6
points
resters
Joined 2,400 karma
Exploring the intricacies of technology and its impact on our daily lives is a journey I cherish deeply.
- It's the second (so far bc he hasn't ruled out a third) presidential term for a strongly anti-immigrant / anti-immigration president who has a lot of support domestically.
Immigrants are being chased out of the US in record numbers. Many of my friends with brown skin (second generation immigrants) are worried their kids will be harrassed by ICE, etc.
The sad fact is that there are a LOT of Americans who deeply resent when someone from another country comes to the US, works hard, and earns a prosperous and happy life.
The US is now led by an emotional revenge-driven crusade against the American Dream, against capitalism, against the "melting pot" that fuels culture and innovation. It's a weird kind of revenge idiocracy going on right now.
In case it's not obvious, many of us here are deeply ashamed of what is going on and we will make it right eventually. I'm personally looking forward to the lawsuits that end up paying people mistreated by ICE significant sums of money, give them flights back to the US, etc. The US has a labor shortage and a talent shortage right now, we need the best and brightest, the most hard working, etc., not the lazy ones who think they are owed something and believe the orange clown.
- His "arguments" on the All-In podcast are always purely persuasive/emotional and never substantiated by fact or logic. Most of it parrots GOP talking points and in my opinion he's a major threat to Silicon Valley legitimacy as he seeks to co-opt existing meritocratic institutional structures and impose his political cronyism/favoritism on them. Very dangerous stuff.
- Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.
People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
- Yes, it’s extremely complicated. I gave up on fire base for one project because I could not figure out how to get the right permissions set up and my support request resulted in someone copying and pasting a snippet from the instructions that I obviously had not understood in the first place.
It’s also extremely cumbersome to sign up for Google AI. The other day I tried to get deep seek working via Google’s hosted offering and gave up after about an hour. The form just would not complete without error and there was not a useful message to work with.
It would seem that in today’s modern world of AI assistance, Google could set up one that would help users do the simplest things. Why not just let the agent direct the user to the correct forms and let the user press submit?
- they do not have to be. People who seek an idea bubble end up finding one.
- is there by any chance a robot simulator for various kinds of robots so those who don't actually have hardware can explore software aspects?
- The people who support him love that about him.
- He probably feels powerful harming businesses (in the US and elsewhere) with his tariffs.
His inheritance performed worse than the s&p by a large margin under his stewardship.
He’s not a business man, he’s someone who inherited $450M in today’s dollars and wears a business suit as a costume, and incidentally more makeup than most drag queens.
He’s disgracing everything he touches and the Trump name will be hated and associated with stupidity and bigotry for a long time.
- I cancelled over it. Not worth it to support a company that is willing to profit from ICE.
- It's a tradeoff. Suppose you are relegated to trading once per minute and you need to allocate $x per trade to make a profit. If you can trade 100 times per minute you need $x/100 to make a profit.
Or, maybe your strategy doesn't make money when you can trade once per minute, but does at a higher frequency.
What is fair about saying someone has to have 100x the capital to participate? You are focusing only on one dimension of cost, when there are several.
- Not at all. I respect that people accept religious authority, the authority of trusted elders., etc., as part of their decision making function. But in my view it should be considered largely an aesthetic preference, much like a favorite color or favorite rock and roll band or preferred pizza toppings.
Such authority has an important societal role, and traditions are important for a lot of people.
- While it's impossible to completely avoid beliefs that are effectively from authority, we do have systems such as science (scientific peer review), capitalism (economic freedom) that give credibility to certain ideas or patterns. Not moral credibility, but effective consensus that is relatively stable. Sure there are disruptions -- scientific revolutions, economic creative destruction -- but those are typically viewed as having been good things after the fact.
Moral authority (elders, traditions, cultural norms) can be helpful in some ways, but they are much more crude and error prone. Respected elders can prey on children, long-held traditions can be oppressive and even harmful (genital mutilation, circumcision). Cultural norms can create significant social costs (women keeping house rather than starting companies or curing diseases, men spending weekends bored out of the social pressure to pretend to like various sports, ec.)
When the average person flips on a light switch they believe they know why the light turned on -- electricity! wire! -- but few could explain it much more specifically than that and could not ELI5 it. So in a sense they are expressing a faith-based belief. But most people can tell you who does understand it and know how to find more detailed explanations if they care to learn. This is quite unlike religious faith/tradition which demands that people profess beliefs that are impossible. When you think about it, the word faith means nearly the same thing as the word doubt only with a different connotation.
