tivert

> If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.

A big reason for that is most people don't have the "fuck you money" to be that selective. Sure, there are some programmers that are indifferent or amoral, but there are a lot more who just don't realistically have the luxury of quitting for reasons like that (e.g. they have a family, if they quit over X they may not be able to get a good enough job to maintain their lifestyle, if they don't maintain their lifestyle maybe their wife will leave them, etc).

Add to that, the Torment Nexus is clearly bad, but a lot of bad things aren't quit so obvious, or can be defended tempting but specious arguments (e.g. Facebook's "but we're just bringing the world closer together").

> [OpenAI] definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

Well, they can argue that, if they're fine with being hypocrites.

They're hypocrites.

> If I said I don’t like Truth Social. But I’m always on it, what does that tell you?

Let's not play that game anymore. Be clear. What do you think that's supposed to tell me? Flip your question around: If I said I don’t like Truth Social. But I’m always on it, what conclusion would you infer from that?

Are you, scarface_74, a US teen? If you are, are you a typical US teen?

Because if you aren't, you are probably missing something relevant about being a US teen, if you're thinking they should just do what you do.

> There is a revealed preferences of use vs non use.

If you, scarface_74, are locked in a cell and fed rotten food, and you choose to eat it instead of starve, it means you like it, right? You've revealed your preference for rotten food, so I shouldn't listen to you when you say you don't like it.

I think you should explain yourself more clearly. It really feels like you're trying to paper over specious argument with vagueness.

> They have no realistic option than use the social media sites in the link I included?

Perhaps. What options do you see, and how do those options meet their requirements? How well do you understand their requirements?

IMHO "revealed preference" has to be interpreted very carefully, in the light of the fact the market actually rarely fully satisfies people's preferences, and nearly everything is a compromise, sometimes a large compromise. I very rarely see that done when "revealed preference" is brought up. In nearly all cases, it's not a gotcha to undermine what people say about their preferences, but that's how a lot of people try to use it.

> In economics, there is a concept of “revealed preference”.

What's your point?

If it's "you teens actually love and trust big tech," I don't think you can make that leap from "revealed preference" data. People buy things for a lot of reasons, and buy from people they don't trust if they have no other realistic option.

> A lot of jobs are truly meaningless, dull, uninteresting, especially in the office space.

If AI lives up to the hype, it will kill most jobs that aren't "meaningless, dull, uninteresting." Shareholders will realize more value if the engaging and creative work is done by mindless AI, and minded humans are relegated to boring monitoring tasks requiring extreme attention and vigilance.

> I remember a lot of praise for duck "typing" as if it was an innovation, and claims you should just write unit tests to catch type errors.

> People kept glossing over the fact that writing typed code would be so much easier than writing untyped code with sufficient manual tests to catch type errors, because no one did the last bit. Things just broke runtime instead.

That was the dumbest thing ever. Exchanging automation for lots of manual work was supposed to be innovation?

So many tradeoffs so sometimes someone could write a clever, unmaintainable bit of brainfuck in the production app.

> The data we have is 500 years of free markets in the western world and the verdict is overwhelmingly: Yes, more freedom means more winning.

No, more freedom means more winning to a point. Past that point it does not, and I'd argue that's where the US is.

> Just invite some incompetent bureaucrat over your house to dictate how you should cook and you'll quickly agree.

That's supposed to be convincing, somehow? Just invite some "competent" capitalist over to your house, and he'll sell your fishing rod in exchange for a short-term discount on fish at the supermarket, and see how well you win.

> Hi small comment, please remember in china many things are sponsored by or subsidized by the government. "We[china] can do it for less.." , "it's cheaper in china.." only means the government gave us a pile of cash and help to get here .

And that's a really important strategic advantage China has versus America, which has such an insane fixation on pure(ish) free markets and free trade that it gives away its advantages in strategic industry after strategic industry.

Some people falsely infer from the experience with the Soviet Union that freer markets always win geopolitical competition, but that's false.

> If i asked an LLM explicitly to list the entire Bee Movie script it would probably do it, which means it was trained on it, but that's through a direct and clear request to copy the original verbatim.

