Nor would it have been thrust blindly into the hands of your manager, the marketing department, the CEO, and countless other folks who have no understanding of how it works, its limitations, or its risks.

Speculative bubbles, I.E. risk is where much of the capital comes from to develop these ideas to start. I’m not sure you can have one without the other.

Could thing be better with the tech industry here? Sure, but at the same time, profits and industry leaders aren't the only things that matters. And at the very least companies here can't just exploit the public with total impunity.

I am not as optimistic as you. We seem to be stagnating our way into a stark choice between becoming an American tech vassal, a Chinese tech vassal, or losing out the remnants of our ability to compete on the world markets. Half of the continent borrows money at an unsustainable rate in order to pay millions of people to do nothing for decades.

We have made decisions that looked reasonable at the time they were made, but too much has changed in the meantime and now we are stuck in bad equilibria.

The Bismarckian pay-as-you-go pension system was stable as long as people had plenty of kids and died, on average, a few years after retiring. Now they have one kid and spend 20 years in retirement before they die. The maths of that system just does not work out anymore.

The European highly regulated industry was king as long as the rest of the world had no other choice, but now that Asia has industrialized, they are blowing us out of the water. First with lower prices, but now also with quality. German exports are half of what they used to be, with another halving expected. And of course without exports, our current social spending cannot be sustained either - you cannot keep such a massive redistribution mechanism running on an economy based on selling each other cups of coffee in a beach bar.

Our most talented engineers tend to move abroad and stay there. Brain drain is one of the most serious things that can happen to a country or a continent, and we are suffering from it.

We just cannot continue to live like that, something will have to yield, but many voters just don't want to hear that.

Aren't you? Or, haven't you noticed yet?

Epstein's network is one we know about because its been exposed and because of the sexual abuse aspect of it has both drawn attention and made people less likely to cover up for those involved. Its only a fraction of the corruption that goes on though.

There are a lot of advantages to constitutional monarchies in terms of stability. The monarchs do not actually have much power. I on balance prefer living in the UK and would not want to move to the US. There are pros and cons, and its culture and society (e.g. unarmed police) as well as politics and some if it is about personal circumstances (as someone who is obviously ethnic minority or foreign everywhere in the world I prefer a less racist society, for example).

I can yell "down with the King" or "down with the Prime Minister" pretty much anywhere. There are some restrictions on protest in a few places like Parliament square.

I just think its worse in some other ways.

Yes, America is somewhat freer then Russia. Despite aligning itself woth Russia, trying to help it as much as possible last years.

But no, America does not have more freedom or human rights defense then Europe. It has also much worst powerty.

We shouldn't assume that YC is hosting this forum out of benevolence. However it is true that this place is also useful for things other than just advertisement, so that's a neat side effect. We just shouldn't assume that that's the primary purpose of HN.

If that was true it is strange that you would find yourself saying as much for a while now, given it sounds most appropriate in response to someone denying the utility of slop generators.

This is the second post on HN today where someone gave this reason for using Claude to write/draft a blog post.

In my opinion, a post that obviously reads as non-native English is going to be more readable than something that can be detected as Claude output these days, unless maybe the former is filled with mistakes. I would imagine native speakers have a higher chance to detect Claudisms than someone less familiar with the language.

This is such a short blog post. You read this line (an entire paragraph by itself) and thought "good job Claude, you really captured what I was trying to say here"?

Not sure why people hate so much AI generated text if it makes sense.

You can combat that to some extent by giving the model a style guide to curb the worst excesses, but some are likely to still slip through.

It doesn't bother me much personally, but for plenty of people it's a nails-on-chalkboard thing.

[1] For example, the problem with the em-dashes is not the em-dashes, but that it's just another case of getting hit with punctuation every few words.

> Not sure why people hate so much AI generated text if it makes sense.

1. It says you did not put much effort in it

2. It is grating to read

3. It's dehumanizing

I mean, LLMs themselves come from exactly this phenomena. They are a product of finding a technology that scales and going with that no matter what. And parts of this will hit a wall and have to retrench, current players may implode but the genie isn't going back into its bottle so disruption within disruption will continue.

My point was, you still didn't build infrastructure out of great lumps of clay. You don't slap down some clay in the middle of a stream and vibe-build a bridge. Infrastructure was still built of stone. Or, if clay, out of individual bricks.

Similarly, LLM-generated code should be used to build discrete bricks of code that can be read, tested, and most importantly, understood. Then you take those bricks and architect and engineer your application with them. This is how you build a platform that can survive actual use.

You can make a model of a bridge with the clay...but the actual bridge is an entirely different pursuit. This is a discipline we need to develop as engineers, since LLM-generated code won't go away. It can be used to make bricks faster but we have to make the engineering decisions that create reliable, secure applications.

I've been working on a project for the last 18 months, and over that time LLMs have advanced to the point where they've become useful. I can write a section of UI and ask the LLM to write all the front end and backend services. There are enough examples that it writes exactly the code I would have written myself. It can build entire sections of code quickly and efficiently because there aren't very many questions without an answer somewhere in the codebase, which it is very good at finding. If it finds any gaps, it can raise it as a question. It analyzes, asks questions, and then completes the work.

