zug_zug

I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.

Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)

With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

What a time to be alive.

I do agree that bots are or will be an existential risk for every online forum. But I also think that an attempt to fix it that takes away anonymity is a cure that's worse than the disease.

My best understanding is yes -- there are signal that somebody is a bot (like how quickly they post), but if HN bans based on those signals then whoever made the bot will keep tweaking the code.

I feel like I rarely see bots in the top 5 comments of any article I read, or otherwise causing major disruption.

I think we just need to get creative about ways a platform can prove somebody is an invested human without tying it back to any personally identifiable information.

I don't think that's true at all.

One of the things HN does is not let you interact in certain ways until you've earned sufficient karma. This is a basic proof-of-work. If your bot can't average a positive karma, then it'll never get certain privileges.

Not to say the system is perfectly tuned for bots, because it's not. The point is that proof of identity is not the only option.

> Did xAI win this contract through a competitive process, or due to personal ties / favoritism (i.e., corruption risk)?

I think this is a fair question. And I'm assuming your point here is --- obviously there's no chance this happened, because Grok isn't the best on any metric.

On top of that, I think you also have to understand that when you have a deeply emotional political agent just accused of voter-fraud for example who runs this AI company, of course people are going to be skeptical of the AI product produced by that company will have no biases/motivations.

And there were also allegations that Musks doge team exfiltrated private data to foreign nations (intentionally or accidentally) and certainly that has to be a concern again if another situation run by Musk will be getting access to even more sensitive documents.

So to your point, yes this is wrong on every metric.

That's fascinating. I'd love to read an account from somebody who's been through that pipeline about how it worked.

Probably worth clarifying that when you say "But, the pro-legalization folks would..." you mean some stoners you met in college.

Because there are plenty of proponents who are not that... in fact 64% of Americans support making weed legal (2025), so it'd be really unfair to judge that movement based on those old experiences.

Yeah that's what I do and it works great for me

Right we have studies, and they are 30 page documents that only academics read, and so they get poorly summarized by articles that try to make them sound more noteworthy than they are. Usually by saying "X linked to Y" without establishing causality or even if that link is a significant risk (is it a .1% increase in risk?)

When it's a drug more than 10% of the US population uses, we can immediately say the risk increase can't really be that big or we'd have noticed it by now.

Edit: after looking at the paper, it looks like among the weed group the prevalence is roughly twice as high -- so instead of 1/100 having psychotic issue it'd be 2/100... and again for people who used when they were 13-17 year olds, which is underage in every state.

So you could frame that as doubling the risk OMG, or a 1 percentage point increase in risk, or it could all just be self-medicating, we really don't know much. Probably still safer than alcohol.

I've heard that too but if you go to any dispensary you can get a gummy with an exact dosage of THC and CBD on the label. It's actually a much superior system now to backchannel dried flower.

So I'm sorry that happened to your friend...

But also let's remember that there are tens of million Americans using weed products (legally in many states) who are having a great time with it. Which is why we need large-scale studies like this, and why any individual anecdote shouldn't offset a large study.

So just for context

"Based on data from 2023–2025, approximately 15% to 17% of American adults currently consume cannabis." - Gallup

So though this may be technically true in some sense, it should also be understood that if cannabis had any major immediate drastic effects we would have noticed them decades ago. Perhaps weed, like alcohol, needs a legal minimum age of 21.

Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the people running the platform have the hard data to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.

But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any significant political issue.

Also as far as documented cases, there were documented cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides [2]

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 2. https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-ri...

I never said the word reparations… just that it’s a topic that makes a certain group really emotional

This is the type of thing that sends certain people emotionally of the rails, but I suppose I can't say a city shouldn't do whatever they think is right just because some bad-faith actors will try to use it as a rallying-cry.

Agree on both counts… but I do.

I’m sure there are systemic changes that are possible, and it’s a topic worthy of brainstorming

Well the reason I said it sounds like you were trying to "hack" feelings was that you mentioned you came up with your own social "algorithm" for testing people you meet that could make them uncomfortable. It's been my observation that most attempts to optimize conversation backfire.

