I found this one of the more entertaining formulations of "back to the land" style sentiments that I have ever come across here, so the downvotes you are getting aside, I thank you for the humor.
487 karma · joined May 28, 2026
> Trump does have a say in how to run google, in a very real sense.
Indeed, as does every President or government. But surely, you have noticed and take seriously that he has acted with greater executive fiat? That by American standards, while he may not be totally alien, he is not "normal"? The question then is whether we want to accelerate along this trend. What is interesting is many populists, whether on the right or left, seem to answer in the affirmative, confident giving their preferred president increased power is the right trade to make. I simply ask, what happens when the government flips, as it always does? Then maybe you will come to regret your position.
> American elites are more than happy to follow basically whatever Trump wants them to do with the knowledge that they'll get preferential treatment by the law and win all the no-bid contracts he can award. But ask yourself if this would be any different if Trump were head of a large company under a smaller regulatory state. Seems pretty obvious that not much would change.
The first part of this is ahistorical. American elites always line up behind the President. If Kamala had won Zuckerberg would be out front with DEI or w/e. The big companies, banks, Silicon Valley, always shower money and gifts on the incumbent. The government operates in many ways as a big public/private partnership. Again, the danger with Trump is the degree, not necessarily a wholesale difference. Some people use this to say it doesn't matter, makes no difference. I'm not one of those people. I believe at a certain point, tip the degree too far, and a difference appears.
As for the second part, democracy allows the people to correct for their mistake. The elites did not want Trump, and never have. He came to power after descending an escalator, elites on both sides mocked him. Elites wanted to repeat Bush v Clinton. Trump may be wealthy, but he is not an "elite", he is new money, and has basically always been a joke among the upper echelons of power in New York City. The elites are nice to him because they are forced to deal with who the mob elected. To not do so is shareholder suicide. Everyone knows he is insane. They simply cannot say it out loud. And why would they? What's with people who simultaneously think Google has too much power and yet want them to be out in front fighting Trump? It's not their job. Why did the American people elect him? What is Google supposed to do? Ignore the President of the United States? Tell the American people who to vote for?
> If by "the mob" you mean, a small cohort of wealthy, powerful, unscrupulous people, those people who make decisions that the rest of us have no say in, then I agree, that is a problem.
No I mean the ~100,000 average Americans who actually make a difference in electing presidents, in places like Wisconsin, where the state is sufficiently purple and there is a small "swing vote" that is often well under a million people. When are they going to be held responsible for their mistake? Why is Google my enemy? I can stop using Google. Google provides me excellent services at a reasonable price (often $0 - I understand I give them data but who cares, really only the government would care about my individual data, and I know Google simply aggregates it to "subsidize" the numerous free services I get). So, a pretty fair deal, and one I can not enter to if I actually wish. On the other hand, what does someone in Wisconsin give me? I can't stop someone in Wisconsin from voting against my interests. Is Google supposed to be the tyranny here? Extend this same logic to any state on the wrong side of your preferred electoral divide. Like many Americans, I really have no say in Presidential elections, because I live in a populous, blue state. My vote doesn't matter, my electoral votes are already priced in. Meanwhile people in red flyover states get the same number of senators as my state, which has a multiple of their population. This makes corporations my enemy? Did Google sponsor the Connecticut Compromise?
> In a smaller state, Trump would have continued to be an executive and the shape of his impact on the world might be slightly different, but would be no less oppressive. Ask tenants in NYC in the 1980s if they think a Donald Trump with smaller regulatory oversight who stayed in business would be better or worse for our country.
Let's not move the goalposts. I never said I was against all government regulation. If you want to regulate Google, then fine. Make a sensible proposal. What is not serious nor sensible is saying "Google is evil" or "Google should not exist".
> Do you think our country flips parties every year because our government does a good job of reflecting the will of the people?
You need to not think only of the current case relative to your supposed best case, but also a worse case. What is the will of the people? Who decides? How? It seems obvious to me the government being defective is somewhat by design (separation of powers) because the founders knew as many people know now, that America is very large, very divided, and very dangerous. A federal government that doesn't give some of the voters 100% of what they want every four years is a lot better than another civil war. Yes things could be better. They could also be a lot worse.
I tend to think people who say "Google is evil" have a rather limited view of the downside risks that occur when humans congregate. Google does not even begin to scratch the surface of the historical depravities we have visited upon each other.
