NietzscheanNull

From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach.

I believe the science disagrees on this point. In the case of humans, adaptations that contributed most to our success as a species are a constellation of pro-social traits that enabled us to cooperate in organized fashion in relatively large numbers (which empathy plays a major role in mediating).

Evolutionary fitness is not always meaningful at the level of the individual, particularly in social animals. IIRC, there are a number of species in which individually-disadvantageous (i.e. purely altruistic) behaviors are conserved, despite their apparent adverse effects on individual fitness.

The problem isn't the surveillance of land; nobody is getting up in arms over someone pointing a camera out of their window to watch their neighborhood street occasionally. The problem is the scale. Flock is running a massive network of cams equipped with ML classification and segmentation algos, running 24/7, to identify and catalog plates, faces, and voices of everyone in view. It's a nation-scale realtime surveillance dragnet, and obviously not what our current legislation on public camera use was written to address.

In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy. Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.

Most tech workers will readily drop all of their ideals for a fatter paycheck. And don't even get me started on all the leftist friends i have in the tech circle that have been profiting off the rise of stock prices

This is a completely disingenuous critique. Not only is it possible to advocate for a more just and equitable system of wealth distribution while simultaneously striving to maximize resources under the current system, it's absolutely the correct thing to do.

In the current US political and economic environment (as well as most other places, to greater or lesser degree), to be poor is to be powerless.

Relative to inflation, wages have been mostly stagnant for decades now all while asset values have skyrocketed. The fact that leftists are aware of this (and act to secure their financial well-being accordingly, despite firmly-held beliefs that our pro-capital system is an engine of inequality) is not hypocritical because the alternative would be voluntary self-disenfranchisement. The poor have scarce means and time with which to engage in political activism, and conversely, the only groups which do are those with stable financial prospects and predictable/reasonable working hours.

How about the $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...

Several consolidated cases against OpenAI:

https://www.bakerlaw.com/in-re-openai-inc-copyright-infringe...

And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.

I'm of the opinion that "true art"/cultural artifacts can't be automated by definition, as they derive their value from the human experience embedded in them by their creators.

OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)

This misses the point entirely; wealth redistributive policies aren't intended to significantly boost the wealth of low wealth citizens directly, they're intended to dissipate the incredible concentration of political power that corrodes our democratic basis of governance. When individuals control more wealth and capital than a significant number of nation-states, barriers to regulatory capture and overwhelming information/narrative control (via media/platform ownership consolidation) effectively dissolve. We're seeing the consequences of that playing out in the US in realtime.

Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.

Sure. Hedge fund owners, VC firm owners, cosmetic surgeons, the Walton heirs, and Zuck/Jensen/Jeff/Elon own 97.5% of all wealth in the United States. The former three, while each representing cohorts, are very small cohorts. The latter are billionaire individuals.

If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)

Do you have any data to back up your claims? Because from what I understand, unions were the backbone of the recovering US labor market following the Great Depression, which punctuated a period of extreme speculation and inequality (the Gilded Age) similar to what we're seeing today.

The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.

As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.

Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company.

A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.

LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.

Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or...

Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.

Drug dealing is profitable. Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable.

To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.

How can you be certain that the ChatGPT "research" you cite is a faithful representation of facts? How do you know that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google haven't introduced RLHF to subtly steer model output on specific topics to align with their political/economic interests?

I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?

We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.

Last I checked, Fortune 500 CEOs weren't mandating that their employees use and find more ways of integrating Reddit and 4chan into all of their business processes and products. And I also don't recall the owners/CEOs of Reddit and 4chan touting their platforms as eventual replacements for all human knowledge labor.

This is a rather vacuous piece, and for anyone looking to avoid wasting time, the stated reason is: "corporate profits keep going up."

I think the byline is a bit of a disingenuous sleight-of-hand: "The boom is not as untethered from reality as it may look" presupposes a majority view that the stock market "is untethered from reality," but whether or not that's an accurate read of prevailing sentiment, it subtly shifts focus away from what most people ought to understand: profits of the largest corporations are now mostly untethered from the financial health of individual citizens.

I've been seeing more and more of this type of underhanded writing from billionaire-owned media outlets lately (the number of which is growing on a nearly daily basis).

