keybored

I am against murdering animals. But I eat animals.

I see a lot of top comments here about how smart people will be disappointed by the world. They see everything broken about it because they are so smart.

I don’t really buy it. There is a sizeable minority here with high enough wealth and income that also (because of their place in society) think that a lot of things are more benign, neutral, or good than they really are. I’ve seen enough threads here demonstrating that. They think that this thing is just a mistake. That other thing can just be fixed by getting smarter people in charge. We just need good and capable people in charge of this other thing and it will be alright. And so on.[1] They watch the news and think that the presenters and people they interview are on their side—and they often are, relatively speaking at least.[2]

This is basically “Mistake Theory” that that Alexander psychologist wrote about. Out of what I have read from him that was the most true thing I’ve read. (But those high IQ + higher income bracket + gadfly interest people just dress it up in let’s say less academic and more improvised theories.)

Independent of intelligence, people with less authority and wealth have more input in their life that gives them reason to doubt and fret.[1]

PD: People lamenting their smartness: 355 comments and counting. Predictably catnip subject.

PDD: It is weird that for an IQ fetishist community where intelligence can solve most things, the only thing it cannot solve is your own contentment, as in it actively sabotages you. But why not? I’m not convinced.

[1] This is basically my vulgar understanding of standpoint epistemology.

[2] But note: sizeable minority. It’s not like I have numbers or anything, but I think there are plenty of people here who are cynical and pessimistic. Not as in, they are wrong. But due to intelligence or background they have reasons to doubt the great order of things. And this place has gotten more realistic/cynical (I say both) over the years. Still, this still is a hub for well paid US West Coast programmers.

> You’re being paid for your expertise and insights.

For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?

Roads were not paved because people had bought cars and now were complaining that they only had cobblestone roads—crowded with meatbags—and dirt to drive them on. Look at the US. A “car-centric” culture. What, but how? Because making huge roads, bulldozing communities to make ugly and inefficient highways right through cities, giant parking lots—it was policy. Infrastructure. Top-down, with politicians and the Car Lobby.

Then continue to look at the the US. Huge, dangerous, and not at all used for “sport utility” SUVs. Yeah, people were blameworthy for starting to buy them. But the drive to make them dominate the whole car market was driven by the industry; much lower safety standards meant less cost and much fatter profits. But they were just meeting consumer demand...?

The global economy, very integrated, fucking giant container ships shipping raw products across the world to be slightly refined to then be shipped back again. Was that designed by anyone. Or just meeting consumer demand? That must have been some giant mass delusion of post hoc agentic reasoning; economists taking the credit for a globalized economy, every corner specialized and competing at what they can do best, exporting that and importing the rest. But I guess they are wrong? Just meeting consumer demand?

Consumer Capitalism. Curious name. It’s not Capitalism with a consumerist culture. It is Capitalism predicated on the mass of workers to “consume”. But I guess it is really optional after all? This economy of ours, the forever-servant of the collective us—it will just metamorphize itself organically to adjust to the realities of your fantasy of mass and uncoordinated consumer behavior change?

> My only practical contribution to

The only practical input you have is in the service of obfuscation. Of division. Of cheap reasoning. I saw someone litter once; that must be at the heart of the problem. I saw someone drive a sport car once; that must be at the heart of the issue. Of scapegoating.

You know your practical input is worthless. And still you will feel vindicated in ten years time when your practical input has yielded fucking nothing.

I haven’t read OP, but there are enough people in our culture with a monomanaic tendency who only need an obsession to go overboard all unsupervised. So they might start running a little, of course slow to start because they physically can’t take it, but after a point they might not notice that adding more and more activity volume can’t just be done forever just based on your gut, dayfeel, and no pain no gain. Or someone reads about meditation and starts doing hour-long meditations, then soon retreats. Then their mind gets hit with an uncomfortable and disturbing realization while their minds are figuratively in a bad and structurally weak yoga pose. But why didn’t the meditation book warn about this? The meditation book aimed at people who successfully will do it for twenty minutes a day and will have 90% no long-term follow through.

AI Inevitability with a left-liberal lexicon.

> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.

Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.

Democracies can be arranged in some majoritarian, concensus-based, or any other way that a group of peers can use to decide on something collectively. “Ha ha wolves and sheep voting for what’s for dinner.” Find another quip.

I imagine that money can buy elections in some districts in the world like this:

- Have money

- Use money to saturate the political attention, making most people eventually wonder are any other candidates even running?

- Attack ads for competing candidates with actual attention already

(1) Seeing this situation, and (2) knowing that everything you have been told about the candidates that you have heard of might be flowery bullshit but you don’t quite know, (3) and not trusting them, you might just as well decide to tell the “eager volunteers” for the millions-funded candidate: I am not impressed and you are unwilling to give me anything that I want. But I vaguely know about this other candidate dressed as a hamster, and he is saying some damn fine and good things for me, the ordinary pedestrian (populist in the literature). Want my vote? Come and try and get it with more than your flowery bullshittery.

This is known as uninformed and irrational in the literature, I vaguely recall (it’s been what, 15 years?), pedestrians not simply taking the flowery bullshit, I mean information they have been graciously given for free by their betters, and then making an altruistic least-harm calculation based on that. (Concessions and bargaining based on personal interest is for tHe eLite; pedestrians are supposed to lie on their backsides and think of Xland.)

headphones block nature

take off and take in the stream

living room and screens

Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.

Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.

Is choosing your favorite hegemon going to be based on WWII Hollywood stories?

I’m impressed. I had to scroll down ten top level comments in order to find a contentless but-China-regime comment. Good work HN.

No, you don’t understand: people say they might dislike asbestos and want to not live in an environment with it, but how could they possibly have that stance if they were not able to recognize asbestos by sight, smell, or touch...

You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you).

Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work.

Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.

> Without LLMs, none of this would ever have happened.

That would have been better for the world.

“Editing” commits is not niche, and editing metadata like dates seems to come up a few times for a fair few number of people.

You can already expose the commit object as the headers (metadata) and the commit message. That’s like a spreadsheet: change these columns and we will make a new commit. That changed format can then be persisted as a commit object. So.

> A tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM.

Are LLMs memory holing all the numerous tools built around Git (with git(1) or without)? There was already a query-Git-like-SQL tool before The Age of LLMs. I never tried that, but was that simpler to implement than this tool? Edit: Okay, maybe it wasn’t “niche” so that’s the differentiator.

Dunno what you are asking me for. That’s what the hypothetical person that you are confronting about their personal halo is doing.

Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.

If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.

I know. The local newspaper believes the same thing. And the local events are all sponsored by businesses. Who could question all of this evidence?

> But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.

They said companies are amoral at best.

There’s nothing like those irrelevant TV gotcha segments. Wow, we were able to find five ignorant people (out of [?]), what a joke of a cause.

You don’t want this proposed nuclear power plant because you are afraid of a nuclear meltdown? Well you thought that those plumes were emissions but they are actually steam, idiot.

Go home. Watch the TV. Don’t express any opinions. That’s right. Good citizen.

> It might not be dietary change to veganism, but when I ask, “What steps have you taken…”

Agitating for political change.

The subject of Internet anonymity and children really presents a pest or cholera situation.

No, I don’t want to scan my face or my passport to use the Web. And also no, this glib, thought-terminating, “common sense” quip about “the parents are responsible” is also something to be rejected. We should try to both collectively protect kids and leave adults alone.

Leave it all to the corporations and you would have them prey on your children on every street corner, splash screen, TV menu, and ad board, with no “parental management” option anywhere. “But parents are responsible”, they would say.

HN’s favorite CS professor homepage webpage-style author is on top of the AIs but sticking with keeping out newfangled CSS. Nothing could tell us more about clanker inevitability.

Asking the AI to believe in itself is the absurd part.

I don’t understand why people think describing something in some ostensibly dismissive way constitutes making a point. But some people spend their time banging keys with letters on them (or not with letters on them) into input fields and then pressing Return, so I guess some subset of those people will do that.

Call it blame, call it something else, but they are in the end changing the product while hiding it. I get these emails sometimes, probably because of regulations:

- We are changing the price from X to Y. [tirade about rising prices]

Maybe they should hang this in the restaurant:

- The THING is now smaller than January 2026. [And it’s your fault. You misers don’t want higher prices? Well have you heard of the Central Bank? ...]

That last part is optional.

The consumer is the last part in the value chain of cow to beef patty so of course he or she just has himself or herself to blame.

AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame.

But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.

The problem with political organizing in order to solve ecological or environmental problems is that it makes too much logical sense. For solving the problem, that is. It’s better to not build a data center in the first place than to build a data center and then fight against its use. It’s better to build and retrofit transportation architecture than to scold people who are not Work From Home workers to not drive to work. Which is why it gets attacked with non sequitors about feeling like you are solving the problem without having done your own personal penance.[1]

Your linked ChatGPT-structured listicle is sound in what it proposes for the individual, but spends no time motivating the change or balancing out of political organizing. Like how to balance individual action versus political action? A big fat nothing. The one single hinge: evErY cHanGe MatteRs. This trivial observation is supposed to balance nine individual-effort phrased points versus one limp-wristed political action point.

At least it admits its corporate stooge tradition by mentioning BP and “carbon footprint”.

We are told that we need a cutthroat and efficient economy for commodities. For sweaters and automobiles. But for not ruining the planet? We need to incentivize individuals to not-do-bad-things. These are not serious ideas.

> I support the goal, but worry its a distraction.

You support people opposing data centers. Presumably you think that building them is bad. And presumably pressure against data centers can help them not be built. Which means that you would get less of the bad things. And yet this development which can cause less of the bad things is a distraction? This isn’t really coherent.

[1]: Curiously this critique is about feeling like you are solving the problem without the consequence explicitly outlined as not solving the problem. Is feeling better while also helping solve the problem... a problem?

Any retort to do this like “but why would they just openly release this”[1] pretty much answers itself. Public relations.

If a company can spend money to redeem itself then, well, it can (game theoretically or whatever) do whatever it wants in the future and then spend money to wipe the slate clean.

[1] By which I mean: the very act of being prompted to ask such a question, of planting a seed like hmm, Meta might have some aspects which are good for us. You don’t have to be convinced of it. Just the seed itself can pay for itself.

Become an anti-democratic economist. I call this the easy mode project.

> Different diseases, one pathology.