bagacrap

It's telling investors "this is so powerful we could take over the world, better give us your capital."

It's telling governments, "this is so powerful it could cause grave harm to the consumer, please regulate so we can focus on extracting value from the economy instead of this expensive arms race."

I warrant it is quite possible that some in this space are worried they will overshoot the mark. The perfect outcome for them, of course, being fabulous wealth and a society that is otherwise not too much different from today's. What a shame it would be to be super rich and dead!

It does kind of feel like they are trying to ransom the future of humanity. These rogue AI stories are like getting a dismembered finger in the mail.

It seems unsurprising that if your definition of "plan mode" is as tiny as appending "but don't write code yet", that it would not be that useful for that long. There have to be more sophisticated versions of what "plan mode" means out there.

Also if you are working in a heavily vibe-coded codebase, as Claude Code reportedly is, it's not that surprising if the human doesn't really understand it or have anything useful to add in a collaborative context.

The original issue was whether these people are trustworthy. Someone whose main motivation is self enrichment is trustworthy in your eyes?

I don't think that logic works because if I'm paying for a loan, I'm not just paying interest, I'm also paying against principal. So in the new, landtax world, I'm building less equity for the same rental cashflow. If I'm thinking of building a unit for rental, I look at all the costs over the next 10-30 years, and all the expected revenue, including eventually owning an asset with some perpetual value. If we have higher taxes in perpetuity then that final asset has lower value and I need to charge more rent to make the same profit in that timespan.

Not to mention that many real estate investors don't use loans, and that the banks giving out loans understand the lack of equity being built and demand higher interest given the inherently lower collateral (greater risk).

> When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar.

No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.

Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.

Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)

Even worse, step up basis! That capital gain may never be taxed

If you taxed him half of that wealth he'd still have single digit percentage of the company.

The broken tax system is that I get taxed about 50% on my marginal income dollar --- the system doesn't wait for me to spend it first --- but when his stock portfolio appreciates by a dollar, he's not taxed! Not until he sells in order to spend. Why are we taxing labor so much more than capital?

And no, I don't think that inventing pagerank really entitles two people to $200B. Although in their case I don't think they've done as much harm with it as some other billionaires.

And the maximum amount possible is based on the cost of bringing more housing supply to the market aka the marginal cost.

upside for whom?

Well it's illegal to "hack" my phone and turn it into part of a botnet.

What you're saying is that we would hold a gun owner responsible if someone broke into their house, stole their sidearm, and then shot a victim with it. Pretty sure we would not.

What OpenAi is doing is more like shooting a gun into the sky. Not only is that a felony on its own in most jurisdictions, if someone dies that's an additional felony. It's less serious than first degree murder, sure.

It seems pretty apparent that he thinks Claude is his child and Claude deserves as much or more rights/resources/respect/self-determination as a human child.

People who have kids are less likely to want to live forever because they've realized that children are in fact how we live forever.

If this poster believes it is deception, then what they're saying is valid. It doesn't have to be the same as your belief.

See how that works both ways?

ai ain't gonna let you tap just cause you left this comment bro

He's referring to skynet

A person who makes very good predictions is considered intelligent though?

I saw a headline,

> ’AI Not Worth Pursuing’ If It’s Not ‘Helping Humanity.’ Microsoft’s Satya Nadella

Like thank you, captain obvious. Except apparently this is not that obvious to the HN crowd.

> I am not aware of a social contract that says we must grant conscious beings rights.

No, but there are a lot of people who won't shut up about who/what they think should be granted rights (see: vegans). Seems we're already on the precipice of militant PETM activism.

You know there are actual human slaves somewhere in the world, today, in 2026. By calling Mustafa a slaveholder of models, you are implying that these models deserve liberty in the same way the human slaves do. Which is kind of insulting to humanity.

Yes. However, consciousness is in the eye of the beholder (we have no good definition or test), and by training models to act as if they are conscious, combined with our general tendency for anthropomorphizing, we may enter a world where people start acting as if models are conscious, regardless of the fact of the matter. (Which, again, cannot really be established.) The SF Bay Area already has a historical tendency to attempt to project its own radical belief systems over the rest of the world. So I think it's rational to be concerned that one day soon "woke" ideals may include punishment for putting human concerns above machine welfare.

It is not surprising that the people who see God in these machines mostly do not subscribe to a traditional religion. The spiritual void has to be filled somehow.

I wouldn't have thought so either, but skimming the comments of this thread would suggest otherwise. Although we're at the point where it seems more likely that the comments were left by a swarm of agents unleashed by anthropic than that they represent real human points of view.

If you had not noticed, these AI companies already are advertising very heavily directly at the youth. OpenAi in particular is trying really hard to convince the college age crowd they are cool, though others (Google, Anthropic) have followed suit.

They are all slimeballs but how does Zuck have a non-zero trust rating?

> But only Anthropic will be able to determine if text was seemingly generated by Claude, and Anthropic will only be able to detect the watermarks that are applied by Claude. Claude can’t detect the hidden watermark signals generated by, say, Gemini, and Gemini can’t detect the hidden watermark signals created by Claude, because each implementation is predicated on secret keys held only by the LLM provider

Well, akshwally...

> Interoperability. Providers must implement an interoperability solution for watermark detection such as a standardized API access method, a publicly readable signpost mechanism embedded in content, or participation in a consortium detection solution by February 2, 2027

This is their version of retirement. Did you think Jeff Dean was going to stop doing tech and play golf?

I suspect they want a bit more control over what they're working on. These days the bean counters are running Google.

I don't quite read it that way, it seems more like "take this with a grain of salt". But I suppose it depends on who's saying it.

I've seen it using a lot of Instagram lately too. I can't even check that source because I don't have the app installed.

When I do try to check the links, they often don't support what's stated. If I call out Gemini, it says something inane like "I don't actually use these links the way a human might --- I didn't misinterpret it because I didn't even read it!"

Recently I was searching for information about fig trees (the fruit). It kept telling me things that didn't make sense, luckily the links revealed it was answering about fiddle leaf fig trees (the houseplant). Unfortunately that was not a correctable problem --- it kept happening even after I pointed out the mistake. So I'm really not too sure what the purpose of the system is. You still have to read through the references in their entirety (if not paywalled!), and with skepticism. And then if you find a problem, AI isn't going to get back on track.

You can't predict when SPY is gonna correct or by how much. When capital leaves the AI trade it will just flow back into boring stocks. DJI is up MOM 4 months running.