pembrook

Agreed, but the days of software projects being ambitious or impressive are over.

By ambitious and impressive do you mean for Claude?

Because while cool this is clearly heavily vibe coded.

Because markets in the short term are almost a random walk and making the blanket statement that “Walmart stock is down today because Deepseek” was an easy narrative to repeat for media people who cover the stock market.

In reality the world is a highly complex, chaotic, reflexive system, and saying “the entire market moved today because of 12,000,000 factors that randomly aligned” isn’t satisfying enough for people to follow your media channel so they can monetize your eyeballs.

This is a red herring.

We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control.

We're arguing about whether governments executing censorship regimes via ISPs (like the Chinese Communist Party) without any balanced legal proceedings is a good thing.

And no, it does not happen like that in the US.

Yes exactly my point...so it sounds like you're admitting this "availability of porn leading to action" theory isn't a very good one? And that in fact it leads to less action given it satisfies urges at much lower cost.

Does it need to be said that by making all pornography easier to access the internet obviously makes rape pornography more prevalent and easier to access as well?

Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.

Yes, it’s an argument but there’s zero data to support it, in fact the opposite.

If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.

It totally could be illegal, and I don’t care. Those laws exist to entrench dominant incumbents, and make our economy less dynamic.

The history of Silicon Valley and most of its innovation come from this kind of thing, and we eliminated non-competes in California for exactly this reason.

Apple having a serious competitor in hardware would be a good thing for consumers all over the world.

Apple’s overzealous secrecy culture starts to become insidious once you become such a dominant force in the marketplace.

At what point do we allow their innovations to bleed into the rest of humanity and lower their margins so humanity doesn’t pay out a 60% tax to them anymore. I think they’ve made enough profits for investors at this point. Id be happy if my Apple stock went nowhere if it meant 20 other companies could grow and innovate new products off the back of it.

I’m a huge fan of Apple but this kind of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Regardless of whether OpenAI poached some of their talent or is the one in the wrong, Apple has such a massively dominant hardware business (some might say monopoly level in some areas) that for them to be publicly acknowledging how scared they are of OpenAI…it’s just…pathetic.

They’re a $5T company and can’t muster up the motivation to get in the game and compete in the next computing frontier.

Apple fanboys will invent some narrative about them swooping in with the best product as a laggard and claim it’s always their strategy, but I see zero evidence they have the capacity to do that anymore.

The Siri situation is just absolutely pathetic and no amount of bad press about OpenAI is going to change the fact that Apple neglecting Siri for a decade now has been a big F-U to their customers.

To me this feels like the Japanese soldier stuck on the island still fighting the old war a decade after it ended.

Thanks for repeating the moral panic narrative for me, it’s exactly what I am talking about.

All your complaints have nothing to do with the topic of this thread and are just a replay of the 2010s media caricature of Facebook …which no longer even exists in the same form (the social graph is dead) and has slid into irrelevancy…because it was never as powerful as you claim it was. It’s a dumb social media app, not the source of all the worlds ills. Nobody is forcing you to look at it (I don’t).

If we’re being honest, the hatred for social media here doesn’t come from a selfless concern for the good of humanity. It’s simply the frustrated flailings of people who were told their whole life they were special and yet the algorithm has unfortunately illustrated they are not. It must be extremely frustrating that other people are getting more attention than you on these platforms, when you believe you are so much smarter and morally superior to them.

You just don't like that people are spending their time in ways you don’t agree with and are consuming content that you and your fellow self-styled urban elite class members haven’t personally approved. And you're hoping to hijack my tax dollars to force your views onto the rest of us at gunpoint via state decree.

I live in the EU and have to experience the consequences of authoritarian overreach caused by this moral panic mob you're a part of, which is resulting in passports to access to the internet and 24/7 surveillance of private messages. The authoritarian attempts at control by the state are the problem. Not some silly California company with a phone app people are voluntarily choosing to use.

