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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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Everything mentioned in the first paragraph as arguments still takes some personal time and effort. The amount of time that’s involved to receive and acknowledge the gift is smaller than the amount of time to prepare the gift. So it feels “right”.

Not sure if I’m making sense, but that’s how I’d feel about it.

Except for the white elephants, which were designed specifically as anti-gifts.

Depends how you do white elephant...

But still, a good gag gift takes effort. It's not like you walk into a random store and pick the first thing you see.

The whole aspect of stealing gifts demonstrates this. It'd be pointless if the gifts were all low grade garbage. They'd be effectively fungible. Yet the theft part it is critical to making white elephant fun. Regardless if you're doing gag gifts or good gifts.

Er... white elephants were not gag gifts.

A white elephant is a gift that you cannot refuse, cannot regift, and is so expensive/complicated to take care of that it will become your primary concern for the rest of your life.

Well, yes, but it also means a gag gift; I'd hazard a guess that >99% of uses of the term in the past several decades have been of the "gag gift" persuasion. There are many white elephant parties thrown by people who care little for history.

Even then, intentionally ruining someone's financial life requires more care and attention than telling an AI agent to perform random acts of kindness (so far).

> Well, yes, but it also means a gag gift; I'd hazard a guess that >99% of uses of the term in the past several decades have been of the "gag gift" persuasion. There are many white elephant parties thrown by people who care little for history.

Is this an Americanism? I've never heard "white elephant" used with such a meaning.

> Even then, intentionally ruining someone's financial life requires more care and attention than telling an AI agent to perform random acts of kindness (so far).

Absolutely.

Even a deliberately bad gift as a gag shows some effort and socialization.

If you send me a Hallmark card, you don't take the time to compose it yourself, but you presumably don't just pick one at random. You read it, to decide if you like the tone and sentiment. You may read several before you pick one. That is, it still takes your time even if the words aren't yours.

You take the time to work to take the wage to buy to buy the card to send. Money is lifetime donated. Or was. Now the artifact has lifetime invested into it token is rapidly loosing that value.

you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric. your post makes me realise i was wrong to tease people about rust the other day -- apologies for that.

edit: changed "ad hominem" to "performative rhetoric", think its more fitting in this case but it all seems borderline

>you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric

This is such a bizarre trend that seems to have gotten much worse recently. I don't know if it's dropping empathy levels or rising self-importance, but many people now find the idea of someone genuinely disagreeing as a completely foreign idea. Instead of meeting a different viewpoint with some variation of "agree to disagree" many more people now seem to jump to "you actually agree with me, you're just pretending otherwise".

Non-tongue-in-cheek discussion of the Mandela Effect is a parallel phenomenon. "My memory can't possibly be wrong, this is evidence of our understanding of physics being wrong!"

Just a couple small things that make me worry about the future of society in the midst of a discussion about one huge thing that makes me worry about the future of society in AI.

As a variant, I recently stumbled upon a post that basically sums up to "people who disagree with me on AI are clearly blinded by their prejudice, it's so sad."

Your argument is dumb because it's objectively better to optimize x conditioned on y than optimize y conditioned on x.

Maybe the worst variant of this is where people don't realize they're actually arguing for different things but because it's the same general topic they assume everything is the same (duals are common). I feel like this describes many political arguments and it feels in part intentional...

> You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.

This is so fucking funny man: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I dont know whether I should be repulsed by this level of stalking, but its extremely funny ngl

These freaks only know projection :D It was a layup.

Hallmark didn't destroy the affordability of the personal computing market.

> I hate the internet's psychosis-like reaction to AI more. The tone is always one of bravery and sacrifice mixed with disgust. You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.

Tell me again about performative rage.

The anti AI folks are review bombing games even suspected of using AI.

The anti AI losers on Reddit are doxxing people that use AI. I have been a target of this.

The anti AI people brigade YouTube creators that use AI to destroy their traction. They'll share links of victims. I have been a target of this too, after spending weeks working on a single three minute animation.

I'm living in this world every day because I build tools for the AI ecosystem.

This is not positive. This is not neural. It's downright hostile, aggressive, and cultish.

Have you considered pro-AI proponents all do these things also? It’s an ugly culture war but from a relatively neutral observer I am seeing gross behavior on both sides. (Eg. Making disgusting porn of real people, mocking the dead’s art and likeness…)

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