How long before this starts getting deployed in safety critical applications or government decision making processes?
With no oversight because Elon seems to have the power to dismiss the people responsible for investigating him.
Anyone not scared by this concentration of power needs to pick up a book.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350
But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in. Any time one even mentions “decentralized byzantine fault tolerant” anything, an army rises up to repeat anodyne versions of “grift… no one needs it… banks are great…” etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421
But if you mention any concerns with AI, no matter who or what you cite, the same group goes the other way and always repeats “(insert problem here) has always been possible, there is nothing to see here, move on, AI is amazing, deregulate and let the industry develop faster”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155
It’s groupthink at its most obvious, repeatable, always on, and I wonder how much of it is organic.
I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering. There is a real reason people hate crypto.
To tip it off, crypto is one of the least meritocratic things there is. The longer you've been in it, the more people you've scammed, the more you hype, the "wealthier" you are.
Crypto smells like a shit and vomit sandwich and people immediately turn their noses.
Build P2P social without the crypto angle and you have my attention. I've been wanting p2p (not federated) social media since the 200Xs and the decline of the indie web. Social and news should work like email and BitTorrent, not Facebook or "federated Twitter".
Do I have your attention now?
Ten years and $1 million dollars later, it’s free to use, but we haven’t started promoting it yet, still testing with paying clients:
Here are some ideas:
Instead of trying to build a "you.com" (as in your pdf example), I want a place we're all just a simple disposable signed hash address (that you can change, make public, keep pseudonymous, etc.) - easy and disposable if needed, but also possible to use as the building block of an online presence or brand if your hash becomes well known. Kind of like email, in that sense.
The platform doesn't need real time streaming video or video calls. Just text and images to start. P2P Reddit or Twitter.
It shouldn't be about building a platform where you attract others to your brand. That can come later. It should be about participating in a swarm and building up a mass of people. An exchange of ideas and information, but where it feels like being in public. Like BitTorrent. Once network effects kick in, you can find the nodes (people, topics, etc.) you care about and want to prioritize in your interest graph.
The SEC's answer no questions, sue first, approach to crypto in general made legitimate players afriad to operate, so the space became dominated by those that didn't care about the law.
Here are some:
https://intercoin.org/applications
But most comments I get are “I stopped reading 2 seconds in when I saw the word Web5.”
(We started using it when Jack who founded Twitter, started bluesky, promoted nostr started using it).
Here is a graphical presentation that can drive it home:
I say that as someone who read the Bitcoin paper in 2012 and was pretty excited back then.
Meanwhile online scams are a bigger industry than the illegal drug trade and bigger than the Australian economy. There are thousands of modern day slaves in call centers in Myanmar and the Philippines with fake social media profiles running pig butchering scams. That industry runs on crypto 100%. I guess that's one "problem" crypto solved.
You need some pretty convincing arguments at this point to convince me (and many others) that getting rid of this stuff wouldn't be a big win for humanity.
Here is the problem statement and solution for community leaders, the same class of decision makers who exited “AOL Keyword NYTimes” in favor of “nytimes.com” on this newfangled protocol called HTTP, with its servers and clients called browsers that people were downloading
intercoin.org/currencies.pdf
Hypothetical example problem statement: We want to promote ycombinator to everyone that could benefit, but banner ads make us look chintzy, directly engaging in the feral discourse on Slashdot would inevitably look unprofessional, and engaging directly through dozens of purpose-built blogs and websites is too onerous.
Hypothetical example solution statement: We should create our own simple, well-designed news site built on user submissions, and include threaded discussion capability with moderation built in at both the community and company level to keep things relatively civil. Then our audience will come looking for us.
What you offered is not a problem statement. It is a sales deck offering a, frankly, convoluted explanation of how starting a currency will solve a largely unrelated problem backed up by an unsupported assertion about the least representative sample in the world— Donald Trump.
