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Comment by butwaitTheres4 | Hacker News Reader

You're reading their comment in isolation. The thread starts with "I assumed something completely different."

You replied to a "still, good to ask in order to seek clarity" type point.

Comment hierarchy is part of the overall context.

Another strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!

There's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it.

The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.

Sure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.

ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....

Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts

Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.

I had a boss at a WebObjects shop who maxed out an old Cube with Cube motherboards and did some sort of magic something or other to make a multi-processor.

http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html

That's pretty clever, but not surprising. NuBus was designed as a multimaster bus, so it should work (famous last words). The fact that your boss said YOLO and tried, that it actually did work, and the boot code helped out, is very cool.

The partners at that firm were fearless and this particular partner had started at NeXT as CMU student support. They also literally ended up with a truck full of NeXT systems in the late 1990's. I directly reported to a guy that was still using his NeXT slab from his student days. Second best place I ever worked.

This is AI. I can see the signature in what it thinks good argument looks like @seizethecheese

The levels of clickbait in that headline are absurd. It's like seventh hell of clickbait.

Also it doesn't come from the source. WSJ headline is: “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA”

So someone's running experiments of some sort on HN, driven by AI, is my read. Hope they snub that shit out.

Welcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay.

At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.

I think right now people are at the end of that cusp; daily they are worse at grasping how their results are collated, and thus are more unable to figure out what "facts" they are getting are reliable. Things are far more subtle than the Ping Pong Pizza days. The online interactions of millions and millions of people with search engines, AI, database backends, and etc. being used to "create" answers on the fly kinda worries me.

I don't disagree with you, but my concern is more people simply accepting the 'answer' because how could the AI be wrong and not for a moment thinking 'I should check if this is right', and if called out defaulting to 'not my problem, the AI said so'.

Not sure. But I figure we are pretty close to a world where people think AIs and tech are so advanced as to convince people they are autonomously making 'offers' of things (like, if people are so bad at all that 'free stuff!' crap that washes over everything in imaginary internetland, how can AIs do it?). Every day at least one of my devices comes up with some cockamamie fake thing it seems to build my personalized results around, even with content blockers enabled.

That is ignoring stuff AI might come up with that isn't steeped in emptions... I mean, if you think about it, I am not sure how an AI should respond if it were acting as a PA (personal assistant) to someone looking for work with no luck after a certain amount of time, for instance. Facebook experimented (I think appropriately) with stuff like trying to calm down mania online, and got sort of bashed for it, but it seems cruel for an AI to be pumping sunshine also. I am aware the DOD researched this extensively and assume the CIA and similar other countries' intelligence agencies will have also.

Add in stuff like what Musk experiments with and peoples' psychological issues with AI almost certainly would be terrible. These are things intelligence agencies have invested in research in for decades and decades.

If there is much more human-machine overlap, if nothing else human interaction as we think of it will be extinct. Do not want that.

Will people just turn into extensions of agentic AI instead of (godforbid either is bad) the other way around? Not a fan of cybernetics; that creeps me out (not, per se, me doing it , although at some point it seems if that happened one would feel like there was no choice but to also take part), but being forced to interact with any of it (and this part is here and now and moving forward continuously now; we are already forced to act with it, most of us, if obviously the tech is not at the point where we are competing for dominance with it quite yet).

I'd like to think that even though agencies like the CIA have been involved in some sketchy stuff over the past almost a century, they also have probably gotten involved to try to prevent more of it than most anyone knows either.

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