Posted by theahura 4 hours ago
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.
I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.
If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
That's a claim.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.
Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the majority.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Some people call what I'm describing here "liberal" democracy, but that's to distract from the fundamental fact that there is no meaningful definition of democracy that isn't liberal. If we're not free and equal, we cannot participate in democracy, and therefore it isn't democracy.
This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.
It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.
> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.
Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.
If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.
If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.
Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.
Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.
Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.
«What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.»
It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.
Did you think democracy was not a modern idea? It unequivocally is. The word comes from Ancient Greek, but what they did had almost nothing to do with the current definition of the word.
This focus on ethnic groups that you have is simply just not germane to this discussion. Democracy as it is currently understood does not have anything to do with "ethnic self-determination" (reeks of Blut und Boden - what the hell does it even mean to have an "ethnic self"?).
I don't know if you are inspired by neo-fascist thought or what's going on, but your understanding of democracy is extremely unconventional.
Find me one single definition of Modernity that excludes the 18th century.
You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.
This is why foreign rioters who incite violence get no sentence, while native rioters get the book thrown at them.
Tell me you've never actually been to Western Europe without telling me... This is so profoundly disconnected from reality that I don't know where to even begin.
But thank you for confirming my hypothesis in another comment that you are indeed inspired by neo-fascist thought.
On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...
After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.
I've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.
It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.
It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.
It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
Generate misleading news articles
Impersonate others online
Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
Automate the production of spam/phishing content
These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).
What mitigations? Nothing they’ve done is relevant to the four points in the comment above.
> such as public education
Their “public education” is about as meaningful as alcohol warnings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj4aRhHJOWU
> With the benefit of hindsight
No hindsight needed. These problems were obvious from the start. Not just to me but to many others. Clearly also to them.
> indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence)
Two things can be true at once. Of course it’s marketing to say “this is too dangerous to release” if they’re going to do it anyway. Either that or they’re so supremely irresponsible and greedy that they don’t care about the consequences as long as they can profit. And again, all of those can be true at once.
Also, worth noting that when they talk about it being “too dangerous”, they’re usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience and enslaving humanity. But there are many other dangers (as listed in the comment above) to consider that come from humans directly misusing the technology.
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
Probably convincing humans that untrue things are true. Think less "AI launches nukes" and more "AI convinces people in country A that country B is trying to subvert & destroy them, while it does the same for country B wrt A."
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
(I noted the same thing a few weeks back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341224 but his recent blogposts should make it crystal clear if there was any lingering doubt).
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
The state is the farmer, and we are the cows.
Mythos found 1000 zero days in a few weeks - if I had asked your thoughts on this a few years ago, I'm sure it would've been "that is a super-weapon".
Plus, scaling laws are impossible to deny: More compute = more intelligence.
AI is going to completely redefine the role of human cognitive ability - if you think this is about "state monopoly", you're really thinking too small.
What’s your answer to it? There are other people who have thought of it and it’s not that simple.
Sure I can! *waves* Thank goodness we have the First Amendment [here in America] and I can just go to a library to find books with that info anyway.
You think this is a coincidence that it's happening shortly before Anthropic IPOs?
How many people in the US government (at senior levels) are currently on track to profiting massively from a huge Anthropic IPO? The answer is, most of them. Most of the most powerful CEOs, senators, congressmen, Trump's retinue, are invested in Anthropic through on vehicle or another.
I use AI all the time and Opus 4.8 can't even get the most basic shit right about a very popular videogame released a few years ago. It's not going to steal your baby and eat your wife.
You sound like you have AI psychosis honestly.
I think they truly believe what they say when they say it's a very dangerous piece of tech and from their wargamed scenarios they figured they really need to be first or shit properly hits the fan - and I agree. their need for money assuming scaling trend holds is transient if they're first.
What’s so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.