At this point, I think this is just performative
If you're satisfied with calling that useful, okay, I guess - to me it's deeply alarming that this is presented as a good example of a useful application of crypto.
In the broader context of crypto demand being driven essentially by digital crime and gambling, there would need to be some seriously glowing example of something good that can be done with it to shift my judgment.
For example, in the early days of Ethereum, I thought it'd be possible at some point to build truly open source, decentralized SaaS, where the deployment happens to the blockchain, and that this in turn would enable open source projects to finance themselves.
I've yet to see an example of this where the crypto aspect isn't a figleaf.
I'm very concerned that people arguing for exciting applications of crypto are involuntarily legitimizing the online crime ecosystem. Crypto in practice seems to lead to a massive transfer of assets to criminals. To an extent where that may end up destabilizing whole countries, given the market cap trajectory.
Jack Dorsey is certifiably insane. His obsession with cryptocurrency is a warning to anyone that throws away success to live as a crypto maxi. You will lose the only things that matter to you in life, your business will be taken away from you by shareholders if you own one. Your control will be hated by users that accuse you of trying to ruin the internet with NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers. Many users outright left as a consequence, others would leave after the takeover. But Dorsey set the stage for the enshittification of Twitter, and anyone that's forgotten that should face the music.
Web5, no matter who utters it, is a phrase that means nothing. A person walking on the street would not be able to define it for you. Me, a programmer, cannot define it for you or even explain what it looks like. It is a marketing term as applied to Free Software, which will alienate Free Software users and disgust/confuse common people. If you cannot find a better phrase to describe your philosophy then people will forever associate you with the myriad grifters that shared your "Web(n)" branding.
Web2 (community) +
Web3 (blockchain)
This isn't true, and last time someone tried to prove it was, they cited .. a huge PDF of all the questions the SEC had been asking crypto firms prior to action.
Besides, the rules are over now. The US President ran a pump and dump. Can't get more legitimacy than that.
Our thesis is that the client-server architecture is a fundamental flaw in the world wide web's design, which inherently concentrates power in the hands of a few. Freenet aims to be a general purpose replacement for this in which all services are entirely decentralized.
The first non-trivial app we're building will be a group chat system called River[1].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ&t=12m0s
Look around the 12 minute mark when I start to discuss how “the capitalist system” produces centralized monopoilies that extract rents for their shareholders.
They key differences between old and new Freenet are:
Functionality: The previous version was analogous to a decentralized hard drive, while the current version is analogous to a full decentralized computer.
Real-time Interaction: The current version allows users to subscribe to data and be notified immediately if it changes. This is essential for systems like instant messaging or group chat.
Programming Language: Unlike the previous version, which was developed in Java, the current Freenet is implemented in Rust. This allows for better efficiency and integration into a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, MacOS, etc).
Transparency: The current version is a drop-in replacement for the world wide web and is just as easy to use.
Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.
Crypto in general and Web3 as well, all have mostly delivered scams. To the tune of billions stolen from everyday folks. Everything (to within a rounding error) that hasn't been a scam has delivered nothing else but being a speculative asset at best. Everything else has been a barely working toy that's better served by non-distributed implementations of the same thing.
People shit on crypto. government, regulators, and the public, all dislike crypto because the only thing that ever happens to us with it and the only thing we ever hear about happening, is folks losing money to scams.
There's no mystery here. Crypto doesn't need a policy shift. Crypto needs to stop fucking over folks. Yes it's cool technology, yes it also seems to just be a way to part folks from their money.
If I am going to put my money at risk, I expect it to be at risk. I'm happy to have a regulatory framework around that from the SEC, for instance, and there are. For example, since the JOBS Act, the SEC has greatly expanded the opportunities to raise money in a regulated way. I even interviewed the actual authors of Regulation S at the SEC, where I go into depth for an hour about how to raise money legally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
FINCEN has also been putting out guidances to the crypto industry since 2013:
2013: https://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G...
2019: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...
So the regulations are there.
