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FWIW, this comment should be immortalized, somehow. I am replying, so that I can find this in the future. This describes, to an eerie degree of detail, some of my own interactions with people in the industry, as well as interactions that my friends have had.

The industry seems to attract people who can only be described as smooth opportunists, always a shy step away from becoming confidence artists. People with big dreams of material success, but with next to no ability or talent, and with a tragic lack of self knowledge (and often a lack of domain knowledge). Pure entitlement and greed, and a desire to use other people as a bridge to the stars[0].

I will say this, however: they do have a keen sense of what the incentives are. They will keep doing this, for as long as society keeps rewarding them, and refuses to punish them. And unhooking those incentives is not difficult: do not let them externalize blame, do not let small dishonesties pass, do not let them internalize praise that belongs to someone else, and, most importantly, do not look the other way, when they decide to cannibalize the career of someone else, in order to nourish their own.

Silicon Valley, since at least the Web-2.0 days, has been about nerds making frat-bros rich, in exchange for a livable wage (salaries tend to be only slightly in excess of cost-of-living, unless you are willing to live either far away from your workplace, or in a small moldy-smelling box of a studio). This is a bad deal. Silicon Valley idolizes Steve Jobs (even when he was alive), but gives little thought to Steve Wozniak (upon whose work, Apple and the PC industry were built). When I was in college, both Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died within a short time of each other. Silicon Valley mourned Jobs, but only a few of us nerds mourned Ritchie.

Silicon Valley chose to name the most innovative car company in the country "Tesla", but it attracts and cultivates legions of future Edisons and Morgans[1]. And that is perhaps the perfect allegory for Silicon Valley: a car company named after someone like Tesla, but owned and operated by someone like Elon Musk[2].

[0]: Maybe this is an ancient human affliction. Did the pharaohs not do the same in their day?

[1]: Funny parallel, that since 2009, SV has been trying to rent out compute and storage, instead of just selling it outright.

[2]: Another pretender, seduced more by the warm glow of gold, than the cool blue crackling lightning of a Tesla Coil.

This is a long comment, but I swear it is going somewhere (new terminology).

Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories).

The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it).

What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time.

So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans.

Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off.

Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate.

Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money.

The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3].

[0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978.

[1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web.

[2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives.

[3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.

Or you can just write in your native language, and let us machine-translate it? Just a thought. We are, perhaps, letting ourselves be held back by norms that no longer bear any load.

The mental-model that I am using for online writing, is that it is analogous to the spectrum of `pretending <-> acting`. The worst writing (AI or otherwise), looks, sounds, feels like pretense, like a kid that tucks a towel into his shirt, and runs around, pretending to be a super-hero. Meanwhile, acting, true acting, is invisible, it is a synonym for _being_[1].

That said, a lot of the AI writing feels "procedural", in the sense that most corporate writing (whitepapers, press releases, etc) feel procedural (i.e. the result of a constructed procedure). Before AI, the constructed procedure was basically that a piece of writing passes through a bunch of people (e.g. engineering -> management -> marketing -> website/email), and the output is a bland, forgettable pablum designed to (1) be SEO-friendly, (2) be spam-filter friendly, (3) be easy to ingest, (4) look superficially trustworthy and authoritative (e.g. inflated page count, extra jargon, numbers, plots), (5) look like it belongs to the "scene" or "industry" by imitating all the other corporate writings out there[2].

AI is interesting, in the same way that computers or the internet or an encyclopedia are interesting: how people choose to use it tells you a lot about them. All of those technologies can be used to compensate for a lack of skill (it helps one pretend), or they can be used to forge a skill (it helps one become).

One has to pretend, before they can act (I guess? Feels intuitively correct to me). So perhaps, AI (and web, and computer, and encyclopedia) is only harmful to the extend that it does not nudge a person towards becoming[3]? And if so, that's a _cultural_ limitation, not a technological one.

[1]: I am not an actor, and so I might be wrong, but that is the impression I get from just watching and analyzing the acting in various films.

[2]: this becomes frustrating when you get criticized for producing something that "reads like $famousSomething", and then you get criticized again for producing something that "does not read like $typeOfFamousSomething".

