For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.
I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."
My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.
I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.
There's a been a few similar instances in my life that have led me take up the personal practice of "Always say hi or wave to friend when the chance comes around, because there may not be a next time". It came about because I tend to see a lot of close friends and looser acquaintances on a day to day basis physically in the world, and there used to be more times than not where I wouldn't bother crossing the street or stopping for a minute to chat. Later I realized this costs me almost nothing, and even for less-close relationships, I'd prefer to have put in the tiny amount of effort to walk up and show them they're worth even that much before they overdosed or moved away or committed suicide. It's not always opportune, but what else is life for?
Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.
There still is value with the casual acquaintances. Just because a person is replaceable doesn't mean they are not valuable when present. My neighbor who I barely talk to has helped me out when I am in a bind. Even if a new neighbor moves in and replaces him, the original neighbor was valuable and gave me a sense of security, peace, and community while he was present.
I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.
That’s not the point. The point is that the number is small. They are not making a judgment on the value of such relationships but rather that that number is and will always be small that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, it only matters in a person’s immediate sphere.
People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.
The number is small in comparison to the whole humanity, yes, but this is not at all what it's about in this post. Did you read the article?
Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.
I think modern healthcare really put a focus back on people as individuals. Mortality rates were quite high even from what we see now as trivial illness or injury, and people would have a lot of offspring to account for this in the past.
By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.
Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well. When automation replaces our job or diminishes our economic worth many fold, not many friends and family remain unchanged. You parents, your siblings maybe and maybe 1-2 of your closest friends. Others will drift apart because we are in a different lifestyle now. Heck, even without any change, parent/siblings drift apart for many. It is tough then to not correlate our value with our economic value.
> Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well.
It's not about the quantity but about the quality of friendships and human connection. I couldn't care less about the number of my friends. I do care a lot though about the connection to them.
It's been a moving target for years at this point.
Both open and closed source models have been getting better, but not sure if the open source models have really been closing the gap since DeepSeek R1.
But yes: If the top closed source models were to stop getting better today, it wouldn't take long for open source to catch up.
This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1]
Pretty sure the majority of people who are a part of the community work a 9-5. But yes, spending after work hours making something that's just completely out there with no monetary purpose at all is much more nourishing for the soul than attempting to create a passive income machine.
A backdoor is a completely different thing when it comes to an AI company, as compared to a social media company. Not really even sure what it would mean when it comes to doing inference on an LLM. Having access to the weights, training data and inference engine?
The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.
It's not like that happened out of the blue. (Which could've also been the case in today's day and age.) Anthropic shouldn't have gotten involved in government contracts to begin with.
They inserted themselves into the supply chain, and then the government told them that they'll be classified as a supply chain risk unless they get unfettered access to the tech. They knew what they were getting into, but didn't want the competitors to get their slice of the pie.
The government didn't pursue them, Anthropic actively pursued government and defense work.
Talk about selling out. Dario's starting to feel more and more like a swindler, by the day.
To your friends and family as well? Or just your employer?
You're describing things that may well be true for a lot of employers, but fall apart outside of that context.
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