eesmith

Are you calling for open border with no controls? That's the only way to get meritocracy.

The system is set up so the casino wins. You cannot, with a straight face, argue the odds are in your favor, but there are rules about how the casino works, both formal and informal.

When a casino only investigates cases where someone wins $1 million on the slots, to see if there's a fault in the system, while never investigating all the times that people lose, that's technically within the legal system, but the spirit of gambling is not being upheld, and people get upset. Just ask Katerina Bookman.

The immigration system, with the thumb firmly in favor of the interests of capital, is still based on the expectation of good faith by those running the system, as doing otherwise results in orders of magnitude more rules, or an alternate set of unspoken rules based more on vibes.

"Pausing" is a bad faith breaking of the spirit of the system.

It means no use of Visa or American Express bank cards, which are US companies.

I think SWIFT transactions are under US control.

No use of Apple, Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Uber, or other US-based services.

Eg, "Canadian judge Kimberly Prost is unable to use credit cards or access everyday services in what she calls an attack on the independence of the judiciary " - https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

The HN submission link is incorrectly titled.

The blog is titled "Merchants of Insecurity". The word "hole" does not exist anywhere on the page, the HTML, or the HTTP headers.

Yesterday's submission used the correct title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433378

Is this a "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" objection, where even the slightest bit of hypocrisy or impurity justifies rejecting the argument?

If a vegetarian, who became a vegetarian because of the high environmental impact of meat production, berates you for defending data center water use, would that convince you to change your mind?

What about a vegan, who also stopped flying and doesn't drive, and is organizing a protest to shut down the local golf course?

Yes, the intro paragraph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood highlights how it's a controversial subject.

You are, I presume, arguing that companies should not have personhood.

I think any definition is going to have caveats. When does a fetus gain volition? Does someone in an irreversible permanent vegetative state lose personhood? Do apes or cetaceans have volition and thus personhood?

The Wikipedia page also points out that "volition" comes from a certain Western philosophical viewpoint, but other philosophies have a different idea of what personhood means.

In any case, "personhood" doesn't mean that all persons have equal legal rights. A 10 year old has personhood but, for example, cannot vote.

"personhood" doesn't require voting rights. Babies have personhood even if they cannot vote.

Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.

Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.

"Put some Ethyl in your Tank!"

Ethyl lead, that is.

Yes, photo safaris have been a thing since at least the 1960s, when it was all film cameras, and the term "shutterbugs" used since at least the 1940s.

Indeed, now that you bring it up, I think a good interpretation of this survey is that more people now are doing photo safaris than they did some decades ago, where "safari" takes on a broader meaning tied to popular culture trends.

It think it's like how many people go to the Louvre for the sole purpose of seeing (and photographing) the Mona Lisa, or (more distantly) the standard itinerary of the Grand Tour, both done because that's what everyone else (that they care about) thinks is the right or cool thing to do.

The survey result is 'nearly four in ten travellers (39%) say they have visited a tourist site mainly to take a photo or record a video.'

You, I believe, are making a different observation, which is that taking a photo or recording a film has long been a component of many tourist trips. Which is of course true.

I'll add that likely more people would have done so had film and film development been a lot cheaper. We certainly did trips in the 1980s where we took no camera, or if we did, only a few pictures or perhaps a single roll.

At the end it explained why they think it's troubling:

"American competitiveness abroad is not just a commercial concern, but a strategic imperative. Protecting the United States’ continued economic supremacy on a world stage starts by defeating legislation that threatens it."

But that is still not "corporatism" ("corporativismo" in Italian), as used in Mussolini's fascism. From the Snopes page:

> In his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton describes corporatism in this way:

> The economy was divided into associations (called 'syndicates') of workers, employers and the professions; only one syndicate was allowed in each branch of industry, and all officials were either fascist politicians or else loyal to the fascist cause. According to law the syndicates were autonomous, but in fact they were run by the state. The 'corporations' united the syndicates in a given industry, but made no pretence at autonomy from the state.