Not sure if it was the intent, but this is a rather grating and shallow reply. Is that unattributed "quote" meant to be an appeal to inevitability?

If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.

Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers). If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?

[...] a lot of young founders here seem to have since embraced a punishing work culture — the 996 ethos. What are your thoughts about what’s happening?

I kind of love it, honestly. I think Silicon Valley got really lazy during COVID

Honest question: is this the type of culture that anyone outside of VC actually wants?

Do a majority (or a significant plurality) of people support this infinite-grind mentality, and if so, to what end? It's framed in the context of a "race" with China, but all I see is a race to the bottom. What prize do we win if we beat China in this "race"? What is the goal here, who benefits from achieving the goal, and what purpose does it serve? (Aside from enriching a handful of VCs and executives, that is.)

For everyone's sake, I hope you're correct. A quick scan of the article's comment section is enough to seriously curb one's optimism, though. I don't know what the demographic makeup of participants in WSJ's comment threads is, but the views expressed are surprisingly homogenous in both substance and tone.

I like to challenge myself with a little "game" in which I attempt to guess the most commonly expressed opinions in WSJ comments based solely on the parent article title; it isn't a particularly difficult game.

Highlighting Israel's inexplicably strong influence over US foreign policy is not the dog-whistle you seem to be implying it is.

still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math.

Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!

In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.

With all the tech-fueled multipliers on productivity that economists and market analysts have been touting over the past decades (not even counting LLMs), one might imagine that there's plenty of money going around to sustain a healthy margin with reduced working hours (or at the very least, the same amount). Seems like a lot of that "surplus value" just disappears or flips negative for many of us, though. It's almost as if a huge chunk of it is being diverted elsewhere beyond our reach. Wonder where that could be?

Where has the bulk of all that "value" our work has created in this industry gotten off to? I certainly see less and less of it these days.

Some of those people were Ph.Ds

Read any of the Epstein emails? Many are nearly unintelligible, despite the "world-renowned luminaries" that wrote them.

The phenomenon was discussed in a post here yesterday that linked to post titled "Privilege is bad grammar": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038125

Perhaps "deny, defend, depose" – not sure where I heard that, but it has a certain mental impact.

You can't be serious. We're discussing a class of people making sub-minimum wages, barely scraping by to afford rent and groceries (much less any childcare or medical expenses), and your suggestion is "lobby to change that" or "just get a different job"?

As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.

Nobody cares that a large number of billionaires and world leaders, individuals with the power to steer the course of society as a whole, are implicated in one of the largest (and darkest) scandals in history?

Speak for yourself.

Found this interesting given the source:

  "If AI does to white-collar work what globalization did to blue-collar, we need to confront that directly," Fink told the crowd in Davos

  Fink's prescription, offered in a conversation at Davos with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was for pensions to invest more in AI infrastructure—the kind of assets BlackRock manages.

  "We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth," he said. "If they're just watching it from the sidelines, they're going to feel left out."

Please don't make baseless accusations. If you had actually read the article, you would know that the scientific study described reports a "U-shaped curve" of negative health outcomes as a function of number of children, specifically highlighting the "finding that people who didn’t have children also aged faster and had shorter lifespans."

I suspect that your default assumption may be revealing an internal conflict that, in my experience, many parents seem to navigate at one point or another. Disregarding that and taking the statement at face value, I'm glad that having children is "the best thing in the world" for you and I hope that continues to be true. That said, I'd emphasize that your opinion is unlikely to be shared by everyone on the planet, and the implicit dismissal of other viewpoints as "nonsense" (including the evidence of the peer-reviewed journal paper described in TFA that would probably _bolster_ your assertion) is probably not the best strategy to convince the undecided.

The vehicle did not hit the ICE agent. The video footage clearly shows the agent first stepping in front of the vehicle, then around to the driver's side with weapon drawn and aimed. The vehicle did not accelerate toward him, it was turning away.

This is completely incorrect. A flat tax has a constant tax rate, which is why it's often referred to as a "proportional tax." Under a true flat tax system, everyone pays the same percentage of their income.

A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.

I always found Hanlon's Razor a bit too optimistic in tone. I prefer it restated in the form of Clarke's third law: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."