unsui

Gonna put out a blanket assertion about my preferences, to get a read on whether these are shared or not:

As humans, we have directives (genetic, cultural, societal, etc.) to prioritize humanistic endeavors (and output) above all else.

History has shown that humans are overwhelmingly chauvinistic in regards to their relationship to other animals in the animal kingdom, even to the point of structuring our moral/ethical/legal systems to prioritize human wellbeing over that of other animals (however correct/ethical that may ultimately be, e.g., given recent findings in animal cognition, such as recent attempts to outlaw boiling lobsters alive as per culinary tradition).

But, it seems that some parties/actors are willing (i.e., benefiting) from subverting this long-standing convention (of prioritizing human interests) in the face of AI (even to the point of the now-farcical quote by Sam Altman that humans take far more nurturing than LLMs...)

So: should we be neglecting our historical and genetic directives, to instead prioritize AI over human interests? Or should we be unashamedly anthropic (pun intended), even at the cost of creating arbitrary barriers (i.e., the equivalent of guilds) intended to protect human interests over those of AI actors?

I strongly recommend the latter, particularly if the disruptions to human-centric conventions/culture/output are indeed as significant (and catastrophic) as they will likely be if unchecked.

Thank you for your new substack, very illuminating (and scary) reading.

It's as if someone was watching the show "Person of Interest" as a guidebook for how to build (and weaponize) the all-seeing eye of sauron that we have today.

Oracle will be the first to freeze

one can hope

the whataboutism is strong in this one

There are a lot of things that are "perfectly legal" to do. Doesn't mean that, in practice, law enforcement would necessarily take the most extreme legal action possible.

This is a new development (well, new-ish for many communities... I imagine predominatly-black communities have always experience this) whereby LE is explicitly instructed to look for any legal course of action to punitively enforce the law (rather than using a more judicious interpretation, which was more in line with the spirit of many of these regulations).

So yes, technically, law-abiding citizens should always xxxx. Does that mean that, in real life, folks always do this? Only if they are in a paranoid state whereby LE maliciously enforces the law for any minor violation and enforces overwhelming (often illegal) responses to these infractions.

Our PMs don't like making things opt-in

That is an implementation detail. What matters is the outcome:

Notion leadership has signed off on this being opt-out.

The calculus here, as you indicated, was that opt-in has little buy-in.

What leadership didn't take into account was the risk of this being publicized, and the blowback from this awareness.

That, or leadership has already calculated that not enough people will care (possibly true).

I suppose it's then up to those that do care to make more noise about this, to tilt the odds?, so this specific calculus (also known as enshittification) doesn't keep occuring (i.e, if the blowback costs are disproportionate to the value provided by default opt-out....)

Subnautica in VR (with the Submersed VR mod) is easily the most immersive environment I have ever encountered.

not entirely.

The risk raised in the article is that AI is being promoted beyond its scope (pattern recognition/creation) to legal/moral choice determination.

The techo-optimists will claim that legal/moral choices may be nothing more than the sum of various pattern-recognition mechanisms...

My take on the article is that this is missing a deep point: AI cannot have a human-centered morality/legality because it can never be human. It can only ever amplify the existing biases in its training environments.

By decoupling the gears of moral choice from human interaction, whether by choice or by inertia, humanity is being removed from the mechanisms that amplify moral and legal action (or, in some perverse cases, amplify the biases intentionally)

On HN, you have a significant subset that think it is akshually cool, unironically

Move fast and break things, right?

I naturally went down a rabbit hole to see if I could find why those characters weren't printing properly.

https://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/Antic_Vol_7_No_4.pdf

On p. 31, you can see the intended characters.

I now remember that Atari actually had their own variant of ASCII, called ATASCII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATASCII

Atari 8-bits were actually really cool computers, in that they let you do things like redefine character sets entirely (to create custom character sets to effectively create tile-based displays), play with display-list interrupts, etc.

Cool business

No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature.

I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.

My favorite was the "TYPO II" ("Type Your Program Once") application, which was part of every Antic! Magazine program listing:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/antic/

This was wrapper around the BASIC interpreter that printed out a 2-character checksum of each entered code line.

The magazine printing also had an associated 2-character checksum for each line. Your job: make sure the checksums matched.

As a teenager who only had cassette-based storage (couldn't afford a disk drive) and was addicted to typing in programs from Antic! and ANALOG magazines, this was a lifesaver.

(ANALOG's checksum program wasn't quite as convenient, and, IIRC, required a disk drive?)

I've called this out numerous times (and gotten downvoted regularly), with what I call the "Cult of Optimization"

aka optimization-for-its-own-sake, aka pathological optimization.

It's basically meatspace internalizing and adopting the paperclip problem as a "good thing" to pursue, screw externalities and consequences.

And, lo-and-behold, my read for why it gets downvoted here is that a lot of folks on HN ascribe to this mentality, as it is part of the HN ethos to optimize , often pathologically.

