Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

You turn off your computer and go outside.

I already do that a lot, and not use any generative AI tools for any reasons to begin with.

Let's convince the remaining 8 billion people.

Why convince them? If they never go outside, they’ll just be inside anyway. You won’t interact with them. Metaphorically. Real life is a place, not an idea.

You're interacting with real people who doesn't see your face and hear your voice all day and affect each other.

Real life is a place encompassing the "cyberspace", too. They're not separate but intertwined. You argue that people affecting your life are the closest ones to you, but continuously interact with the ones who are farthest from you distance-wise and they affect your day at the moment.

Maybe this is worth thinking about.

People who want billions of people to be inside and compliant, want those people's vote to go a certain way (at least, while that is even still a thing). Once that part stops being a thing, you stop being allowed to be outside, as that could be a problem.

That would be fine if they didn't vote.

As bad as the current US administration is, a day in my life today is not really any worse from what it has been under past Presidents.

Not invalidating your viewpoint and I'd bet we are pretty well aligned, I too have a pretty local-first view and that as a country we put too much emphasis, energy, and discussion on national politics and could all benefit from "getting outside". That said, I did want to point out that this comes across as a very self-centric viewpoint, one that would differ greatly depending on who you ask. Even as an anecdotal story, it offers very little to say about the current state of affairs related to how people voted, which would appear to be the intent of the response.

As a bit of a semi-related aside, while everyone has different motivations when voting, as a whole when folks are able to vote for their gov't, one hopes that enough people are thinking about what is good for the majority and society as a whole and not only what is good for themselves. And that has more impact at local and state levels usually. A bit idealistic, admittedly.

I certainly can and do that. Can you please convince remaining 8 billions to do the same?

Based on ie election behavior or populations, what you describe is naivety on a level of maybe my 5 year old son. Can you try to be a bit more constructive?

More constructive!?

Ok, let’s break it down for you: What all 8 billion people in the world think does not matter to you. There are people out there cutting heads off in the name of religion, or people who think their dictator is a divine being.

People outside your country have little effect on your daily life.

Even people within your country have a weak effect on your daily life.

What other people believe only really matters for economic reasons. Still, unless you are very dependent on social safety nets even they don’t matter that much. You just find more money and carry on.

You might think that more propaganda will result in people voting for bad politicians, but it is actually possible to have too much propaganda. If people become aware of how easily fake content is generated, which they are rapidly realizing in the age of AI, the result is they become skeptical of everything, and come up with their own wild theories on what the truth really is.

The people whose thoughts matter most are the people you interact with on a daily basis, as they have the most capability to alter your daily life physically and immediately. Fortunately you can control better who you surround yourself with or how you interact with them.

If you turn off the conversation, the world will appear pretty indifferent even to things that seem like a big deal on social media.

It's ironic that the front page of HN had a related article:

- Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circle...

tl;dr: More close friends people have, more polarized societies become.

It's easy to profile people extensively, and pinpoint them to the same neighborhood, home or social circle.

Now what happens when you feed "what you want" to these groups of people you see. You can plant polarization with neighbourhood or home precision and control people en-masse.

Knowing or seeing these people doesn't matter. After some time you might find yourself proverbially cutting heads off in the name of what you believe. We used to call these flame wars back then. Now this is called doxxing and swatting.

The people you don't know can make life very miserable in a slow-burning way. You might not be feeling it, but this the core principle of slowly cooking the frog.

You said: "You might think that more propaganda will result in people voting for bad politicians"

In the US at least, the people who vote the most are typically the older people 40+ and those people have very little experience with tech and AI and are easily tricked by fake crape. Add AI to the mix, and they literally have no perception of the real world.

40s have very little experience with tech? Those were the people who practically invented tech as we know it today. Most AI researchers are in their 40s and 50s, and have been experimenting with machine learning and AI for the past decades.

I think your comment is just very ageist. You stereotype everyone who is middle age and above as barely lucid nursing home seniors.

Ironically I would say it is young 20 somethings and below who have no clue how a computer or software even works. Just a magic sheet of glass or black box that spits out content and answers, and sometimes takes pictures and video.

I am 42. I had a Commodore 64 as a kid. From the perspective of my first girlfriend, this made me wildly privileged. My first boyfriend was about a decade older than me, he didn't even have a household phone growing up.

> You stereotype everyone who is middle age and above as barely lucid nursing home seniors.

No, they have not. My dad worked on UK military IFF software solutions and simulations. Still took him years to realise Google (c. 2010) search results had a scroll bar. Mum eventually did get Alzheimers, but was mixing up reality and fiction decades earlier, in the form of New Age healing crystals, ley lines, etc., and as I grew up with that influence I too believed them until practicing Popper-like falsification stripped away each magickal belief.

Me, I've been following AI since before the turn of the millennium, and I still get surprised when I see how fast the tech is improving. I also see plenty of people, even on HN, assert AI will take (paraphrasing) "centuries, if ever" to reach performance thresholds it has now reached.

Your mom and dad must be much older, but at 42 you are among the first of the millennials and that’s a pretty tech literate generation. You’ve experienced a huge spectrum of tech and software in various forms, and struggled through their evolutions.

A lot of assumptions, some could be correct, some are plainly not.

Your idea of living in society is something very different form my idea, or European idea (and reality). Not seeing how everything is interconnected, ripple effects and secondary/tertiary effects come back again and again, I guess you don't have kids... well you do your life, if you think money can push through and solve everything important. I'd call it a sad shortsighted life if I cared, but thats just me.

This is kind of true - the media environment can be both overwhelming and irrelevant. But eventually it hits. I have some friends who are trans and very familiar with what a hostile propaganda campaign can do to your healthcare.

(also, has everyone forgotten COVID?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com