Have you been to states that predominantly vote against your particular preferred political party? You will find "the corporations" are not your enemy. It's what it always has been, all the time, throughout every historical age. The problem of civilization is other people. You will not get around that by trying to treat corporations as some special case.
Propose sensible regulations. Maybe even a way to reform the electoral college that has a chance of passing. I am interested in these ideas. Innovation can happen in technology and in government. That's why I like this forum. But too often interesting conversations are drowned out by "Google is evil" as if this is useful. I would love to hear more interesting solutions, and less hyperbole. Thanks for the pushback.
> I fancy myself a misanthrope, but damn, next to people in this forum I am probably the last humanist walking through the ruins of civilization.
A humanist who uses a term of sexual violence so cavalierly?
If you are in the United States and you want a good civic lesson in state power, you should go to your nearest metropolitan criminal court. Maybe you will have a more accurate view of what government means then. At the very least, you will likely learn to banish such a casual invocation of that word from your lexicon.
> Nothing else can be better, if all your options are "mob rule" or "executive fiat".
What we have now is the middle ground between king and mob. It took centuries and much carnage to achieve. Does the famous Churchill quote really need to keep being repeated? Do you have an alternative proposal? Or maybe you have a sensible proposal that falls within the established democratic bounds? Or perhaps instead by "would be a much nicer place if they ceased to exist" we should simply infer a generalized whining rather than any specific policy prescription?
What's your actual idea, do you have one?
Maybe if you endeavored to communicate without self-satisfied hyperbole you would find we actually have reason to agree with each other.
Every single serious theorist of democracy has recognized this.
Democracy is about rule of law and institutions, not simply the mob.
Tyranny of the majority is the paramount concern of all democracies. Nevertheless, institutions can fail.
The idea that democracy always leads to desirable outcomes is evidently false by historical record.
I just don't understand people who think the state is better than Google. Google pretty much works. Google does not have police powers. Google cant surround your car and point guns at your family. Most of the bad things about Google are actually forced upon them by the state. Who could have even a passing knowledge of history and think states are somehow safer than corporations?
Take the United States. Should Donald Trump get a say in how to run Google? Maybe you like him, so how about the guy that comes after him, or the next one after that?
The American mob seems intent on leading their country into the gutter. Good thing (despite what the mob has thrown at it) that the United States still has strong institutions and strong markets. Without Silicon Valley, America would have already lost its place on the world stage.
But please lets hear more indictments from a population who can't even agree with itself on the issues already under the government's purview. Now let's set a precedent for even more state interference in the market, that way when your party (whatever side you are on) chokes the next future election away the next nut you don't agree with has even more power? Is that your plan?
What's your alternative? Executive fiat? Mob rule?
Deepmind is objectively good. These endeavors would always cost money. Better private capital than state, no one has to give Google anything. The state is not so generous.
Rest assured I only sought to comment in that manner because I find generally on a forum such as this, leading with a sense of outrage (regardless of how justified) is typically unhelpful. I share your sentiments, though I sort of take it as a given on this forum that these aspects of WWII are known. I would guess far less people know about Operation Paperclip, thus the "nugget".
If upon learning about this someone needs me to connect the dots to your sentiments, well frankly I would suggest such a person is likely beyond my reach given the nature of the venue we find ourselves in (pseudonymous forum).
I would encourage you to not so readily cast aspersions upon your fellow interlocutors here based on turn of phrase alone. Have a nice day.
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.
As usual, not really sure blaming AI is a useful way to understand the problem. British politics has felt "broken" since at least Cameron's failed bet on Brexit.
Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.
von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.
von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
This would also be more transparently a benefit to consumers, as I recall one of the hurdles in the present state of anti monopoly law is present monopolies (like notably Amazon) have rather obviously reduced costs/made life easier for consumers.
This tension between these companies and consumers becomes more obvious as companies resist these moves while more and more consumers adopt LLM intermediaries.
By "compete with China" I mean at least have parity of competition with China in the essential technologies of the future, rather than falling behind into some sort of obsolence or inability to shape the global economy we all on the whole benefit from. If China becomes the dominant economic hegemon without a viable American competitive check, I think the world (and certainly Americans) will be worse off.
