fzeroracer

Calling something 'virtue signalling' in 2026 is in itself a form of virtue signalling as to what kind of beliefs you hold. Frankly I think we could all do without those things breathlessly clogging up the page because people want to desperately overreach into what someone said for the sake of making an inane point.

So you don't have an argument, you just reject sources that you either can't understand or don't like. Which is just proving the parents point.

It's this and I don't know how people here can't see it. You're getting fleeced by corporations as they walk away with all of the money thanks to an illegal tax by the US government on most consumer goods.

Companies get to benefit from higher prices being standardized (once a price baseline go up, they rarely go back down) and they get another check from Uncle Sam.

Nothing like the 'free to not buy items' argument against a tax illegally levied by the government on most consumer goods.

I think people are missing the forest for the trees here and immediately defending a corporation reflexively. The point here is to try and recover money that was illegally gathered by the government. Costco offloaded the tax burden onto the consumers and now they can collect said taxes back from the government.

I had a much longer bit about your factually incorrect framing of the incident with Pretti, but I'll just say that it's really insane that we still have people here on HN that are repeating lies by the state to cover what was clearly an extrajudicial murder. The video evidence cannot be more clear.

It's actually not that hard to prove. For example, PSN now has dynamic pricing for their games which can vary quite wildly and all it takes is a small number of consumers with price differences to prove it. The same is true for grocery stores or whatever else.

Enforcing it is another question though and you're right that companies will likely just accept the fine. It's all the more reason why this sort of thing needs to aggressively be legislated against and denied.

How many times are we gonna have to see businesses get caught sharing customer data before we learn to not just trust them?

I'm curious: If your boss emailed you and all of your coworkers with mass buyout offers and demanded that they quit their job how many do you think would take up the offer? 10%? 20%? Do you think it would be enough to cause significant organizational issues?

I don't think it's as much an 'attitude' problem as it is a 'wealth' problem.

The richest folk in this country have bought out every single media apparatus it can get its hands on and have spread decades of propaganda. The 'philanthropic' billionaire that spent wealth so that they could have a building or initiative named after them have vanished and gave their wealth to the methhead billionaires that rip up the wiring of the country to sell for pennies.

Reading this thread has definitely sheared off a few of my brain cells seeing people so collectively deluded about Chuck Norris. As you said he was a totality of capitalism, a product wrapped in human skin. He's only truly notable for the jokes people made (myself included) at the dawn of the early internet. As a person, what he actually accomplished is nothing at best and at worst actively damaging to multiple groups that didn't deserve the heat.

The only good thing out of this mess is that the universe felt cosmically aligned to have his death occur on the same day as Mr. Rogers birthday, someone who genuinely did fight for a better world.

Well, his administration has ignored the constitutional rights of this country multiple times at best, and at worst outright violated them resulting in killing American citizens with zero justice or recourse. There's a million different alternative reasons people could come up with, but we can just go with the classic 'treason' and line them up accordingly.

I'm asking you to explain what the actual difference is and you're avoiding the question.

If we had a complete black box where you submitted Prompt and out came Thing, and you had zero clue what said black box actually did, could you claim creation over Thing? What does knowing that it's a human vs LLM make materially different in terms of whether or not you created it?

> If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved.

> If you use an AI, there isn't.

What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters.

If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.

If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?

Because 'quality' is a misnomer. LLM writing has quality in the same way that a press release from a big company has quality, or a professional contract written by a lawyer has quality. It is functional, generally typo-free and conforms to most standards but that doesn't mean it has flavor or spice to it.

Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid.

> “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee.

The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.

> But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.

I can't say I agree, at all. This is essentially just your average post on Facebook or Linkedin made relevant on HN through telling a story about software mechanics. I don't find it interesting to 'read' collaborations between human and AI bots there and I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well.

I feel like there was something else at play.

For reference, I moved to Austin in 2018, my rent for my apartment was about 1200/month. In 2022 (the year I left), my rent jumped suddenly to 1600/month despite new apartments near me, and all of the apartments I looked into had similar jumps. And anecdotally speaking my coworkers all reported similar massive rent spikes.

