Why do you doubt this when the rich also have Signal? They meet and talk out of view? The insider trading coming out of Washington?
Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?
Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them.
The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.
Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth.
"Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!"
Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!
Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily.
It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now.
> we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now
sometimes i wonder if this is what happens when organic growth stops/slows; when (for lack of a better word) desperate people just start looking for any alternative to keep the growth train running...
It's just what happens when you give the rich all the political power in your society.
All of them come from the 'make money from other people's labour' background, and they will, of course, use that political power to optimize that wealth extraction.
It might just be frustrated young people. They're getting squeezed real hard by a system that was set up to put them on an impossible trajectory before they were even born.
You can see the divide everywhere. People with lots of money think supply and demand, congestion pricing, etc. are great tools because it doesn't impact them at all compared to people on the bottom. Those are only good solutions if you're not the one falling off the bottom rung of the ladder.
Is it really shocking that people are upset to see the supply of resources being cornered and hoarded by the ultra rich with the most likely outcome being the only way to get access to those goods will be to pay forever?
The possibility of AI becoming a must-have knowledge repository or memory assistant is scary if you couple it with the idea of never being able to own it. How much is your memory worth? What if you can't compete in terms of productivity without having access to AI? What about the people that can't afford the "first month of rent"?
People come in and make angry posts like the GP because they know they're getting disenfranchised and don't have the power to do anything to change it.
I think it’s probably mostly what your sibling comment said, it’s very cheap to sow division and discord now.
I get what you’re saying, and there definitely are people who are angry about the US slipping, and standards of living reverting to the mean a bit, and looking to blame someone. The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time. Those people get tremendously angry about it, and represent fertile ground for politicians and motivated groups to plant the seeds of hate.
People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.
> The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time.
Is it just people trying to sow division when you're potentially describing an entire upcoming generation?
> People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.
I don’t agree. The current generation of young people can’t afford housing and education without taking on decades of debt. Buying a pair of 3090s for local AI isn’t even on the radar. Even if they could, it’s unlikely they’d be able to make productive use of them. The big AI companies haven’t even scraped the surface when it comes to memory, specialized knowledge, etc..
I see people downvoted my comment and I’m not sure why. I’m not trying to pile on to create drama. I’m trying to explain there’s a growing cohort of people that have a right to be angry because they’re watching global productivity increase as their standard of living is decreasing. Who wouldn’t be upset?
The dangerous part is that people angry about it are easy to sway with propaganda. It’s not the billionaire families colluding to fix food prices, which happened with bread in Canada, it’s the “insert another marginalized group here” that’s causing the problem.
I think the commenters with new accounts and comment on only political topics and not technical ones on Hacker News are a bit suspect. Not saying that there aren't a lot of disaffected youths out there, there totally are, and I'm agreeing with you with that bit about The True Believer, I just have a suspicion that a lot of these new politics-focused accounts aren't real. But maybe there are real young people who come to HN just to discuss politics, I guess tech has become more political over the last few decades.
I didn't mean that most people are going to go out and drop $1,000 and run their own models locally, I meant that it's pretty good evidence that they're not permanently locked out of owning access to AI, if that's a priority to them.
I agree with most of the rest, I'm a strong proponent of all sorts of safety nets, and higher top tax rates/cap gains tax rates. But it's also important to maintain perspective. A lot of what's happened is that citizens of very rich countries are maybe seeing their standards of living decrease somewhat while many more people globally are seeing their standards of living skyrocket. Visiting family in China every 5 years, the difference is astounding every time.
Upvoted that comment, fwiw, you answered in good faith, not sure why it's downvoted.
I totally agree that we need to be taking better care of each other, our system's a mess, but I wasn't planning on getting into a big discussion about that tonight from my phone.
The point about 3090s was that reasonably good local AI costs on the order of $1,000, so Americans aren't structurally locked out of owning the means to run their own models like the person I was responding to seemed to be claiming. If you can afford a desktop, local AI is in reach if owning it is a priority for you. I don't recommend that route, but it's possible.
From your other comments, sounds like you're also a "privileged first worlder" who got to go to college and attend Burning Man, so let's not fling stones. I'm extremely lucky, I'm extremely aware of it, a visit to some of the actual poorest parts of the world, where people wash themselves and their clothes in rivers that stink so badly of sewage that it's hard to breathe without gagging made me very aware of how lucky even the poorest Americans are, despite how bad it can feel to be in close proximity to some of the richest people in the world when you're not.
