.
- yannoninator 5y ago
  HN is controlled by automatic downvote bots, there are almost no real users on it, you just get used to it. edit: here we go, flagged, you see?
- mnd999 5y ago
  Downvotes (and flags) are getting ridiculous on this site. I’ve recently been downvoted for (among other things) criticising Tesla, speaking up for women, being a dick. Only one of those was justified. This will also get downvoted.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > This will also get downvoted. For breaking the community guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
lcuff 5y ago
I really didn’t say everything I said. -- Yogi Berra
tinco 5y ago
What's going on with this person? It looks like she really exists, her LinkedIn shows a solid network and the links seem to check out, and the Twitter account exists since 2009. But everything about her presence online seems fabricated, is she paying a service to generate these for her? What's the game, does this give her clout in the insurance industry somehow? The generated tweets are nonsense but seem to be fairly high quality nonsense. And the replies to Paul's reply were surreal, a bunch of them were just people having fun but a bunch looked like they were auto generated as well. I feel at some point big machine learning networks will interact with humans so much through Twitter and other networks that eventually they will learn how to sway and manipulate people. I think it's one of the ultimate weapons a super power could create using machine learning. Of course looking at this it seems they'd likely get stuck just talking nonsense to their competitors.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  Re your last paragraph: Neal Stephenson explores this in his book 'Fall; or, Dodge in Hell'.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    APEs - autonomous proxies for execration. Social media bots designed to offer up plausible commentary ranging from accurate to bizarrely disconnected from reality, deployed at scale in order to overwhelm the information available on a person such that discerning reality becomes impossible. You could probably do it with gpt-2, but gpt-neo's smallest model is perfectly sufficient to this task. All you need is a botnet and a sufficient number of nodes that can get away with a ~1.5gb download, then running a ~600mb model in memory. And antiCaptcha and other logistics payload. (Now, draw an owl.) Previous comment on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell Twitter style social media is susceptible to this, dall-e and lithe synthetic media could make fb and ig plausible posts. Not a bad response to outrage mobbing,imo.
- simonsarris 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blagie 5y ago
"I didn't say that. In fact, no one seems to have, according to Google." - pg
- rg111 5y ago
  The tweet he replied to is also relevant here.
itisit 5y ago
It turns out Paul Graham didn’t say that.
kthejoker2 5y ago
A nice modern spin on https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg

57 points by rg111 5y ago

Flankk 5y ago

I never said half the crap people said I did. —Paul Graham

ant6n 5y ago
Wait isn't that quote attributed to Oscar Wilde?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stan_rogers 5y ago
  The most familiar attribution, original or not, would have been Yogi Berra.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, or Albert Einstein maybe.
yissp 5y ago
--Benjamin Franklin --Abraham Lincoln --Mark Twain --Albert Einstein ...

the__alchemist 5y ago

Carl Sagan, in the opening to his book Billions and Billions: > I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it. > But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I’d appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it. He’d dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelgänger, that went around saying “billions and billions” on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.)

Gunax 5y ago
Sometimes it's not about the literal text, but the meaningnis accurate. In this case, Sagan did say 'billions' a lot. And he also tried to emphasize the scale of the universe (something the general public has difficulty grasping). It might be a misquote in the literal sense, but the meaning is actually quite accurate, and I don't think Sagan should be upset. 'Billions and billions' is a good shorthand for that. Sometimes you have to modify a quote a bit to give it context. Just saying 'Im your father' is a bit too generic. But 'Luke, I am your father' lets the listener know we are talking about Star Wars. Same with the 'Beam me up, Scotty'. I have no idea if this applies to Mr Graham, but just needed to put my useless opinion out.

bigyellow 5y ago

What is this? Who are these people and why does anyone care about their conversation? Wow, downvotes for asking a legitimate question about a pointless, contextless discussion between randos. What a lovely and welcoming community you have here.

zepto 5y ago
It’s easy to Google Paul Graham.
fullshark 5y ago
Don't know who Sabine VanderLinden is, but Paul Graham is the cofounder of ycombinator and his tweets/blogposts are frequently posted here and discussed as a result. I'm not sure why this is interesting other than how it reflects misinformation can grow on social media?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kevinventullo 5y ago
Paul Graham created Hacker News.
yannoninator 5y ago
HN is controlled by automatic downvote bots, there are almost no real users on it, you just get used to it. edit: here we go, flagged, you see?
mnd999 5y ago
Downvotes (and flags) are getting ridiculous on this site. I’ve recently been downvoted for (among other things) criticising Tesla, speaking up for women, being a dick. Only one of those was justified. This will also get downvoted.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  > This will also get downvoted. For breaking the community guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

lcuff 5y ago

I really didn’t say everything I said. -- Yogi Berra

tinco 5y ago

What's going on with this person? It looks like she really exists, her LinkedIn shows a solid network and the links seem to check out, and the Twitter account exists since 2009. But everything about her presence online seems fabricated, is she paying a service to generate these for her? What's the game, does this give her clout in the insurance industry somehow? The generated tweets are nonsense but seem to be fairly high quality nonsense. And the replies to Paul's reply were surreal, a bunch of them were just people having fun but a bunch looked like they were auto generated as well. I feel at some point big machine learning networks will interact with humans so much through Twitter and other networks that eventually they will learn how to sway and manipulate people. I think it's one of the ultimate weapons a super power could create using machine learning. Of course looking at this it seems they'd likely get stuck just talking nonsense to their competitors.

the__alchemist 5y ago
Re your last paragraph: Neal Stephenson explores this in his book 'Fall; or, Dodge in Hell'.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  APEs - autonomous proxies for execration. Social media bots designed to offer up plausible commentary ranging from accurate to bizarrely disconnected from reality, deployed at scale in order to overwhelm the information available on a person such that discerning reality becomes impossible. You could probably do it with gpt-2, but gpt-neo's smallest model is perfectly sufficient to this task. All you need is a botnet and a sufficient number of nodes that can get away with a ~1.5gb download, then running a ~600mb model in memory. And antiCaptcha and other logistics payload. (Now, draw an owl.) Previous comment on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell Twitter style social media is susceptible to this, dall-e and lithe synthetic media could make fb and ig plausible posts. Not a bad response to outrage mobbing,imo.
simonsarris 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blagie 5y ago

"I didn't say that. In fact, no one seems to have, according to Google." - pg

rg111 5y ago
The tweet he replied to is also relevant here.

itisit 5y ago

It turns out Paul Graham didn’t say that.

kthejoker2 5y ago

A nice modern spin on https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg https://youtu.be/vTSmbMm7MDg