Meanwhile, a balanced competition between the US and China I think will benefit almost everyone on the planet, for reasons likely not that unlike what I expect Lina Khan will say in that video. There is no perfect solution, so I will look forward to hearing more of her perspective on this issue, thanks.
If you think Google (or any large firm) is going to be by necessity be a loser in the AI race relative to smaller firms, you should go ahead and explain why you think that is.
In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.
How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
So if the government isn't going to be in the business of massive capex investment (the kind China subsidizes) well then you need massive private companies.
The American peoples response to a future dictated by the terms of Chinese hegemony is break up the centers of American innovation? What do you think is keeping the capex cost manageable if it's not the government? How does Google work if you take away its cash cow?
So many of you (I assume despite the complaining that > 99% of HN readers can afford it) need to just pay the $20 or whatever for YouTube premium if it's so terrible and get over yourselves. The tax your children will have to pay if the United States is reduced to a second rate power will be far greater. What's with people wanting free access to services and simultaneously offended by ads? I don't like them either but I understand it would be silly to think they should be free. They can be regulated or reformed in many ways, but the government should be highly restrained about cleaving apart companies. Just remember the powers you give the government today the next government will inherit, and it is not so easy for a party to maintain power for more than eight years. Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives and sustained strategy on a timeline that spans decades. Companies need to be able to match this horizon without fear of whatever the new normal in Washington is every four years. The trend for the United States is not looking good.
Isn't that sufficiently divorced from most of what makes Chrome unpalatable to people who appreciate Firefox as an alternative?
Why then aren't there more forks of Chromium? I would think with the progression of SOTA LLMs it should not be long now before everyone can simply ride their own custom flavor of Chromium.
I would just say while generally your last point is true, we also shouldn't underplay the vast extent of civic protest against the current administration in Israel prior to October 7th. It is easy to forget given how quickly October 7th changed Israeli priorities, but I would actually suggest prior to the current "state of emergency" like suspension of internal policy disputes, Israeli society was well demonstrating the democratic benefits of having a country where (mostly) everyone has to serve. You had senior military figures, active military service members, former generals, and civilians (most of which served or had family who served or were serving) all standing up to prevent what was essentially a far-right takeover of the judiciary.
That is no small thing, and the political optics and ability of Israeli democracy to protect itself in this (and other instances) is I think grounded in large part by the fact that the majority of that society sees defense as a collective responsibility of all, rather than the sequestered task of a few. This allows for more checks on state power. Obviously, Israel is not a great example for other reasons. But it is hard to imagine such an act ever occurring in the modern United States under present conditions. Take the Jan 6th attack. Why is it the job of the Capitol Police alone to prevent such an attempted decapitation of American democracy? Every American should feel a sense of patriotic duty and capability to protect the foundational organs of the American state. It doesn't exist in this country because for the vast majority of Americans, the federal government is really something of an alien entity. It's a piece of paper or a tax or a headline. The problem of modern America is we are supposed to be a democracy yet we are alienated from our own institutions, our own government, and our own military. In Israel, despite its numerous other problems, this problem does not exist.
Athenian democracy - that which the West and the American founders lauded - had the same sort of emphasis on the inculcation of civic virtue through public service. Even the gadfly Socrates was a veteran.
Americans should get free education and free healthcare. But as JFK said, one should also ask what they can do for their country. The military has a lot of jobs, relatively few members actually serve in combat. There are more than enough tasks to go around. Most every type of work you identify already exists as a subset of military service.
If this is due to post Venezuela kool-aid, then he drank from the same cup. Many others in the natsec space have resigned or been fired for standing by their convictions in the Trump era. The DoD is not without responsibility for this failure. Blaming Trump alone has been the sad redoubt of modern American discourse, a rather depressing reflection of a country that cannot look itself in the mirror, that treats Trump as a cause rather than a symptom.
If the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq had not occurred, Trump would likely have never been elected. His entire electoral premise has always been institutional incompetence. He famously was elected the first time by destroying the Republican guard from the inside, by tearing down Jeb Bush - a proxy for his brother and his two wars of failure.
If most Americans don't want to fight sustained wars overseas, America should not fight. That is the point. It is easy to make declaring war a distant political issue when a tiny subset of the population fights, yet creates problems for generations across the world. The effects of interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran will likely continue to be felt for generations, and likely make future attacks on the homeland more probable given the asymmetric consequences of the United States continuing to create failed quagmires abroad.