- check out reason.com ... that's pretty much all they are talking about.
- > Sadly, the whole culture around SV is based on libertarianism, so regulation isn't even considered.
Thiel actively supported one of the least libertarian candidates in US history. Whatever reputation he has for having libertarian views is nonsense.
No libertarian would try to control others based on his/her religious beliefs, and no libertarian would be remotely comfortable with any of the heavy handed stuff in Trump's platform.
In my view, what happened to Thiel and Musk is that they succeed in business and everyone starts respecting them and treating them like deities. They want to believe it is justified rather than simply people trying to manipulate them, which leads to a reinvention of self where they perceive themself to be a bit superhuman or important to the world. They act, they explore new areas, they act more. They usually do not experience as much reward from additional success in business, they are typically poorly socialized and fail to create a solid support network of people who know them and care about them. They realize money doesn't really help, fine food doesn't help, expensive possessions doesn't help. Even positions where they occupy a top hierarchical role end up feeling lacking.
What's left is the allure of tradition, religion, blood, war, progeny, and the trajectory of civilizations. They admire the brutality and decisiveness of medieval kings and the idea of theirs being destiny rather than luck. They then try to figure out how to believe they are deserving and suitable for the unique kind of destiny they realize can be theirs.
Most of us do not have to worry about hearing the voices they hear calling them to this destiny. One can see it on Elon's face. He's quick to sweat, quick to contemplate how his every decision will be more significant to the world than the entire lives of thousands.
Day after day of waiters, concierges, personal assistants, aides, advisors, trainers, masseuses, chefs, SVPs, etc. all at their absolute service. They must ask themselves again and again endlessly "what do I want? What do I really want?" Ultimately they realize that all they really want is to shape the world like so many kings or prime ministers or philosophers have. But theirs is a different skill-set. In spite of their desire they are not philosophers, not kings, not literati, not demagogues.
So they struggle to become that which they are not so they can do more than order a delicious lunch and pay for everyone else's and listen to everyone's flattery.
They want to shape the world with who they are, but part of them realizes it was luck and the are not as unique as they hoped. So they find ways to feel special like cultural supremacy, authoritarianism, buying favor with politicians or religious leaders, etc.
- Yeah it's pretty amazing. Not sure if a lot of HN readers are MAGA or if someone wrote a bot of some kind, or if dang and the crew are suppressing it to avoid retribution of some kind from Trump toward YC.
- Have you ever used TikTok? It responds rapidly to your engagement (likes, skips, etc.) and very quickly starts showing you mostly the kind of content you enjoy.
Not sure what you mean about it not being relatable to a worldwide audience. I see mostly US content in English and a bit in Spanish, but the algorithm will quickly adapt to show the user content from whatever regions they are interested in.
- The administration's theft of TikTok is absolutely unacceptable and we should all be horrified. Entrepreneurs built a great business with an algorithm that is still -- years after it launched -- head and shoulders more entertaining and engagement-generating than anything domestic firms could come up with, even with years to figure it out.
TikTok is also significantly better for content creators and has more useful tooling. TikTok lets videos be downloaded by default which is why most Instagram Reels (tm) and YouTube Shorts (tm) are actually TikToks someone uploaded.
TikTok was a problem for the US Government both because it outshone US firms -- ironically by making the algorithm show more interesting and appealing content to users, rather than the "viral" rubbish that overtakes the incumbents feeds... and also because it started becoming a source of highly informative citizen journalism, spreading awareness about many social issues, from police brutality to the treatment of the people of Gaza by Israel and the US.
It's the politically sensitive citizen journalism that Bebe considers a "weapon" that needed to be stolen from its creators.
Now, per Larry Ellison's recent comments, everyone's TikTok history is being mined by Oracle to help suppress dissent against Trump's policies and keep people in line.
I've already started noticing a few obviously fake disinformation campaigns that support pro-Trump goals starting to gain ground on TikTok and other social media in the past week or so.
There is absolutely no reason that any country that values freedom of speech and press freedom should confiscate someone else's company to weaponize it against the American people. This is an utterly shameful episode motivated by the worst and darkest human motivations -- controlling others and suppressing the speech of the downtrodden.
- Which moral doctrines/strictures do you think it violates?
Also, I did not assert that either party is "good" on immigration. The US should relax restrictions and allow many more immigrants to enter/study/work/live.
If we really want growth, fully open borders would double world GDP.