And frankly, most true adherents of crypto have been yelling from the rooftops that Celsius and FTX and Binance are not actual DeFi. They are not decentralized, they simply tell you to do the very thing crypto was designed to avoid -- i.e. send them money and "trust them". This is the very thing Bitcoin and Blockchain were designed to avoid -- the middleman.
FileCoin and UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and so on are real crypto, and they have never had any scandals and billions of dollars, bits, etc. are entrusted to them every day. Ditto for most altcoins and networks, including Hedera Hashgraph, Polygon, COSMOS, Polkadot, etc.
Any shade thrown at, e.g. Telegram's TON or Ripple's XRP, is due to regulators. I can understand why Facebook's Libra was shut down. But it has to do with them becoming "too powerful" and "not subject to national oversight". Kind of like Facebook and Twitter and Google themselves.
UniSwap: a marketplace for speculation on arguably scam crypto products.
Aave Marketplace: a marketplace for speculation on arguably scam crypto products.
FileCoin: file storage at rates 50% higher than e.g. BackBlaze/DigitalOcean.
There's no actual value here other than as scam, speculation (nearly a scam), or products that are flimsy pretenses at not being scams (but which don't deliver a lot of value). Why should anybody care (other than transparent greed)?
Don't bother telling people how it works. Show them who's using it and for what.
Oh, and for any kind of "normie" use it must have a decent moderation and anti-abuse system. Which inevitably clashes hard with "decentralized". Bluesky is succeeding because it lives in a contradiction of pretending to be decentralized, but what it really offers is the "pre Elon Twitter" experience. To basically the same people.
> the same group
While there's a certain amount of hivemind, it's rare that you see people directly contradict their own posts here; what you're seeing is different people.
Yeah that sounds like a feature, not a bug.
I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case. We are in a political system that is oriented more around getting people to feel rage and hatred as opposed to consensus and deliberation. Elon is the face of that, but it's a much longer and larger problem. Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.
The problem I have with Elon is that they are wasting a once in a lifetime chance to actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government. Deploying LLMs in the government space doesn't fear me with dread. Continuing the senseless partisan drive of the 20 years does.
I’d suggest starting with Rick Perlman’s book “Nixonland” if you’re interested.
I have also been a delegate to both the RNC and the DNC at a state level.
This is not a appeal to authority, but rather a honest response to your request for my education level.
IMHO, The root cause of the "senseless partisan drive" is the fact that he founding fathers could not come up with a way to restrict parties (they called them "interests") and left them unchecked. This is a constant "sin" of the American political system, and is a key reason Slavery survived as long as it did, why separate but equal became the law of the land, why America shot itself in the foot several time with the Banks of America and why we are looking at the wrong side of history now.
The parties now act to destroy each other as their prime directive, rather then to better the country. I liken this to Wiemar Germany, where the increasing radicalization of both the Nazis and the Communists led to political instability and eventual violence that destroyed the government. That erosion of democratic norms, as well as the "other side must be destroyed for us to survive" messaging is the true threat, IMHO.
I would strongly suggest Richard Evan's three part history on Nazi history to understand Fascism. Don't worry, you can still hate and worry about Trump and think he is the next coming of Hitler afterwords - it will just be for better reasons.
So try to come up with some sort of future observation that can be made where you think the other person's model would give a different answer to yours about what you would be able to objectively observe.
What do you reckon?
Just some observable metric.
If they literally can't come up with a single observable predictive difference then the predictive aspects of their models are actually equivalent and they are only narratively different and don't "really disagree". Like Copenhagen interpretation vs many worlds.
If "democracy" is just metaphysics then it's irrelevant. But if it has actual tangible effects such as "can you vote?", "can you protest the government?", "is the leader of the opposition arrested?", "do most people think they live in a democracy?", "how popular is new legislation compared to previous years?", etc...
Then you can make predictions about it and test them!