But I'm not really trying to convince you, I don't have a horse in this race. If you want maybe ask an AI and see what it thinks, they are great neutral tool for being a judge on human tone or being a social mirror.

As a neutral 3rd-party who wants to help you speed-run your self-growth (because I like your energy):

- Yeah you come across as aggro. That's okay, sounds like you went through some stuff.

- Sounds like you've identified you grew up in a weird situation. That sounds bad, sucks you had to go through that.

- But it also sounds like there's a piece of you that's trying to overcorrect. I understand, it's common among us nerds -- you grow up in a situation where you aren't as appreciated as you should be and you try to turn off that feeling entirely somehow. Unfortunately these types of attempts to hack our own feelings are usually worse than the problems in the first place. Usually the best course is to slowly try to remind yourself (over years) "That was a bad situation, it was bad luck, it meant nothing, and it's not the norm. I don't need to fundamentally change to not have that happen again."

I'd lump this in with so much other inspirational advice (e.g. "Dance like nobody is watching! Love like you've never been hurt!") that is well-intended but hugely impractical.

I think there are finely-tuned social algorithms that we innately follow. For example when meeting somebody we often perform the progressive self-disclosure algorithm in an attempt to find mutual talking points, so maybe yeah you say that you're into drinking IPAs or some other stereotypical thing, that's great.

The reason such a protocol is highly effective is you want to establish somebody's feelings about you before disclosing a huge amount.

Nope I'll make a google doc and export to PDF I think.

Part of what's going on here -- why we have this gap in what we say we fear and how we act, is just a human deficiency.

I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable.

Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it.

AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year.

We should be starting to write the laws now.

I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance

But if people want to make more good creative games and the store helps me find them I have plenty more money to shovel at them

It's funny -- about 8 years ago I remember this exact same issue came up, but the other way around. There was this guy, James Damore, basically a republican who said the diversity program was grievance politics or whatever, sent out a memo to hundreds of other employees, created a kerfuffle, ultimately was fired. He sued and retracted.

Anyways back then I felt some sympathy for the guy, talking politics at work, because as far as I could tell he was a good-faith free-speech proponent. I even wrote a blog post about it and shared it on this site.

However now seeing how much the tables have turned, and how little that cultural swing had to do with free speech, I feel embarrassed about my past self. It's incredibly clear to me that at most a small % of those "free speech" advocates are genuine, because I never see them speak up for the other side (like I did).

No I'm not saying we're no the cusp of anything necessarily.

I'm saying that the best current AI probably has an IQ of at least 60-70, and that is more impressive than getting a few people on the moon for a few hours. As far as I'm concerned we've made another thinking mind, it's not exactly creating life from nothing, but it's pretty close.

"These people are bots?" Dude I've been on this site as long as you which is something about my account you could see...

TBH It sounds like this is a tremendously emotional topic for you if it's absolutely inconceivable that somebody could think that anybody could have a different opinion...

Also you're kinda a jerk ftr.

What did I just read? I liked the bits explaining the basics of the difficulties of versioning data, well known points but explained in a simple way. But then it just kept going without any clear central thesis.

Was the central thesis supposed to be that it's impossible for any tools to ever represent complex migrating systems with well-defined data? Because that's not true. Or that it's not practical or cost-effective to do so? Or was there a central point?

Yes, technically.

But terms of amount-of-money that needed to be reinvested to bring it back to prior highs (let alone ever go like even 50% past its prior high) is significantly more this time.

To be clear I’m not negging the moon landing. I just think it may only Be humanity’s second greatest achievement

But thinking machines, even if they only have an IQ of 70 right now, even if they may end humanity, are still a technological marvel on the order of splitting the atom

Yeah I took over a year of singing lessons from a vocal coach and saw minimal improvement.

That’s fine, but it annoys me when people lie about this stuff. I don’t say everyone can program, and that’s okay. Nobody can say “everybody can X” because nobody has met every person.

Well… maybe making thinking machines mass produced is actually a more amazing project than the moon landing

Just need to make sure the wealth is spread equally

Hypothetically, what about allowing new property only of higher quality than existing ones? That way to assure it’s a net improvement for everyone