That is nothing at all like what is happening with Western economies, so it is not "corporatism", so it is not "textbook fascism".

You can read the various definitions of fascism at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism and verify that none align with 'marriage of corporations and government'.

FWIW, surely the Dutch East Indies company was a marriage of corporation and government, yes?

I believe you are referring to the misquote described by McKay as 'Benito Mussolini created the word "fascism." He defined it as "the merging of the state and the corporation."'?

I'll now quote from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fascism-corporations-corpo... , which thoroughly rejects that interpretation:

"In other words, corporatism in Mussolini's fascism was not a free-market capitalist system. Far from it. It did not allow for the kind of competition, innovation, market entry, and research and development characteristic of modern capitalism, and it was closely ruled in every way by the state with Mussolini at its head.

Anything that draws a direct link between what are now referred to as corporations (large, powerful private companies operating in a modern free-market capitalist system) and Mussolini's corporatism, is founded on a misunderstanding — most likely caused by the similarity between the words."

And then there's People Express Airlines in the 1980s, which let you pay the fare in cash, after takeoff. Just walk onboard and take a seat.

I also know someone who publishes their JAR files under the MIT license, though they don't publish the source code, so ... have fun reverse-engineering!

I also failed to follow the logic of that quoted part.

Free software is the four freedoms you mentioned - use, study, modify, and redistribute. There is no obligation to accept anything, for any reason.

I don't think the argument that AI is a tool, combined with the disbelief that people would reject a tool due to "the circumstances of the contribution’s creation, and not due to its quality" is a strong argument for broad AI use, because we know examples were many people stopped using high quality tools due to the circumstances of its creation.

The Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy was created by the Nazi Eduard Pernkopf and his four Nazi artist assistants. It is a "scientific and artistic masterpiece" ... created as the result of Nazi medical research on the corpses of executed political prisoners, and containing Nazi symbols in the original artwork which were airbrushed out for wider, post-war release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf

Sure, for some the book fundamentally a tool, but "[o]pponents have asserted that any use of the atlas makes the user complicit in Nazi crimes".

The Wikipedia entry ends with a quote from Pieter Carstens: "Beautiful anatomical drawings were created, but this was only made possible by the unethical and unlawful procurement of the anatomical remains of murdered victims of an evil Nazi regime–thus beauty and evil were fused. This fusion not only perverts and diminishes the status and content of the Pernkopf Atlas, but also explains why it should be rejected. / [It] should be permitted to show its duplicitous face only rarely and then for very good reason in the teaching of history, medical ethics and medical law so that its lessons will be learned and its history never repeated."

This is not a call for a ban of this tool (the atlas), but rather a call for highly limited use, for very specific purposes.

Since I think I would be one of those opponents to widespread use of the atlas, you can see how I would factor in "the circumstances of the contribution’s creation", even for a high quality contribution.

"Other than TSA" sounds to me very much like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

In the early 1990s, my girlfriend was scared of flying. I went with her to the gate for emotional support. I also sometimes met people when they arrived at the gate. No longer, at least, not without some planning.

In the early 1990s, full names and id checks were not required. This made for an active resale market which has since disappeared, with the profit going to the airliners. My mother and I share the same first initial, which proved personally useful one time when we booked the ticket as "E. Smith" since we weren't sure which of us was going make the trip. No longer.

In the 1990s, from drop-off to gate in the small city I lived was about 5 minutes, for carry-on. Check-in at the gate by showing the ticket. The only inspection was for guns. I regularly carried a pocket knife back then, even on planes. No longer.

In the early 2000s I traveled international. My carry-on at times included bottles of beer (to share with people in Europe) and wine (returning from South Africa), since I thought that would be safer than in my luggage. I bought them in regular stores. No longer.

