jsrozner

This piece fails to understand that, in general, ethics depends on what side you are on. In hindsight, the winner's notion of right and wrong usually dominates.

If ethics mattered, the colonists wouldn't have taken America or slaves. If pre-existing laws mattered, America would have lost the revolutionary war (America legally belonged to the king). If ethics mattered, anyone who made money in cigarettes would be in prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.

If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.

This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.

It looks like you can get ~10-20% efficiency gain from these kinds of wings. https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/11/18/175391/folding-w...

That's a meaningful improvement but not that big. Perhaps the limits to this kind of technology are ~50% fuel gain? https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/01/24/180345/hybrid-wi...

We've got AI, but I'm still waiting on exponential technological gains. So far I've mostly gotten exponential enshittification of my google experience. Is AI going to unlock the detonation engine and bring down the cost of my plane ticket? https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/11/23/181486/exploding...

Meanwhile, what AI did to arxiv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981206

If as a primary school student you had needed to reverify every fact /experiment that was presented in your textbooks, you would not have gotten very far.

Trust is very important to human progress.

I reviewed for ACL (big NLP conf) and another similar conference recently. Lots of crap (though there always has been). One superficially well-written paper was likely AI-plagiarized (i.e. the AI sampled an idea from prior work and rewrote it) and got desk rejected for it.

Reviewers were also totally unengaged. Of 20 reviews I read (from my reviewers or from reviewers on the same papers), maybe 2 were mediocre, and the rest were crap (though likely not AI).

The notion that science will somehow benefit from this is about as stupid an idea as you can have. Science relies on skepticism. AIs are not skeptical, and many folks are submitting papers because they stand to gain something, not because they are motivated to do good research or develop new understanding. Fields are being inundated with garbage that is maximally indistinguishable from real work (that's the training objective for LLMs). This in turn maximizes the cost of identifying bad work.

This is the same enshittification process that we see everywhere else. You get spam phone calls because there is no reason for a spammer not to call you. "Researchers" are submitting spam papers because there is no cost to doing so with some possible gain. Absent intervention, this eventually drives the community value of the network to zero (or potentially negative, if friction costs to switching are high).

Has anyone here actually looked at the Shai Ben David (SBD) result? I did a final grad project on it recently for a class on incompleteness. In my view it's not really that interesting. For learnability to be undecidable, the cardinality of the continuum (size of the reals) must exceed \aleph_k for all finite k. ZFC does not bear upon this (CH is independent of ZFC), so this is a possible setting of the world, and therefore learnability can be undecidable.

But say the size of the continuum is, e.g., \aleph_3, (in this case CH is false, but it's not "horribly false"), then SBD shows how to build a compression scheme, and thus their EMX -- estimating the maximum problem -- is "learnable". But the compression scheme whose existence they show (it's just a function whose existence they prove) can't actually be encoded, since it requires identifying a maximal element by invoking the well-ordering theorem. So there's no algorithm that enables solving the problem (though a function solving the problem exists).

This result, without further work, does not immediately say anything about the sorts of problems for which abstractions can be learned. And abstraction is at the heart of understanding and problem solving.

See e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08410 (§5)

Yes, it is very clearly AI written or substantially AI assisted. "Claude, write about Godel's incompleteness thms with respect to AI"

And it's annoying that comments like yours get downvoted. Maybe HN should have a "vote that this is undisclosed AI writing" button for every post now.

And then a million private equity, venture capitalists, management consultants, and other aspiring grifters cried out in terror.

Hopefully they stay silenced.

You’re right and wrong: today’s economy is often negative sum from total utility perspective. It hurts society and the person but it helps Mark Suckerberg and Scam Altman and the private equity firms.

It’s positive sum from a wealth-weighted utility calculation though. And that’s why it happens.

or, you know, lobbying and oligarchy. great at changing outcomes even when the folks agree.

Following the overturning of Roe v Wade, it is clear that the US needs privacy enshrined in the Constitution. For example, it is absurd to imagine a state government trying to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage in order to potentially prosecute; this distinction is something that no one beyond the woman should have any right to know.

It's my view that the Founders did not think to directly mention privacy since they had no capacity to imagine technology as powerful as that which enables today's surveillance capitalists. But the sort of law that would establish a general right to privacy (or the kind of values that would lead us to establish one) would likely also hinder companies from aggregating user data for any purpose other than directly serving users. (And it would also hinder the government from surveilling its citizens.)

If such an amendment were considered, we'd all fast find that most techies aren't actually liberals. Oh wait, we saw that when they all turned to support Trump. Surprise, surprise.

I promise you that when consumer and enterprise funds dry up, every one of these AI companies will be placing ads and selling surveillance and drone tech to the government. Anthropic already dropped the part of its constitution that forbid collaboration of any kind with the military. The pressure to profitability is immense.

Today, purported morality is mostly (temporary) sophistry. Most folks will work for Zsuck or Palantir if the money is good enough.

https://archive.ph/DqPNZ

How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it?

The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.

META should pay a 20B fine for this one.

