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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned our media / political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to not repeat the mistakes we made with Big Tech & Social again with Big Ai. I find it curious how split the dev community is, and especially HN, is on this, which has long been skeptical and speaking truth to power. I'm surprised at how quickly the public switched to abdicating to Big Ai's claims and recommendations. These people do not have our interests in mind.

Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.

View on HN

The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking. HN has always had a US bent, but it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a technical discussion of non-US AI because it will be drowned out by a very vocal anti-everyone-else-but-the-US crowd.

But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.

> The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking.

I've observed similar with my negative comments towards Big Ai. Anecdata and vibes caveats

And I've observed similar about my positive comments about big AI shrug.

That fawning for the oligarchy to be negatively received by HN, I find inline with what I (in bias) expect to be a standard HN response. One of my biggest curiosities is how much of the HN community has formed emotional attachment to their preferred Ai buddy or open v closed position. I suspect this is a significant contributor to the astroturfing we see around Ai.

lol, the idea that you’d call a generic positive comment about the big labs “fawning for the oligarchy” is an excellent example of what I was talking about, so thank you! chef’s kiss

I was not making comment about any specific comment, but rather a generalization of the astroturfing and comment patterns that can be described as fawning, which do exist here on HN.

Yes, in response to my remark about my own positive comments about big AI. If you were talking about other positive comments about big AI, you picked a peculiar place to do so.

> you picked a peculiar place to do so

the original HN post and the comments underneath would indicate otherwise, you haven't made any comment here I would classify expressing sentiment about Big Ai, I would call the your comment I first replied to as meta-commentary on the sentiment displaying comments

Has the HN population really been skeptical? I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.

> I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.

Nah. Back when Uber was boasting about all the laws they were flouting, I was pretty anti-Uber, and I was among the minority here on HN. Most of the comments were about how problematic the taxi system is, and how it's great Uber was breaking the cartel.

I think young people in search of a fortune are quick to rationalize.

If memory serves me, HN turned on Uber pretty quickly around the time stories like the Christmas party started showing up, where they put up stats like trips to planned parenthood by day of week up on a big projector.

True, people often do realize the grift. But then turn around and hail the next company funded by the same VC funds and a revolutionary event in the history of humanity.

I am encouraged by recent polling that shows significant awareness and agreement, across all people and countries, about the corruption and dysfunction in our governments and corporations.

Liberal democracy may be the worst form of government, besides all the other ones humans have tried, but it has also failed to deliver on promises so people are again considering those other forms of government. Coming out of WW2, it was easy to deliver the first part of the pareto, the last part has not been delivered. Eg. building schools and hospitals was easy, making education and health care good is not so easy.

I have faith that we will get back on a correct course, once we try everything else.

I am hopeful and have some faith that we will not retry those worse forms of government. There's always the French approach if things get really, really bad.

Ah yes, advocating for murder of your political enemies, very classy.

it was the monarchy and bourgeoisie in this case, has happened countless times in human history, some times bad leaders are so bad they earn the ire of people and the death penalty - for murdering countless people over their politics, petty crimes, their religion, or the color of their skin

You need to travel more if you think Uber and Airbnb are a "scam". To be abroad in certain countries and NOT use Uber or Airbnb is potentially putting your life at risk, especially getting into random taxis.

So... maybe there is an actual reason many of these companies had/have success that you may simply not be privy to?

In the US, where they started, they were openly flouting local laws.

Yes, the secret to their success is a lot of capital. They scale up hugely by steamrolling laws and providing their services at a greatly reduced cost in order to capture their market. Then, they can basically do whatever they want because they have a captive market.

It looks Uber like, 15 years to be profitable. It's still not profitable everywhere. The only reason they solidified their place is because they spent a ton of money to do it.

It's not a scam per-se, these companies do have value. The question is if their value makes any economic or business sense in an objective way, and the answer has been no. But it doesn't matter, because capital forgives all.

What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?

Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?

> What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?

I meant to imply society at large making the mistakes, which arguably is the primary reason our media / political ecosystem is so dysfunctional. Historically, what we are experiencing was also experienced by humans who lived during other periods of significant wealth inequality, another primary cause of the dysfunction and polarization.

> Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media.

They are not in my mind. I often use the phrase "social / news media ecosystem" when talking about the dysfunction.

ahh, thank you. agreed society made mistakes with respect to social media and online discourse (except the Amish, they don't seem to be affected by modernity).

Everything's a grift to our current leaders and media. The specifics are wholly irrelevant and replaceable. crypto, AI, it's buzzwords and the important thing is how much money they can make off the grift du-jour.

Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.

I hear more people talking about this, the wealth inequality, the dysfunction, the blatant corruption. We like to look for easy quick fixes, but remedying the last 50 years will likely take just as long. I hope I'm wrong and working on this is the majority of my volunteer/community efforts this year and looking forward.

It's much more likely that society will simply regress to a pre-industrial state as knowledge becomes more scarce, infrastructure breaks down and environmental protections are rolled -leading to things such as burning rivers as well as the spread of plagues.

Everything will have to become local and community-based, so I applaud your efforts on that -that's one of the few things I see that can make any sort of difference in the long term.

I've stopped trying to predict the likelihood of future events and instead have been studying history so that I have a larger knowledge base to draw on as new, unpredictable events arrive. There are some really smart people who have spent careers analyzing, pondering, and writing so that future generations might be more prepared.

Timothy Miller, Adam Tooze, and Sherry Turkle are my favorites right now. Just started Daron Acemoglu's new book this week, strong contender for list expansion.

The last 50 years have been the greatest in human history, and the next 50 looks even brighter.

Greatest for who? In America, the last fifty years have trended to the greatest wealth inequality in our history. Many people are quite unhappy about the current situation. Educational outcomes have so fallen while spending has increased, this pattern appears across most aspects of society.

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