jameslk

And yet, this organization found a way to grow its funding base by avoiding government handouts. It’s a net win

Organizations should avoid funding by the government whenever possible. It creates incentives for the organization to align with the politics of the government. I am all for this outcome, as it’s a net win for PSF and any organization that can fund itself

The government shouldn’t be spending itself further into unsustainable debt. And state funding of private organizations will always be subject to the politics of the state, leaking those policies into the organizations they fund. Avoiding both is a net win for everyone, so this is a great outcome.

I generally don’t like looking at anything AI generated, but I grew up in a world where this wasn’t the norm. I really wonder, as the tech improves, whether the next generations will have the same revulsion as us. Or if this is their new normal

Speaking just to the workers aspect: there is no catching up to this for the US. It simply comes down to population. China has a workforce of 858 million. The entire population of the US is only 340 million.

This sounds like something George Costanza would say

Are you Zuck's neighbor? (...just kidding)

At the individual level, I agree. Generally unfair to have some unzoned private school next to your house shuffling in people constantly. Though I doubt this would get much press if it weren't Zuck or the NIMBYs who can probably pull strings to get a story in the press about their harrowing plight and tormented lives (not saying that's what happened of course, and perhaps the neighbors aren't NIMBYs--who knows)

As a group though, I think Zuck and any NIMBYs deserve each other

Zuck vs Bay Area NIMBYs… this is going to be a tough one to pick a side on

Fair point. The non-apology is not helping I agree and would have been better left off altogether. I’m guessing this staff person is not very high level and just trying to help and connect the right people. That is, if you’re not very high up in an org, you may not feel you have the authority to speak on behalf of the org as a whole. I don’t have much context to know.

Mozilla could of certainly handled it better as an org, that I would agree with.

It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.

I usually do the same thing when the medium is text and someone is not happy. Tone conveys a lot of useful information. Even better if you can see a person and their body language.

I don’t think the cynical view of the staff person’s intentions is fair, though I don’t know the person’s history nor do I have dog in this fight.

Maybe they ran into a paywall

Seems like a win for reducing air pollution

Surprising but unsurprising… nobody wants to “just” be happy. I’d go as far as to say most aren’t prioritizing being happy, even if they think they are.

A lot of people want to have kids. Is this because they want to be happy? Is buying a house about seeking happiness? Is following a religion and going to place of worship about happiness? Is the author writing this article to be happy? Is reading Hacker News going to make you happy?

If happiness is all that matters, there's far more direct ways to be happy than most choose. Apparently happiness for many is not the only reason to live.

> What would you even call their socioeconomic system? They're not exactly doing neoliberal capitalism, their government is far too involved for that. They're not socialist, they've got free enterprise galore.

What you’re describing is state capitalism, which is largely what the economic system is in China, Russia, and to some degree in the US. It’s where the government intervenes in the economy and controls critical corporations and industries

It hasn’t kept up with inflation and the price of hard metal commodities so it’s more like the price keeps going down:

https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

https://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historica...

Given the sharp rise in production since 2010, it seems the flat price has more to do with increasing supply and less to do with waning demand:

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country

Vibe voting is the end of any semblance of neutrality in AI models. Each major party will have its own model

Borrowing to fund AI datacenter spending: https://x.com/MikeZaccardi/status/1984036161426485358

When your Federal Reserve Chairman starts giving you stock tips, the market top is near

The good news is that you don’t have to use it. I see ways this idea can be improved, some of which I already mentioned in this thread. It just launched recently so judging solely by what it is today is missing the point

> versus a site being useless by not actually having facts about the topic you're looking for, yet spouting out authoritative-looking nonsense anyway.

You just described Wikipedia early on before it had much content, rules around weasel words, original research, etc

I recall a similar argument made about why encyclopedias written by paid academics and experts were better than some randos editing Wikipedia. They’re probably still right about that but Wikipedia won for reasons beyond purely being another encyclopedia. And it didn’t turn out too bad as an encyclopedia either

That’s a good point. I think it’s a similar problem of why you wouldn’t let a model go wild in your codebase though. If good solutions to how we handle AI models making code changes are found, it seems reasonable to expect they also may be applicable here

> Llms arem't "there" yet with respect to this sort of thing

Yes, nothing about this is “there yet” which was my point

> Having an editor is totally infeasible, at that point you might as well have the humans write the articles.

Why?

> Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources.

Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models?

What prevents one from mitigating hallucination problems with editors as I mentioned? Are there not other ways you can think of this might be mitigated?

> You would need to trust a single publisher with a technology that’s allowing them to crank out millions of entries and updates permanently, so fast that you could never detect subtle changes or errors or biases targeted in a specific way—and that doesn’t even account for most people, who never even bother to question an article, let alone check the sources.

How is this different from Wikipedia already? It seems that if the frequency of additions/changes is really a problem, you can slow this down. Wikipedia doesn’t just automatically let every edit take place without bots and humans reviewing changes

It was just launched? I remember when Wikipedia was pretty useless early on. The concept of using an LLM to take a ton of information and distill it down into encyclopedia form seems promising with iteration and refinement. If they add in an editor step to clean things up, that would likely help a lot (not sure if maybe they already do this)

Wikipedia is a great educational resource and one I've donated to for over a decade. That said, I like the idea of Grokipedia in the sense that it's another potential source I can look at for more information and get multiple perspectives. If there's anything factual in Grokipedia that Wikipedia is missing, Wikipedia can be updated to include it

I hope we can keep growing freely available sources of information. Even if some of that information is incorrect or flat out manipulative. This isn't anything new. It's what the web has always been

More generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg

Tragedy of the commons which is a symptom of lack of common culture. That is, since not everyone has been raised under the same culture and norms, there will be misunderstandings about what is acceptable. More regulation and fines[0] to solve what is mostly an educational problem seems unfortunate

0. From TFA: In the UK, the Liberal Democrats proposed legislation that would make playing content out loud a fineable offence of up to £1,000.

I’d be curious how much of the goal of the tariffs is for solar actually produced in those countries vs just slightly modified goods from China. That’s one reason tariffs don’t work when they aren’t applied universally

I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course

80% of the supply chain for solar is based in China[0]. As long as this is the case, it is unlikely there will be as much demand in the US for it due to new Cold War and bipartisan efforts to tariff solar panels from China

The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China

0. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...

EDIT: it looks like the article does mention it, I just missed it:

> The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024