eevilspock

that's limited to node. won't work in a browser.

In the media: https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/us-uk-announce-sweeping-sanc...

The irony is that the people and employees of the AI companies will vehemently defend the morality of capitalism, private property and free markets.

Their robber baron behavior reveals their true values and the reality of capitalism.

What's interesting is the speaker in the poem is predicting their own inevitable ("with a sigh") reality distortion field, i.e. is being cynical about themself. So it is a poem about self-serving bias, despite the fact that we are perfectly capable of checking ourselves. Our biases aren't entirely subconscious. We can be willful about it, willfully look the other way so our biases remain "subconscious" and thus not our responsibility, making it easier for our conscious side to convince itself that its self-esteem is legit.

And then there is a meta-confirmation of this bias: The way people commonly interpret this poem. If Frost had that in mind all along, then he/the poem is genius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

http://archive.today/f0saw

I think it depends on how it is done, and the kind of ICs you have on the team. It can come off as micromanagement, which may work well enough if you have not-so-competent ICs, but will backfire if you have talented ones.

On a daily basis here on HN, capitalists and libertarians and others with the SV mindset work hard to protect the narrative that their way is the best way.

Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those who work as hard as you but get less because of economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that poverty breeds poverty)...

It really boils down to your system of morality.

If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.

Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.

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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair

The marketing dollars spent by the care assistant service is additional GDP.

Using GDP to measure the health or rank of a company is like rating writers by the number of words they produce.

You are implicitly anthropomorphizing LLMs by implying that they (can) have intent in the first place. They have no intent, so can't lie or make a claim or confabulate. They are just a very complex black box that takes input and spits output. Searle's Chinese Room metaphor applies here.

The difference is that you are capable of reflection and self-awareness, in this particular case that you understand nothing about dressage and your judgements would be a farce.

One of the counter arguments to "LLMs aren't really AI" is: "Well, maybe the human brain works much like an LLM. So we are stupid in the same way LLMs are. We just have more sophisticated LLMs in our heads, or better training data. In other other words, if LLMs aren't intelligent, then neither are we.

The counter to this counter is: Can one build an LLM that can identify hallucinations, the way we do? That can classify its own output as good or shitty?

Soon you’ll have no friends left

This dynamic far outweighs factors like moral and intellectual honesty. Humans want to be a part of a tribe and be respected within it far more than they want to do the right thing or be honest.

The period of fastest growth of Christianity was a period of Christian violence and darkness: the Crusades, The Inquisition, Christian colonialism and imperialism, the Dark Ages.

The fastest growing religion now is Islam, which is in many ways following the earlier playbook of Christianity.

Whereas Buddhism, the real kind, not the new agey California kind that is centered on self, or the popular Asian kind that is as close to Buddhist principles as Evangelicals are to Jesus's teachings, has nearly vanished from its place of birth, India, suppressed in favor of Islam or Hinduism, whichever the rulers of India favored at the time, and is a rarity everywhere else on the planet.

If any religion is COOPERATE-BOT, it is Buddhism, the real kind.

A Homebrew install option will help this take off on Macs. https://github.com/thomasschafer/scooter/issues/6

Isn't Twitter doing much better now Musk has returned it to Founder mode?

One might say the same of founders, but with respect to the org they are a part of: society. Founder? Nope, professional money extractor.

Anyone who's critical of, which is to say critically aware of, the underlying nature of capitalism will get what I'm saying.

Elon Musk (who proofread PG's post) is a master at extracting money from society and its government, while extracting labor from workers for minimal pay.[1] Zuck is a master at extracting money from society (by maximally playing to people's addictive tendencies and selling their attention to companies who want to extract more!). These types are driven by money and power, not by bettering society, though as masters of extraction they are masters of selling themselves as the latter.

Compare them to people who are driven not by money but by a desire to contribute: Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds. If capitalism/markets were efficient, Albert Einstein would have been the richest person in the world, not Musk. The inventor of the web would be worth a lot more than the inventor of a web app that prey's upon people's addictive tendencies. Linus Torvalds' baby runs the internet (and android phones) yet his net worth is... Remember how Microsoft said open source was un-American, akin to communism? Now Microsoft is a master at extracting money from open source.

Capitalism's measure of net worth (money in the bank) does not correlate to actual net worth (positive impact on society).

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[1]: btw, how is the Founder Mode he instituted at what was formally known as Twitter working out?

https://archive.is/5Je01

Dynamic field theory provides an explanation for how the brain gives rise to behavior via the coordinated activity of populations of neurons. These neural populations, depicted in the dynamic field simulator below, make local decisions about behaviorally relevant events in the world. For instance, move your mouse above the blue line in the simulator and watch what happens. When you move your mouse high enough, the group of neurons form a local decision—a peak of activation—detecting the location of the interesting event (your mouse movement). When you move to another position along the line, a different local decision forms. Activation patterns in other dynamic fields might be sensitive to other types of information such as color, shape, or even the emotional valence of an event.