Huh? The "request" part doesn't matter. What you describe is exactly like if someone ships me a hard drive with a file containing "the entire Bee Movie script" that they were not authorized to copy: it's copyright infringement before and after I request the disk to read out the blocks with the file.

> Facts themselves are not protected by copyright.

But don't LLMs encode language, not facts?

> If there's no unauthorized reproduction/copying then it's not a copyright issue.

I'm pretty sure copyright holders have gotten the models to regurgitate their copyright works verbatim, or nearly so.

> AI music company Suno’s CEO was quoted as saying “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” in what sounds like yet another justification of Suno’s prompt-based (and very popular) generative AI music service...

> Such systems offer the promise of skipping the labor by bypassing the creative process and, yes, the difficulties, confusion, and frustration inherent in such endeavors, but…

The true purpose of AI is to free humans from creative and engaging work, so we can spend more time doing drudgery (like monitoring AI output).

> Statements like Suno’s perfectly captures the prevailing public mindset about AI: that Artificial Intelligence is little more than a labor-saving optimization tool. This mindset tends to be good for #Capitalism, but betrays not only a lack of understanding of why people make music, but also a profound lack of imagination regarding how we could, or would want to live with our technologies in our lives.

The true goal of Capitalism is the elimination of anything that isn't Capitalism, so it can be replaced with more Capitalism, until everything is Capitalism and nothing else remains.

> I just don’t understand why they shut them down in the first place. They couldn’t have cost much to keep running. They provide a huge amount of value in the form of free support for their products. What am I missing?

Businesses are actually pretty stupid, and often make decisions based on narrow and parochial criteria without considering important factors and externalities (from the decision maker's perspective).

For instance, we've had our internal corporate wiki (or wiki equivalent) nuked on several occasions, with little to no supported migration path. The nuking is presented as an "opportunity" to "clean up," and I get the impression they're result of cost-saving migrations (e.g. cancel contract with one intranet provider, because a better deal was to be had with another). I don't think the "owner" of the intranet understands it as anything more than an announcement board and a place for storing FAQs.

The result is we've lost a lot of documentation for apps that at the time of the nuking weren't supported by an engaged and future-thinking developer, who was unwilling to put in the thankless and unfunded legwork to migrate documentation thoroughly. Those apps still need to be supported, it just becomes harder to do it properly.

I'm looking forward to "If Python Were a GUI."

> If you're arguing that voters choose a person who is less qualified, can you explain how Harris is a Nazi?

Why? Harris isn't a Nazi. The hypothetical was exaggerated to emphasize a specific point. Don't take it too literally or try to map it directly to current events.

> a voting majority decided that he was the most qualified person for the job.

There's your mistake: the technocratic assumption that elections are job interviews selecting for the "most qualified" candidate.

That's one part, but not the only part. This thought experiment should make it clear: You're voting in an important election. One candidate is an incompetent and unqualified clown, the other is a highly competent and qualified Nazi. You hate Nazis. Who do you vote for?

> On the Operator release blog, OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it. This seems fairly innocuous and cool, remember how we used to do this? You'd have to Google for day tours, browse trip advisor, likely open a few of them, then book the tour. Now, Operator does it all for us and we don't even have to interact with the middle man.

That actually sounds pretty terrible, and the kind of optimization too many people will adopt to just make things bland. The decision reduced to picking the hugest number, under dumb assumption that huger is better for you (not to mention the rating could be gamed). And the user has no visibility so no opportunity to second-guess the algorithm if it's being stupid.

It sounds like someone confused "faster with less friction" with "better."

> While this behavior may exist in pockets, my experience suggests that this is not broadly the general mental model / approach by executives. I think this is a narrative in some peoples heads, but is neither an accurate reflection of the world, nor a healthy way to approach employment.

But it may be consistent with worker's experience with the effects of executives' actual decisions, and a better fit than the executives' actual mental model.

> Of course, the repair works had 6,000 people.

Who were also experts working full time, with plenty of practice with that specific model, and loads of specialized equipment.

vs. a handful of hobbyists.

Long ago, I had a 5 character username (first-name + last initial) on a decent sized ISP's email system.

Eventually it got a ton of spam, and it was pretty clear a lot of that was from brute forcing emails at the ISP.

