I recently wrote more or less this exact comment on another platform recently (although I've been making music for a while).
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something.
I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently.
I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth.
Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false?
We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful.
I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said.
Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.
Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.
Timeline:
1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.
2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.
3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.
4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.
5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.
6. The parents sued.
7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.
8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.
9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.
10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.
The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.
Let's not ignore the fact that Jones's lawyers also completely messed up the discovery process by providing the prosecution with everything, including correspondence they had with Jones essentially admitting everything.
The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error.
> If you actually cared one about about victims, you would not be putting on "it is just about fuzzy feelings" bullshit on.
Ad hominem. Personally I think Alex Jones deserves far worse than this judgement.
> Also, this is the kind of case where USA allows Alex Jones kind of bad actors a lot more leeway then most of world countries.
Not an argument. I'm from the UK, I understand other countries police feelings more aggressively. That isn't justification.
My opinion on this is strictly in regards to what I feel is appropriate punishment from the government given what Jones did. I don't like the idea that you can be fined by the government for lying (even if those lies hurt peoples feelings). I could accept it if the fine was reasonable, but $1b isn't reasonable in my opinion.
We can disagree on these things without being mean to each other =) I appreciate your view. I guess I just disagree.
The government did not fine Mr. Jones or Infowars. The plaintiffs recovered damages from the defendants for the tort of libel. The foundation of society is trust. If people abuse trust by committing fraud or by wrongfully harming a person's reputation, the impacted party needs compensation. The plaintiffs incurred expenses from moving, loss of employment, and emotional distress from receiving death threats. It is practical to expect the responsible party to compensate the harmed person. It is true that the government enforces civil law.
The key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth.
To quote Jones:
“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”
That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.
Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.
> That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.
I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable.
It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.
They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere.
And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.
Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.
Depp v. Heard is another famous US libel case, but more controversial. They ruled that Heard made false claims (not just speculation) that harmed Depp's career, and she intended for it to hurt his reputation. Alex Jones met similar criteria except much worse.
True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.
The tik-tok psychic defamation case would likely be better comparison (which is on par with Depp v. Heard). She defamed an innocent college professor about committing murder based on tarot card readings and continued to do so after the actual murder was convicted and receiving cease and desist letters.
An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".
You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.
What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.
Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
> What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.
> Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.
What do you feel would be an appropriate punishment?
You've done a lot of whinging about how you feel the $1B is too much but that you do feel Alex Jones should be punished. Try staking out a position on what you think should happen instead of this continual "yes but not that" mess.
Honestly, I'm not sure about the $1B number, but it needed to at the very least be the amount he made from slandering them on InfoWars, otherwise he'd still have profited off it. That would probably bankrupt him either way.
I think with Alex Jones in particular it's that people knew he had money, and so they wanted a piece of it. If you're a nobody and you say false things no one cares really. Look at all the randos on X spouting nonsense without repercussions. It didn't help that these people in power don't like him.
It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.
> It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money.
Correction: As someone who has developed themselves as a media personality, it's dangerous to say false things, particularly if the saying of false things is explicitly intended to enrich themselves further as a media personality, and they're aware of the falseness of what they're saying.
When you add in the rest of the details the outcome starts to make a lot of sense!
Yes, probably... For a few years now I've been telling people to assume if they're in a tech job it will be their last. That's not to say there will be no tech jobs, but they will be very hard to get and less well paid making them relatively unattractive vs other work.
As it stands it would be a mistake to focus on a career at all. It might take a few decades, but AI and robotics will eventually automate all productive labour whether we like it or not. Any job you do is at risk of disruption in various ways from here until the end.
If you're still in school "learn to be a plumber" is decent advice. If you're older your best bet is probably to look for various low-skill and semi-decent paying jobs.
Your main focus should be trying to achieve financial independence, your physical security and food/water security – in this order. You should also learn basic survival skills and learn how to build things. Can you grow your own food? Can you make and repair tools?
In addition to the job losses political systems are likely to break down over the coming decades as AI and wealth inequality destabilises and erodes the political order. Meanwhile technological risks will undermine our security.
Your concern about your passions and career will seem silly soon. While it's good people are starting to worry about mass joblessness I feel most people are still misunderstanding the full impact AI will have on society with time. Be thinking and planning for the next decade and the decade after that, not the fact there won't be any tech jobs in a few years.
Building a tech business is very hard these days if you're doing it as a technical founder.
