fzeroracer

There are some incredibly strange equivalences going on in here that make me think the person in question is indeed quite out of date.

The people pushing for the destruction of privacy and attested software integrity ARE the tech bros. I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity. They're building up their moat in real time because not only does it let them kill that pesky FOSS, but also it means they can legally gather even more data from individuals in question.

It also goes hand-in-hand with the increasingly authoritarian bent a lot of those same people have taken and these resources will absolutely be used to crack down on minorities and things they don't like.

I think your head would have to be firmly planted deep underground to somehow not connect the two dots. As another poster here said, they're literally lobbying for these age verification laws because it benefits them.

I'm sitting at about a decade of experience and it feels equally bad here. Honestly right now I'm mostly waiting for either AI to blow up and companies to scale back massively or for other engineers to deskill themselves into oblivion so that skilled engineers get the edge again.

If neither gambit pay out then I'll just go find some other career and keep software as my hobby. I'm not going to let this billion dollar industry ruin the thing I enjoy.

> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

I see few people actively engaging with the thesis of the article so lemme restate it in another way:

We can agree that the invention of the car revolutionized transit, but when you optimize around cars it creates perverse incentives that warp society. American society for example is rife with these issues: Cities and towns that are fundamentally unwalkable, cars that are increasingly large and hazards to public safety and lower and lower expectations for drivers.

In that sense the AI craze is exactly the same. Even if you believe that AI will or has revolutionized coding (a take I firmly disagree with), the resulting craze is creating perverse incentives that are warping tech. Access to computing is becoming narrower and narrower as prices sky rocket, applications are becoming more unstable and unsecure by the day and more and more of our economy is reliant on AI gains that will likely not be realized. Not all tools reshape society for the better, much like how advertising was a tool for attempting to gain eyes on your product now it has become a dystopian weapon to sell your users as the product.

This is without getting into the actual issues AI has directly, just the way it's warping things around it.

The article really sums it up perfectly. It's incredibly see to see topical reasons why people fucking hate everything tech touches. You can't buy a TV without it being an embedded advertising device that forces you to see ads every time you turn it on. You can't buy a car without needing a touchscreen that if it breaks you're SOL. People who actually like computers increasingly can't even afford to buy one

If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.

Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...

I've found this to be more consistently the case than not. People almost never post their project and in the rare cases that they do, it's usually some shambling mess that doesn't actually function. They put together a keyword soup post that sounds good on an AI generated resume but falls apart upon investigation.

'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.

I can't say I agree, I think it's more about the death's you're exposed to. Doctors get to experience the full brunt of how the medical system treats patients, the good and the bad. So they opt out of it when it's close to their time so they can die a peaceful death.

But a peaceful death at home is rarely real in my opinion. My father was pretty badly traumatized by his mother who had oral cancer, got a bit through treatment and then refused to continue. His last days with her were spent as she slowly starved and went through terminal dehydration, barely conscious through the drugs hospice used to try and make the passage easier. It's something we tell ourselves post-hoc to try and make ourselves feel better because they died at home with family.

This doesn't mean dying in a hospital is much easier and often family keeps people in a state of semi-torture so that they can have more time. But that I think sometimes we have this 'ideal' of how we want to die, and the reality will always be much messier than that.

I don't agree with the critical comment at all, particularly because the OP is incredibly guilty of making drive-by comments in their very recent post history that don't actually add anything to the conversation. People will complain about the site 'becoming reddit' while making inane posts that are clearly against the rules or don't actually bring anything to the conversation. People don't practice what they clearly preach.

In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.

It's really quite sad to see people think this is a 'great' idea in a world where the US literacy rates are falling rapidly and people graduate out of highschool barely able to function. Slashing both the bottom and top end of education aid isn't going to suddenly make things financially viable or improve education; it's just going to further narrow education and turn college into Highschool 2 which it slowly is already becoming.

If you wanted to tackle the problems of education you'd start by improving our failing highschools and then ensuring higher education is free and easily accessible so that the earnings gulf isn't as wide.

Then this falls into the exact same pit the OP mentioned, either you need to blindly trust that the LLM is generating tests that actually work, or you need extensive test coverage for your tests to ensure that your tests are actually testing.

Blog on site by company pushing AI adoption and AI finance products advocates that AI does not hurt hiring and that you should keep integrating it. In other news, forks frequently found in kitchen and other surprising facts.

Speaking from my side of the industry (the gaming industry), we are seeing a massive increase in the number of games people are making. Above the growth that was already there.

