mikemarsh

Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)

Is it even worth mentioning that the whole "AI is the reason for layoffs" line is a charade, or does everyone here know that already?

For anyone who doesn't: the economy is bad in general, but saying citing "AI" as the reason for layoffs lets companies reverse their public perception from "company going through a crunch" to "forward-thinking innovator".

The latest "Pivot to AI" pulls together a lot of mainstream financial reporting on this very thing: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/29/the-job-losses-are-real-b...

Truly the next uncharted, civilization-upending frontier in computing, definitely worth the unlimited consumption of any and all natural resources and investment money.

Presenting this quote without additional commentary is an interesting Rorschach test.

Thankfully more and more people are seriously considering the effects of technology on true wisdom and getting of the "all technological progress clearly is great, look at all these silly unenlightened naysayers from the past" train.

Late to the party, but speaking of "challenge your own biases", have you considered that "Christianity" as a blanket term equally covering

* historical American Puritanism (of the kind you rightly opposed)

* modern "rock concert and a TED talk" Evangelicalism

* Traditional Orthodoxy such as that of the Jordanville Fathers of the linked article

may not be the most accurate classifier? Anything more than a cursory inspection would reveal these are all very different things, even if they all use some overlapping vocabulary from time to time (word-concept fallacy).

Getting your definitions and worldview from 20th-21st century reactions (many justified) against goofy evangelicalism rather than actual theology and history is likewise frivolous and embarrassing.

> The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful

Although written primarily for Orthodox Christians, there are valuable cautions here to consider regardless of your tradition: https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence

Nice job kicking the hornet's nest with this one lol.

Apparently it's an objective truth on HN that "scholars" or "philosophers" are the source of objective truth, and they disagree on things so no one really knows anything about morality (until you steal my wallet of course).

It's not about "Pathologising those who disagree", it's about how demonic influence (which anyone can fall victim to) _actually_ works.

You've highlighted a very real equivalency in spite of yourself.

I wonder if the concern about "civic institutions" as some unique and special thing within society is a generational thing; as a millennial I've almost always viewed "universities, and a free press" ("rule of law" is much more nebulous) as simply "institutions", or rather "the establishment", the key distinction being "the establishment" also includes corporations, banks, big capital, etc.

The "institution" of the AI industry is actually a perfect example of this; the so-called "free press" uncritically repeats its hype at every turn, corporations (unsurprisingly) impose AI usage mandates, and even schools and universities ("civic institutions") are getting in on implicitly or explicitly encouraging its use.

Of course this is a simplification, but it certainly makes much more sense to view AI as another way "the establishment" is degrading "society" in general, rather than in terms of some imagined conflict between "civic institutions" and "the private sector", as if there was ever any real distinction between those two.

Yeah, it's quite unbelievable people are still repeating the "AI everything -> UBI -> everyone comfortable and well-fed" line.

Who's to say the governments won't just let society continue on the exact same trajectory it was before generative AI: "Lost your job? Too bad for you. Here's a gig economy and maybe some minimal food stamps. Innovation marches on!"

If the "author" couldn't be bothered to write it, why should the "reader" bother to read it?

Yep, it never fails. Here's another prediction for "The next two years of software engineering"; AI vendors will start to utilize their senior devs' personal domains to write their advertising pieces to attempt to mitigate scrutiny when such things are posted to social media.

In the sense of LLMs becoming competent enough, no, it's extremely unlikely.

In the sense of "smart tech founders" and C-suite executives in general using AI hype as an excuse for layoffs and understaffing, that's absolutely in the realm of possibility, and already happening in some places.

I'm glad Paul Louth of https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/ is here in the comments.

At this point basically everyone has been exposed to the concept of `Option/Result/Either/etc.`, and discussions typically end up revolving around the aesthetics of exception throwing vs. method chaining vs. if statements etc. without any concept of the bigger picture.

LanguageExt really presents a unified vision for and experience of Functional Programming in C# for those are who truly interested, akin to what's been going on in the Scala ecosystem for years.

I've been using it and following its development for a few years now and it continually impresses me and makes C# fresh and exciting each day.

Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?

So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?

The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.

Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.

Everyone's a practical empiricist until our cherished science fiction worldview is called into question, then all of a sudden it's radical skepticism and "How can anyone really know anything, man?"

Even granting all of your unfounded assertions; "the output" of one is the rain you see outside, "the output" of the other is a series of notches on a hard drive (or the SSD equivalent, or something in RAM, etc.) that's then represented by pixels on a screen.

The difference between those two things (water and a computer) is plain, unless we want to depart into the territory of questioning whether that perception is accurate (after all, what "output" led us to believe that "jellied meat spread" can really "perceive" anything?), but then "the output" ceases to be any kind of meaningful measure at all.

They're not asking about telling the difference in collected data sets, data sets aren't weather.

The question is can you tell the difference between the rain you see outside your window, and some representation of a simulated environment where the computer says "It's raining here in this simulated environment". The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.

Defining machine consciousness is indeed mysterious, at the end of the day it ultimately depends on how much faith one puts in science fiction rather than an objective measure.

The argument is about causation or generation, not simulation. Of course we can simulate just about anything, I could write a program that just prints "Hello, I'm a conscious being!" instead of "Hello, World!".

The weather example is a good one: you can run a program that simulates the weather in the same way my program above (and LLMs in general) simulate consciousness, but no one would say the program is _causing_ weather in any sense.

Of course, it's entirely possible that more and more people will be convinced AI is generating consciousness, especially when tricks like voice or video chat with the models are employed, but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually conscious in the same way a human body empirically already is.

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing thought, how could anyone ever hope to to replicate such things via software in a way that "clicks" to add up to consciousness?

Talk to any right-leaning young man who's actively engaged in a church community (even better if they're actually pursuing Christ, and not just chasing an abstract ideal of "community") and you won't hear very much about the "loneliness epidemic", except maybe in reference to their peers.

It may be hard to find them online in order to "talk" to them though, and of course that's the whole point :-) Selection bias at work.

As a "believer" myself (we don't typically use that evangelical terminology but it's close enough) I can completely understand that. People should go to Church for Christ, and anything else, even "community" is a nice bonus but is not going to sustain people when pursued for its own sake, as you're experiencing.

Maybe a sport or hobby club or some other thing you're interested in where people have a specific motivation to get together, bonding and forming "community" more naturally?

"The Patriot Act. Read it."

"I hate dread. What a completely useless emotion."

Funny you should say that, since the sense of dread seemed to motivate this decision pretty heavily. Seems like the emotion was pretty useful as a sort of "burnout immune system".

link for anyone interested: https://mises.org/library/denationalisation-money-argument-r...

As a college dropout myself, I don't think I've ever used this ridiculous "argument" to justify my decision. Are there seriously people out there who fancy themselves "The next Mark Zuckerberg", simply because they don't have a degree?