nojonestownpls

When you take into account how much corporations cloud the effects of your work from you, and how easy (normal, in fact) it is to live in a bubble where you don't realize the level of suffering of others, then when you say

no matter who you are and what your role is

that view is exactly what you are endorsing. You may not feel that way, but unfortunately, you don't have to explicitly feel it in those words to act exactly in accordance to that.

Yes, when life puts you in a position where you're insulated from the consequences of your actions, just enjoy it :)

If your role is actively making life worse for thousands of others, that's their problem.

When you've been offered the privilege of an uncomplicated life in a complicated world, just grab it by the neck and take it, discard the complications as something for others to deal with!

$250k can do a good job of easing meme-induced pain.

"survive underwater" what a joke. Yes, there will be good engineers there who will be sad to see it go this way, but they choose to be there, get paid better than 99% of humanity for that.

Yep, large scale murder is just "business is business", but Musk ouchied my feelings with the bad words and that's far worse - that checks out for the current US left attitude.

As a non-white person, I'm far more worried about the danger and damage from openAI and Google, that is real and current. Elon sees us as inferior and isn't quiet about it like most of the rest of the powerful folks are, but "business is business" gets our families killed far more than some tweets do.

Do you not use any major provider's AI at all? Because the other big options are from companies actively aiding a genocide (Google), or companies clamouring to be the tools used in future war crimes (OpenAI and Anthropic - the latter only attempted to put weak muzzles on it, they're still heavily involved).

Every one of them is involved in actively involved in destroying non-white people's lives and livelihoods, people just seem to not pay attention unless they're really loud about it like Elon is.

I checked it out based on this comment. It's funny how in some ways it feels like a lazy student-assignment copied from Wikipedia: the subheadings and the structure are exactly the same as the Wikipedia article on the topic, and sometimes it even leaves in the citation numbers as normal text like a careless copy paste.

However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!

There was no border dispute of any kind between these countries

That is such a perfect representation of the level of public discourse around this, that I can only thank you for providing a sample. It's not even hard to learn about the Donetsk region's conflicts and the destruction there long before the invasion, but flooding the media and Internet with convenient narratives like "just the Russian desire to own Ukraine" has worked and continues to work very effectively on the general public (likely even more than the censorship does).

And all of this is quite orthogonal to the main fact here, which is that it makes very little sense to blame the population living under an authoritarian government and want them destroyed for that government's actions, and then turn around and give people in a democratic country a pass on their government's actions.

It's interesting to contrast comments like this in this thread, with the amount of hatred and abuse heaped upon Russians on the day of Russia's invasion - not just the Russian state, but a big chunk of comments that made it clear that they held all Russians responsible for it and would like to see their lives destroyed. And had relatively little pushback against them.

I agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, but I wish that thought applied in general, and not just to some special case countries. Especially considering the widely differing levels of democratic power people have in these different countries.

And yet far less attention than those in Ukraine got even at a time when the destruction and killing there was less than 1% of what Palestine has gone through. Within one week of the first attack, Ukraine got more mainstream support, on-air time, and geopolitical response, than Palestine got over a year of suffering through civilian murders and other clear war crimes.

There has always been a significant section of the US public that's anti-science, and would have posed a strong obstruction to funding any of the space achievements of the 20th century - if not for the fact that the Soviet Union demonstrated space supremacy first. Because of that, space research and technology was made palatable to this demographic by making it a "let's show them commies" thing.

The momentum from that kept things going for a while after the Soviet Union fell, but the inertia has been running out and anti-science sentiment has been raising to the surface in its full form again. The sad truth is that it will most likely be at least another decade to swing things around again, if it's possible at all.

I've also heard people jokingly call manicures handjobs.

He's upset that Democrats didn't let him commit crime just because he donated to them?

Yeah, doesn't he know that you have to be blood-related to the President for that privilege?

Imagine if this was a male journalist snooping through newly appointed young, female engineers' histories, e-stalking them the same way and writing an article of his findings. You can justify it as "it's technically still reporting", but it's very creepy that they thought of this and then continued to think this was a good idea throughout the process.

Not necessarily a culture shift - assuming you mean IRL culture, not HN culture - but rather a sign of HN's much increased popularity in recent years, outside the thoughtful nerd circle.

