I didn't even mention mods in my (admittedly flamey) comment, I actually don't think the moderation of HN is a problem as much as the larger culture that comes with being tied to a SV finance company. But thanks for the info.
No, you might even be right that I have a "victim complex", given that my country is currently being victimized by the current US administration's pointless desire for a trade war. I'm especially hot under the collar at the moment.
But I would still maintain that this site's culture reflects the Silicon Valley finance culture it came from, and it's not a pretty culture.
OpenAI once again trying to drive up hype by making ChatGPT seem mysterious and dangerous, and the tech press uncritically eats it up. Ars even invokes the tired cliche of ChatGPT getting us into nuclear war in this article. I don't know about redditors but I'm sure that ChatGPT could persuade a Tech Journalist, they seem as impressionable as children on anything AI-related.
I'm sure that Elon isn't helping, but I've read that Tesla sales were always expected to decline due to no new car in years (outside of the Cybertruck which is seen as a gimmick) and market saturation from Tesla's continued monopoly on the American EV market. Basically everybody who wants an EV already owns a Tesla and has nothing to upgrade to.
There used to be a time, in the early days around 2018-2020, where "AI art" was something that only could have been made by an AI. Very trippy and resembling hallucinations. Sort of like dreams of a computer. I do miss that era of AI art. If you search "early ai art" on Google images there are some good examples.
If Kagi made a cheaper "no AI" tier I would be happy to subscribe. AI is costly to run, so even if you don't use the AI it's priced into your subscription fee - you're paying for an expensive product you don't want or use.
e: according to Kagi's pricing page they do have a 'no AI' tier, but it limits your number of searches to 300/month. Seems like a totally arbitrary limitation, but its still better than forced AI.
I agree with everything you're saying about how hard the privacy issue is, but would also like to add that the social media companies are incentivized to act like they have no idea how to implement a solution, because they want teens using their apps. The Facebook Files make it abundantly clear that social companies see teen users are their most valuable asset, since the rest of the culture tends to follow where teens go. When the social companies, who are collectively worth tens of trillions of dollars, say they don't know how to implement the law without convoluted, privacy-destroying, digital government IDs I just don't buy it.
They claimed to be a bank (savings account) that would give users free lottery tickets for saving money on their app. After freezing customer assets on the app, they pivoted to gambling. Customer funds are still frozen last I checked.
They're not doing "voluntary exits" out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it because their accountants determined that the cost of paying employees to quit outweighed the reputational damage of doing another round of mass layoffs.
Paired with the Pixel 4a "update of death" it feels like Google is throwing in the towel on smartphones. I don't care about Pixel but I do worry about Android - as flawed as it is, it's still the only viable option for an "open" smartphone. I've been playing around with a Pinephone lately and it's lots of fun but obviously not ready for use as a daily driver.
The Nvidia export restrictions have already harmed Nvidia. Deepseek-R1 is efficient on compute and was trained on old, obsolete cards because they couldn't get ahold of Nvidia's most cutting edge tech, so they were forced to innovate instead of just brute-forcing performance with faster cards. That has directly resulted in Nvidia's stock crashing over the last week.
My first time playing NMS was around 7 years after launch when it was added to Game Pass Ultimate. It's a fine game, but the reliance on procedural generation for planets made everything feel... stale, and same-y. It's ironic, the game has billions of unique worlds, but none of them have anything interesting going on on them because they were made by an algorithm and not a person. Starfield had the same problems (remember Starfield?). This is also how most people feel about AI-generated content.
I recently ordered a Fairphone 5, imported from the UK. Stock Android experience, replaceable battery, SD card slot, unlocked bootloader and modding is encouraged. Its basically what the Pixel (Nexus) line was originally supposed to be.
This (YC funded) startup is the same one that ran ads saying "stop hiring humans", "AI won't complain about work-life balance" etc. They're definitely trying to create controversy for attention.
One of my friends almost got scammed by a fake job posting just yesterday. The job was for a real company with a real site and headquarters in the US, and the fake recruiter was impersonating the identity of a real recruiter on LinkedIn. They realized it was a scam when the "recruiter" told them that the job interview would be over Telegram. Often these fake jobs will string applicants along, then start asking them for money to pay for "onboarding fees".
The number of people interested in doing self-hosting for AI at the moment is a tiny, tiny percentage of enthusiast computer users, who indeed get to play with self-hosted LLMs on consumer hardware now.. but the promise of these AI companies is that LLMs will be the "next internet", or even the "next electricity" according to Sam Altman, all of which will run exclusively on Nvidia chips running in mega-datacenters, the promise of which was priced into Nvidia's share price as of last Friday. That appears on shaky ground now.
That still means that that AI firms don't have to buy as many of Nvidia's chips, which is the whole thing that Nvidia's price was predicated on. FB, Google and Microsoft just had their their billions of dollars in Nvidia GPU capex blown out by $5M side-project. Tech firms are probably not going to be as generous shelling out whatever overinflated price Nvidia was asking for as they were a week ago.
Correct, Nvidia has been on this bubble-like tragectory since before the stock was split last year. I would argue that today's drop is a precursor to a much larger crash to come.
Sauce? How do you even measure "capabilities" in that regard, just writing answers to standard tests? Because being able to ace a test doesn't mean it's AGI, it means its good at taking standard tests.
Uyghurs committed frequent acts of terrorism against China throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so you actually don't need to imagine that scenario. The treatment of Uyghurs is unjust and a clear violation of their human rights, but it's nowhere near the level of depravity of the western-backed Gaza Genocide.