[3]: No clue how you (plural -- let's bring back "yous") will convince your boss that you did not take the shortcut, because you were trying to "become more".

If you read history widely (across millennia and geographies), you'll note that most of the power-contests follow this pattern[0]. In the modern industrial world, the pattern becomes exponential rather than incremental. What I'm saying is that this is not unique to AI Labs[1]. This is caused by the deeply flawed and unbalanced system that we have constructed for ourselves.

[0]: The pattern, or, as gamers would call it, the "meta", is that every ambitious person/entity wants to control as much of the economic/material surplus as possible. The most effective and efficient (effort per control) way of doing this is to make yourself into as much of a bottle-neck as humanly possible. In graph-theory this corresponds to betweenness-centrality, and you want to maximize that value. To put it in mundane terms, you want to be as much of a monopoly as you can be (Thiel is infamous for saying this, but it does check out, historically). To maximize betweenness, or to maximize monopoly, is to maximize how much society/economy depends on you. This is such a dominant strategy (game-theory term, but in modern gaming world, they might call this a "cheesy strat" -- which just means that the game lacks strategic variety, forcing players to hone that one strategy), that we even have some old laws (anti-trust, etc) designed to prevent it. And it makes a lot of sense: Standard Oil was reviled because everything in the economy either required oil or required something that did. 20th-century USA did a lot to mitigate this. It forced monopolies like ATT to fund general research like Bell Labs (still legendary) towards a public good (a kind of tax, but probably much more socially-beneficial). It also broke up the monopolies, and passed anti-profit laws (e.g. hospitals were not allowed to make a profit until 1978; I have seen in the last 10 years a tiny cancer clinic grow into a massive gleaming hospital -- a machine that transforms sickness and grief into Scrooge McDuck vaults of cash). This monopolistic tendency of the commercial sector, is a tendency towards centralization, which yields efficiency, sure, but also creates the conditions for control and rent-seeking and exploitation.

[1]: Much of the cloud-computing craze was similar in character (and also failed to deliver on some of its promises, such as reducing/replacing IT overhead (they just renamed IT to DevOps)). And Web2 itself was about creating and monopolizing a new kind of ad-channel and lead-generation-machine. There is a funny twist, that a capitalist society like the USA, has much more deeply rooted incentives to create a panopticon than communist states of the past ever did. Neither is pretty of course. The communists demanded conformity and loyalty, while the capitalists demand consumption and rent.

Not really a question. Just wanted to express my gratitude for Hypothesis. I use it regularly. A few years back, I had to build a semi-formally-verified fund and account management service, and used the state-based-testing of Hypothesis to validate its correctness. Cannot express how invaluable this little framework has been.

A little while after that, I spoke to someone in the pharma-adjacent-space who was looking at Antithesis to validate their product. At the time, Antithesis (the company) told him that it was a bad fit. I suggested something akin to my previous approach (which did not include antithesis). No clue what they ended up doing, but it is nice to see that Hypothesis and Antithesis have finally joined forces.

Didn't get around to reporting it (huge backlog of tasks). Luckily I am working on a project that _has_ to support SQLite, so if I run into the bug again, I'll report it.

I don't believe that I can tell you the name of the company (they made me sign some NDAs, before the interview, and I have no clue how enforceable those are). Also, this was in 2019, so I would be shocked if they did not fix the problem by now -- especially after I interviewed there (plus I can't be the only one to have noticed this, since).

That said, you have a few data-points if you want to try to triangulate them yourself: physical vm-hosting and storage product, existed since at least 2019, used linux kernel as hypervisor, custom FS, international customers across 2 continents. All of those data-points are my recollection from 2019.

And sometimes you find errors in code that absolutely should never have errors: I found an (as of yet not-root-caused) error in sqlite (no crash or coredump, just returns the wrong data, and only when using sqlite in ram-only-mode). Had to move to postgres for that reason alone. This is part of the reason why I have a strong anti-library bias (and I sound like a lunatic to most colleagues because they "have never had a problem" with $favorite_library -- to which my response is: "how do you _know_?"[0], which often makes me sound like I'm being unreasonably difficult).