It feels more like this is associated with the tech industry cooling significantly in Austin so they can't get away with pricing bumps. This isn't to say new housing doesn't help, but it certainly didn't prevent me from getting fucked on rent.

The speed with which LLMs rot peoples brains is really quite stunning. This is just one of the many reasons why I can't trust anyone whose holding the bag for AI stuff, anyone knee deep in this mess is likely unable to see the horizon.

I believe if you reread my post, you will find I isolated out my criticism to a very specific group.

I believe in, quite simply, the fact that their actions outline what they truly believe. Elon Musk said he was a pro gamer who was top of the ladder in Path of Exile 2, then he was found to be cheating having hired folks to play the game for him.

If someone calls themselves a free speech maximalist followed by banning people who criticize him, then he cannot by definition be a free speech maximalist.

Unfortunately this is an argument from the wrong angle, because it assumes what the pronatalists 'mean' by their belief. It's the same way that arguing with Musk about being a free speech maximalist is fundamentally a failed argument, because he doesn't actually believe in free speech.

The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family. They want absolute control over women and absolute control over their kids. Or they want to exert control over particular minority groups.

Where are my flying cars?

Fair mistake on my end, I'm aware of what OSS means but my eyes will have a tendency to skip a letter or two. The same argument applies; because if I write something and release it to the OSS community there's going to be an expectation that A) I know how it works deeply and B) I know if it's reasonably secure when it's dealing with personal data. They can verify this by looking at the code, independently.

But if the code is unreadable and I can't make a valid argument for my software, what's left?

I cannot empirically prove that my OS is secure, because I haven't written it. I trust that the maintainers of my OS have done their due diligence in ensuring it is secure, because they take ownership over their work.

But when I write software, critical software that sits on a customer's device, I take ownership over the areas of code that I've written, because I can know what I've written. They may contain bugs or issues that I may need to fix, but at the time I can know that I tried to apply the best practices I was aware of.

So if I ask you the same thing, do you know if your software is secure? What architecture prevents someone from exfiltrating all of the account data from pine town? What best practices are applied here?

Is it your work? What did you bring to the table? Because if we're going to analyze design, then code is one function of that design.

For example, you talk about how the code is secure. How do you prove that it is secure?

And since the foundation of the internet, the correct response to bots and disingenuous actors has been to a) ignore them b) ban them and c) ostracize then. We're talking about basic behaviors that have been understood since Usenet, something you surely should be aware of since you grew up in that era.

I can't say I'm impressed by this at all. 100+ hours to build a shitty NFT app that takes one picture and a predefined prompt, then mints you a dinosaur NFT. This is the kind of thing I would've seen college students slam out over a weekend for a coding jam with no experience and a few cans of red bull with more quality and effort. Has our standards really gotten so low? I don't see any craftsmanship at play here.

I think a lot of us have worked with That Guy at one point or another. The person that never internalized what being 'wrong' means. I don't mean the curmudgeons that might be really prickly about certain things, but the kind of person that is not only habitually wrong but incapable of recognizing it.

In a sense I think this is a different thing from someone that is antisocial or manipulative, because even they can admit being wrong or incorrect in certain circumstances. It's closest to narcissist behavior but it exhibits in such a specific way that makes me think it's a different type.

You could probably link it to a lot of different things. Extreme machismo social media brainrot, a society that rewards never admitting you're wrong, extreme wealth.

I've done that for years and it's a 'tax' for being allowed to use my actual headphones. Every single converter I've used will shit the bed after 6-12 months thanks to shitty cabling, and I've used both the official converters as well as third party ones. Eventually it becomes a fucking pain in the ass when it dies at an inconvenient time.

In comparison the headphones I've been using have lasted me for over 10+ years with no issue, and any decent high quality set of cans makes the 3.5mm cable easily replaceable.

This hasn't been true for probably over 40 years. Every conservative presidency has resulted in causing more budgetary issues, increasing the power of the feds and chipping away at the constitution. You can look at the actions taken and the budget over the years. Reagan massively blew up the national debt with Reaganomics, George W followed in his wake and so did Trump. The new definition of the GOP is just what happens when the mask fully falls off and they don't feel a need to lie to people.