For some added context on the vaccine distrust:

In the early 2010s, the CIA ran a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad, offering free Hepatitis B vaccines to children in an attempt to collect DNA evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the compound where he was suspected of residing. It is unclear how samples were to be collected or how they would lead to bin Laden, but when news of this scheme broke, it added proof to existing conspiracy theories about vaccinations. As a consequence, many local leaders began urging people not to vaccinate their kids, various districts banned vaccination teams, and the Taliban issued a fatwa against vaccination programs. To this day, local leaders rail against vaccines as Western spying programs.

- https://www.vox.com/first-person/22256595/vaccine-covid-paki...

Given how many activists have used it in overthrowing dictatorial governments

How many? There's some news about it being recommended for use by BLM protesters, and about it being blocked in China, Iran, etc. Where is this info about it being used in "overthrowing dictatorial governments"?

The mailing lists are censored and the inner circle cannot be criticized.

Well, HN isn't censored in this regard (unless you believe their influence extends here too). What specific criticisms do you have against "the inner circle"? And what evidence can you show for them?

And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all over the map, ignore the issue, too strict, knee jerk in about every way, sometimes every way...

It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things

Can there even be a good mechanism to deal with these things, when most often there isn't any evidence and it's a "he said she said" situation? That's a fundamental problem with these situations that's intrinsically hard to solve.

One reasonable course of action is to say "we'll see if evidence accumulates, and if there's multiple independent complaints then we'll assume it's true". Which is pretty much what they did here, and now they're facing flak for that, as being on the "ignoring the issue" side of the fence. Another is to say "zero tolerance, any complaint and you're out". And that has obvious problems of being weaponized, and would end up on the "too strict, knee jerk" side of things.

Men and women are both incredibly complex and varied, and organizations having to judges of characters and relationships with limited evidence is going to be inevitably fraught with peril.

Yeah, all Apple users know that "this software needs to be updated" means "the software itself is fine, the developer just needs to pay us money". It's obvious, not misleading or an attempt to create FUD at all.

Google: We have no moat!

OpenAI: Hold my beer while I get these people to artificially create one.

It's strange that old expressions like "the US is throwing stones from a glass house" or "the US is like a pot calling the kettle black" have existed for a long enough time to be idioms, but the term for decrying such expressions "whataboutism" is relatively much newer and more of a political term than a language idiom.

Explicit control is in many ways better than this kind of subtle behind-the-scenes manipulation. It's more visible, easier to gather resistance against (yes, even under the control), and relatively easier to dismantle. To "subvert the controls" people first have to know they exist, and then go through the friction of subverting them, which very few people bother to do in practice.

You can of course criticize whatever you want, have double standards, and call things "authoritarian regimes" with no idea what those actually look like. Doesn't make them so.

Twitter is a well-established company with a huge userbase and existing infrastructure.

Gwynne was hired to make something out of nothing in an unproven space (no pun intended), having to build everything from the ground up (also no pun intended).

Framing is a fun exercise, you can do it a lot of ways.

As a previous non-regular-Twitter user, every time I checked in to see what the hype was about, it was full of people trying to create "personal brand"s and sounding very artificial. It had a very LinkedIn-ish vibe. Regular Twitter users probably had a very different experience, of course, but this average initial experience was a turn off.

There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.

It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.

The US doesn't have to bother with formal requests of course.

I believe Bookmarks existed before Elon, he just made it more visible in the UI (or approved the change, or however it happened).

pushed the chronological feed

It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.

You don't have to go that far. Elon just got more involved in politics than before (or at least more publicly than before - all billionaires are probably influential in politics, just not so explicitly), and the best move in that game is not to play. Politics is a mind killer, and instant enemy-creator.

The why is answered in the first link, I'll copy paste it for the lazy:

Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.

Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.

A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.

To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Bard conversations. ... *Please do not include information that can be used to identify you or others in your Bard conversations.*

Eek!

Was my first response on reading it, but tbh on reflection, there isn't really anything in my ChatGPT conversations that I would mind a human reading, and I expect the same for Bard (as long as it's disconnected from my login, which this policy mentions they do). It just feels weird that your "conversation" could be intruded upon and inspected by third parties at any point in the future.

(They also mention that you can "pause saving Bard activity", but knowing Google, that probably results in you not being able to access any Bard history whatsoever, even if saved in the past.)

I love when authoritarian nations just block internet.

Much better to just have control over the popular platforms, have a revolving door between them and the government intelligence agencies, and do your communication control that way.