205 karma · joined January 23, 2020
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating '_PyRun_SimpleString(r)')People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.
Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.
Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.
For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.
If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.
It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
This showed up at the top of HN for me today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.
Honestly, I'm at a loss for words.
In fact, I think it's actually a perfect demonstration of how incredibly subtle and pernicious even small changes in the language we use can be, especially over a period of years to decades. Those changes are capable of reframing public perceptions in ways that inhibit our ability to recognize what would otherwise be obvious attacks on our expectations of rights and individual agency (were they couched in the existing terminology instead).
I would propose a modified counter-example to illustrate my point:
"Google is banning installation of apps they don't approve!"
vs
"Google is banning sideloading!"
This makes it clear what's actually happening: ownership of a Google device is no longer truly ownership. You are only allowed to install apps Google deems acceptable, and are denied the agency to install apps that are not. The device is fundamentally Google's to control; you're merely a user.
That figure represents ~40% of extant grid capacity for the entire country in just a single state.
edit: I'd also add that historically, power generation has accounted for 4% of all water consumption in Texas. The highest recorded load demand on the ERCOT grid, to date, is ~87.5 GW. Scaling generation capacity by 500% is not possible to achieve within a short-term time frame, but even if it were, the water demand of the additional generation sites would completely drain many critical aquifers and result in skyrocketing water rates for citizens of a state already suffering terrible droughts regularly.
> Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. One large-scale, recent review found a testosterone slump despite researchers’ adjusting for the subjects’ body mass index. “Even among normal-weight men, we see that same decline,” Eisenberg said. Some analyses, he added, have suggested that testosterone has dropped off most profoundly among normal-weight men.
I believe that many Americans that were previously dismissive or ambivalent regarding critiques of US activity at home and abroad (either due to patriotism, realpolitik apologia, or general naïveté) are now re-evaluating some of the beliefs they hold about their country in light of the chronic political dysfunction and an absolutely breathtaking extent of corruption being perpetrated in broad daylight today (as well as indications that extensive corruption has long festered among our elite class, surfaced via the Epstein revelations).
I acknowledge that it may be pure coincidence, but the problem with an opaque system is that deliberate antagonism can't be categorically excluded as a possibility. And considering the financial interests of the platform's ownership, I'm also not convinced we should extend the benefit of the doubt very far, either.
I believe the science disagrees on this point. In the case of humans, adaptations that contributed most to our success as a species are a constellation of pro-social traits that enabled us to cooperate in organized fashion in relatively large numbers (which empathy plays a major role in mediating).
Evolutionary fitness is not always meaningful at the level of the individual, particularly in social animals. IIRC, there are a number of species in which individually-disadvantageous (i.e. purely altruistic) behaviors are conserved, despite their apparent adverse effects on individual fitness.
In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy. Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.
This is a completely disingenuous critique. Not only is it possible to advocate for a more just and equitable system of wealth distribution while simultaneously striving to maximize resources under the current system, it's absolutely the correct thing to do.
In the current US political and economic environment (as well as most other places, to greater or lesser degree), to be poor is to be powerless.
Relative to inflation, wages have been mostly stagnant for decades now all while asset values have skyrocketed. The fact that leftists are aware of this (and act to secure their financial well-being accordingly, despite firmly-held beliefs that our pro-capital system is an engine of inequality) is not hypocritical because the alternative would be voluntary self-disenfranchisement. The poor have scarce means and time with which to engage in political activism, and conversely, the only groups which do are those with stable financial prospects and predictable/reasonable working hours.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...
Several consolidated cases against OpenAI:
https://www.bakerlaw.com/in-re-openai-inc-copyright-infringe...
And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.
OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)
Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.
If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)
The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.
As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.
A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.
LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.
I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?
We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.
I think the byline is a bit of a disingenuous sleight-of-hand: "The boom is not as untethered from reality as it may look" presupposes a majority view that the stock market "is untethered from reality," but whether or not that's an accurate read of prevailing sentiment, it subtly shifts focus away from what most people ought to understand: profits of the largest corporations are now mostly untethered from the financial health of individual citizens.
I've been seeing more and more of this type of underhanded writing from billionaire-owned media outlets lately (the number of which is growing on a nearly daily basis).