And if you're not an account who's part of an "AI-fueled agitprop campaign", I'm sorry for whatever's happened to you that's given you so much rage that you're feeling the need to come here and dump on nearly everyone you've interacted with. I hope things go better for you in the future, I really do.
I think treating them as the fae, vampire or demons is sort of insulting. Those creatures are at least bound by supernatural laws and can be negotiated with in some way.
Anyone who argues it is a class issue is not of sound mind?
Those who disagree with you are crazy.
Right.
Says one vain but ultimately useless meat suit whose food and shelter the rest of us don't have to concern ourselves with because it's so inconsequential an existence it props nothing important up.
Ah it's people like you that provide the most entertainment in life. Watching you shill delusions about your economic achievements in a physical reality that doesn't care you exist and a social system that provides no assurances your efforts today will afford you food and shelter in the future.
As the other 8 billion on the planet while you live don't notice you exist.
But you're of sound mind; a privilege you give yourself to begin with. Lol. Sad.
Technically true, because Google's core product is ads. Also fundamentally wrong, because Gmail serves as a massive source of ad targeting information, in addition to being a high-engagement canvas to display those ads.
Because not everyone is just out after earning the most money, some people also want to enjoy the workplace where they work. Personally, what the quality of the codebase and infrastructure is in matters a lot for how much you enjoy working in it, and I'd much rather work in a codebase I enjoy and earn half, than a codebase made by just jerking out as many LOC as possible and earn double.
Although this requires you to take pride in your profession and what you do.
All of human agency must prop up the vanity of you. Of all people.
Got it.
...ok fine; lack of political action to put us all on the hook for your healthcare is your choice to take a gamble on a paycheck. It's a choice to say your own existence is not owed the assurance of healthcare.
So I will honor your choice and not care you exist.
Why do we have to get by as you say? On whose command?
Why do we always act like there's an immutable social obligation to march right along believing the prior generations had freedom to start marching in that direction, but we are forever locked in to such a direction.
You know all the people that made those choices are dying and future generations have zero obligation to carry on linearly from where they left off?
Women would not have the right to vote. We'd all be speaking Latin.
Two things that would remain true if society of the living was tightly coupled to exactly how the past worked.
The original comment has conflated every ill into "have to", combined with political fatalism. Not unreasonable given the way things have turned out, but yes it's not inevitable either. It's just the direction of travel that the majority chose.
Certain "have to" are imposed by the physical world. The world will have to use less oil in 2026 than in 2025, because production has been so heavily impacted by the war. What happens beyond that .. well, only a fairly small number of people get to make that decision. Next US presidential election is in 2028.
>> That can’t continue as the rest of the world is catching up.
This has already been happening quietly in several industries.
I remember many years ago when I was working in a bike shop (early aughts) and the Specialized engineer was talking about how Taiwan used to be the brunt of the jokes in the bike world for decades. He went on a rather long rant about how over that same time, they had essentially dumped billions into becoming a technological behemoth when it came to bike manufacturing. Their factories were so far advanced, and their engineers were so highly qualified, that many bike companies (including Specialized) were moving their manufacturing back to states because it had become too expensive to continue using the Taiwan factories.
Your comment is devoid of content, of substance. Just more parroting of obligations that do not exist.
You're not struggling to understand my comment. You're struggling to think altogether when your argument is "well because random political choice in 1979, we must today in 2026..." type reductive, functional illiteracy.
But ok; we must coddle the past to satiate some. Well, debt jubilees are things humans have done before. Wipe the ledger and start counting again. What is grandpa going to do? Rise from the grave?
As an obscure 19th century theorist once said, history does not walk on its head. That is, it is not ideas or sentiment that make the difference, but processes and the actually existing relations among people.
If you don't have the guts to pick a side, if you remain at the level of just disciplining sentiment, if you can't even say what you mean, then you are no better than a swindling preacher--you are part of the problem you are nominally fighting against.
You don't have to do anything, nobody cares about individuals when you have 8 billions. The masses, on average, want cheap simple fun, cheap stuff and so on. Market responds. Good luck trying to change that.
Sure, there is some market manipulation, ads are the best example (how can any adult with even a smidge of self-respect accept any ads in any form is beyond me, thats mind slavery 101) but since forever masses wanted bread and games more than literally anything.
All those companies making high quality expensive products that lasted decades? Barring tiny exceptions, they either went down with quality (less control, move to china etc) or went bankrupt.
Parent is right in 1 aspect - if we elevate whole world to similar income levels, the income of previously-rich countries will have much less purchasing power, can't escape simple numbers. But who cared in the past about slave kids in sweat shops, right, they didn't have the right skin color, passport or religion to worry about.
Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?