- Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?
It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").
- I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.
- For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.
- Web search-based RAG is very different from having something embedded in a model's training data, though.
- Let’s define the bot as one that asks LLMs to visualize concepts, then.
Now I’ve argued that the bot would very likely have thought of the same question you did, and my original assertion stands.
- Acting as a pass-through for LLMs is logically equivalent to wiring up a bot account.
- Would you mind elaborating…?
- Unrelated to the topic, it seems awfully unintuitive to name a function ‘poll’ if the result is ‘not polling.’ I’m guessing there’s some history and maybe backwards-compatible rewrites?
- One thing worth taking into account is the practice of finding people who actually like the product, and then paying them to write an honest review. I find this to be much closer to ethical than paying exclusively for positive reviews to people who may not have ever used the product, but it has a similar net effect of distorting the sentiment by amplifying a subset of opinions, so still not ideal but at least it’s rooted in honesty.
If you haven’t been vocal about your support of products in general, you wouldn’t show up on the radar for these “opportunities.”
- > Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them.
What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to?
Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks
- The ability to harness electricity had not been invented yet, by a few thousand years.
This seems unlikely.
- Wow, thank you for this detailed reply! I’ll be checking out some of those resources at lunch today :)
I didn’t take your comment as a dig at all. I’m honestly a little surprised myself that I’ve made it this far with such a flawed understanding.
> Did you think they could do it anyway so trying to pass a law to force backdoors to be made is a cover for existing capabilities, or what?
I had to do some quick reading on the ChatControl proposal in the EU.
I see it along the lines of, if they really needed to target someone in particular (let’s not get into who “deserves” to be targeted), then encryption would only be an obstacle for them to have to overcome. But, for the great majority of traffic - like our posts being submitted to HN - the effort of trying to break the encryption (eg, dedicating a few months of brute force effort across multiple entire datacenters) simply isn’t worth it. In many other scenarios, bypassing the encryption is a lot more practical, like that one operation where I believe it was the FBI waited for their target to unlock his laptop - decrypting the drive - in a public space, and then they literally grabbed the laptop and ran away with it.
The ChatControl proposal sounds like it aims to bypass everyone’s encryption, making it possible to read and process all user data that goes across the wire. I would never be in support of something like that, because it sounds like it sets up a type of backdoor that is always present, and always watching. Like having a bug planted in your apartment where everything you say is monitored by some automated flagging system, just like in 1984.
If a nation state wants to spend the money to dedicate multiple entire datacentres to brute forcing my encrypted communications, achieving billions of years of compute time in the span of a few months or whatever, I’m not a fan but at least it would cost them an arm and a leg to get those results. The impracticality of such an approach makes it so that they don’t frivolously pursue such efforts.
The ability to view everyone’s communications in plaintext is unsettling and seems like it’s just waiting to be abused, much in the same way that the United States’ PRISM was (and probably is still being) abused.
- Perhaps that is why I was asking for better information.
- As someone who’s fairly tech-literate but has a big blind spot in cryptography, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for articles, blog posts, or smaller books on the topic!
My (rudimentary, layman) understanding is that encryption is almost like a last line of defense and should never be assumed to be unbreakable. You sound both very knowledgeable on the topic, and very confident in the safety of modern encryption. I’m thinking maybe my understanding is obsolete!
- Well, yes, we all know that you can go caseless if paying for repairs or new phones is within your budget.
The point of a case is to avoid having to pay for those repairs.
- What has your experience been?
- Sometimes, we just don’t “get” the appeal of something. For me, one of those things is fishing.
For someone else, it might be reading Hacker News.
For you, it’s video games.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with differences of opinion, even to the point of bewilderment, but it doesn’t feel productive to question people’s interests and reduce them to, frankly, disingenuous levels of oversimplification.
I think one of the more beautiful parts of the internet is how we can be connected and talk about our differences and understand each other better. But it does not seem like you are truly attempting to understand, instead your posts read more like “looking down one’s nose,” which isn’t fruitful or productive for anyone.
Maybe I am mistaken! If so, I’d like to encourage you to try to reach understanding of others without depicting them as “mad” or financially wasteful or simple-minded.
- What is the specific use case you have in mind?
- I mean, there are humans without values. We don’t have to go far.
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On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.
Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?
Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)
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I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.
Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.