I relate news, Microsoft 365 has been renamed Microsoft 364, pending consideration of Microsoft 363.

https://archive.is/20240628055539/https://www.theatlantic.co...

I chose the article's subtitle as it is more relevant for the HN community.

I don't think any user who leaves their unsynced data sitting in a drawer for more than a year can reasonably expect it to sync to a shared database, not just because of schema incompatibility but more so because of conflict resolution (imagine expecting your PR based on a two year old git commit to be accepted to a very active project). Just give them a report of the diff (the unsynced changes) so they can redo them via the latest client manually.

Lenses make total sense. You don't have to maintain lenses for all past versions, just a rolling set with old ones scheduled for deprecation announcements and a sunset schedule.

doesn’t it then mean that whatever process is encoded in the NN, it should both be possible to represent in some more efficient representation...?

Not if NNs are complex systems[1] whose useful behavior is emergent[2] and therefore non-reductive[3]. In fact, my belief is that if NNs and therefore also LLMs aren't these things, they can never be the basis for true AI.[4]

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism, https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almana..., https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34519/chapter-abstrac...

[4] Though being these things doesn't guarantee that they can be the basis for true AI either. It's a minimum requirement.

From a nine-year-old HN comment and a reply to it[0]

$12.70/month, according to that Mozilla research, is the total value of advertising per user.

The news and other content we all enjoy on the open web is mostly underwritten by ads, as are the social networks activists use to coordinate.

And who underwrites the underwriters? We do! It's a lie that ads give people content and services for free (explained below). If Mozilla truly wants to fight for users, it needs to end its reliance on advertising revenue, and help invent honest ways for content and service creators to get paid by end users. We are a creative industry. We can find ways to do this while also keeping access open to the fraction of the population that can't afford to pay (which per below would only be people who don't buy advertised products).

I know this truth is hard to swallow for an industry that has grown so dependent on ads. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." But if we are to do the right thing, we have to really think about the truth:

1. The advertisers who pay web providers get their money from us, added to the prices of other things we consume. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because ad-supported web providers live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, they are using us as products more than treating us as their paying customers. Let me restate to be extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to their finance department.

4. We pay for all the collateral damage of advertising, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes.

5. We pay the social costs. Whether or not you agree with the social costs laid out in the above article, I'm sure most can agree democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2]. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe the social costs are the most expensive.

Added together, we end users are paying a lot more for "free" product than if we could just straight up pay for it. And even we non-users are paying the social costs and collateral damage.

Ads are simply a sneaky and dishonest way to get at end users' money without them realizing it.

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

[1] You don't need me to explain. We all know that money often overwhelmingly decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who wins, and influences what legislation they introduce, support or fight.

[2] http://www.chaosisgood.com/2013/03/how-advertising-undermine...

It's not just consumerism. It's selfism, of which consumerism is a subspecies. As I wrote nine (9!) years ago on this site:

Advertising is our C8. It pollutes nearly every corner of the web with deception and manipulation. It is the cause of the cancer called click-bait. It is so profitable it has given rise to factories that pump out cheap junk "content", overwhelming anything of merit on the web[1][2]. Then, to extract even more from the devil in this Faustian bargain, we invade our very customer's privacy, selling our soul twice over.

Most of us avert our eyes from this moral abdication because it funds our high salaries and our get-rich-quick startup schemes[3]. Everyone seems happy with their "free" non-stick pans and waterproof boots, so why spoil the party?

    It is difficult to get a man to understand
    something when his salary depends upon his
    not understanding it.” 
    
    - Upton Sinclair

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

It's a longer comment, with a lot of replies.

So what gives us the right to claim responsibility for our victories? Do we ever truly win? Or do we just get lucky sometimes?

Well, in any given game of Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe you can do everything right and still lose (or do everything wrong and win.) However, the better player always rises to the top over time.

Bad breaks are inevitable, but good judgment is always rewarded (eventually, and given enough chances.)

This assumes that everyone is on a level playing field with only non-compounding randomness preventing the better player from winning. But as you point out, luck does compound over time:

The parents we’re born to, societal power structures... so many past events have an invisible impact on each new action we take

This is commonly known as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and to economists as the Matthew Effect[1].

You could try to model this in the game by having wins skew the odds of the next game in your favor. It's harder to model in a simple two person game like this... You have to persist state for a population of players over time.

I've wanted to publish alternate rules for Monopoly, where at the start of the game players don't get the same amount of cash. Cash is instead distributed according to real statistics for "birth wealth". Alternatively, your cash at the end of a game roles over into the next game.

I'd love to discuss this with you if you are interested. We might even collaborate on a future project.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

~ I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing, http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer

I've thought of and yearned for this too. Conversely, in the winter I'd like a path with maximum sun exposure.

    There's a dark and a troubled side of life;
    There's a bright and a sunny side, too;
    Tho' we meet with the darkness and strife,
    The sunny side we also may view.

    Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
    Keep on the sunny side of life;
    It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,
    If we keep on the sunny side of life.

Thank you!