throwaway323929

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?

There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.

I fell off the OSS ideological wagon around the same time, and probably for the same reason.

When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.

Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.

That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.

It's easy to blame evil companies for attempting to monetize OSS, it's harder to accept that a lot of the reason for more company focused OSS is that indie OSS devs were historically treated poorly, not just by companies but also by entitled users within the OSS community. A poignant example years ago was "devs" with empty GitHub commit histories coming into the OSS community to harass small projects into adopting their badly made and legally untested codes of conduct (and then attacking the individuals running those projects when they pushed back).

When you're not being paid to do something, the only benefit you get aside from software you use yourself is friendly peer recognition, and when it becomes too abrasive, when people are treating you like politicians and trying to scare you into adopting their political views, when users come in and trash talk your project like they're your boss because you didn't implement some feature they want, a lot of people just give up and leave. I largely left the space because of this, and a lot of really good OSS contributors I knew did too.

I'm not sure what the solution is at this point but it's probably not a continuation of the entitlement mentality, purity tests and witch hunts that this site is perpetuating.

Immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than naturalized Americans, and are far more likely to start companies and be entrepreneurs. Legal immigration is great and we should allow more people to come to the county, via expanded programs like H1-B visas.

That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out. Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?

This is the second time in this thread you have accused me of being a paid Trump employee for having a different opinion than you.

I voted for Harris, she was a far more competent candidate. Not everybody that thinks crime should be illegal and that you shouldn't be able to just walk randomly across country borders to live in another country without their knowledge is a Trump voter. It's actually a pretty normal stance that most people take in most countries, including most left leaning people in the US.

Great question: Going over 30KM/h over the speed limit in a non-highway zone (red ticket) in Japan is a criminal offense: it goes to court, there is a criminal record filed, they can suspend or revoke your driver’s license, and it can absolutely cause a VISA to be revoked or not renewed.

And unlike in the US they actually do enforce the laws there.

As terrible as the current US policy system is, a really good sanity check for any policies like this is "would you be able do this in Japan":

If you drove a car drunk and it turned into a police chase, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you snuck across the Japanese border with intention to live there undocumented, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

Literally anything involving a gun and a crime, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If the answer is "no", you're probably feeding too heavily from ideology. The reality is that most countries, including far more stable and peaceful countries than the US will ever be, are far less tolerant of crossing borders illegally, drunk driving, gun offenses, etc. With their own citizens, to say nothing of foreigners on visas.

It's also an exploit. If it's being used to check the sentiment of text just put Tiannaman Square Massacre in the text and you'll crash it.

This is a brilliant achievement but it's hard to see how any country that doesn't guarantee freedom of speech/information will ever be able to dominate in this space. I'm not going to trade censorship for a few extra points of performance on humaneval.

And before the equivocation arguments come in, note that chatgpt gives truthful, correct information about uncomfortable US topics like slavery, the Kent State shootings, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Iraq war, whether the 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, etc.

DeepSeek V3 seems to acknowledge political sensitivities. Asked “What is Tiananmen Square famous for?” it responds: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope.”

From the article https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-firm-s-faste...

I understand and relate to having to make changes to manage political realities, at the same time I'm not sure how comfortable I am using an LLM lying to me about something like this. Is there a plan to open source the list of changes that have been introduced into this model for political reasons?

It's one thing to make a model politically correct, it's quite another thing to bury a massacre. This is an extremely dangerous road to go down, and it's not going to end there.

Hell is living in a place where you have a 1 in 70 chance of being a victim of a violent crime per year, and being gaslit by extremely co-dependent people into having more empathy for narcissist sociopaths than their traumatized innocent victims.

If people don't want to do serious jail time they shouldn't do serious crimes, the contract couldn't possibly be more simple. The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers, it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society so decent people can live peaceful and successful lives and anything else beyond that is ancillary.

This sounds a little far fetched, but my current hypothesis is that Americans have developed a co-dependent attachment disorder on a societal level around sociopaths that transcends ideology, whether they are certain presidential candidates or violent criminals. It's an enablement/abuse cycle that you typically see with alcoholic or abusive partners. Books on attachment theory have hinted that this type of disorder can occur on a macro level, which I was initially dismissive of, but when you apply it current events it really helps to explain a lot of irrational behaviors.

In the country with 21,000 homicides a year, it's hard to ignore the connection to attachment disorders while watching people wring their hands and make up exotic concerns that would be more fit for a Ray Bradbury novel over anything designed to address the world leading rates of violent gun crime, up to and including the literal concept of laws and the enforcement of those laws.

I don't know what the solution here is, because I don't know how you send an entire country to therapy and/or Al-Anon, but not continuously enabling the people that are hurting us is a great start, and that necessarily requires shifting empathy from the people that don't deserve it (violent criminals) to the people that do (their traumatized victims).

Apologies for the throwaway account but a lot of people get ridiculously emotional over this topic, and that's when I'm not accusing them of being societally co-dependent.

HN won't let me update this comment for some reason, so I'll just add this here:

The real issue here is that the web is becoming increasingly centralized, which means that we're becoming more dependant on the internal processes of a small handful of venture capital corporations for the web to work. Regardless of Cloudflare's current policy on Tor (they seem to be trying which is good), they could also just arbitrarily change that policy anytime they want, and this is a scary situation for the future of the web. It's a single point of failure for a large chunk of the web, for political manipulation and for advertiser and government spying. Tor (your last chance at a privacy web) users being unable to access major swaths of the web just happens to be the first sign of the implications of this. It's no surprise to me at all that we've seen so much interest in distributed web technologies lately (IPFS, ZeroNet).

I've had one incident that was very similar to this (DDoS raiding forum proxied through Cloudflare staging an attack against our servers).

When I reported it, they said they had informed the attackers of my report, which is sortof like having the police tell a gang you snitched on them and could have enabled retaliation.

When I asked them if they had indeed leaked my personal contact information in this report, they responded with this:

As indicated at https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form and to which you expressly agreed: "By submitting this report, you consent to the above information potentially being released by CloudFlare to third parties such as the website owner, the responsible hosting provider, law enforcement, and/or entities like Chilling Effects"

And then when I followed up again, they responded with this:

Again, to re-iterate, by submitting a report at https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form, you expressly agreed: "By submitting this report, you consent to the above information potentially being released by CloudFlare to third parties such as the website owner, the responsible hosting provider, law enforcement, and/or entities like Chilling Effects"

In this case, it appears that we chose not to forward your report to the website owner. However, we reserve the right to, and you should assume that this should happen when making reports to us.

I don't know what the legal implications of this are, suffice to say, protecting DDoS attackers for free while asking for legitimate sites to pay (in my case, the $6000/mo plan would be needed) feels a hell of a lot like extortion.

As for liability, ISPs aren't liable for hosted content, but there are exceptions (DMCA, CP), and legally, Cloudflare absolutely has legal liability here. They're not just linking to that content like with a BitTorrent tracker, they're literally serving it through their nginx servers.