UtopiaPunk

Yeah, I agree with you! Regulation of that kind of environmental problem works better the more land is covered. National is best, statewide is meaningful (if you are in a geographically large state). Local is better than doing literally nothing, but it does have the nasty side effect of pushing the problem out of people's sight :(

A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.

A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.

Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.

Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.

It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.

You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.

You should report that to animal control. In most cities, dogs are not allowed to be running loose off leash and "at large." If they are bothering people, it's clearly an infraction.

It's a fictional dialog that gives an account of history from a different viewpoint, from a society that was destroyed by modern civilization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(Quinn_novel)

I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.

Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.

Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.

Ishmael is a good read.

I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that? Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.

That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening. In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.

Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).

Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.

We must respect the Ferengi's values

"Our AIs"? The AI models belong to giant corporations (Google, Microsoft) or are receiving millions of dollars serving giant corporations. How are they yours?

A better solution is passing laws on wage transparency. For most jobs, the company has a range in mind. Make them post that range in the job offer itself. Short of robust labor unions bargaining for better wages, transparency in the job posting is the next best thing.

I don't buy it. Executives worry about labor costs, ARR, RoI, etc. The grandest promises of AI are that executives will make a lot more money with a lot fewer employees. Of course they are pushing it!

ICs worry about doing their job (either doing it well because they care about their craft, or doing it good enough because they need to pay bills). AI doesn't really promise them anything. Maybe they automate some of their tasks away, but that just means they will take on more tasks. For practically any IC, there is no increase in wealth nor reduction in labor time. There is only a new quiet lingering threat that they might be laid off if an executive determines they're not needed anymore.

That's the difference in enthusiasm about AI.

It's amazing Cuba has lasted so long, despite being utterly hated by their neighbor, the most powerful country in the world.

Both capitalism and communism really only "work" when many countries work together. Cuba is committed to the communist project despite the USA all but suffocating the country through trade embargoes. The relationship between Cuba and the USSR was always complicated, but with the fall of the USSR, the communist network went to shambles.

It will be interesting to see how Cuba's future plays out as China grows in power and influence. IMO, Cuba just has to keep the candle burning. China and Cuba do have a positive relationship today, and I can only assume that the threat of China is a counterweight to any rash ideas the current USA administration might have in mind for Cuba.

Fun fact: Today, we tend use the term "first world" as a synonym for developed nations that are fairly wealthy, and "third world" for developing nations that are poor. But did you know there was a "second world"? It was the USSR and those aligned with it. The first world was the USA and its allies during the Cold War. The third world was basically everyone not aligned with either USA nor USSR.

Cuba's doctors and medical research is helping struggling countries live to see another day. They punch way above their weight. Incredible really, given they are a small island nation, living under the shadow of the biggest, most advanced military in the world, and it hates them.

I think the headline is valid. I'm of course aware of click-bait or otherwise misleading headlines, but in this case I think it is good. It gets right to the point it wants to make. For additional context, a reader is expected to read the article. I don't know how much information a single headline can reasonably be expected to bear.

If you are intending to spark a discussion on what is or is not justified: 1. I think it is proper for someone who shoots a person to receive stiff legal penalties, as seems to be happening here. 2. I think it is proper for accomplices of a murderer to bear some legal penalties, and the details depend a lot on the circumstances of the specific case. 3. I think it is entirely possible, that someone could be wearing black clothes (a common protest tactic) and otherwise activley involved in the protest without being an accomplice to an attempted murderer.

The Trump administration has an idealogical agenda against whoever they call the "far-left." The concern of the article, and the concern I also share, is that they may use this case to make people who fall in category 3 (protesters they don't like, basically), to be considered category 2. And the really troubling part is that there may not even need to be a category 1!

Protesters in black clothes = domestic terrorists. That's the potential outcome that's very troubling. And also why I think the headline is pretty good.

Lmao, this is an extremely HN post. 10/10 on the HN scale.

I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me

Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.

I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.

Can you elaborate?

Ant eating crabs when??

What is the distinction between using "AI to learn" and using "AI to aid learning?"

How would one possibly hope to keep the Final Fantasy series straight without knowing Roman numerals?? It's already challenging knowing them

I think I understand a desire for "calm" learning. I'm not especially interested in learning a language right now. However, I do generally have a distaste for "gamified" learning, and, separately, I feel distracted by things I feel are not very fulfilling, but are addicting (namely, scrolling through news, social media, or videos on my phone).

I won't say what you are building is a mistake. But just based on what you described, if I were interested in learning a language through your app, I would not just be comparing it to other language learning apps, but I would also be comparing it to language textbooks/workbooks, classes at a community college or MOOC, or language courses on DVD/CD/YouTube/etc. I guess I think that apps are good at gamifying things, if that were to be a goal. If you are stripping that away, what makes your app unique compared to all those other resources? How does your app replace or supplement other things?

And to be clear, I imagine there could be plenty of things that make your app unique! I just would want to know what those things are before diving in.

Impossible to know if there is something like Sheol after death, so we thought, "why not make our own eternal emptiness?"

Mmm, kind of. Scarcity is definitely fundamental under capitalism. But what do we do in a theoretical, post-scarcity society?

The digitization of information and media combined with the Internet and widespread use of electronic devices practically means that in some important ways, we are already grappling with post-scarcity in certain fields. 600 years ago, "books" and other texts were rare and valuable, then there was an explosive transformation with the invention of the printing press. But while much easier, there was a still a laborious printing process and a copy of a book was still a valuable thing. Now, a "book" can exist as an .epub and be copied perfectly a million times practically for free. It is similarly true for movies, photos, recorded music, news articles, etc.

As a capitalist society, we've really struggled how to deal with this post-scarcity arrangement. We understand in the abstract that this stuff is important, and that creating it is a laborious process, but we do not really know how to assign copies of those works value (because, once created, they immediately become infinitely abundant). The best idea we've seem to have settled on is articifically creating scarcity by locking the digital works behind paywalls and subscription services that require an account, or maybe DRM paired with a EULA. But I think people generally, and the HN crowd specifically, understand that is a lousy arrangement.

Could energy become so abundant that it is also post-scarcity? Between fusion energy and advancements in solar, wind, and geothermal energy, maybe! It is a tantalizing vision to dream of, but what does that look like under capitalism?

I basically agree all value is derived from labor, but a lot of modern economists do not.

There's are an interesting book called "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" by Martin Haaglund. Part 2 of the book is really concerned with the Labor Theory of Value, and it articulated it in a way I'd never really understood before. It's hard to summarize in a short post, but here's an essay that engages with the ideas in a span of a few pages: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-revival-of-heg...

Really, I encourage people to check out the book. It was at times challenging, and but always thought-provoking. Even when I found myself disagreeing (I have some fundamental disagreements with part 1), it helped me articulate my own worldview in a way that few books have before. It's something special. Anyway, the book really cemented and clarified my views on the labor theory of value.

Maybe!! :D

I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.

"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..."

That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.

Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).

As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.