The distinction is that the games being made are garbage, and I mean worse than shovelware garbage. It's actively made things much harder as someone that fancies himself an indie game curator because you gotta dig through more and more games to find stuff with actual people behind it.

> I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself

In many respects this reflects the growing K-shaped nature of our economy. Average consumers don't matter because you really just need a small cohort of wealthy individuals to be hyper-invested in your product, 'regular' consumption is therefore just a way to keep things relatively on rails rather than the actual economic driver.

All of these AI-first companies don't actually have any market fit, so what they're doing is selling an imaginary product so that they can get investments and loans. As you said the company is the product.

> Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy.

As someone that actually lives in Seattle, this is so funny to read. It comes across as someone that pretends to live in Seattle and there sure are a lot of people that love to pretend they live here.

Seattle has far more energy than Austin does for example and it doesn't really take much digging to get involved in the various scenes we have here. The food scene here does suck though, that's universally true.

To put it succinctly: It really comes down to jealously. The people generating creative works, whether it's art or writing or games or whatever do so because they are utter voids of creativity. They do so because they believe this machine can even the odds for them, finally show artists how it's done because they have far better ideas than any snobby creative.

And as sardonic as I am I'm also not joking. This is the #1 thing I see consistently show up when you push back on the drivel they're generating. They're upset that there's a perceived wall in front of them that's gatekeeping them from art and they want it destroyed.

It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.

Then those 'competitors' can fork Godot and make their own AI version of it. Will they? No, no they wont. But they sure will complain about the rules while doing nothing about it.

The drama is in a nutshell someone made a really stupid post claiming only the woke use game engines. Godot community manager said guess that makes us woke (paraphrased), conservatives went batshit, got blocked on Twitter or elsewhere for going insane and a few innocent tweets got caught in the crossfire. Someone went off and made a fork of Godot as a 'non-political version' which went in the only obvious direction it could go.

Basically some incredibly stupid highschool level drama fed by the worst YouTubers you can think of. People vaguepost about it because it's so dumb.

In order to reject low quality PRs, you first have to determine that they are low quality. Guess what LLM-generated code is really good at hiding.

The way back to sanity would've required the opposition party to be worth anything. Right now they're busy writing up their own project 2029 plan which involves cracking down on the internet and whining about the old guard getting voted out of office for being feckless.

This isn't 'a person', this is one of 'THE' people. Elon Musk is technically just 'a person' at Tesla, but their actions have clear and profound effects. The same is true here.

When you're a founder or one of the c-suite your actions represent the full company. That's part of your job.

> However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?

A bit too late for that now, isn't it? Extreme anti-immigration stances have always been associated with anti-privacy because eventually those stances evolve into state apparatuses designed to identify dissidents and targets for deportation. What will you do when the party your co-founder supports eventually demands stripping away privacy for the sake of finding 'terrorists'? Trying to hold this thin veneer of apoliticalism outside of your privacy stance is a remarkably foolish one and one that most people can identify. Especially those who saw that progression occur in real time.

This is quite literally what they said: "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."

They want to deport anyone that isn't Swedish enough, even if they're native-born Swedes.

Generally speaking, if the mission of a company is privacy and then the actions of the c-suite or founders indicates that they are more than willing to compromise on that, then yes. Why shouldnt you scrutinize people whose product is not aligned with their goals?

And yes I do actively switch products. I left the Windows ecosystem for Linux and I will leave Mullvad for whatever else pops up. So it goes.

They recently laid off an internal team that was popular among workers and also fired one of the oldest employees for dubious reasons. Notably all of the people laid off or fired were union advocates, so this can be seen as a supercharged reaction to an effort to union bust (whether it was or not, it was certainly perceived that way).

> Why does this fear exist? I’m at a loss. Is it because people aren’t less educated now than they were 30 years ago? Is it because deadly diseases have fallen out of public consciousness? Was there a coordinated external effort to psyop the American people into believing such things (now I’m starting to feel like a conspiracy theorist)?

There was essentially a coordinated effort and it's not particularly a conspiracy. Shock Jocks, YouTube personalities, folks like Alex Jones etc all would gleefully share anti-vaccine sentiment because it got eyeballs and eyeballs is more money. Then it travels up the chain, creating an entire industry around anti-vaccine sentiment by selling snake oil. Eventually you get stupid enough politicians to genuinely believe it and enact policy on it.

And unfortunately most people are incredibly stupid with zero foresight. Someone's kid will die of measles and they'll just shrug and say it was God's plan. They'll gleefully send their kid with fifty preventable diseases out to die and kill others along the way.

Saying never talk to the police is an 'online belief' is frankly baffling.

There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.

People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.

I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria.

So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.