Around 2008 I made the mistake once of returning international via SFO to visit friends there. I knew where they lived - I've driven there many times. But I didn't know their zip, only their street address, and there was no way for me to check in the new automated kiosk without that vital piece of useless information. I was able to look it up, but I was flustered and in panic that I would miss the flight.

Back in the 1990s, as US citizen I could just show up in most countries, with only my passport - no visa, no fingerprinting, no automated facial recognition, and no "electronic system for travel authorization" or rather its foreign equivalents.

It even worked the other way. I had friends of mine from South Africa going to Canada for a conference, with a transfer in the US. They didn't know they were supposed to get a US visa even though they didn't leave the airport. But the US at the time did have the TWOV (Transit Without Visa) program, which meant they were able to get to the conference and back home. They even had a comfortable TWOV room at the airport, and an escort for those who needed to step outside for a smoke. The TWOV program was suspended in 2003 and has not been restored.

Air travel in the 1990s felt like freedom. Now it feels like a key part of modern government security and control, with little leeway for humanity.

This UN report isn't about "foolish uses of freshwater."

This report praises AI as a part of the next technological revolution, but points out there are problems that should and can be addressed to make its benefits more equitably distributed, to minimize its negatives, to promote transparency in resource use, and to address sovereignty issues.

Discussion of water rights reform, water use for almonds, alfalfa, and golf courses, etc. are completely irrelevant to the goal of this report.

Yes, I've mostly stopped eating meat because of its environmental impact. I've also stopped flying, and buy most of my clothes second-hand. So of course it makes sense to also minimize AI use. We can easily do many things, and unlike animal products, AI tools like image generation are not embedded in millennia of culture.

FWIW, I have a hard time evaluating the validity of "A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage."

My back-of-the-envelope estimation, with total power and water consumed, ended up with a few un-resolvable factors.

First, what is "the average AI user"? Is that just people, or does it include businesses, militaries, the police and other government surveillance organizations, etc?

As specific points, does the data collection and AI analysis by both the NSA and McDonald's count as part of the average AI user’s resource usage?

The report says "A spam filter and an image generator are both forms of AI" so am I an AI user because I have a Bayesian filter built into my email client? Because if so, my minuscule power use is nothing like the what's needed for typical image generation, causing the overall average use to decrease.

Second, the wholesale prices I see for power, water, and milk, are all subsidized values, either from direct government subsidizes (like funding dams in the US southwest, or farm subsidizes) or from incomplete pricing (like the environmental impact of burning natural gas for AI). How do I even convert a hundredweight of milk for the wholesale price into the size of a glass? Or did you use the retail price of milk?

In other words, how did you end up with your conclusion?

It has been an issue for decades. So what? It isn't like ignoring the topic will make it go away.

The report I read does outline the advantages, starting off in the executive summary, after the AI-generate image, with:

"Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems. AI systems that learn, perceive, reason, and generate content are now embedded across economies and daily lives, supporting services from translation and recommendations to finance, healthcare, energy management, and transportation."

It later says:

"""... AI enables tasks ranging from data processing and translation to diagnosis, forecasting, and autonomous decision-making. Today, AI can analyze massive datasets in seconds, translate languages, detect diseases from medical scans, forecast climate trends, and power everything from personalized recommendations to self-driving cars.

By executing complex operations at speeds and scales far beyond human capacity, AI is more than just a technological tool—it is a transformative force. It is reshaping economies, redefining labor, and influencing how societies interact with technology and with the planet. As AI’s influence accelerates, so too does the urgency to understand its full impact: not only the promise it offers, but also the profound challenges it raises.

AI is a powerful driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)1, or Industry 4.0—a global transformation marked by the convergence of digital, physical, and biological systems. Propelled by rapid advances in everything from AI and robotics to cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), this revolution is reconfiguring how people live, work, and are governed. Yet while much attention has been given to AI’s capabilities and risks, including bias, misinformation, and automation leading to loss of jobs, far less focus has been placed on AI’s environmental impact.