> This email address has only ever been used to sign up for HN. I have never posted the email address and never set it to public.

Was it something simple and guessable, like hn@yourdomain.com? or ycombinator@yourdomain.com?

> seems to be working fine, people seem to care what Sam Altman says and Elon Musk is making himself deputy emperor of a nuclear weapons state.

For the billionaires and chatterers.

But even for non-chatterers, you probably should pay attention to what Altman says, not so much in a gullible take-it-at-face-value sense, but in a kremlinologist look-carefully-for-hints-about-what's-really-going-on sense.

> pretty fucking dire indictment of the rest of us and what we let the world come to.

What are the rest of us to do? Pretty much everyone has been trained by society to follow the rules above all else as a strong moral imperative, no matter how stupid or how bad the collective outcome may be. If you do otherwise, you will get smacked hard; and if you try to organize, you will all get smacked harder.

> So f&@@&?@&!& annoying to login to do something and have things moved around for zero benefit, but it really is the icing on the cake when they put a pop-up over the UI declaring the change with pride, which further distracts me from accomplishing the task I need to.

I'm sorry, I think you're confused. That annoyance you feel is the feeling of technology innovators innovating to make the world a better place. Change is good.

I'm looking forward to the singularity, where Silicon Valley will finally improve the human experience to the point where it will be pure inescapable annoyance, felt constantly all the time.

The haters needs to keep their negativity to themselves, get out of the way of the builders, and be positive about what they're building.

> That, and probably a great deal of what we'd consider rotten meat:

Natural human stomach pH is low, like carrion-eating scavenger-low: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_acid#Comparison_betwee....

> I read "drop-in remote worker" as AGI. You can give it any task and it performs at-or-exceeding human level. The real question to me then becomes the implications for the rest of the economy, not simply a question of what happens to vertical AI companies.

> ...

> If there are relatively few humans in the white-collar workforce, then we are talking about nothing short of a complete remake of the economy.

Which is why I hope AGI is a chimera. It will be a very bad thing for nearly all people, and very, very, *VERY* lucrative for an elite few. I'm reminded of this quote:

> ...in these pre-modern, agrarian societies the economic divide between regular people and the wealthy elite was vast and functionally unbridgeable...As a result, often the wealthy landholding elite in these societies had access to entire classes of goods that might simply not be available under almost any circumstances to the commons, because they required quantities of money that might be relatively trivial to the elite but which were unobtainable for the masses. (https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...)

A post-AGI world is almost certainly going to be like that, but worse. At best, most people will lose all economic power be allowed to subsist on a UBI that will provide a tiny living space, some cheap manufactured goods, access to an AI therapist running in the cloud, and no future. In a mideaval feudal society, peasants were at least valuable to their lords. In tech feudalism, they won't even be that.

> interesting. Why are you required to pay US taxes if you are a resident of India now.

The US taxes global income for all residents: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/freq...

IANAL, but that sounds like a situation where you need hire an actual immigration attorney.

>> The US has nothing similar

> this reminds me another brilliant comment:

Do you have a reading comprehension problem? Because all the stuff you were reminded of has nothing to do with the kind of "illiberal censorship regime" that I was referring to in what you quoted.

> Congrats, you just walked in the primary stage of socialism

I feel like you're trying to taunt me, but you're doing a pretty poor job of it. Your mention of joint ventures, seems to confusing walking back from socialism with becoming more socialist, somehow.

> If you look at the point of a Chinese, the block of Google/Facebook certainly can be justified by "geopolitical adversary has control". The exactly same reasoning of data security and propaganda manipulation can be applied.

It could, but that's clearly not the reason they are banned in China. IIRC, foreign websites were perfectly kosher in China just as long as they fully complied with its illiberal censorship regime.

For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China:

> "In January 2010, Google announced ... they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary."

> ... On 6 August [2018], China Communist Party's official newspaper People's Daily published a column which was soon deleted saying that they might welcome a return of Google if it plays by Beijing's strict rules for media oversight.

----

> You can't say without hypocrisy that China blocking US social media is censorship but US banning Chinese app is national security.

I can without hypocrisy (see above). Your ignorance doesn't make your false equivalencies true.