You can even do local predictions if both can agree, such as "will the combined incomes of my family be higher or lower in 4 years time?" as low coupling proxies for gdp. (Ideally one would use probabilities for loosely linked proxies like that and use the probability differences the two theories assign to give bits of evidence to one over the other, so you'd want many many such proxies, ideally uncorrelated ones)
Was Jan 6 a protest of the government or an insurrection? Can Russians vote or are elections a sham? Do the majority of Russians believe they live in a democracy if they’re afraid of whose conducting the polling (or the MAGA non response to polling)? Those are values question that require you to have an agreement on reality.
> You can even do local predictions if both can agree, such as "will the combined incomes of my family be higher or lower in 4 years time?" as low coupling proxies for gdp
Your personal income has absolutely no predictive value on gdp. It’s more predictive of whether you personally made successful bets or even if you’re better at sucking up to the current power structure. It tells you nothing about population level metrics if you have no way of conducting reliable population level surveys. For example Donald Trump’s personal net worth sky rocketed under Biden because he won the election while as the leader of the opposition to the democrats was looking at jail time and whether that was legitimate or not depends on which political lens you look through it.
> If they affect your life they can be observed.
Ah, but if either side distrusts the other about whether the observation made is truthfully reported, how do you solve that? It requires some amount of trust and right now there’s a very clear divide there.
If there is literally no tangible difference then it's just label games and metaphysics and doesn't matter.
> Your personal income has absolutely no predictive value on gdp.
It actually is correlated (admittedly in most day-to-day cases it's just a lagging indicator, but things like natural disasters hit both). It's not the strongest correlation but it would still be evidential. Definitely under 1.0 bits though... One would need a LOT of such observations and having them not screen each other off to start getting a convincing number of bits.
Probably not realistic to have humans manage these sorts of numerous tiny updates though...
/nitpicks
> Ah, but if either side distrusts the other about whether the observation made is truthfully reported, how do you solve that? It requires some amount of trust and right now there’s a very clear divide there.
Yeah, it gets much trickier like that. But I do think two reasonable people from the opposite political sides could agree on some sort of observable to the extent their disagreement is anything other than narrative.
If the other side calls it a violent riot does it still count as people getting put in jail? Cause the Jan 6 insurrection and BLM protests occurred at about the same time and are viewed very differently depending on which political lens you put on.
> If there is literally no tangible difference then it's just label games and metaphysics and doesn't matter.
You’re discounting feelings as if it doesn’t matter. But if people believe or feel like they live in a dictatorship, what quantitative data are you going to use to disprove that. Moreover, why aren’t feelings valid when talking about politics which is fundamentally an emotionally driven human activity and not a data driven one? By the way the left believes they live in an authoritarian dictatorship under Trump while the right believes they lived in an authoritarian dictatorship under Biden. And political power literally is the power to emotionally manipulate others because you individually can’t actually accomplish anything by yourself.
Regardless of how justified the rage is or not, being very emotional about things usually have one of two effects on people A) people gets taken aback by someone's strong emotions or B) people get inspired/taking with the emotion, even feeling that emotion stronger themselves. Sometimes also C) they don't really care either way.
What probably isn't helpful, is calling someone is "undereducated" when they're clearly saying that they're person (A), and just because they may or may not agree with you (although parent didn't even clearly say they disagree, just that they're "taken aback" a bit).
Some people are calm regardless of what's going on around them, even if the world would be on fire, they'd try to describe what's going on around them with careful words and consideration. It isn't wrong or right, just like the people who feel rage and very emotional aren't wrong or right, it's just a showcase how we're different.
But we should aim to at least understand each other, not by trying to provoke, instigate or look down on others, but by asking questions to clarify and to better understand.
Has it occurred to you that the people who feel rage fundamentally misunderstand the situation and are completely undereducated in this area, and are only fuelled by sensationalism and Media manipulation? And then I suggest you go read Dirty Politics by Kathleen Hall Jamieson if you're interested, because that's what people who want to sound more intelligent than the other half of the conversation always do.