... The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 was nothing short of a technological shockwave. ... Once a niche technology, AI is now woven into daily life, powering much of the digital world, including voice assistants, search engines, recommendation systems, smart energy meters, and smartphones. The influence of AI is transforming how people work, communicate, access information, and consume services. ... AI is employed in diagnostics, medical imaging, and patient risk prediction—improving speed and precision of care, while reducing treatment costs. ... AI helps forecast demand, manage power grids, and integrate renewable sources into power networks. ... AI is also revolutionizing transportation and mobility."""

Could you clarify how that's not a good outline of the advantages, and elaborate what specifically you think is fear-mongering?

What in this report is making your reduce your trust in UN?

Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:

"“This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH who led the investigation team. “It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable.”"

It is impossible to judge of the net benefit is worth the cost if you don't know the cost. More specifically, "The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured."

Its key policy messages even include: "AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem."

You can also see it's not anti-AI by how it argues, for example: "Governments should integrate AI infrastructure into energy planning, water governance, and land-use permitting, and require standardized environmental footprint reporting."

The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.

Yes. And two seemingly unrelated things can share deeper similarities.

Since California produces about 80% of the world's almonds, it also means that the global water footprint for almonds is about the same as the global water footprint for AI.

More directly, a global analysis does not mean the AI data centers are evenly distributed around the world. From the article:

"A Bloomberg analysis suggests about two-thirds of data centers built or planned since 2022 are water-stressed regions, concentrated in Australia, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Saudi-Arabia, and the US Southwest (Nicoletti et al., 2025). Within the United States, Texas hosts over 400 data centers projected to consume nearly 3% of statewide water supply by 2030 (Martinez, 2025), in a state grappling with recurring drought conditions and aquifer depletion."

"Corporate sustainability reports confirm this concentration: approximately 42% of Microsoft's water consumption occurs in water-stress regions, and 15% of Google's water use is concentrated in high water-scarcity areas (Barratt et al., 2025)."

Comparing water-stressed regions in California for almond production to water-stressed regions used for data centers does seem relevant.

I agree with your link that the unsustainable use of water for almond farms causes problems, and agree that these problems are quite similar to that of water use for AI, so both should have high scrutiny. Quoting your link:

> Almonds use roughly the same amount of water as total indoor water use in California. This is unsustainable.

> There are simply too many almonds being planted in areas with unsustainable water supplies (minimal to no groundwater, uncertain or no surface water). ...

> We’re not opposed to growing almonds; we’re opposed to growing them unsustainably and taking water away from the environment and our cities. Almonds are a luxury and export crop; approximately 70% of the state’s crop is shipped abroad for the express benefit of a handful of industrial-scale growers and hedge funds.

> Water is a public trust resource, and Californians must regain control of it as they face a future certain to be beleaguered by drought, low reservoirs and over-drafted aquifers. We can't continue to subsidize agribusiness plutocrats with the water ratepayers need for basic survival.

Water for AI also uses unsustainable water supplies, directs water away from the environment and our cities, and is subsidized for big tech plutocrats paid for by water ratepayers. It also sure seems to me that most AI use falls in the "luxury" category.

I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together.

When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.

(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)

Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.

The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.

Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.

Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of?

It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.

I nearly always use DDG in noai mode. A couple of hours ago I failed to find information about the origin of 'click piano' - a setting on my electronic piano - so I decided to try Google Search, only to be hit with the "click here to prove you are a human" then the "select the boxes containing a ... to prove you are a human".

I closed the window rather than waste my time more, which is my increasingly common response to CAPTCHAs.

I'm also seeing issues with Google Scholar. A few days ago I was at the local college library to look up some papers. The same Google Scholar search on the library terminal, reloaded, would bring up anywhere between 3 and 17 citations. I also got CAPTCHA'd on Google Scholar, only to find the CAPTCHA triggered the library terminal's URL filters, which prevents anyone from actually doing the CAPTCHA.