The Iraq War would have probably not happened the way it did if there was a draft. If most Americans don't want to fight, then America should not go to war. What could be a simpler democratic principle?
Instead you seem to support and make excuses for a volunteer military, one with an (at minimum) two decade history of failure, whose hubris and excesses have multiplied in a time of increasing political polarization, lack of faith in institutions (gee, I wonder why?), and as you say, technological change.
Why would this not be a time for radical reform? Why should we ever allow any president or congress to inherit such an institution?
Generals shouldn't always get what they want. Civilian oversight cannot be effective if the gap between civilians and professional service members is so wide. Kennedy famously had to talk down professional generals that bordered on homicidal. Luckily, he was was a veteran himself and was willing to resist their more outrageous impulses. We may not be so lucky next time. More people in the room, and in the military can only lead to better outcomes. If this makes a few trigger happy generals less happy, so be it. It should not be so easy to send men into battle. That is the problem you are failing to appreciate. The problem with the military is that it is too easy. As such, your claim about it being underfunded strikes me as some type of semantic game. If you listen to the alcoholic running the Pentagon, we are wildly succeeding. He doesn't seem to take his job seriously enough. Perhaps it is because it is rather easy for him to obliterate targets and cause chaos from the sky, with minimal repercussions? The cost of this escapade approaching what, $100 billion? And you want to give them more? For what mission are they underfunded? A land invasion? More bombs? More air defense? What more should we take from the American taxpayer to make this make sense? Maybe we should repeat 2003 and invade an adjacent country that has nothing to do with this again?
If everyone had to serve, then perhaps the next time they will have to actually convince the country and the men in their care of the virtue of their purpose. Nothing could be more desirable in a democratic society.
Make the Pentagon finally pass an audit. Cut its funding. It is clear the profligacy is incentivizing bad decisions - the new normal in the Strait of Hormuz being only the latest.
It's clearly too much of a toy and too much capability for the past few decades of both civilian and military administration. An entire generation only knows the United States military as an institution of blunder, excess and failure.
After cleaning house, the United States should also bring back the draft. More social spending should be paired with more public service. It will be harder to start wars of choice and treat veterans like beggars when everyone's kids will have to sacrifice. This will not degrade capability, as many of the most capable militaries in the world have a draft - notably Israel. Making people from Iowa and New York serve together would be good for a dangerously fracturing country. The "volunteer professional" military was created to get around opposition to Vietnam. It's a disgrace.
> Do you have a response to the threat of cognitive surrender and cognitive debt as a second order effect from heavy LLM use and how that could undermine humanity’s ability to steer these correlation engines toward your preferred hypothetical outcomes without AGI?
Yes, by way of analogy. Primordial man was more familiar with murder and the slaying of wild animals for sustenance. To lament this loss is to be something like those men I mentioned earlier, striving to be screamed at while shivering in the cold in some pantomime of ancient virtue.
The world is complicated. Humanity cannot continue to advance without finding a way to offload such complexity to technology. This has always been the way, and on balance, we are better off for it. The problems of the future are likely too complicated, along too many dimensions, for human cognition to solve alone. In many ways, humans have always known this. It's where the notion of God comes from.
I'm also not sure what sort of cognition will be needed to "steer". It's a good question. This is an interesting problem, but I think the way you frame it rests on a few faulty assumptions.
1. That humans, absent of LLMs, even "steer" their own societies. The average human has really no say in affairs of even the most liberal modern states, certainly not in its underpinnings. A lucky few get to frame the terms of constitutions or revolutions or polities. Most who are cited to have died in such efforts were not the ones to actually make the choices we still live with today. That power has always been the province of a privileged few. This is an inescapable side effect of complexity. In this way, LLMs are merely a continuum of historical trends, and as such, are largely unavoidable.
2. That humans will be the necessary or only interface to steer LLMs. It is far more likely some engineering around adversarial machines or consensus of other automation will have to "enforce" certain types of steering, irrespective of the wishes of any particular human agent. This is likely desirable, in the same way most modern states do not wish to be hijacked by executive fiat.
