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mikeyouse

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Even in the first option, it is so much easier to destroy something than to build it. This is causing damage that will take a generation to reverse. Why would any foreign students choose to study here if we’re one election from deporting them and banning them from working here?

If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.

Yikes.

A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..

The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.

B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.

C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.

One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.

The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.

Tools are neutral.

Ha.

Optimal corporate taxes are zero (or close to it) anyway, same as tariffs.

From a purely theoretical standpoint about the optimal allocation of private goods, that might be true -- but the reality is that when corporate taxes decrease, so do overall revenues because their owners are also engaged in massive tax "avoidance" via many of the same schemes and we don't have any way to effectively collect tax.

As a simple example, to return profits to their owners, companies often engage in stock buybacks to increase their share price instead of paying dividends -- another theoretically 'neutral' choice except that many of the owners of the appreciating stock are international, nonprofit, or in convoluted overseas trusts which 'defer' the tax ad infinitum. We've disastrously and intentionally underfunded our tax enforcement mechanisms so huge portions of those deferred taxes are just never paid. [1]

Asode from that, even if one disagrees with the first statement or the Trumpism economics, there are 195 countries in the world and quite a few will be willing to tax foreign (enemy) tech companies. See the new hostility of EU against american tech.

Sure, but the tech companies are paying massive bribes to the President of the country where they're domiciled. How on earth are any of these other countries going to enforce international tax obligations on them if they're protected by a nuclear-armed state that's the sole source for AGI?

[1] https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publication/...

"US taxable shareholders strongly prefer buybacks from a US tax perspective, as they tend to reduce their tax liability by 9.3 percentage points, on average. US nontaxable shareholders are indifferent between dividends and buybacks, and foreign shareholders strongly prefer buybacks, which reduces their US tax liability by 14.5 percentage points."

My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.

What in the history of our world gives anyone faith that those companies are going to start paying taxes instead of using "AGI" to engineer increasingly complex methods to avoid them so that their equity owners can pocket the profits?

https://itep.org/trump-meta-tesla-alphabet-amazon-obbba-taxe... - "The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero"

I can't believe we need to rehash these tired arguments every time this is discussed. At this point, I'm convinced that some people are too jingoistic and simple-minded to believe the immense benefits that attracting the smartest people in the world has for the US.

"In 2018, there were 91 unicorn companies in the U.S., and 50 of them (or 55%) had an immigrant founder. Just eight years later, in 2026, those numbers increased to 775 U.S. unicorn companies (as of April 2026), and 455 (59%) have at least one immigrant founder"

Om Malik has died 26 days ago

Yep - a very common view/philosophy outside the Valley. For whatever reason, that's not the culture at all in SV. Actually "vouching" for someone is still gated by people's reputation, but introductions are understood to be less of a personal 'I think this person is worth hiring' and more of a 'You are both working on something interesting in a similar area, I think you should talk' or commonly, 'This person has some very weird but interesting ideas about something I know you're interested in'.

Random example but I was working with an algae biofuel company during the cleantech boom and we were having analysis problems as the equipment we were using kept fouling due to the harsh desert conditions where our ponds were. I was at a birthday party and obliquely mentioned that issue to a friend who had asked how it was all going and before I knew it, he'd called his former coworker who'd founded a company that successfully launched similar equipment to Mars which was obviously not user-serviceable so was built to be extremely robust. There was no 'ask' from anyone involved and nobody got richer from the exchange, but it was just a random occasion to connect people who might find each other interesting that was completely common in my SV experience.

Om Malik has died 27 days ago

There is a really tremendous streak of people helping people with no strings attached that I hadn’t found anywhere else I’ve lived. Especially but not exclusively on the engineering / product side - for a long time you could take a greyhound to Soma and have a couch to crash on and a job interview lined up without knowing anyone. Introductions are made without a second thought (extremely contrary to my east coast experience where to get an intro, it must be “worth” something to the third party), it is (was? I moved away a few years ago) an extremely special and collaborative place.

You can have character and be loyal to Google (lol) or make $xx million… I’m not surprised when people choose the latter.

OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.

I think a big part of it was the Chinese element as well - the RISC-V Swiss reorg happened at the end of the first Trump term when the US was making a lot of noise about banning Chinese investment in US companies and more greatly restricting IP - I'm sure their members were nervous about building a long-term plan with a lot of Chinese involvement.

RISC-V Foundation did.. though they go out of their way to talk about it in terms that try not to piss anyone off..

"Across 2018-2019, the RISC-V community has reflected on the geo-political landscape and we have heard concerns from around the world that investment in RISC-V must come with IP access continuity to ensure a long-term strategic investment. We first mentioned our intentions to move at the December 2018 summit. Incorporation in Switzerland has the effect of calming concerns of political disruption to the open collaboration model. RISC-V International does not maintain any commercial interest in products or services as a non-profit, membership organization. There have not been any export restrictions on RISC-V in the US and we have complied with all US laws. The move does not circumvent any existing restrictions, but rather alleviates uncertainty going forward.

In March 2020, the RISC-V International Association was incorporated in Switzerland. Along with this, we shifted to a new, more inclusive membership structure. Members of RISC-V International have access to and participate in the development of the RISC-V ISA specification and extensions as well as related hardware and software. RISC-V has a Board of Directors composed of member representatives as well as a Technical Committee of work group leaders."

RISC-V International has not incorporated in Switzerland based on any one country, company, government, or event. This move is reflective of community concern and managing strategic risk for our community investing in RISC-V for the next 50+ years.

The IP contributed and produced by RISC-V International is held under industry and global standard licenses that are already open to leverage by any company regardless of jurisdiction. This licensing is a common open source approach to foster collaboration that is not tied to any geographic regulation. IP in the public domain has not been subject to export control.

https://riscv.org/about/

Facebook's IPO was something like ~20x revenue and 100x earnings. If SpaceX IPOs at $1.5T, that's nearly 80x revenue and if you buy their 'adjusted' EBITDA figures, 230x earnings. Not quite an order of magnitude, but substantially 'worse' financially.

One regular workflow is a reconciliation we do for events that we put on — a number of costs that are expensed, a number of costs that are prepaid until the event happens, individual registration revenue that is recognized immediately and then the corporate sponsorships that are often paid in advance but their recognition is deferred until the event happens. Previously since that involved both balance sheet, income statement and CRM reporting, we relied on an integration vendor to write custom scripts to bring all the info (poorly) into our ERP. Since then, we’ve found a tool leveraging LLMs to ‘join’ those various sources and our events people generally described the report they wanted with a template in excel and it readily created that report with “export to sheets or excel” functionality.

A report that previously took ~4 hours per month for a very expensive resource now takes 30s to validate and can be run completely ad hoc by the events managers.