krapp

The character of the message is that "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."

Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.

>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.

I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].

I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.

[0]https://www.abc.net.au/religion/tiwi-christianity-aboriginal...

[1]https://www.thenorthernmyth.com/2017/12/20/graverobbers-god-...

When the same guy wins when he gets the popular vote, and wins when he doesn't, that may technically be "democracy" in the sense that a vote occurred and votes were counted, but it clearly isn't fair (and it isn't, it isn't designed to be. If it were fair, the people might do something crazy like vote in a populist demagogue...)

And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.

Russia mounted a gun on one of its space stations[0] but it didn't work out, and they were going to launch an orbital nuclear platform[1] but then everything went to shit.

Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3

[1]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...

If only the AI renaissance didn't mean a dark age for everything else...

Because they never "just say that." Christians aren't raised to believe that "no" is a valid answer - that means eternal damnation after all. Everyone must accept Christ, that's the message, and Christians must do whatever it takes to get that message across. Food, medicine and other elements of "civilization" are always used as leverage, a means of influence and control, to pacify and eventually convert. Inevitably another "pagan" culture is erased, its heritage and language forgotten, its children indoctrinated (perhaps by force as happened with American and Canadian indigenous people) and its people made subservient to Western interests.

Sounds like iOS is problematic.

It's depressing that everyone decided Electron was the final form of all applications and that native apps were dead until AI came along, and if native apps come back it will only be as vibe-coded slop. It's like we've just moved from once circle of hell into another.

Also Show HN is supposed to be for posting code that the community can discuss and play with. Plain advertisements and landing pages aren't allowed.

That will probably change sooner than you think. Now that it's commonly accepted* that AI has reached AGI status there are already movements to grant legal personhood and rights to it, which would mean legal liability for its actions. Eventually we get to the cyberpunk trope of entirely autonomous corporations that only ever hire humans for gig work and pay them in femtobitcoins or something.

* I'm not arguing what that actually means, much less, whether or not that has actually happened, just that it's what people believe, and as we are a belief-driven culture rather than a data or fact driven culture, that belief is what will drive policy.

I see little real difference between using proprietary software and using AI to generate software in terms of the freedoms allowed to the end user. The entire point of the free software ethos is that the end user should be in control to the degree that they want to be, not merely to the degree that a proprietary service allows. If nothing else the obliteration of programming culture and education and the mass deskilling created by the normalization of AI works against that ethos. It turns programming into just another form of capitalist consumption.

Which is all well and good if you don't care about such things and just want the end product but AI shouldn't be conflated with FOSS. A tool that strips knowledge away from people is antithetical to the culture even if the end product is high quality.

There is a restriction - the useful models are closed source proprietary services that cost money to be used effectively, and those models require vast and expensive infrastructure for training that isn't available to the public. I can't apply the four freedoms to Claude or OpenAI or Grok. I can't fork a billion dollar data center. A bunch of weights isn't the same as source code.

What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.

That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.

Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.

The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.

You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.

I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.

Second on the list of things HN needs a solution to is fucking troll green accounts because it's getting ridiculous.

Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.

The whole purpose of this site is to "satisfy intellectual curiosity," not to post LLM generated content.

The fediverse. Mastodon or Lemmy are viable alternatives if you curate well enough.

You'll just get banned.

Unfortunately most of what gets posted to HN or could conceivably be posted here is already LLM generated to some degree. Because content of interest to HN tends to be written by the same people who increasingly prefer to use an LLM for everything they do, machine-generated submissions are only going to increase over time. Tagging submissions as LLM generated is ultimately futile, as one might as well tag water as wet.

Also HN's design ethos of not having "silos" precludes having tags or filters or blocklists, since they want everyone to see the same content at the same time. This is the kind of thing you're going to have to use with a browser plugin or third party service if you want it at all.

Ansel Adams had a process that incorporated on his understanding of optics, film, light and aesthetics. He didn't just point a camera in an arbitrary direction and push a button. I don't think a monkey could take an "Ansel Adams picture." If one took a picture that resembled an Ansel Adams picture... somehow... it would be a novelty but I wouldn't consider it art. No one would say "this monkey is equivalent to Ansel Adams in every meaningful sense" or that "Ansel Adams clearly doesn't have intent behind his photos because a monkey made this" or that "this monkey's intent is the same as Ansel Adams because it took a photo that resembles the artist's work."

And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.

And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.

If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.

>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.

Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.

>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.

I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.

And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.

>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.

No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.

But building a website like the one posted here was already possible. you compared it to the early "indie" web.

There is literally nothing about generating websites with AI that merits being called "the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species."

FFS we've stood on the moon.

I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.

I've never seen the shadow man or anything.

People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.

You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.

So "intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense?"

You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.

I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.

The nature of creativity is an implicitly philosophical matter, and you can't criticize me for that when you're putting qualia on the table.

Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.

Like a lot of people you may be confusing randomness with creativity.

You can make a Markov chain generate the phrase "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud." That doesn't make the Markov chain creative. Creativity implies intent, which AI doesn't have. "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud" doesn't communicate anything meaningful.

edit: I guess it was a reference to a thing I never saw.

Invading Iraq was always part of the neocon agenda. 9/11 provided a useful pretext, but it was always going to happen.

Except for the part where the author never actually calls for government censorship to "protect the children" or anything of the sort, sure.

Hack was the better language for so many reasons. It should have killed PHP instead of the other way around and I'm still annoyed about it.

A thread on HN about the CIA and feminism? I'm grabbing some popcorn, this is going to be entertaining.