The impression that I'm starting to form is that you do not want to use AI very much early in a project, except to ask questions and check your code. But it's usefulness at assisting with code scales with the size of the project.

Which repository are we working on?

Are we continuing on the existing branch, or creating a new one?

Is the branch based on the master branch?

What is the description of the task?

Are there existing coding style guidelines?

Are there clear boundaries, such as requiring an execution plan, confirming understanding, and always waiting for approval of the plan before proceeding?

These instructions clarify the scope of the task and specify what must not be altered.

LLMs are an incredible technology, and I would have loved to see them developed organically over time with sensible regulation and strong ethics....it would have taken many more years, but it also wouldn't have stolen the sum of human creativity, generated a hype bubble that threatens the global economy, wrecked the consumer hardware market, or been deployed in the most shortsighted, environmentally destructive ways imagineable.

But that's not what we got, so evoking the same fear and uncertainty that we must face in those who lead global megacorps is not out of bounds, as far as I'm concerned.

For the AI haters the dogmatism turns AI usage basically into a moral contagion. I saw similar with the cancellation of Framework: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/moral-contagion/#where-i-pus...

To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.

I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!

Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.

The problem isn't that they don't have potential, but that the downside isn't worth it.

You're trying to convince people that asbestos has great potential as a building material. You're saying it does an amazing job of fireproofing, and don't worry your pretty little head about cancer.

Asbestos is everywhere in older buildings because it was excellent fireproofing. We're still dealing with the consequences.

This is also my argument against militarization and armed revolution as a strategy of establishing anarchist or communist society. The downsides are illustrated and argued against in "The Anarchist Cookbook," a rewrite of the original by Keith McHenry. So, I'm interested in what you think the downsides may be here, since I'm not immediately able to think of any - at least not any caused by me as an individual activist.

It does seem that AI was used effectively recently in the defeat of Bolsanaro's son in Brazil, which I use as evidence for. I'm at this moment looking more into that when I really should be working, heh. Thanks to user solyin, sibling to you.

Then we can move to the damage it does to your mental abilities.

We can continue to the ongoing effect on society, the damage to the environment, and so on.

And we can finish with extrapolating on the abilities of the models, and the dystopia that having full AGI would be. Especially if that AGI is built by the current leaders.

I think you're aware of the downsides, but you don't want to put down your precious.

"Humanity" isn't a preschool classroom where we all hold hands and do one thing at a time like the teacher says. It's fine for some people to be working towards the future while others are trying to fix things in the present.

There is no reason that people who want to take on a ridiculous challenge shouldn't.

> ...you could build out sustainable settlements in the Antarctic, the depths of the Sahara...

That isn't an argument. I don't know what that is.

People who die on their way up to Mount Everest could .... ? People who spend their lives playing games could ... ? What a strange way to think.

Its good that different people really do want to do different things. Some of the best of have been taking on unbelievable challenges, pass or fail, live or die, since history began. Celebrate it.

However, this does not mean that other required technologies, like for transportation or for protection against dust, cannot be solved before.

I also agree that recycling technologies are actually more important than spacecraft technologies, because they are equally applicable on Earth, not only on the path to other planets or in bases established there.

I do not believe that interplanetary travel will be possible for humans otherwise than in spaceships with artificial gravity produced by rotation.

This not only would avoid the health problems (the experiments on mice in the ISS imply that a gravity as high as 2/3 of that of Earth might be necessary for preventing harmful effects during long-term missions) but it would also simplify many of the recycling technologies, because handling fluids and powders is difficult in weightlessness. It would also simplify the growing of plants or fungi.

A couple thousand people live in Svalbard, though.

People do stay McMurdo over winter and there are many physical and mental problems because of the conditions, isolation and limited physical limitations.

https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/anta...

In big cities there are a lot of people who, at least for a big part of the year, spend all their lives only inside their home apartment and inside their work office.

If someone had been willing to spend many times more money on a base in Antarctica, it could have been built to have a much greater interior space and with much more comfortable facilities, so that for the people living inside it there would not have been significant differences between living there and living in some big city of the Earth, especially now, when with modern communications they can speak face-to-face with anyone else on the Earth, at any time.

People living in the far north type of places suffer significant suicide and drinking problems, when compared to typical people from other places because of the dark.

Mental health living in Mars is going to be a killer, life there is worse than living in a isolated prison. Try living in your home without any human contact or fresh air, and now imagine doing that for the rest of your life.

Lastly, money is not unlimited. The cost of a launch today is already tens of billions, the ISS cost hundreds of Billions. The cost of a mars base will be Trillions. Not sure why you think this is trivial consideration. If the US wont give free healthcare to its citizens who actually are productive and pay taxes, why would it spend an equivalent amount for a man or woman or a few of them to grow potatoes on Mars ?

To say nothing of the fact it would end wars over oil, facilitate cheap desalination, and solve so many other resource constraints.

This is the next big revolution we should be focused on - not the mass-IP-theft slop bots.