Sometimes, only thing you can do is let the plague spread, and hope that the people who survive start showering and washing their hands.

[0]: I once interviewed at a company that sold a kind of on-prem VM hosting and storage product. They were shipping a physical machine with Linux and a custom filesystem (so not ZFS), and they bragged about how their filesystem was very fast, much faster than ZFS or Btrfs on SSDs. I asked them, if they were allowed to tell me how they achieved such consistent numbers. They listed a few things, one of which was: "we disabled block-level check-summing". I asked: "how do you prevent corruption?". They said: "we only enable check-summing during the nightly tests". So, a little unsettled, I asked: "you do not do _any_ check-summing at any point in production"? They replied: "Exactly. It's not necessary". So, throwing caution to the wind (at this point I did not care to get the job), I asked: "And you've never had data corruption in production"? They said: "Never. None". To which I replied: "But how do you _know_"? My no-longer-future-coworker thought for a few seconds, and realization flashed across his face. This was a company that had actual customers on 2 continents, and was pulling in at least millions per year. They were probably silently corrupting customer data, while promising that they were the solution -- a hospital selling snake-oil, while thinking it really is medicine.

At long last, Bruce Schneier is now the mightiest man alive.

https://www.andrewhay.ca/archives/661

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1057708-bruce-schneier-kn...

As far as I can tell it is real.

This is not exactly novel. In the 2000s, someone made a fully functioning Perl 6 runtime in a very short amount of time (a month, IIRC) using Haskell. The various Lisps/Schemes have always given you the ability to implement specialized languages even more quickly and ergonomically than Haskell (IMHO).

This latest fever for LLMs simply confirms that people would rather do _anything_ other than program in a (not necessarily purely) functional language that has meta-programming facilities. I personally blame functional fixedness (psychological concept). In my experience, when someone learns to program in a particular paradigm or language, they are rarely able or willing to migrate to a different one (I know many people who refused to code in anything that did not look and feel like Java, until forced to by their growling bellies). The AI/LLM companies are basically (and perhaps unintentionally) treating that mental inertia as a business opportunity (which, in one way or another, it was for many decades and still is -- and will probably continue to be well into a post-AGI future).

Even before LLMs, there was a _lot_ of deception and cheating in university. I -- and I do not say this with pride -- used to write essays for my classmates for money. In my own defense, I needed the money. I also know that in addition to homework for money, many fraternities and sororities kept copies of prior exams and assignments, and getting access to these was one of the perks of membership. Knowing what kind of questions to expect (let alone the exact questions) can easily give someone a few extra IQ points for free.

Personally, I felt that the drive to automate the parts of the professors' workloads that mattered (i.e. teaching and grading and evaluation and research), only so that they can be given work that matters less the more they do it (i.e. publishing slightly different flavors of the same paper, to meet KPIs), was oddly perverse.

The multiple-choice test and the puzzle-solving test and really any standardized test can be exploited by any group that is sufficiently organized. This is also true in corporate interviewing where corporations think (or pretend) that they are interviewing an individual, whereas they are actually interviewing a _network_ of candidates who share details about the interviewers and the questions. I know people who got rejected in spite of getting all the interview questions correct (the theory is that nobody can do that well, so they must have had help from previously rejected/accepted candidates).

The word "trust" shares a root with the word "tree" and "truth" and "druid". Most exams and interviews are trying to speed-run trust-building (note that "verification" is from the latin word that means "true"). If trust and truth are analogous to "tree", then we are trying to speed-run the growth of a tree -- much like the orange tree, in the film, _The Illusionist_. And like the orange tree, it is a near-complete illusion, a ritual meant to keep the legal department and HR department happy.

The LLMs have simply made the corruption of academia accessible to _all_ students with an internet connection (EDIT: and instantaneous and cheap, unlike a human writer).

There has never been a shortcut to building trust. One cannot LLM their way into being a (metaphorical) druid.

I do not look forward to the Voight-Kampff tests that will come to dominate all aspects of online and asynchronous human interaction.

