- The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
That thread is just bullshit.
- Time for a classic Canadian joke:
Canada was supposed to have British Culture, French Cuisine and American Technology. Instead we ended with British Cuisine, American Culture and French Technology.
- He uses heroin as a metaphor. Do you know metaphors shouldn't be taken in very precise details, right?
> If we sold it for a dollar at every gas station we wouldn't have nearlythe same problems with it we do today.
Go to Portugal. Heroin consumption is legalized there. And it isn't a pretty sight.
- True.
In the US, it isn't just about social media being vicious. It is, more than that, how it became a plutocracy that controls the government and congress.
And is a plague that the rest of the world is just catching up to. It isn't just the European Union that wants to regulate it. India's government, Brazil's supreme court, Australia, ...
I which we could have a global wake-up. The world would be a better place without social media.
- > and people are buying into it based on that claim.
I say this remains to be seen. You know that a lot of times you see the expression "AI" in the news. it comes followed by the word "bubble", right? If we see a big crash on the AI companies stocks we'll have proof that people aren't buying. And I strongly believe we'll see this crash and I think smart people aren't buying it.
OTOH, I think we need to be careful with the usage of the word "think". Dijkstra would probably give it a very broad meaning, going from French Impressionism, Bach and Shakespeare to Relativity Theory, Evolution Theory or Quantum physics, maybe even to Maradona's or Johan Cruyft's feet (Dijkstra was Dutch, remember). Computers and AI might go very deep in their "think" but will be very, very bad at the broad game. Frankly, I don't see how Markov Chain based technologies (e.g LLMs and most of AI today) can stop being replicators and start being innovators.
It is a bit like Pablo Picasso's quotation: "Computers are useless, they can only provide us answers".
- True, mostly.
This idea of "AI taking control" reminds me a lot what Karl Marx would say about "capital".
He wrote his things during the blooming of the second industrial revolution, a time when machines were replacing humans and forcing forward new economic, social, political, cultural and labour relations. And a key issue he stressed a lot is that this diffusion of machines and capital reshaping society was brought forward by a class of people that he called the bourgeoisie. He stressed a lot that it was a power struggle within society.
We're going through something similar today with the information technologies reshaping social relations. And the Bezos/Zuckerberg/Altman/Ellison of today are similar to the industrial barons from the Gilded Age. But, the same way that people reacted against the full-blown wild capitalism from 19th century's second half, we might also see some reactions against the advance of this techno-plutocracy.
In particular, I am optimistic about how the EU and some 3rd World countries (e.g. India, Brazil) are placing restrictions on social networks and techno-cartels.
> What is the value of you in this system?
So, to answer your question: individually I can't go beyond much more than careful choices (avoid cookies, stay out of Facebook, etc). Collectively we can make political choices. Ultimately, the most consequential political choice is move away from countries that give all power to the techno barons.
- As a non-EU tourist, I say this is good.
I actually keep the museum tickets and city passes as a trip souvenir. I have them for the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, RijksMuseum, Mauritshuis, the MC Escher house, Vatican Museum, Uffizi Galleria, the Museums' Pass from Vienna, the Guggenheim in Venice, Vasa and Swedish History Museum, ...
- I get the idea.
But if I can't understand how and why the fusion reactor is safe, small and cheap, I wouldn't consider it safe.
Very much the same way that I don't take Claude Code's changes to my code without understanding what it does.
Augmenting my intelligence is non-negotiable. I want to be in control.
It is the classic "trust but verify". And I need my own intelligence to verify.
- I think the best take in AGI is Edsger Dijkstra's:
I am not interested in computers that have their own intelligence but I do want computers that increase my own intelligence.“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” - This is precious.
Almost every tech company wants to continue the IBM "surrounded by blue" strategy, fencing customers into their "walled garden" surrounded by a Warren Buffet moat and blocking obsessively any competitor that wants to breach in. Google mandates that every Android application must be signed by developers verified by them, Microsoft demands that users open an account with them, ... and just don't get me started with AWS, Apple, John Deere, Nespresso, etc. Meanwhile, I fail to see any real contender in the smartphone arena.
But, in wearables, Pebble puts up a fight. The platform/product has proven resilient, mostly because of its users passion and commitment. It is more alive today than Fitbit, the company that bought and buried it.
And will only get stronger.
Now I'll be anxiously waiting for my PT2. It will be the 5th Pebble in my collection.
- I was a Rust programmer, for 3 years. Did web backend, kernel programming, network security...
Then I discovered that C++ has a very cool feature that Rust doesn't have: jobs.
Now, I no longer search for Rust positions.
- > Drama everywhere nowadays.
That's the way open source works. Do you think the Linux Kernel or Python communities are better?
Btw, that's also the way democracy works. Dictatorships don't have drama because they repress it.
- > Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
> Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
No, it isn't. But it is something that mostly works. Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights. You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
The general rule is that, in general, cooperation is better than war. War is too destructive and is even more destructive when it targets a complex society (because there is more to destroy). With cooperation, in general, you avoid the destruction of war.
- > Why does it matter? If it’s good and accurate and helpful why do you care? That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.
Agree. What matters is quality, regardless of what/who made it.
O.t.o.h., it is funny to see tech people here, that work on implementing technology, taking an approach so... Luddite and "anti-tech".
- > empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community.
Speak for yourself. I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do. I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights. This is my moral basis.
> humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans.
Tribalism, again. You don't get past that, do you?
> Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people
Yep, but neither did religion and those countries were very, very Christian. And, btw, even today the U.S. is the most religious among rich countries and, at the same time, the most imperialist. If religion is so good how come the most Christian country is so bad to the rest of the world? (I am from South America, btw).
- > They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles
Yeah, sure! Those evil "putatively secular people" that burned tens of thousands of women during the witch hunt in Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of other people during the Crusades and the European religious wars of the 17th and 18th century, that condoned with the fascist and authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Spain and Portugal because they were against the scourge of communism, that blessed the slavery of Latin American indigenous peoples because it was meant to spread the blessing of Christianity... that was all made by "putatively secular people", like the Catholic Church, right?
I am so impressed by how well and deep you know and understand "putatively secular people"... Are all church people smart like that? /s
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.