deleted
49 karma · joined July 28, 2026
Even upvotes can be an issue. Oh, you wrote your comment the day after the post went up? Too late! Nobody's looking anymore, no upvotes for you. No replies either. You feel your effort has reached nobody and you have wasted your time, so you stop bothering to put in effort.
I think the generality of it pushes topics into "old and inactive" way too fast.
Also, reddit's moderation is terrible. Just look at how long hate subreddits have tended to last even after they started hitting r/all regularly. People who are worth talking to don't tend to hang out anywhere that starts to feel like little nazi camp. Subreddits are separated to an extent, which does help, but that only goes so far.
I think the visual design also discourages longer "wall of text" responses in a way that traditional forums often don't. Lots of things (especially anything nuanced) can't be said in a tweet.
I do think the size that comes from centralization is part of it too. "Communities" feel less community, and posts/discussions are abandoned too fast and almost never revisited (exceptions are posts that come up as the #1 google search result for a tech problem).
The default and r/all subreddits are the worst by miles, though.
But city subreddits and any kind of recommendation thread have been much shittier lately because of the bots and the chatgpt copypasters.
Little forums also have a lot more character in their visual design than reddit, and they tend to allow more customization for individual users too. It's easier to recognize a person behind a regular commenter if they have a big pfp image or a goofy signature.
It's a very effectively designed human trap, in this and other ways.
https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Searle.pdf
People have been having these discussions since 1980 at least. I'm not going to bother rehashing the issue endlessly in shortform internet comments, but this paper exists if you're really interested in the subject.
Pope Julius II did not paint the Sistine Chapel's ceilling. Michelangelo did. I cannot believe I have to say this.
The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.
Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.
There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.
Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).
Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.
What can generative AI do that can't be done, and done better, otherwise? Nothing.
It's not an attempt to replace or add an artistic medium; it's an attempt to replace the artist. It doesn't open new avenues of expression, and it has negative journalistic value too.
People who "make AI art" are not making art, nor making anything else. They are commissioning images/videos/text from a bot, just as people commission art from humans. The amount of praise/admiration this deserves is zero.
There is a difference, also, between saying, "I am not morally okay with this, so I am going to do X", vs. "If you don't also do X, you are a Bad Person."
To me, after reading up on the platform of the right-wing party in question and Mullvad's CEO's level of involvement with it, the situation with Mullvad is worse. And because it is a much smaller company, a much greater percentage of my money would go to that CEO in particular. And my choice to pay or not has much more influence on Mullvad than it ever could have on Apple.
Others are free to feel otherwise, and to use their money as they please.
Besides, there are plenty of small company alternatives, like IVPN, which was recommended widely around the time this news broke. And I think that people who found out about Mullvad are likely often the sort to put thought and research into their choice of VPN, rather than just buying NordVPN or whatever based on name recognition only.
A single data point is pretty meaningless. If there were actually data to be found on how the customer base numbers or growth rates of the various VPN companies have or haven't shifted since the news broke, that would be interesting.
Ultimately though, what other people do or don't choose to do is irrelevant to my own choice. Moral purity, as you call it, is impossible. The world is not simple. I am going to do my best to make ethical choices anyway.
Besides being reprehensible, that kind of mass trafficking requires mass surveillance. It simply can't be done without it.
This kind of surveillance is antithetical to what Mullvad promises.
There of course could be a "privacy for me and my customers, but not for thee" thing in their minds.
But I don't trust that CEO whatsoever, and I don't trust the rest of Mullvad's leadership either because their response to the backlash was mealy mouthed "everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all be civil" minimization schlock. They didn't give a fuck; they just wanted the PR problem to go away.
Mullvad's VPN service might continue to be trustworthy, but... I have other options. And it could be enshittified over time, just like so many other things. At least one CEO has a motivation to enable mass surveillance.
I'm also just not going to knowingly put money into the hands of someone I know will use it for evil, if and when I have a choice, which in this case I do.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
Seriously though, every AI story feels the same lately. There's:
1. company wants or gets more compute 2. IPO 3. AI slop is bad 4. AI company executive says something batshit (often because IPO)
It's gotten pretty boring to read more than the headline for most of these.
Seriously though, every AI story feels the same lately. There's:
1. company wants or gets more compute 2. IPO 3. AI slop is bad 4. AI Company Executive says something batshit (often because IPO)
It's gotten pretty boring to read more than the headline for most of these. It doesn't feel bleeding edge so much as repetitive.
Now we have this software that's specifically designed to mimic humans, and mistaking it for real intelligence or consciousness can easily be disastrous. It's very important that we not anthropomorphize it, but we are catastrophically bad at NOT doing that.
Even our language has had a lot of computer anthropomorphism baked into it ("my phone died!", "this laptop is fussy", "the computer is sleeping", "it's thinking"), and it's not easy to excise that routine anthropomorphism from the way we talk about LLMs.
I don't want an LLM to write as if it were a person because it's definitely easier and more reliable to cut that problem off at the root, as much as possible, rather than to just try to willpower my way out of my human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
I'll grant that LLMs talk like this because they're trained on human writing. It may not be possible to get them to not do that. But if it can't be fixed, it's just another thing to put on the "reasons this is all an incredibly stupid idea" pile.
Wikipedia actually does appear to have separate pages for every Lord of the Rings character. Frankly I think it makes sense for this series, since there's a truly unusual and effortful amount of worldbuilding behind its scenes, and since it has been so influential to fiction (even regardless of medium).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings
Anyway, Jimmy Wales doesn't unilaterally make article inclusion/exclusion decisions; there's a whole debate and voting process that Wikipedians use to make decisions like that. So if anyone were to be called corrupt for making ill-fated decisions to delete articles, it would be a bunch of pseudonymous Wikipedia users. And I think they likely acted in good faith, trying to improve the encyclopedia, even though it didn't work out well and wasn't what I would have done.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
That whole debacle is even specifically relevant to this thread because the operator of archive.today (aka archive.is) was caught using a script on its captcha page to make visitors' browsers connect to the blog they were mad at. That's how their DDOS attack worked. They used their own visitors, who naturally trusted the captcha page, to commit a crime.
For whatever reason, with the exception of Wikipedia (bless the editors), they seem to have gotten away with this, as well as with deliberately falsifying the content of "archived" pages (as described in the arstechnica article), without consequences.
So, call me crazy or a Russian bot if you want, but I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of any weird captcha behavior from this website in particular.
Email services don't even support true 2FA; many claim to, and ask for a 2FA code for web login, but connecting an email account to a client via POP or IMAP bypasses that.
If a website/app goes passkey only (or, even worse, if it starts relying only on one-time email codes), I won't use it.
I know plenty of others who feel the same, though I don't know if we're numerous enough to put a dent in a company's bottom line or not. I imagine it depends on the company and its target audience.
"Should piracy be illegal?" is a different question than, "given that the court has decided piracy is illegal, should this law be enforced equally?"
It is not hypocrisy to say that, if piracy is theft is a crime, corporations do not get to do it either. Especially not at many times the scale achieved by the owner and operator of a pirate streaming service.
The alternative is letting corporations be above the law. At that point, the law ceases to be a system of justice and instead becomes only a tool of oppression.
Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd.
Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly.
The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.
It's like Myers-Briggs or "Which Hogwarts House Am I?", but worse and less amusing.
What's even the point of something like this, if not to stroke egos?
Everyone has better shit to do with their time than this.