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Privacy (like most rights, I dare say) only makes sense collectively. My own privacy is of trifling importance to me compared to our access to the right collectively.

Bit late here, but one point to consider is that people believe a lot of silly things when it comes to jobs. Maybe you don't, but still. Either through believing some cliche that people say, or letting some insecurity or fear have too much power over us, it can be easy to entertain fantasies about the workplace and our space of possibilities in it.

This is a very good and practical and humorous read on the subject. I suggest before you make any drastic decisions you try some of the stuff there, and see if you weren't nursing some illusions:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ludics-guide-to-getting-soft...

Calling whoever - this surely shouldn't be flagged. What rule is being broke? The comments are lots of people agreeing in civil tones and sharing their stories. Seems legit

I agree that LLMs are useful, in many ways, but think that people are in fact often making the stronger claim which I refer to in your quote from my original point. If the argument were put forward simply to highlight that LLMs, while fallible, are still useful, I would see no issue.

Yes, humans and LLMs are fallible, and both useful.

I'm not saying the comment I responded was an egregious case of the "fallacy" I'm wondering about, but I am saying that I feel like it's brewing. I imagine you've seen the argument that goes:

Anne: LLMs are human-like in some real, serious, scientific sense (they do some subset of reasoning, thinking, creating, and it's not just similar, it is intelligence)

Billy: No they aren't, look at XYZ (examples of "non-intelligence", according to the commenter).

Anne: Aha! Now we have you! I know humans who do XYZ! QED

I don't like Billy's argument and don't make it myself, but the rejoinder which I feel we're seeing often from Anne here seems absurd, no?

> AI could potentially be a non-judgmental, privacy-preserving matchmaker here.

I think it highly likely that LLMs are - overall - going to be incredibly damaging to whatever vestiges of privacy people have left. So this statement came with a certain jolt of morbid humour for me.

It seems no discussion of LLMs on HN these days is complete without a commenter wryly observing how that one specific issue someone is pointing to with an LLM is also, funnily enough, an issue they've seen with humans. The implication always seems to be that this somehow bolsters the idea that LLMs are therefore in some sense and to some degree human-like.

Humans not being infallible superintelligences does not mean that the thing that LLMs are doing is the same thing we do when we think, create, reason, etc. I would like to imagine that most serious people who use LLMs know this, but sometimes it's hard to be sure.

Is there a name for the "humans stupid --> LLMs smart" fallacy?

Have you ever gone on a day trip with no camera of any kind?

Surely if genius is to maintain any usefulness as a word at all, it has to mean more than that the person didn't work with a big production crew or have a "primary collaborator", whatever that means. How irrelevant!

I'm not sure if this notion of "genius" helps people appreciate music or if it just worsens the idolising/othering aspect of it. If we are going to use the word, though, can we not attempt to reserve it for the uncontroversial candidates, like Art Tatum, for example.

Wow, nearly missed this. Very cool!

> DeepMind have some history here so I reserve the right to be skeptical.

What history of cheating is there? I hadn't seen anything sneaky, but I don't follow everything. Do share.

Great development.

F-Droid continues to be great.

Ah no, I know myself that there have been headlines here and there.

I'm pretty sure there was some controvery in the linguistic blogging community even at some stage over the last couple of years, with someone writing an essay claiming the Chinese character system was in some sense less advanced and maybe on the way out, and this leading to a serious response or two, the usual fiery academic affair. I can't locate it this instant though.

I moreso meant for OP's low-effort dramatisation to not go unanswered. Framing it as "winning" some sort of language battle is particularly silly.

Your musings are interesting though, and the topic certainly is a fascinating one. Languages that use morphemes for writing are wild. Symbology is a cool word also - surely there has to be a lisp blog somewhere with that word in the title.

Hmmm. Is there a statement of HN policy somewhere about that? Or is this just a thing you decided to do on your own accord?

No judgment, just curious. I presume you've reflected on the idea that one person's flame war is another person's gentle exchange of opinion.