Note that, short of homework/classwork that _can't_ be gamed by an LLM (for some fundamental reason), even the high-quality honest students will be forced to cheat, so as to not be eclipsed by the actual low-quality cheating students[0].

I imagine that we may end up wrapping around to live in-person dialectics, as were standard in the time of Socrates and Parmenides[1]. If so, this should be fun.

[0]: If left unaddressed, we may see a bimodal distribution of great and terrible students graduating college, with those in between dropping out. If college is an attempt to categorize and rank a population, this would be a major fault in that mechanism.

[1]: Not to the exclusion of the other kinds of tests, writing is still important, critical even. But as a kind of verification-step, that should inform how much the academic community should trust the writing (I can imagine that all the writers here are experiencing stage-fright as they are reading these words).

Not contradicting this (I am sure it's true), but why is using an LLM for this qualitatively better than using an actual fuzzer?

Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.

By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.

Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.

EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).

That is (slightly) reassuring (but the rest of his portfolio does not inspire confidence). Nevertheless, we should be required to disclose whether the code has been (legally) tainted or not. This will help people make informed decisions, and will also help people replace the code if legal consequences appear on the horizon, or if they are ready to move from prototype to production.

There is no comment on whether LLMs/agents have been used. I feel like projects should explicitly say if they were _or_ were not used. There is no license file, and no copyright header either. This feels like "fauxpen-source": imagine getting LEX+YACC to generate a parser, and presenting the generated C code as "open-source".

This is just another way to throw binaries over the wire, but much worse. This has the _worst_ qualities of the GPL _and_ pseudo-free-software-licenses (i.e. the EULAs used by mongo and others). It has all the deceptive qualities of the latter (e.g. we are open but not really -- similar to Sun Microsystems [love this company btw, in spite of its blunders], trying to convince people that NeWS is "free" but that the cost of media [the CD-ROM] is $900), with the viral qualities of the former (e.g. the fruit of the poison tree problem -- if you use this in your code, then not only can you not copyright the code, but you might actually be liable for infringement of copyright and/or patents).

I would appreciate it if the contributor, mrconter11, would treat HN as an internet space filled with intelligent thinking people, and not a bunch of shallow and mindless rubes. (Please (1) explicitly disclose both the use and absence of use of LLMs -- people are more likely to use your software this way, and preserves the integrity of the open source ecosystem, and (2) share you prompts and session).

So passes the glory of open source.

Your workplace has chosen to deprive you of the enjoyment that you got from the work. You have a few options: (1) ask for a raise proportional to the percentage of enjoyment that you lost, (2) find a workplace that does not do this, or (3) phone it in (they see you and your craft as something be milked for cash, so maybe stop letting yourself get milked, and milk them right back, by doing _exactly_ what is asked of you and _not_ more -- let these strategic geniuses strategize using their own brains).

If a commit's job is to capture state at a particular point in time, so that it can be reproduced and understood, then it _also_ needs to include the exact model used. This is only useful if you can ensure access to the previous versions of the model -- which is not something that providers are willing to do (in fact, they regularly "retire" old models). The only transparent way forward is to open source the models, along with their weights, and their training set (to verify that the weights match, and to retrain the model when new architectures and new hardware are released).

Not insisting upon this, would be similar to depending on a SaaS to compile and packages software, and being totally cool with it. Both LLMs and build systems, convert human-friendly notation into machine-friendly notation. We should hold the LLM companies to the same standards of transparency that we hold the people who make things like nix, clang, llvm, cmake, cargo, etc.

I am just pointing out that `program that can make other well specified and understood programs appear on my machine` is not exactly novel. In fact, not only has the entire open source ecosystem been relying on such programs, but they in fact _inspired_ the various app-stores in the 2000s (package management was one of the killer features of linux for a long time).

Yet, people keep holding this up as a particularly novel aspect of LLMs, and it makes them sound like they have never seen or used a package manager, or a container, or a VM. For some bizarre reason, in spite of being augmented with a machine that knows everything about marketing, sales, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, etc, programmers are consistently failing to market their new favorite tool. This is embarrassing, and it does not inspire confidence in that class of people that control so much of the economy[0].