This is absurd. You're just asking for reasonable control over data that ostensibly belongs to you. Moreover, this minimum functionality was resolved years ago with RSS. That you'd be willing to pay so much reflects how well every tech company is doing at using tech against its own users.

By law, the English king could do what he pleased to. Somehow most folks still think the American Revolution was just.

Public transit and public places will continue to decline in cleanliness and quality for as long as the rich suck resources out of local municipalities.

They do the same things with public schools (pulling educated teachers to teach in private institutions) and with medical care (pulling physicians into private concierge practice).

If all the rich people had to take public transit and send their kids to public schools, they'd start investing money and (human) energy / capital in making the public infra better.

The investment of resources by rich people into their own private enclaves is entirely rational and can be solved only by wealth taxes that preclude such action (by making it impossible).

This is not true. If a king has all the money, then whatever the king wants is what society builds. The use of resources by tech companies to build self-driving cars uses resources for things that might otherwise have gone to some other approach.

Google's use of resources does not occur in a vacuum. Moreover, if cities decided to pass laws that would slowly transition all road infra away from private vehicles to shared public transit, then Google would lobby against that.

For public transit to function well (i.e. competitively with private vehicles), traffic needs to be much reduced (e.g., imagine no traffic lights and no traffic). Google's private cars on the roads do not move us in that direction. There is no doubt that they are technologically impressive, but they do not provide greater utility than investing in shared infrastructure would.

One of the authors of the linked article (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617) is a computer scientist not an economist. Just bc something is published in arxiv economics does not make it written by an economist.

I'll take "A waste of the world's resources for $200k, Alex" *600k, sorry

Stop thinking about taxes as a way to fund the government.

Money in the long run can buy anything, including political influence. There are no regulations that can effectively preclude this. (And empirically, America over the past 40 years has seen moneyed entities successfully re-align politics and economic policy with their interests -- this was entirely predictable). An unequal society therefore cannot be a democracy. If you believe in democracy, then you necessarily must believe in wealth redistribution. (In fact, I argue that any person who believes that the American Revolution was justified, for any non-trivial reason, will likely find that those the same non-trivial reason could be invoked to reallocate wealth away from today's wealthy.)

Counterarguments to this view (i.e. a different top-level value than democracy / meaningful sovereignty over the society in which one lives) might invoke utilitarianism: an unequal society potentially produces "better" outcomes if capitalism is allowed to run unrestrained.

But a problem this argument encounters is who gets to decide what "better" is? All systems are economic in the long term, including political ones. A good framework for understanding is that a society in the long term is not "one person one vote" but rather "one dollar one vote." Today's preferences are dollar-weighted. Those with money decide what is better. The economy serves the average dollar's interests. And the average dollar's interest are the wealth-weighted preferences of society's members.

We started with an income tax to fund the government. But today our most pressing issue is not funding the government, but not having an oligarchy. Wealth is the thing that most needs to be taxed in order to allow for any semblance of democracy. Analogies drawn to income, though interesting, are meaningless.

Yeah maybe we should just stop doing that and invest in public transit infrastructure instead.

Rankings not all consistent:

  - private military 6 but defense 39;
  - surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
  - polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
  - scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
  - influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);

  - lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
  - escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)

By making jokes about the physiognomy, we encourage future applications of eugenics to avoid this unappealing one. This is the right choice as long as the market votes in favor of this post.

There, I used Andreeson's ideas so you can understand it.

I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.

the US can't build bullet trains because they'd serve the average person and there's no money in serving the average person

"and i also wrote this using claude" -- can we just include that at this point?

Idk but the analogies in the piece strike as AI generated. I don't think the new yorker is using AI to write pieces, so maybe the author has just been ingesting too much slop

"full extent of the information...including any IP masking services"

This suggests that Google aggregates derived information based on how a user uses Google (i.e. VPN info). The fact that derived info was also potentially passed along is particularly upsetting to me.

Aside from the fact that I don't think companies should be able to collect user data at all (if you disagree, I think there's a good chance you're at least a little bit fascist), this amounts to Google providing free surveillance services to the government.

If you squint, it's minority-report-esque: eventually Google will tell the govt who it thinks is likely to commit crimes based on how they interact with its AIs. Almost certainly coming to a society near you soon.

My entire point is that the failures you point out in public transportation are due at root to the wealth inequality: Wealth inequality produces a negative feedback loop that destroys public infrastructure.

Rich people want their own methods of highly convenient transportation; they don't want to share with everyone else. They don't pay taxes. Public infra gets worse and the average person taking public infra is poorer. Over time your city has people who don't have houses or jobs, or who do drugs. Inevitably they are relegated to public spaces since they own nothing. The rich people avoid interactions with the poorer members by building gated communities and private infrastructure--rich techies now have concierge physicians and monopolize high quality teaching at their absurdly expensive private schools. Each decision is rational. This is the social rot that is wrought by an oligarchic, and generally value-extracting rentier class.

Many problems today stem from wealth inequality.