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Perfect. Meta is doing good things as of late, like telling the UK govt to fuck off with the 'drop E2E encryption' bs. I hope more tech behemoths start to stand their ground.

Companies trying to maximize their profit >>> Authoritarian dystopia 24/7 surveillance governments ran by lunatics

In any sane place this would be satire, but this being HN, I'm not so sure.

I see what you mean. I think that despite the noise, one can still tell what's real or important, and what's not, intuitively. This sense can get distorted when a government can spend billions of dollars/yuans pushing a specific narrative.

What I mean is, I believe one can be closer to the truth when exposed to all sorts of ideas and propaganda, than when one specific entity controls the flow.

Bitcoin is mainly useful for money laundering... or... er... disagreeing with the government. In other words, removing the middleman. Also, depending on inflation levels, it can be a good storage of value.

All in all, I think it's the most useful technology in the last decade. If you live in a bubble you won't realize that, but it's what it is.

As soon as you move to a third-world country with heavy taxing and corruption (see: Venezuela), you see that Bitcoin is more useful for the average Joe than ChatGPT.

I see it primarily as a form of transfering money, not storing money. I get paid overseas, convert it to bitcoin, transfer it to my wallet, then sell immediately.

No, but I do prefer chaos over the alternative of governments and government-aligned media determining what is information and what is 'disinformation'. If I wanted that, I'd live in China.

I've been using Bitcoin for over a decade almost daily and it's a great tool that has passed the test of time, and will continue to be useful unless governments around the world actually go out of teh way to ban it. As for Chatgpt, I think it's really useful as well, but there's no way to compare the two.

I've never been excited about VR and 'blockchains'. I was, and still am, excited for Bitcoin, which in my opinion is the only useful application of blockchain. I use Bitcoin in a daily basis, and I have done it for over a decade.

As for ChatGPT, I'm actually using it and it enhances my productivity by a lot. So, I believe this isn't just hype.

I think that would be really good

I completely disagree. All throughout history the "experts" or the "most authoritative sources" were proven wrong againd and again. I'm sure lots of things we take for granted today we'll be proven wrong during our lifetimes.

I want a different future, one where there are no authoritative sources, one where a journalist's words has no more relevance or weight than anyone else's.

You're right about that. Dealing with astroturfing will be an arms race and will require some proof of "humanity" in social media, forums, etc.

But, ultimately, I don't buy the idea that astroturfing is all bad. Or the opposite, that the lack thereof is necessarily good. I think bombarding with AI content can have possitive effects, like overwhelming human moderators who built echo chambers and ban wrongthink (e.g., Reddit). Or, it has the capacity for a small organization to compete with the likes of the NYTimes, or The Atlantic, etc which currently control the narrative.

Why? I honestly don't care who or 'what' wrote something, as long as it is useful. In fact, after a certain point there's no way to actually distinguish human-written content from AI-written content because it's the same.

We'll just become used to it and only a few people in HN will shout to the clouds.