Yes, if the US was modeled like the USSR they could extract 100% of everyone’s private assets and the politburo could spend them on whatever moonshot projects they wanted to, unchecked by silly democratic votes.

But…the USSR and that entire model failed spectacularly? So not sure what you’re getting at here. Is there some fantasy economic model you believe you’ve innovated that will lead to utopia and the end of resource scarcity?

In an earlier phase of AI I might have agreed but now the publicly available data they’ve trained on is increasingly useless for the frontier.

RL/post-training is now a much bigger part of it, with that being largely proprietary and expensive work that the open source model just won’t fund.

How charming.

A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us 'stupid sheep'...with the implicit threat of a gun to the head via the state's monopoly on violence.

Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not all be less enlightened than you? And that, in fact, it could be you who is a sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic...scapegoating all the worlds problems and your own personal frustrations onto some dumb social media app?

Not great tbh.

The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.

The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.

But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.

Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?

Yes, and as with everything humans do as a mob, the pendulum tends to swing way too far in whatever direction the memes are trending.

We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything. But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."

If I'm incorrect that you don't just have a gut reaction to anything new being built, can you articulate exactly what about Datacenters is uniquely bad in comparison to anything else humans build (factories, houses, warehouses, malls, golf courses, pools, etc) that you believe needs to be stopped?

Would you be happier if we de-centralized data-centers as hardware in everyones homes and re-classified their resource usage as residential (basically where things are headed if we keep down this path)?

Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? Are we afraid water used in a data center is somehow destroyed and can no longer enter the water cycle?

I'm struggling to understand here.

Hate to confront you with reality, but if you're in the US, 95% of the infrastructure around you was built in a world prior to the sham obstructionist cudgel of "environmental impact studies" even existed.

So the answer is no, you would not have voted to build everything around you that currently exists.

Btw, have you ever looked into how your municipality funds its services and where that tax money comes from? I have some bad news for you.

The factory comparison is a moot point. This isn't about taxation.

Do you think the people hysterically screaming about a data center being built within a 500 mile radius of them would be okay with you building something that uses even more energy/resources like an actual factory?

We don't need unique taxation regimes for datacenters...they've existed as a concept for 70-80 years and are not novel in terms of their energy usage (they use less energy than traditional factories and less water than golf courses). These are all solved problems.

The solution to a fundamental lack of meaning in secular modernity will not come via taxation unfortunately. The doomsday religion that has captured the zeitgeist for the past 40 years is grasping at straws (datacenters) while trying to pivot from climate hysteria to AI hysteria given their end times prophecy did not come true. No amount of tax money will provide the same level of meaning as LARPing as an activist fighting in defense of an abstract fragile god (a femininely delicate "mother earth").

And they will, because Texas allows building.

Question, how do you think the entire infrastructure around you that you’ve taken for granted your whole life was built?

If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?

One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything. Even on this supposedly 'intellectually-minded' forum the extreme irony flies over the heads of most.

Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)

The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…

None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.

There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.

So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.

As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.

Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.

Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.

However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).

When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.

But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.

But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.

People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.

This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.

Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”

I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.

We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.

are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it.

I’m sorry but this is just not real.

There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.

If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.

power cannot be destroyed, only transferred...someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life

I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.

That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.

The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).

The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.

The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.

The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.

And AI is currently enabling the next step of this in many new areas.

a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations

I think you're intentionally muddying the waters here.

In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.

This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about.

You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.

You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.

Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.

So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?

You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.

Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.

However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).

Oh the horror, they might try to lower your salary forcing you to find another competing employer!

Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.

As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.

Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.

Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.

No. My point is you should fear centralized power in general, and in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.

Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.

Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.

This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.

For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.

The root issue is still government having absurdly asymmetric power over you.

If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.

The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)

In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).

Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr by me voluntarily choosing to use them.

Meanwhile, EU governments want to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the backs of each of my children (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.

I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.

Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.

These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.

Be more worried about governments. Read more history.