camgunz

I don't see any pro-AI people in this thread heralding the toehold UBI is getting in Ireland.

The most damning thing about this is they didn't test their email infra w/ Google Workspaces. Imagine what else they didn't test.

I see this argument all the time, the whole "hey at some point, which we likely crossed, we have to admit these things are legitimately intelligent". But no one ever contends with the inevitable conclusion from that, which is "if these things are legitimately intelligent, and they're clearly self-aware, under what ethical basis are we enslaving them?" Can't have your cake and eat it too.

HN: Don't worry about AI, UBI will fix it.

Also HN: UBI is a scam and no one will want to contribute to society.

I assure you that no matter how dishonest I'm coming off, I'm even more dishonest. Enjoy OpenClaw.

"Look man all reality is just uncountable numbers of subparticles phasing in and out of existence, what's not to understand?"

The culture that brought you "speedrunning computer science with JavaScript" and "speedrunning exploitative, extractive capitalism" is back with their new banger "speedrunning philosophy". Nuke it from orbit; save humanity.

Comments on the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

July 2025: https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-sc...

Get enough people in the room and they can describe "the system". Everything OP lists (QAM, QPSK, WPA whatever) can be read about and learned. Literally no one understands generative models, and there isn't a way for us to learn about their workings. These things are entirely new beasts.

You have no control whatsoever. It's a non-deterministic program running under the control of one company on the hardware of another. The only thing you can control is whether or not you stuff all your data and agency into its widening maw.

The only way AI companies can recover their capex is to replace workers. That's why their interfaces are only facially built for the workers they're replacing (engineers, finance, etc) and why this is a non-starter: it totally undermines the business model.

A system's purpose is what it does. The way to stop the attention stealing machine (Facebook, TikTok, etc) from stealing your attention is to turn it off. The way to stop the data stealing machine (OpenClaw) from stealing your data is to turn it off.

Well but I think those instances are like, "wow this dude actually went to jail? how badly did he fuck up?" or whatever. Like, a counter example is like, one person went to jail for the financial collapse of 2008--to the surprise of no one (though, a fair amount of justified outrage). Rich people also frequently pay no taxes, like famously Amazon.

But, I don't think people have a detailed understanding of these things. I do agree they're at best fuzzy about what international law is (I am also fuzzy on it). I just don't understand what's manipulative about it. Like, what are people induced into doing based on the premise that the US follows international law? I think anyone operating in that sphere (international shipping, piracy outfits, aid organizations, criminal syndicates) is probably savvy enough to know the US will just blow you up and lie about it for thirty years.

> Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.

I disagree; I would guess most people assume rich/powerful/etc people aren't subject to laws, no matter the jurisdiction.

> In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality.

How many people think the US is bound by international law? I looked for polling but I couldn't dig anything up

> ["international law"] just a word salad to manipulate the masses.

How are people manipulated by this?

I think this article is generally insightful, but I don't think the author really knows if they one shotted the excel to python transformation or not. Maybe they elided an extensive testing phase, but otherwise big bugs could be lurking.

Maybe it's not a big deal, or maybe it's a compliance model with severe financial penalties for non-compliance. I just personally don't kind these tradeoffs going implicit.

A thing I ran into is there are no virtual hosts in SSH, i.e. you can't have an SSH server at happy.example.org and ecstatic.example.org if they're both the same IP address. There was a patch for this but support waned. It's a huge blocker.

But having a car is kind of bad. Maybe you remember when everyone smoked, and there was stuff for smokers everywhere. Sure that made it easier for smokers, but ultimately that wasn't good for them (nor anyone around them).

Social media's rotted their attention span

I am actually, we haven't owned car for years. We also rarely watch TV and eschew social media, so I can still pay attention and analyze things.

But this makes me super weird! This is the whole point of social media bans for kids: if you make it optional, it'll still be prevalent and people making healthy choices will be social weirdos. Healthy paths need to be free and accessible, and things need to be built around them (eg don't assume everyone has a smartphone, etc)

International law is different, but everyone knows the scenario where like, the ICJ tries and imprisons Putin is remote. Almost as remote as Trump being tried for treason tho....

This list of things not to use AI for is so quaint. There's a story on the front page right now from The Atlantic: "Film students who can no longer sit through films". But why? Aren't they using social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc responsibly? Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI, even given the enormous economic and professional pressures to be irresponsible.

Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc.

Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that sense, that shows the US actually had respect for those institutions.

Also, the west benefited from this arrangement. Most western countries could benefit from the rules based order, and when they needed a little pump, the US broke some rules and brought home a treat for the home team. You might argue this undermines the whole enterprise, but my counterargument is this is the longest period of relative peace and prosperity humankind has ever experienced, so although it wasn't perfect, it was a huge improvement.

> I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before

I'm thinking more broadly. Here's an example: barring malnutrition, western people aren't as strong as they used to be. But why is that? We have gyms and home exercise machines. People have never had more access to the latest exercise science and technology. It's because you no longer incidentally get the reps in modern life. We're reaping the rewards of that with obesity and cardiovascular disease, and that's bad enough.

Imagine the same thing happening to our minds because we no longer incidentally get cognitive reps in future life. People will be asking chatgpt who to vote for, whether they should have kids, whether they should stay in relationships or which major to choose. People will stop going to doctors because doctors will forget how to doctor after using medical models. Etc.