That this has not been historically true in the United States is the notable outlier.

So, bootlicker, got it.

And yes, it is very much a character thing...

We've crossed the Rubicon, where sarcasm is no longer indistinguishable from reality.

This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems.

As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.

This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.

And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some degree.

Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they work, to the extent that they are production systems.

And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that the system is attuned to.

And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems indiscriminantly.....

and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.

It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality, warts and all.

And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises, evil.

accountabilty and role-based permissions based on least-privilege.

None of that matters with what DOGE is doing. That should worry you.

This is key.

If this were pushed by Apple, people would be responding much differently, since there is an inherent level of trust in regards to Apple's privacy protections, vs Meta.

So, not so much the technology, but rather the trust (or lack thereof) behind the implementor.

This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.

disagree. While hackers traditionally do lean anti-authoritarian, I am consistently disappointed by how many folks here generally side with CEOs and tech leadership that do, in fact, display authoritarian tendencies.

It is no coincidence that the "tech bros" are sinking democracy full steam ahead, given how Thiel and fiends find democracy incompatible with their vision for the world.

So, no, I wouldn't say that HN tends to lean anti-authoritarian. From my experience on this site, I would say the opposite.

The HN response to all this has actually been very strange to me.

Are you surprised that folks are generally dismayed that disruption-for-its-own-sake, particularly for governmental institutions that were never intended to either (a) run a profit, and (b) were generally intended for the public good, is seen more as chaos-mongering rather than a "good thing"?

Real lives are being impacted drastically, and overwhelmingly negatively, by this cult of optimization.

So, no, not surprising that, when the rubber meets the pavement, and real people lose their jobs, their education, their savings, their future... that perhaps, maybe the cult-of-optimization isn't all it's cracked up to be?

No?

I guess I just need more kool-aid, bottoms up.

is it?

Depends on your definition of "fine"

I'm thinking more of "this is fine...."

if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.

The inevitable enshittification of goods and services once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e., profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-classes will be involved.

Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing) makes more sense

It does not lead to obsessive/compulsive behaviour if you simply optimize your emotional and awareness skills first.

I don't think you understand what optimizing entails.

Optimization is inherently antithetical to balance, in principle.

Optimization is looking for local/global maxima. Balance is releasing the need from seeking local/global maxima entirely.

I mean, you could try to seek balance through optimization. Good luck with that.

therapy will generally recommend removing the need to optimize entirely, in order to achieve an emotional homeostasis (particularly given that the need to optimize often leads to obsessive/compulsive behavior).

so, no

ha, you think they give a damn about that?

If you speak spanish, you're a "mexican", regardless of whether you're from el salvador, ecuador, cuba, whatever.

nevermind what they think about "indians"..... JFC indeed

Do you think that having a default of "Delay, Deny, Defend" is a good-faith approach to healthcare?

Cuz sure seems like you're on the side of DDD by default.

Because the hype will always outdistance the utility, on average.

Yes, you'll get peaks where innovation takes everyone by surprise.

Then the salesbots will pivot, catch up, and ingest the innovation into the pitch machine as per usual.

So yes, there is genuine innovation and surprise. That's not what is being discussed. It's the hype that inevitably overwhelms the innovation, and also inevitably pollutes the pool with increasing noise. That's just human nature, trying to make a quick buck from the new-hotness.

Reminiscent of the recent HN submission for "Security is a Useless Controls Problem", re: 5 monkeys & ladder expt.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110149

The crutch isn't the EdTech itself. The numerous examples regarding WGU's success for some self-driven training here suffices to suggest the tech isn't the issue.

It's the metrics required as part of legislation such as NCLB that effectively bind administrations to ensure adherence to a common curriculum, regardless of capacity or competence.

This effectively imposes Goodhart's law, since the only way to meet these measures on scale is to teach to the test, and only the test.

This ensures that no actual deep learning occurs for those falling back, while hamstringing those who master the subject matter early since there is no mechanism for rewarding early mastery.

There is a certain mindset amongst engineers and developers that reachest its zenith in SV: pathological optimization for its own sake.

I say pathological because it's a mindset that optimizes for optimization.

This mindset is exceedingly effective; it works by looking to discard any obstacles to its own optimization. In a way, it's basically the paperclip problem but done in meatspace.

And that is what I see this article highlighting: the costs of Founder Mode (i.e., the slip towards accidental authoritarianism in the pursuit of optimization-at-all-costs).

Now, there is much value in having a unified vision for a product or service; Too Many Cooks (TM) can water down the broth.

But that doesn't necessarily entail that the antipode (my way or the highway) is the correct answer either.

In a world where the value of consensus, of distributed alignment, itself is at stake, it helps to remember that it's not all-or-nothing, but a balancing act. And THAT is worth optimizing for.

it's disheartening to see people actually defend companies when they set these policies.

HN is full of temporarily-embarrassed CEO-wannabes-in-waiting who tend to side with the disruptor, not so much with the disruptees.