3. That you need broad buy in to steer LLMs. Again, historically this has never been the case. Revolutions are typically won by a minority, most of the population in any conflict usually remains unaligned and simply wants to stay out of harms way. Most people do not want to steer anything, they just want to survive and be left alone. Government is not a luxury - it is insurance against being murdered in your own bed. Most people intuitively understand this, even if they do not understand or appreciate the genesis of their own particular states.
But I agree, it is a good question, and I am not convinced we will achieve that "love letter" state. That is simply one of the few positive outcomes I envision. But I personally find it more likely humans will destroy each other before such a state could be meaningfully achieved at scale. I am just trying to be more optimistic.
I agree people will still want to do things when society has fully automated away paychecks. That is why I look forward to the elimination of exchanging labor for monetary reward. Let people freely pursue those passions you outline, a paycheck adds nothing in a world where automation provides such people with not only survival, but ample surplus and innovation.
But you then go even beyond the already answered market efficiency/plausibility objection that comes up ad nauseam when Bullshit Jobs is mentioned to make a positive assertion that:
> The truth is that many people enjoy working
On what basis? What is "many"? Do you think a majority of the workforce would elect to keep working if they could maintain their current standard of living without any work? Do you think this would maintain independent of any standard of living? Do you think people would no longer find fulfillment in performing some work (whatever they choose) if it was not economically required of them to perform some labor? I mean presumably the people who do not want to sit around and do nothing will act accordingly. Let them do whatever they want. Why does it follow from that to say that most people "enjoy" having to exchange their labor to earn a paycheck?
It seems to me you are making a rather remarkable claim, with little attempt at substantiation. Maybe you could answer some of my questions to flesh out your point a little more?
Of course, I applaud the humans doing the hard work to ensure no human has to ever labor again. Apologies if I was unclear on that perspective. I suggest a second look at my reply will however convey this to you.
The irony is allowing machines to automate the economy will allow more people to have more enjoyable lives. For every nerd plugging away at something like this there are millions of ancestors who fought and died and clawed to do what for most humans for most of history was the only thing that qualified as labor - participating in brutish endeavors (hunting/farming/murdering) that barely sustained their short lives.
LLMs over the next century (probably in China given the retrograde impulses dominating both sides of the political aisle in the US) will likely assist (if not autonomously) solve cancer and other diseases, invent new alloys and forms for manufacturing, automate away all labor (including most if not all military service), travel farther into our universe than any human ever plausibly could, and other breakthroughs.
A huge concentration of the actual talent of our world is already enmeshed in this endeavor. The majority of the detractors aren't cut out to compete, so they cling to their "bullshit jobs"[1] instead of leveraging the democratic processes their ancestors bled for to simply convince enough of their fellow humans to engineer an equitable redistribution of gains. Why do so many people want to eliminate the only chance their kids will have to not have to work? Is it some desire to inflict our modern masochisms onto future generations? It's like watching these colonies of men sign up to get screamed at to prove they are masculine [2]. The West seems to have entered a state of mass delirium. It's the same thing. Pining for the past. One is even more distant - where the labor of raw strength mattered. Another is I guess pining for the more recent past where if you could write or manage powerpoint or excel effectively enough you could have the "American Dream."
Most of the people applauding this particular mathematical breakthrough are unlikely to be able to understand it. It's the same irony that has led man for centuries to use romanticism about human nature selectively. For most of history these conceptions were used to draw arbitrary lines around which homo sapiens were and were not worthy of basic dignity - who was citizen and who was slave. The same capacity for cognitive dissonance is alive and well in modern man.
Don't curse your children. If you don't like who owns LLMs in the United States, the democratic tools to nationalize or redistribute the gains are at your disposal. If you were to actually engage in this battle you will quickly learn the "enemy" is not the machines - it's what it has always been, your fellow man. The past is not coming back, and it was never that great to begin with. It was not so many generations ago that most children who were born died shortly thereafter, and more children were born in general because children were a source of labor to keep the household afloat.
Stop romanticizing labor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/the-camps-prom...
Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.
So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.
Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.
I personally recommend, but I understand many people do not want to be pushed back by something they see as little more than a servant.
This setup does work to also have agents argue with each other. That can be very interesting, though you have to set them up to be very skeptical. Otherwise they will tend to read another agents assertion as authoritative off the bat.
I am convinced much of the harness/prompt engineering we are doing now will also be automated away. Within 5 years the best practices for the most popular use cases will have been found, automated and fully baked in.