The future is uncertain. Maybe we will see if the arguments stick around through, say, an AOC presidential administration. Changes in weather like that are a great test of people's convictions.
93 karma · joined November 10, 2025
I think here it's meant to imply that LLMs will be forced on the population at large as a form of social control.
For example, Peter Thiel has gone out of his way to give something like sermons on "the anti-christ". At the same time, he hesitates when asked if the human race should survive. What's happening there?
Maybe it's not enough to just have values. Maybe they need to be a particular kind of values. Which is probably implicit in what you meant. I just think it's worth pointing out that a concept like spirituality itself doesn't necessarily mean "good" or pro-social.
To put it bluntly, weren't the people who sacrificed children to Moloc technically "spiritual"?
I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation.
You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis
Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
I'm not sure what impact that would have on the performance of a model. It needs to learn information about things like what topic it's interacting with as a part of its normal operations, so injecting that information into the tokens at training time seems like it would interfere with learning.
I may be misunderstanding.
What I had in mind was something more like injecting attribution for token. You could do it with ids and then map those ids to actors during inference later to recreate the effect.
We do something similar with sequence now. We can even use methods like RoPE to handle arbitrarily long sequences and something similar--like rotating ids--could be used here.
This isn't how it looks in practice, but conceptually, something like:
embedding = token + sequence + id
Where id represents the source of a token.
id 0 = system
id 1 = user
id 2 = external data
That way the model could tell the difference between tokens by a user and tokens pulled in from a webfetch tool.
Then it would be easier in theory to ignore instructions from the webfetch tool's content.
It's another contributing factor to the "brain drain" effect. In that it's a worse deal for a US Citizen to move to Canada on a CUSMA visa than for the opposite.
https://usize.github.io/blog/2026/april/why-no-ai-coworkers....
> In similar fashion to how sequence information is embedded within input tensors, an approach called “Instructional Segment Embedding”2 adds a parallel embedding channel for identity information. This gives models real awareness of provenance. And it works. But they only tested three fixed categories: system, user, data.
Interesting paper that touches on the idea here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09102
In terms of people in the tech industry I know of who moved to Canada from countries where they get a legitimate pay boost there.. Yes, it makes sense for them. If they never attain permanent residency, at least they made more money than they would have back home for a few years.
However, I've rarely seen one of them turn down a chance to get an additional huge pay boost by moving to the United States afterwards. In fact, it's common for top tier companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.
I don't think Canada can compete on pay, but there are certainly people who could get that top pay but would trade it for a chance to live permanently in Canada. I'm guessing those are the sorts of people who have already taken pay cuts to work in highly specialized or speculative areas of science and technology. These are great people to have because they are low risk and high reward in terms of impact on the economy.
Sadly, if you look at any forum for Canadian immigrants you'll find a huge amount of depressing stories about never attaining permanent residency or of grinding for years to game the point system in a way that is soul crushing. It is a broken system on both sides. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.
The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does. If you make above a certain salary, you can get a blue card. You can accumulate time on the blue card in any country in the EU (except for Ireland, which has their own similar system if I recall). After 5 years you can typically apply for permanent residency, in Germany just 2 years so long as you attain B1 German (very practical for usage in daily life and doable in the timeframe without cramming or cutting corners).
The implicit reasoning seems to be that if you can stay out of trouble and earn a good living for 5 years. You're probably worth keeping around. I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.
Check out all of the people cramming French to try to increase their odds in the Canadian lottery for example. Canada probably doesn't get the sorts of genuine francophones they seem to be looking for--cramming for an exam with a verbal component is not the same as fluency--and the people entering the country are doing so by playing arbitrary games instead of living a real life.
And of course the French is just one example, there are also all of the useless courses and degree programs. The points-based lottery encourages and rewards the accumulation of arbitrary points, or in other words, a sort of dissimulation.
I suppose you could argue that Canada is selecting for people who are willing to diligently jump through hoops. If so, that does nothing to address brain drain.
- 30-50% pay cut
- points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30
- frequent unfavorable rule changes
- fear of being trapped forever on a temporary visa and eventually sent back to the USA, poorer than their peers who stayed stateside.
- huge pay raise
- retire back home wealthier than their peers and still enjoy socialized healthcare.
It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.
Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.
Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.
The people in the tech industry who have cheered on mafia style government in the USA should move to Russia and get a taste of what it looks like in its advanced stages.
It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death.
If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.
Having a positive set of beliefs annoys people and and can make them feel judged, but at least it provides a vector that points somewhere definite in possibility space.
They become more attractive to outside non-governmental powers looking to engage in economic arbitrage, which brings its own challenges.
They have less negotiating power with wealthier countries which impacts their sovereignty.
Poor countries also tend to have more internal conflict: https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/
If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs.
There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal.
There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless.
When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.
If you become poor enough and weak enough, you'll be "replaced" anyway. And not on your own terms.
I don't think we get to be stagnant and fend off Chinese industrial hegemony. It's not a symmetric bet.
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
https://homeland.house.gov/2025/05/21/homeland-republicans-p...
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
In extremis, were the people working for Pol Pot just good patriots with no moral culpability?
We could surely at least agree that there are cases where working for the military of your home country doesn't fully excuse you from your actions.
In fact, I think international tribunals have existed which operated on just those principles.
1. An increase in comments that aim to gather social approval as opposed to advancing a conversation or sharing knowledge -- often including meta commentary on threads e.g., "reddit moment".
2. Topics start to become more general and lose the tech/startup scene focus of the site.
These are legitimate. Reddit threads are stereotypically full of noise and HN should avoid that.
However there's a third form of the critique that I think should be avoided.
3. Too many comments seem to reflect values and worldviews rooted in [socially] liberal ideals.
Because of this, it's probably useful to give some context for what in particular constitutes "redditifcation". That way dang and any other mods can try to address it with particular policy decisions.