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Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across
by sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
Yeah, the craziest thing for me to come out of this was how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Poor poor sam altman, he's a victim. He comes across as a sleazebag to me.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent"." My impression was rather a overwhelmingly "wtf is going on?" edit: I still don't know enough, to judge anyone involved
- sigmar 3y agoPeople love to see things in black and white without nuance, "oh you think the board should reverse the decision, that must mean you think Altman was innocent and should never be fired!". My read was that most people here (at least on sunday and monday) viewed the board as making major missteps, that doesn't mean all of HN is "team sam"
- dmix 3y agoIt’s just another hot take instant reaction of a new headline. Social media threads on controversial topics are always a whiplash, people love the swings in narratives, the opportunity to be contrarian or superior to the other people commenting on the topic, because they knew better. A new headline by a journo seeking their own clickbait angle comes out and the flood of “See it was really just [black/white] position and you were all wrong” is the most classic stereotypical social media take to a now past it’s prime story, when IRL it’s as nuanced and shades of grey as ever.
- coliveira 3y agoI have no doubts about it. The good thing is that now I know a place I don't want to work for.
- breakfastduck 3y agoI know people are innocent until proven guilty but it does seem rather bizarre also that he's had literally 0 media scrutiny / never been asked about (to my knowledge) the fact his own sister claims he abused her for years when they were young.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agoPeople are innocent until proven guilty in the legal system, where we have is a strict process for assigning a binary guilt outcome. In real life I use all available evidence for scoring outcome likelihoods. I score this guy high on sleazebag, and this article just increased this score.
- youcantcook 3y ago[flagged]
- kybernetyk 3y agoIf you use the "innocent til proven guilty" principle in your day to day interactions you're bound to get fucked by every 2nd person. Well, maybe not that bad but you will still get fucked because you don't have the same resources as a court does to figure out if someone's fucking with you or not. You just don't have access to tax funded investigators working for months to figure out if the other person tells the truth or not. So it's down to: Something's off? I'm not trusting you. Especially when you want something from me.
- youcantcook 3y agoI also use stupid sayings sometimes too
- infecto 3y agoWhile I am certain there were people on both sides of that camp, I never saw a overwhelming outpour of people framing him as a victim. Most of what I read was people confused as heck, including myself. What I did see is lots of people wondering how he lied to the board. Almost a week later and we still don't know how he lied to the board. We can all speculate away but there has been zero evidence of wrong doing, what else are we supposed to do? I guess we can just call him a sleaze-bag like you do.
- ruszki 3y agoThere were way more people who framed the board, than Altman as someone who did bad. At least until Monday. There were a ton of hearsay why ousting Altman is bad, without any context and internal info. And many of them was written by PR people. For example, "the last time when this happened was with Steve Jobs 1985". This is clearly a statement which wants you to direct towards that Altman is the victim. When it's not even true, because it happens all the time, like with Emmanuel Faber at Danone. Btw, this is the most probable reason right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-board-fight.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
- sam0x17 3y agoIt's also par for the course in these scenarios for the public story to be completely fabricated and have nothing to do with whatever thing actually pissed off the board, so we may never know what really happened
- darkerside 3y agoVictims can be sleazebags, and sleazebags can be poor victims. Both things can be true. Not everyone that is identifying a victimization is feeling or advocating sympathy. It's not black and white.
- temp112123 3y agoI don't know about sleazebag, I've mostly been confused as to what exactly he brings to the table. Dude gave himself scurvy after all.
- sigmar 3y ago>how everyone in HN just assumed he was "innocent". Did they? You should try scrolling through the original thread and ctrl-Fing [edit: removed the single word that was getting me downvoted to oblivion, my point is that people were quick to jump to very serious/troubling conclusions to explain his firing and explicitly weren't jumping to innocent] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agoThis was so buried that completely escaped me. But it's full of nuggets https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/1635704398939832321 https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232... > I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. > (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) > I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you. I don't know how to use twitter - is she responding to someone, or talking to herself?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aoeusnth1 3y agoShe is just posting into midair, but at a time when Sam was in the news and it was implied she was talking to him.
- alwayslikethis 3y agoIsn't he also the one wanting to scan everyone's eyeballs?
- 93po 3y agoyou mean how google scans everyone's fingerprints and apple scans everyone's faces?
- TheBlight 3y agoSo that puts him in good company?
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agoYes, that's how he means it. What's your point? Make a point.
- mandmandam 3y ago... Are you implying all biometric data is equal? Strange take. If fingerprints and faces are the same as retinas, where do you draw the line - or is there just no privacy line for you anywhere, as long as a billionaire somewhere is making lots of money?
- alamod3 3y agoI think it is quite different though, in that biometric-as-a-device-authenticator features keep your biometric data on your device. The plan with worldcoin is to create a central database of this data.
- JackFr 3y agoBiometric data as authentication vs. differentiate my shitcoin so I can get in on the crypto grift.
- Aunche 3y agoSupposedly Worldcoin deletes your biometric data after it's done generating a hash of it. If you don't believe that, then why would you believe that Google and Apple don't secretly send your fingerprints and facial scans off device?
- kordlessagain 3y agoI'm old enough to realize that I have no idea who someone is until I sit with them for a time, and even then I only have a slightly informed way of determining whether they are ethical and can be trusted. I've always said that in another country, like Germany, it might take time to get to know someone and, if you don't know them, you certainly shouldn't ask how they are doing. In the United States, we say hello and ask how people are, even if they are complete strangers. This is a generalization, not something to be used for every single person, or culture, but it's a good indication of how cultures deal with trust up front. Here in the US, we'll give you "trust credit" and then roll over you like a semi truck if you screw up later.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI'm not completely sure if it works the same in the States as it does in Canada, but asking strangers/distant acquaintances how they're doing is never a real question. People aren't actually asking. You basically have 4 or 5 canned responses to supply from "great, you?" to "living the dream...", all of which don't say much. Any more and you're being a nuissance.