How does it help anyone?
Yes, rage might be the appropriate and response given the situation. But it’s often true that it starts with an emotion, and then people just argue from there. Even while being wrong. Just look at all the people with contradictory opinions in history, both with strong, emotional rage, and and equally certain of their connection. Throwing the fact that people actually has a tendency to want to be angry.
This creates an environment where misinformation and emotional appeals spread faster than facts. When discussing complex, non-trivial topics, logic and reason are the only tools that can cut through the noise. But in a system designed to reward outrage, those tools are often drowned out.
I highly recommend Sam Vaknin's talk about Social Media toxicity.
Sources: Outrage is the most profitable emotion https://www.cityam.com/outrage-most-profitable-emotion-so-ad...
Sam Vaknin: The TRUE Toxicity of Social Media Revealed - Interview by Richard Grannon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58mFU004hg
I wonder if you could even name what some of these critical problems are? Or have you just been told that there are problems that justify this chaos?
Breaking all the laws to bypass the government does not "actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government", that is an absurd position. Caesar did not fix the Roman Republic.
And opposition to DOGE is not on the basis that people don't care about government efficiency. It's on the basis that the shit they're doing has nothing to do with government efficiency. There's not even a pretense of trying to calculate the "benefit" part of the cost-benefit equation with the cuts they are doing, they are just slashing and burning without any concern for outcomes as a power play and messaging tool. Elon is famous for doing this at Tesla and Twitter and all evidence points to it being incredibly harmful.
This isn't efficient! https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/15/return-to...
And not everything is about efficiency. Laying off veteran's crisis hotline workers or refusing to pay for the USAID employees you've just abandoned to be extracted (or in one case, medevac'd after a medical emergency) from the places they were sent to is just cruel (and again, illegal).
2. Congress as a whole isn’t a single entity —- one party refuses to compromise in any way while the other plays by the rules.
3. Doesn’t matter. Cost reform needs to go through existing legal routes.
4. What constitutes “auditing” the government? Because we had plenty of non partisan positions overseeing and auditing all parts of the government. DOGE fired those people.
5. Again, go through the legal route.
6. A lack of “digital transformation” is the vaguest most unconvincing point in this entire justification.
7. These budget issues need to be decided on through constitutional processes and with oversight, as before.
8. Ditto.
9. Medicare can lower health costs by other means, such as being available universally to all and setting limits on what they pay to providers based on procedure.
10. Do you watch CSPAN?
I think what the government is going through right now is wrapping up the last political system. The idea that Democrats and Republicans just need to learn how to work together is just wrong. The parties are being destroyed, and I think we should all cheer that. They were built to address the issues of the 20th century, and neither party in the current form is ready to address 21st century issues. I think AI, Climate change, world demographic changes around the world (ie: low birthrates) is going to seriously alter everything about our world from geopolitics, to economy, even social issues.
The democrats are stuck in supporting the new deal bureaucracy and the post ww2 order. That's over, it's crumbling right now, and i'm not going to try and defend any of it personally. It's just obsolete. The old Republican party your dad probably supported is dead too, that died a while ago. The new Republican party seems to be an alliance of people who just really want to cheer the crumbling of the old system (MAGA) and the first emergence of what politics in the 21st century is going to look like (the tech alliance).
Democrats would be smart to understand it's a new century we have new threats, new challenges, and need new institutions.... and this IS NOT a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix our government. This is the first draft of our new political system, and they have a choice to participate in shaping it, but they will need to get votes, and to get votes they need to stop stalking about obsolete ideas.
And even if you think the rule of law is antiquated, you’re misanthropically cheering the destruction of the largest institution in the world that 330 million people depend on for survival.
> The new Republican party seems to be an alliance of people who just really want to cheer the crumbling of the old system
I agree, and I think this is a bizarre flipping of the "Democrat ~= progressive / Republican ~= conservative" dynamic that has been largely assumed throughout my lifetime.