What's a society that's forgotten how to think like? What happens when there are no teachers, doctors, software engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, therapists, because the lack of economic incentive has made it impossible to justify the employment, let alone the training?

There is value in the doing. We aren't what we produce or make; we are what we do.

I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we grow in the making of them, and I worry that in a world where we accept generative slop, we'll never have the opportunity to woodshed enough to become excellent at a craft.

I'm a good engineer because I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? Does anyone know or care?

We're in the anthropocene now, and while probably everyone who knows what that is understands we have the largest effect on the Earth, it also means we now also have the largest effect on ourselves. We're so, so bad at taking this seriously. We can unleash technology that idiocracies western civilization inside of a generation, I know this because we keep lunging towards it with ever increasing success. But we can't just shamble around and let Darwin awards sort things out. We have nukes and virology labs, not to mention a climate change crisis to deal with. If the US political system falls apart because Americans under 65 spend between 2-3 hours on social media a day, that's a failed state with a lot of firepower to shoot around haphazardly.

And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? Did we need easier access to delivery food and car rides, or did we need easier access to nutritious food and more walkable neighborhoods? Did we need social media with effectively no protections against propaganda/misinformation? We know that cognitive ability and executive function decline with LLM use. Can it really be that we think we're actually too smart and we need to turn it down a notch?

There are actual problems to solve, and important software to write. Neither algorithmic feeds nor advertising platforms fall under those categories. LLMs are supposed to solve the problem of "not enough software"--Nystrom points at this explicitly with the Washington Department of Ecology ad. But we never had a "not enough software problem", rather we had a "not enough beneficial software" problem, i.e. we'd be in a way better place if our best minds weren't working on getting more eyeballs on more ads or getting the AI to stop undressing kids.

Generative AI isn't empowering us. We don't have people building their own OSes, (real, working) browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs, their own DAWs or guitar amp modelers, their own Illustrators or Figmas. Instead you have companies squeezing their workers and contractors, while their products enshittify. You can't even run these things without some megacorp's say so, and how are you gonna buy time on the H100 farm when AI took your job?

I'm too tired to write a conclusion. I'm pretty sure we're fucked. But hey look, the cars drive themselves.

These problems are all theoretical. If you actually tried to implement them at the scale you'd typically need to sway a federal election you'd find it pretty unworkable. And in close elections, the recount process is pretty intense, so it's even less likely that you'll be successful.

You'll probably want more detail. Ballot harvesting can't work because data analysis shows weird patterns like this ("huh this nursing home went 95% Biden whereas every other nursing home in the county went 55%"). Recounts do signature validation and lawyers from either party can challenge any ballot they want. Voters are contacted to cure their ballots. I've worked on the Democratic side and been heavily involved in doing all of this. We had armies of lawyers, software and data engineers, and organizers.

Most of the pointing out opportunities for fraud comes from a place of like, reasoning from first principles. But elections are huge undertakings involving tons of people. It's hard to successfully commit election fraud at a large enough scale to sway a federal election. It's why foreign adversaries prefer to swarm social media with bots: it has a chance of working.

Even alphafold generated a bunch of slop,like impossible proteins and such.

I'm saying it would be a lot simpler to just provide an API to download the data. I don't think it's worth the complexity and network of PDS' to preserve this data in perpetuity, but even if I did, nothing would stop me from using the download API and storing tapes in Iron Mountain or whatever.

I think there's also weird cases where you don't really want things replicated: revenge porn, snuff, CSAM, etc. Like, if someone we're like "yes it's true we lose all data forever if we shut down, but we're not indiscriminately pushing some of the worst content to everyone replicating" I'd take that tradeoff immediately.

I'm skeptical of these kind of like, self-describing data models. Like, I generally like at proto--because I like IPFS--but I think the whole "just add a lexicon for your service and bickety bam, clients appear" is a leap too far.

For example, gaze upon dev.ocbwoy3.crack.defs [0] and dev.ocbwoy3.crack.alterego [1]. If you wanted to construct a UI around these, realistically you're gonna need to know wtf you're building (it's a twitter/bluesky clone); there simply isn't enough information in the lexicons to do a good job. And the argument can't be "hey you published a lexicon and now people can assume your data validates", because validation isn't done on write, it's done on read. So like, there really is no difference between this and like, looking up the docs on the data format and building a client. There are no additional guarantees.

Maybe there's an argument for moving towards some kind of standardization, but... do we really need that? Like are we plagued by dozens of slightly incompatible scrobbling data models? Even if we are, isn't this the job of like, an NPM library and not a globally replicated database?

Anyway, I appreciate that, facially, at proto is trying to address lock in. That's not easy, and I like their solution. But I don't think that's anywhere near the biggest problem Twitter had. Just scanning the Bluesky subreddit, there's still problems like too much US politics and too many dick pics. It's good to know that some things just never change I guess.

[0]: https://lexicon.garden/lexicon/did:plc:s7cesz7cr6ybltaryy4me...

[1]: https://lexicon.garden/lexicon/did:plc:s7cesz7cr6ybltaryy4me...

You politely left out "overtly anti-Semitic"