What they _should_ be excited about is: I/you/we can now use this "zooming"[1] package manager to make software appear on my machine (or inside my program), and I can now fearlessly[2] fork these "packages", without incurring as much technical debt, and without having to convince the maintainer to upstream my changes.

This is of course, for now, a bit of an exaggeration. But it is certainly true that the "software supply chain", is the _opposite_ of elegant (for example, making a webapp is needlessly difficult for a beginner), and LLMs can help you navigate and understand different parts of that supply chain more quickly.

[0]: Why is most LLM marketing based on fear and shame and exaggeration? You would think that we would use these pocket-geniuses to actually do _ethical_ marketing, because the cost of that should be going down as a result.

[1]: It works at all scales of abstraction.

[2]: You can even violate licenses and patents without any fear now. The _real_ killer feature of LLMs (not for me, but for the industry at large), is that they let the tech-oligarchy capture a larger share of the economic surplus, without breaking the law[3]. In fact, this is how the software industry has always operated. Remember, software's job is to eat the world (to paraphrase Andreesen). But even more so, this is how unregulated _markets_ have always operated! Everyone needs to always defend and grow the share of surplus that they control, in order to survive. This means that the "meta" of the unregulated-market-game is to make yourself into as much of a bottleneck as humanly possible. In graph-theory, this corresponds to maximizing your _betweenness centrality_. In economics and law, they call a 100% betweenness centrality, a monopoly. In fact, one SV oligarch (Thiel), has said: "the goal is monopoly"!

[3]: As usual, the wealthiest will be impossible to sue for infringement, whereas now, the entire open source ecosystem is tainted, unless you are using software that has not been updated since 2023. In some sense, patent trolling is back, it just has extra steps now. I will let you (plural) infer the implications of this.

And also in Turkey. It (the word, if not the stew itself) arrived to the Balkans by way of the Ottomans. (And having just now clicked through to the link, it seems to have arrived to Turkey by way of the Persians).

I know what will blow your socks off: package managers. They are kind of like magical wizards that can make fully operational software appear on your machine. Want a scheme compiler? Just `nix-shell -p racket`. Want common lisp? `nix-shell -p sbcl`. It works like a charm every time.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about florid and elaborate writing (e.g. Faulkner, Lispector, Mieville, Mossman, Joyce, Austen, etc)?

Even the linkedin profile has a studio-ghibli-style avatar. People are going to assume that he is just an "analog interface" to an LLM. Which is sad, because he might be a good programmer. In fact, I tend to see a lot of english-as-second-language people embrace LLMs as a kind of "equalizer", not realizing that in 2026 it is the opposite (not saying that it's right either way, just pointing out that it is becoming a kind of anti-marketing, like showing up to a conference without any clothing, and getting banned from the conference permanently).

We should probably normalize publishing things in our native languages, and expecting the audience to run it through a translator. (I have been toying with the idea of writing everything in Esperanto (not my native language, but a favorite) and just posting links to auto-translated English versions where the translation is good enough).

EDIT: as someone with friends and family from Eastern Europe, I can tell you that the prevailing attitude is: "everything is bullshit anyway" (which, to be fair, has a lot of truth to it), and so it is no surprise that people would enthusiastically embrace a pocket-sized bullshit factory, hook it up to a fire-hose, and start spraying. We saw it with spam, and we see it now with slop. It won't stop unless the system stops rewarding it.

Thank you, I will check these out!

The vast majority of workplaces have never cared about code quality (with the exception being the actual engineers that write the code). Everyone else has no clue what programmers do, other than, "they write arcane symbols, and our product works, and our business continues to function". They do not know that code can even _have_ quality. It does not help that they only ever have to interact with engineering when something is going _wrong_, which conditions them to associate engineers with stress and failure and angry customers. Nobody ever thinks of engineers when everything is going well. The LLM mandates stem from a combination of mistrust and resentment.

I know, from second hand experience, that long before coding LLMs became a thing, engineers would ship slop when it became clear that their superiors cared about deadlines uber alles (i.e. not shipping slop would be the same thing as quitting, but without the paycheck -- slop code is often a form of quiet quitting).