I showed it to the librarians. They had not seen it before. It is, after all, between sessions. The fall term starts soon. I wonder what will happen.

> With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread.

I tried to verify that a couple of years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709428 . It does not seem to be true.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Fa... says "Wilbur and Orville were in the vanguard of those manufacturers that offered right-hand threads on one crank arm and left-hand threads on the other" but not the inventors.

I was also able to find earlier uses of left-handed threads for bicycles, like in this 1881 book, at https://archive.org/details/indispensablebic00stur/page/14/m...

"The Centaur Crank is first screwed up to a shoulder on the axle with right and left-handed threads, so that the pressure of the foot tends to make it all the more secure ; whilst, to prevent its loosening by “ back-pedalling,” a slightly tapered conical pin is driven through both crank and axle, and secured with a nut."

Do you know the patent number? I searched the USPTO but found no bicycle related patent by either of the Wright brothers.

So in the country you live in, a shop owner is free to kick out women from his phone store, simply for being a woman. India banned discrimination on the basis of caste back in 1947. Does that something you can imagine with your "third-world brain"?

The US used to use this logic until around 1960. It was a horrible country, at least if you were black. Even if a white person wanted to offer housing to black people, the white person was discriminated against. Collective private action used to reinforce a white supremacist social structure.

That's why we needed laws to require public services be available without discrimination based on race, religion, and various other protected classes.

"A private business can refuse anyone. That's because it is private."

A business may be privately owned while doing business with the public. That is quite different than a privately owned business which operates a private club.

Furthermore, businesses are subject to regulations that private people do not have. This is clear in organization structures like a limited company, where the company is a recognized as being legally distinct from its owners. These companies exist only because the government says so, which means the government can control what they can or cannot do.

It's also clear in places like licensing, where someone cannot simply say "I am a medical doctor" and offer medical services, and in other regulations like food safety, where restaurants -- even privately owned ones -- are held to standards which people don't have when cooking for themselves.

This was a tangent starting with "I find the RealID opposition baffling." at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983452 .

I oppose Real ID because I don't understand the problem it's trying to solve, and it seems expensive and cumbersome for at least some.

Real ID is a US-only issue, so I interpreted "If you are worried that your tenant might happen to be an illegal migrant" in the US context.

In the US case, quoting https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination :

> National origin discrimination involves treating workers (applicants or employees) unfavorably or favorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent, or because they appear to be of a certain ethnic background (even if they are not).

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> National origin discrimination also can involve treating people unfavorably because they are married to (or associated with) a person of a certain national origin.

In where you live, and where you used to live, a business can refuse service to a minority group? To indigenous people? What about to someone whose boyfriend is a member of a minority group?

You write 'exercising their basic rights of liking and disliking whoever they want (and consequently making or not making commercial agreements with them)'.

The "consequently" is doing some heavy lifting. In the US you have the basic rights of liking and disliking whoever you want. This is part of the freedom of assembly, which is the US way of saying the freedom of association.

Commercial agreements for services available to the public, however, are interpreted under different rules than private agreements. In the US you are free, under the law, to run a private club which refuses black people, Jewish people, women, and so one. These all exist.

However, if your club is open to the public, then you cannot discriminate on race, religion, or sex.

(Technically the US had federal civil rights laws, which under our federal system only apply to businesses large enough to nominally be involved in interstate commerce. However, state laws essentially extend this to everyone, with a few carve-outs for, for example, a women looking for a housemate and insisting they be another woman.)

Do you live in one of the handful of countries which are not signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination? Quoting from https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/cerd.pdf

"In compliance with the fundamental obligations laid down in article 2 of this Convention, States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights: ... The right to housing .. The right of access to any place or service intended for use by the general public, such as transport hotels, restaurants, cafes, theatres and parks."

Almost every third-world country is signatory, so it can't be some broad "third-world brain" viewpoint.