I can see what you're saying though, and I have seen discussions where I've thought "oook, don't really understand what these people think they're achieving", but I wouldn't say I've seen anything horrendous. I mean, individual horrific comments get quickly flagged to death. Why bother flagging the whole topic? Why not simply not investigate those threads?

Who is saying we ban smart phones for adults? I don't get how this is a response to what I'm saying.

Source?

This smacks of "I saw a headline once"-itis. Especially the fact that you refer to the Chinese characters as "calligraphy characters", as if that were the general term or something.

I use invidious, and if I can't because it's down or something, I use a FF extension called "unhook". I hadn't been on to youtube proper in a good few years, but with unhook, I can block everything (suggested videos of all kinds, comments, etc). I can re-enable comments by clicking on the extension in the toolbar and unchecking comments. Easy peasy.

You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.

Actually, I should say, using

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not interested in to be such a major affront to my sensibilities.

Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.

The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.

It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.

I heard a variant of this recently. I told a colleague I don't use my phone for long periods, days at a time, that I miss nothing, am a happier person, do stuff with my time that makes me happier, etc, and she broke out in a mild panic, along the lines of:

"What about emergencies?? What about when you need to phone someone about X, or phone someone else because Y happened?"

It's a good argument - the typical phone in 1998 was a useful and practical device. Seriously, being able to ring people has many excellent and real use cases. Phones aren't just calling devices anymore, though.

Have you interacted with humans anytime in the last five years?

People scroll TikTok or equivalent scrolly things as they drive, eat, poop, cook, as they "talk", as they walk, as they queue, as they "watch" movies and tv shows, during their down time, up time, in the bed until the small hours of the morning, people wake up on their day off and have a big plan and then... scroll the whole day. People go to the beach and scroll, they climb a mountain and scroll. They cycle and scroll, I've seen them do it.

If they can't hold it - showering, exercise, love-making (sometimes) - they get the thing to pump audio and/or visuals in their general direction, sometimes propped up, sometimes just strewn there. It's a riot.

And yes - people also scroll on these devices, if you can possibly imagine it, when they work. In schools, even! And in post offices, betting parlors, nail salons, cafes, while they do their only fans performance, you name it.

I've never been to Finland, don't speak a word of Finnish, and don't know much about Finnish culture, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if I had a 20c coin for every time a teacher in Finland scrolled TikTok for a minute or two during work hours, I'd have, roughly, a completely ridonculously large bag of 20c coins.

I think this is a reasonable description of what happened, and a real danger. Dogmatically gettng stuck on one set of economic and social possibilities just because they fit into the grand benevolent -ism is the issue is always fraught.

It goes both ways, of course.

When people say: "Oh, we can't do socialism, or anything that looks or feels even a tiny bit like socialism, because look what happened with Lenin et al!", I think they are ironically engaging in the very essence of what lead to these attempted revolutions going so poorly.

Social and economic rigidity and dogmatism is the issue.

Socialism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Capitalism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Same for anarchism, veganism, hedonism, and so on. This isn't to say that all ideologies are equal, but that dogmatism is generally very dangerous.

I appreciate the sincere engagement.

I wasn't saying that statement you quote is true for all groups everywhere, I was explicit about that, if you reread. I was saying that if that threshold is met in a specific society at a given time, maybe then at that stage we could say that porn was "shaping society" there more than society was shaping porn. As in, it could be a threshold we could look at.

While I agree that it's a large claim by itself, and that it's going to be hard (or impossible) to measure, I think having an idea of a threshold like that can be useful for thinking about where we are. And I do think that "where we are" with porn and its influence is a lot more serious than people are comfortable admitting.

So yes, while I very much agree that religion is maybe the single other huge thing, the effect porn is likely having on human sexuality is something I think we vastly underestimate.

Geez, thank you for taking the time to write that!

Seconded, very much. I Ctrl-f'd for "Bush", because in my head I immediately went, awh no, I bet it's going to be something a million miles away from what Vannevar Bush was trying to describe.