Most people would _prefer_ to be able to "program" their entire business from a spreadsheet. LLMs have enabled them to get involved, and they cannot understand why engineers reject this "help" (it is for the same reason that a pilot would reject a copilot that thinks he knows how to fly because he played a flight simulator or read Jonathan Livingston Seagull; flight simulators are used in training too, but they are not a substitute for actual piloting experience). This refusal and resistance feeds into the mistrust and resentment. We live in a world where managers and administrators do not understand what they are managing and administrating, nor do they think that this is part of their job description. In the worst cases, they believe their job is to extract compliance from their subordinates.

There is a _lot_ of alpha in being part of a company, where authorities understand how the internals of the business (including software and IT!) _actually_ function. (One engineer told me that clueless yet demanding managers are, for all intents and purposes, unwitting saboteurs, and that the best a company can do about this is get him a job interview at a competitor). In some sense, the economy is just a machine for transferring wealth from those who do not know something essential, to those who do know something essential. This can veer uncomfortably close to exploitation. If we want to avoid crossing that line, we need to cultivate an economy where a lack of understanding is not seen as an _opportunity for profit_, but rather _as an opportunity for illumination_.

Just FYI, Chomsky, answering "Is Iran a Threat?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdxxVxtHK2M

Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here (https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/), with a link to the PDF at the bottom.

[1]: what you see is the first 5% of the essay, based on the notes that never made it in. Many topics are untouched, such as cults, caves, imagination, conspiracy, paranoia, fear, wakefulness, blindness, hallucinations, altering consciousness, notations, etc. And other topics are mentioned but not explored deeply (taoism, buddhism, prophecy, trust+belief[2], mnemonics, dreams, metaphors, etc). So it's mostly setup, with planned payoffs and epiphanies in the latter unwritten parts[3]. And some of the transitions between topics are in need of deburring.

[2]: note that many languages use the same word for trust and belief. In Indo-European languages, the root is the same root as tree and true. Relevant to the unwritten parts of the essay.

[3]: so you'll just have to imagine the unwritten parts, until I actually get around to writing them ;)

Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". They are being betrayed by the shareholder class, and they in turn are betraying their customers and their species.

The only thing that we can do is to not make it worth their time in the long run. Don't let greed and fear slide. Don't hate someone for choosing their family and comfort over your own, hate the system that forces them to make that choice. Hold them accountable, but attack the system, instead of its hostages and victims.

An interesting economic fact: Karl Marx observed that if factories keep getting more efficient, eventually, they will require fewer workers because the population is not growing quickly enough to match the increasing rate of production. This, as we have seen historically, is correct: we have fewer workers per factory and fewer factories per manufactured widget. Marx also observed that this will create mass unemployment. While this is _logically_ correct, it did not really turn out that way _historically_. Most of the manufacturing labor was replaced with bureaucratic labor (so called white-collar labor) -- all of those manufacturing firms needed to grow their internal bureaucracies to manage and direct a sprawling supply-chain.

In some sense, programming is about figuring out which algorithms are a fitting metaphor for business problems. By programming, you are building a model of the business problem and a model of its solution. Most of the non-programmers who are in positions of authority (managers, CEOs, even some CTOs), do not understand that this is what programmers do. From their point of view, the authorities come up with a "strategy", after dozens of meetings, and give the programmers vague instructions based on the strategy, and programmers turn those instructions into code that does something somewhere, usually after finding ways to avoid bad or unfeasible ideas, while still complying with the instructions.

To them, an LLM is indistinguishable from a programmer. From the point of view of authority, progress happens one meeting at a time. The reality is that there is a pyramid of experts beneath the authorities, that keep everything running smoothly, in spite of the best attempts of the authorities to demolish the foundation of the pyramid by "helping".

EDIT: to end on a positive note, it does not have to be this way. We just have to be willing to understand _how_ the organization we are a part of actually functions. And that means actually being curious instead of merely authoritative. I understand that curiosity is hard to maintain when you swim with sharks, so maybe don't swim with sharks.