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Comment by itsalwaysgood | Hacker News Reader

Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest.

In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.

Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.

Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.

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What kind of sacrifice are you imagine the students to do here?

And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.

I have zero opinion about the state of the world. I'm just making an observation.

Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.

Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.

Money and power have much larger spheres.

So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.

Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.

Is that an actual observation or theory about how world should work? Because what I wrote was actual observation - students actually being willing to put on work, organize and sacrifice. And another observation that there is no real action they could possibly take and are lazily not taking.

From that point of view, your stance seems more like a theory/ideology you project on the world rather then an observation.

Thus Evil speaks.

Evil wins when the Good do nothing.

How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?

Are 'working' and 'learning' not part of 'living?'

> The crowd is booing but they will never act.

The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.

TBF Hollywood and the streaming sites were already flooding us with low quality content by importing all those 2nd tier foreign-made reality TV shows. I watch maybe 2-3 hours of TV a week now depending on which series I like is airing its 8-10 episode season (down from 15-24 because the good stuff doesn't come for free!).

Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair

That's the danger behind economy and society: we all must be useful in some way. We all have to find 'value' in some way. We take on 'roles' so we can contribute.

Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.

AI changes the way we contribute.

The metaphor I'll make here is this: It is much much cheaper for McDonald's to produce a hamburger then for some Michelin rated chef to produce fine cuisine. Society needs to have demand for fine cuisine or we'll all be stuck eating the cheapest, unhealthiest possible fast food.

You're right, we all don't have time to be experts in everything. But that doesn't mean experts aren't valuable, or that experts shouldn't exist.

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