We need both conservative and progressive forces in our society. Someone needs to be saying "here's what's wrong with our system; here's what needs to change", and someone else needs to balance that with "here's what we're doing right; here are the parts that are working well and that we should not get rid of".
It seems to me that now, instead of that tug-of-war discussion happening between the two parties, it is happening in parallel within them. Unfortunately, the sane and responsible version of that discussion is happening entirely within the boundary of the Democratic coalition, in a way that is completely ineffectual because (a) the internal conservative moderating force is relatively strong in a moment when the populace seems to want more progressive action, and (b) to they have so little ability to effectively wield political power.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are dominated by a bizarro "progressive" faction that wants to pull us all in an entirely different (IMHO regressive) direction. And that faction is completely unchecked by any internal "conservative" moderating force within its own party, so it is for the moment able to push us as hard and fast as possible in its preferred direction.
I'm REALLY looking forward to 2028, because I think that potentially will be the first election where we start to see what modern politics will look like. I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple new parties, and multiples of them have a real chance. If it seems one sided right now, it's just because one side found their way to the start line first... but make no mistake, history shows that over time new political factions will form that offer resistance to bad ideas, and clear a path for the good ideas.
Given the rate of change with AI, We're going to have a real idea on what a world being disrupted by AGI (whether that is true AGI, or something close to it) looks like. At the same time Healthcare is only getting worse, and Trump is NOT going to fundumentally address it. China is going to be rising, and they're a real geopolitical threat. The war in Ukraine has completely changed what warfare looks like, and we're going to have to completely restructure our military (just like we have to restructure our healthcare). I also wouldn't be surprised if Trump's war with the cartel turns out to be far harder than expected because cheap autonomous drones allow a small military to compete against a large traditional military.
All of our prior assumptions on retirement are different too, retired boomers are not the same as the pensioneers from their day. They're not impoverished, instead they're flush with cash. I'm not sure in a world with an aging workforce you're going to be anti-immigrant... and all these benefits we give to retirees may not make sense in a world where retirees are wealthier than the regular workforce supporting them.
The general theme for the next decade is going to be throw out all the old books, 80% of our prior assumptions no longer apply.
The GOP controls both houses and the POTUS. They could absolutely do a top to bottom audit with full transparency and make cuts where needed. But that's not what this is about.
Just poke around a bit: https://doge.gov/savings
And please even try to explain how this sort of thing is even remotely in America's best interest:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA865018C7886_970...
> ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)
Then there's the basic accounting 101 things like improper categorization, 150 year old people getting social security, etc. Why should the US government be held to a lower standard than a publicly traded company?
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-funding-trump-musk-misinfor...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
People are just angry at Musk for turning their safe space into a free speech platform then switching sides. And that he’s now taking away their sides unlimited slush fund.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.
So much honesty and transparency out of this group.
There was a time liberals screamed at the top of their lungs over this type of threat to democracy, now they embrace and endorse it because they’ve fully merged with the primacy neocons.
Maybe get your news from somewhere other than Twitter.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/doge-departme...
I personally would like to see the end of the "find gravy train, keep that gravy flowing at all costs" methodology of capitalism, because it's primary focus is money instead of the service provided. Whether it's pentagon contractors, business subsidies, or the heinous medicare and medical insurance fraud. But I don't want to cut SNAP even if someone buys a goddamn coke once in a while.
The current method seems to be brain surgery with a monkey wrench. Slash and burn with little thought given to the effects upon humans, especially those who don't have other options. Kagi gave me a figure of between 9.2 to 15.2 percent of welfare being fraudulent. Yes that's too high, yes I'd like to fix that, but I want that change to be considered, studied, and planned with caution.
No one told you to feel rage.
> Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.
Weird, there are a lot of comments doing discussion in reply to the parent comment. It hasn't been shut down at all! You read those words and disagreed with them, and wrote your own words in response. You're doing the discussion you're claiming is being shut down! What are you even talking about?