I strongly dislike when people naming things just pick something from the past to squat and vibe off. Have some respect for the legends of yesteryear, don't simply squat their concept-names with some very tangentially related product. Pick a different vibe. As my co-commenter said, even just put a tiny spin on it, to leave the original word unassaulted.

Any good suggestions for trustworthy and non-propagandistic books that go into this?

I've only read one excellent (French, translated) collection of the writing of Alexandra Kollontai, and otherwise nothing much of length on the topic. Kollontai was already enough to suspect that the usual simplistic narrative as whispered by our interlocuteur here might not be the whole story whatsoever.

Just like they listen to the music they want, watch the movies they want, buy the products they want, and go to the websites they want..?

I don't think it's true for porn or for any of the above things that people "do what they want" in any serious sense of the term.

It might be true in some sort of world without advertising, where media is presented neutrally, and barriers to creating and sharing (porn, music, plays, books, etc) are low, and we all explore and pick what we liked from these media sources in a deliberate, thoughtful way.

But that is so very, very far from the world we're in, surely?

Or a different way to make the point, just compare a pre-internet and post-internet kid. What did pre-internet kids know of sex when they were 14 or 15? And post-internet? This is a quick and easy example, but surely it's a major shift?

Assuming that your reading comprehension skills aren't letting you down here, I can only read this as a highly disingenuous comment. I made a serious argument, politely, and you've ignored the entire thrust of it, and instead you pick five words to quote back at me and willfully misinterpret.

You know very well that when I said "because of... history, or something" I was alluding to the fact that you had not in fact specified your historical reference at all. You did not state anything about the Soviet Union in 1917, you alluded vaguely and noncommitally to the redistribution of wealth being bad, maybe - it's unsure because, as I've said, there's no specifics.

If you don't make your point, we can't assume what it is. Or do you think that the Soviet Union in 1917 is the only moment in history where wealth/poperty was redistributed? If so, that would be a display of a pretty serious level of historical ignorance on your part.

In any case, now that you've deigned to share your point with us - the choice isn't one between a. what we have now, unchanged, and b. the Soviet Union in 1917. This false dichotomy is a common favourite of people heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, often people who are monetarily invested.

On the off-chance that you're not one of those types and are simply ignorant of the richness and complexity of human social organisation, I warmly invite you to read some anthropology to discover the myriad of ways human societies function and have functioned throughout history. You could be in for a very eye-opening experience.

I'm reminded of the videos about procrastination on youtube where people seem to never, ever, ever tire of comenting to say things like:

"I'm watching a video about procrastination... and I've got a test tomrrow! Lolol!"

Obviously your comment is the refined HN equivalent, but still.

I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was.

Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so.

None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.

I'm guessing from the ellipsis masquerading as an argument that you're implying that doing something about wealth inequality is dangerous, because of... history, or something.

This isn't totally false. Social change can be uncertain and rocky. If you want to be serious though you've to look at the risks of inaction, namely, allowing the funnelling of resources to the top percentile to continue.

I'm not sure how many people realise how out of hand that funnelling has gotten, or how concentrated at the very very top it's gotten.

As an example I saw recently, here's a graph[0] of French society from 2014 to 2021. Along the x-axis it's the poorest percentiles on the left, richest on the right. Y-axis is the percentage annual increase in revenue.

I think the reality is that inaction is arguably at least as likely to lead to the kind of "..." that you may well be hinting at.

[0] the graph itself -- https://elucid.media/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/170-croissan...

Taken from here (French article) -- https://elucid.media/analyse-graphique/inegalites-revenus-fr...

Hard to believe this comment could be serious, but nonetheless, for the impartial observers, there is a healthy ecosystem of Common Lisp implementations, from "permissive" open source all the way to (expensive) commercial, proprietary ones.

https://common-lisp.net/implementations

I think a full-featured GPLv3 implementation would be very cool, personally.