- Kiro 3y agoBut it's OK to assume he's a sleazebag?
- 93po 3y agoyeah exactly. everyone is speculating on an event we know virtually nothing about, involving people virtually no one here knows or knows well, in a realm of business virtually no one here has experience with (serving on board of $90b company)
- mandmandam 3y agoIf he pushes WorldCoin? Yes. No doubt.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agoThis. This tells me everything I need to know about this guy. It tells me that he would happily enslave everybody if that boosted his shares.
- whalesalad 3y agohttps://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-against-openais-sam-altman-highlight-the-need-to-prioritize-humanity-over-tech/ https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman-s-sister-annie-altman-claims-sam-has-severely https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... He came to visit our office (YC '12 company) a few times and spoke with our team in very small fireside like gatherings. Dude always gave me a very creepy vibe. Something aint right there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shalmanese 3y agoThis feels like a wild misreading of the situation based on a simplistic good/bad dichotomy. People were mostly stunned at how poorly the board handled things and that sama probably wasn't as bad as the board was trying to make him out to be which is wildly different from him being good. Even the worst criminal in the world should be declared "not guilty" if they were caught for a crime they did not commit for which the prosecution did not make a convincing case. In law, there no "innocent", only "not guilty" and most people surmised that sama is not guilty in this context irrelevant of a larger backstory.
- peruvian 3y agoHe's a YC guy who made a lot of money in tech and this is a YC website full of people wishing they made a lot of money in tech.
- subtra3t 3y agoI think you will get downvoted soon (and I for mentioning this) but this is the simplest and most logical explanation on this thread by far.
- tux1968 3y agoYour comment and sentiment is wildly inappropriate. You don't even bother to raise an accusation, just smear a person's character. We should all expect better from this forum.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agoOk, my accusation is that this guy wants to scan people eyeballs, and monetize that.
- loveparade 3y agoI subscribe to the HN RSS feed, which shows flagged items since they're published on the feed before they're flagged. The craziest thing that stands out to me is how so many negative stories on Sam Altman end up being flagged, even though they are just as legit as the positive ones. I'm almost 100% certain that HN is highly manipulated for this story. For no other topic have I seen so many flagged stories, and all of them are the ones that paint Sam in a negative light.
- hn1986 3y agoSimilar to Elon Musk stories..
- wahnfrieden 3y agoHN is strongly anti-controversy. So when you have a large enough minority of users who rally around flagging certain topics, they easily get taken down even if there’s otherwise interest in the discussion. I don’t think it requires owner manipulation. You can see it in how things like any coverage of Palestinian perspective getting flagged immediately while coverage of far-right ancap politics lingers despite both being contentious political topics (where ancap discussion is controversial but detractors lack the habitual urge to flag brigade and are more open to discuss).
- verall 3y agoThere are topics where I'm interested in discussion but I don't think HN is mature enough to discuss them so the early comments are very thin ideology or discrimination so I just flag the article, even if it was good. I'm probably not alone in this.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThat’s my point: yours is a weaker urge than the calls to take down Palestinian perspective as being terrorist sympathizing and antisemitic that come from that particular flag-brigade set (as one example), compared with diffuse concern over immaturity
- abadpoli 3y agoI think part of this was also your classic case of tech industry misogyny, too. There has been a lot of thinly veiled sexism in the discussions about Helen and Tasha vs Sam.
- tristor 3y agoIf you’re referring to discussing their qualifications to be on the board, I don’t think that is in any way driven by sexism. There were numerous comment threads discussing the qualifications of all the board members and these two stood out as being specifically unqualified, and D’Angelo stood out for having clear conflicts of interest. Given how the board handled this whole situation like an amateur hour shit show, you will be hard pressed to argue their competence and qualifications in their favor. Rather, you are doing exactly what you are claiming from others, you’re seeing two unqualified board members, who happen to be women, and defending them because they’re women even though this whole situation displayed the incompetence of the entire board, Helen and Tasha included. The only one taking a sexist position is you. If the board handled this situation like competent adults who had ever spoken to an attorney, we wouldn’t all be having this conversation in the first place.
- abadpoli 3y ago> defending them because they’re women There’s absolutely nothing in my comment that even implies I’m defending them and their actions, and also absolutely nothing in my comment that implies any of my statement is based on their gender. I seem to have struck a nerve with you, though. I think the commenter doth protest too much.
- empath75 3y agoI think most of what you saw as support of Sam was support of ChatGPT as a consumer and b2b product, which is pretty clearly his baby and was put at risk by this drastic change. A _lot_ of people on this site are betting their futures on this technology right now and would very much not like to see that boat rocked.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- postmodest 3y agoThis entire thing has seemed to be the board saying "don't be the guy who went behind our back to summon the Devil" and everyone saying "but the Devil promised us Unlimited Moneys!" And HN agreeing that Unlimited Moneys are what startups are for, and everything else is excusable.
- BryantD 3y agoI don’t think it was everyone, I think there were just some loud voices. I also attribute that to human nature rather than anything organized. I’ve made a few Altman-skeptical comments and they generally got upvotes rather than getting flagged into oblivion; this tends to indicate there wasn’t premeditated astroturfing.
- JackFr 3y agoI just don't get his cult of personality. He's an underwhelming intellect but a top-notch promoter. And Worldcoin, seriously? I can see in 2019 wanting to be in on the grift, but let it die.
- Aunche 3y agoIt doesn't help that the board publicly accused of being a liar without any evidence. If they simply left it at "Sam's vision no longer aligns with the charter of the nonprofit", I'd bet they would be viewed much more sympathetically.