Anyone with morals driving their use of a new tech will be limited, and unless those people massively outnumber the few selfish ones they will lose eventually.
As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...
But the reality distortion field around the current administration is very powerful. Fox and CNN are owned by supporters of the republicans, NYTimes and Washington Post don't appear to be reporting certain aspects of the government restructuring. Multiple social media sites are owned and ran by people who support the current admin.
I am personally worried that we're going to see the gradual yet continual escalation of rhetoric, more actions that undermine rule of law, and continued lack of critical thinking in so many people. That path appears to lead to extremism.
I have a horrible feeling that whoever "wins" in a couple of decades or so will have no time to savour their utopia as the climate catastrophe really starts to bite hard.
Deepseek R1 is something that you can run in a garage on hardware that the average software engineer can buy with a months salary and when it came out last month it was better than _every_ other model.
Depending on the curve we’re on, LLMs may grow more resource hungry while becoming closer to human performance in software engineering tasks. It’s not unimaginable this would concentrate productivity in the upper class of software engineers that can afford the hardware and/or licenses.
My heart goes out to all the oppressed programmers in the EU.
Kenya is, and at current exchange rates the range in this citation is $558-$1876/month: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/kenya-software-engineer-s...
If op is trying to catch up to frontier models locally on a budget 1/5th of what you can get in the west then I can see why she would feel the way she does about Ai.
You said a month's salary; cedws said "third world" devs can't afford $5000 — and this is correct, third world devs can't afford that. cedws did not say EU, they said third world, at least not here. You said EU, not them.
When you reply to me with "With salaries like that it's not first world either", who is "they"? The country I said explicitly was third world? Because that's a tautology.
You can bet your ass Musk is using his AI tools as propaganda tool for his advancement, just like he does with X. We already seen prompt leak of Grok, it wasn't neutral.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/chatbot-arena-leade...
It's still a very impressive feat, but it wasn't frontier-pushing.
Its already worth noting that we already ran into the self hosting at scale problem. People don't want to run a web server and instead accept all the problems that come along with the convenience of social media. Why would LLMs, or any future AI product, be different?
Of course, similar things could be said about controlling information flow through: social networks, newspapers, printed books, or whatever the town crier shouts in town square. But, each advancement in information dissemination tends to be power concentrating relative to the older tech, and I don't see any reason why this most recent advance won't follow that trend.
the pendulum swings back and forth. i don't see that changing
There a fantastic website here, following the status of Project 2025 [1], with references. Trump is following that document to the T.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/07/trump...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293521/foreign-influen...
Has America already become an authoritarian state where this sort of thing really happens?? I don't know, I haven't seen that sort of thing happen yet.
The conservative Supreme court recently ruled that the president has essentially unlimited power. During his campaign, Trump did promise that he will be a dictator for a day. Appears to be overdoing it.
Similarly, Musk can potentially launch a campaign to sway the public to move for Trump to be impeached due to his felony convictions.
A battle between the two might be the shakeup the current empire needs.
Trump may be more powerful than Musk by some metrics, on a time-limited basis (unless he manages to change the term limits), but Musk is more powerful in many ways as well. Musk's wealth is greater than that of many entire countries.
Also, dang, is there anything we can do to keep the comments on this submission tech-focused? Perhaps the Elon-bashing political digression can be split into its own thread?
Unfortunately, Elon has made himself a spectacle. To separate him and his intentions out from the technology itself would be a disservice to the discourse as a whole.
What concrete danger do you imagine will happen as a result of xAI being controlled by Elon? Try to be as concrete as possible.
and those are pretty terrible, anti-science, and petty
This isn't something specific to xAI, but it turns out that the person who controls xAI also holds an unusually strong influence over the highest level government officials. These officials can use xAI as an excuse to implement harmful policy, "because the computer said this is the best course of action"- not unlike people who end up driving on train tracks or into large bodies of water because their GPS told them to go that way.
I for one was ready to welcome my AI overlords once they were mature and tested. It was an inevitability. Because of the relationship between this oligarch and the government though it looks like the time line has accelerated and we're going to see misplaced trust in tools that aren't ready for what we're about to hand them.
I can empathize, but I can't feel indignant about it. Not any more.
For years and years I've watched people warn about the centralization of power by tech companies. They were shut down left and right. I'm not accusing you of being one doing the shutting down. I'm just annoyed that Elon is what it takes for people to start realizing the people arguing the principal might have been onto something.
And I expect to see them start getting their "I told you so" in. Watching this play out, I'm personally inclined to join team "you made your bed, now sleep in it."
Judges can only be removed by Congress.
Congressional representatives can only be removed by their peers.
The check on this is the market. Don't understand your point other than "Elon bad"
It’s also annoying that the top comment engages in no way with the content of the OP…
It must be truly infuriating to work hard to push a release, and you see it featured on your favorite orange website, only for the top comment to have nothing to do with what was worked on.
Here's a test - if this post was about Starship, the same comment could apply! Neuralink, the same thing! Boring Company, same thing! Wow, could it be that such a comment is really applicable to so many different companies or projects, or is it just a generic one? You decide.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796948 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622767 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11025852 (2016)
I would also argue he is not being singled out, here are some comments posted criticizing Steve Jobs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28295688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578642
It really shouldn't come as a surprise that notable people related to a company or project are brought up when an article about it appears on HN.
just because you disagree with a widespread view/opinion does not mean its bots
Can someone enumerate the "great harm" that Elon is doing? I honestly don't see it.
The rest is pure speculation. “It is very reasonable to believe this thing that confirms all my biases so therefore it must be true”
It'll be a disaster for the soon-to-be-previous most powerful country on earth...
shows a total disregard for the wellbeing of others
Yeah but Elon is your president now.
It's clearly being run by Elon Musk, but he has not been nominated or confirmed for any official position.
DOGE appears to have unprecedented access to systems that usually have safeguards in place. What do you think people should do in this situation if they are concerned about abuse of power?
They have read-only access to systems and the “abuses” seem to be publicly posting what the government is spending money on.
Why do you think it’s a problem for the public to know where the government spends money?
If all they are doing is posting information that was already public then what exactly is your problem?
Do you hear yourself?
Name a specific thing you would like to know about DOGE that is not publicly disclosed.
But just on the surface, Elon has accused a journalist who published the name of DOGE employees of breaking the law. If it were up to them, even that would be kept secret. This is not a transparent organization.
Why one of the guys working for it was running a dodgy image sharing website and has links to cycbercrime and CSAM?
and why Elon called the journos that revealed these links criminals?
OK I actually know what this is and no, it's absolutely nothing like the USDS, which builds tools to support government processes. What has DOGE built?
> Why do you think it’s a problem for the public to know where the government spends money?
I would very much like to see transparency, and if that were what DOGE was doing it would be great. But it looks to me like they're operating in secrecy and firing huge numbers of people before publishing any kind of analysis or study, without even providing reasoning for what they're doing.
They built a portal to look at government spending, which is both worse than the existing visualizations, and did not put authentication in front of it's database. https://www.theverge.com/news/612865/doge-government-website...
Trump is so far gone in his dementia, he can't even make eye contact anymore. You see this in all the videos. He's basically King Théoden at this point. Not even Musk's kid respects him.
He's so disabled, he's sending his VP to do the job, and we all know how much of a paranoid child he is, from the past term (when he went into a Colonoscopy without anesthesia just to not have to give the nuclear codes to the VP).
No comment about current US politics, but it’s probably a given that many will read “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” and drop the second part because the first is exactly what they want. Same as how you can’t get in touch with human support on many platforms nowadays, but instead just get useless bot responses.
Hopefully sooner than later. I trust this more than the literal scammers and thieves who were previously running things.