Almost everything with clear use has been built. You can make slight improvements to existing products here and there but you'll struggle to be ranked well in search because you'll find there's typically at least 10-20 direct competitors which have been doing what you're doing for way longer. Additionally today Google is more or less an ad search platform rather than a website search tool, which means even if you could just do some SEO and get on the front page, you'll always place below the ads anyway.
In my experience these days you need to be reasonably good and sales and marketing to start a successful business online. Generally that will mean you need a good ad strategy and you need to be able to convert those who click your ads, which will mean you need to aggressively pursue leads.
Another thing that can work if you're b2b is having a good network to sale into to. If you have a few contacts in corporations you can sign a couple contracts then you're good.
This isn't 2008 anymore. You can't just launch some random thing online, do a little SEO and be ranked at the top of Google with only 1-2 viable competitors. You need a good sales and marketing strategy.
it's not like this. You need a very good product that solves a real pain much better than competitors and word of mouth will work wonders with a little marketing push.
I've been concerned about AI safety for about two decades now. Given my age I genuinely think the most likely way I will die will be from AI either directly or indirectly as a result of it being created.
I had a nightmare last night where a tyrannical AI was hunting me down and I knew there was nothing I could do because it was faster, stronger and smarter than me.
I have had similar iteration of this nightmare going on for decades now, but they're almost a daily occurrence at this point.
Mass job losses concerns me, but at the same time feels like the most manageable aspect of what's coming and therefore something I've been prepping for for many years at this point. We will almost all be poorer as a result of this technology, but we'll still have our loved ones around us and assuming we don't enter this period in debt can continue to live a decent life by historical standards.
It's what comes after this that should really worry people... A society with mass job loss and poverty is not stable. The extreme concentration of power AI will bring to those who yield it will not be conducive to a continued peaceful world order. The technologies that will be created from the US of AI might cure cancer but they will also enable unthinkable horrors to be inflicted on our bodies. Creating a species that's more intelligent than ourselves opens a can of worms which we may not be able to control.
I've been very poor before. It's unpleasant but after a while you normalise emotionally and it's okay. It's everything else that I worry about. I can survive and manage being poor. But super viruses, world wars, AI-driven mass-surveillance, the erosion of reality and fiction from AI powered propaganda, democratic collapse. These are all things I struggle to know how to prepare for.
I know I sound crazy. I assure you I'm a very sane person, I just seem think it's rather obvious that very bad things are coming soon. And I'd argue this has always been obvious to anyone thinking about the consequences of AI rationally.
While reading this I couldn't help but think this is the kinda dumb socially out-of-touch type of thing I might have done when I was younger... This is real money and real people's lives... I get some companies/people will do these types of experiments from time to time to test AI capability, but these guys seem to have done it simply for the fun of it and to get clicks. If you genuinely don't want this to be the future, then perhaps you shouldn't make it the present? Either this is low IQ or bad faith, and I'd bet on it being the latter.
As someone who likes to prep for interviews and get quite emotionally worked up ahead of them, I think if I had joined an interview and it was an AI interviewing me I would feel very hurt... Even if I was given the job by the AI I'd probably also decline it because I assume if I'm interviewing I'd be looking for a real job and not to be paid to par-take in some AI experiment... But the humiliation doesn't end there because these guys are going to show the world just how witty their AI was in its replies after making interviewees feel so uncomfortable that they decided to decline their stupid roles.
Crazy stuff guys. I had to double check if this was satire or not before commenting because it's the kinda thing that only a silicon valley company backed by YC would do.
I agree. My partner works in schools and recently she was talking about how they now run these classes in schools telling the kids not to send nude pictures to each other because it will ruin their careers and if they get out people will bully them, etc.
Of course I agree with teaching kids that people might have various views about nudity, but I think effectively teaching them that if they take nude photos of themselves it is the end of the world and will inflict permanent damage to their reputation as a means to try to prevent it happening is absurd.
I think if anything the opposite would be the better solution – to teach kids that it's perfectly normal and respectable in this day and age for people to share nudes with each other, but that it's important to trust those you share the nudes with if you don't want them getting out.
Similarly with deep fakes I don't think we should be telling kids how awful it is for them to be deepfaked, and that they are a victim etc, but that this is just something that's likely to happen these days and while it's disrespectful, and while they have a right to be angry, it's also not something to get overly worked up about.
I just think we have to be pragmatic about this.. The only reason there's any shame in any of this is because we have a societal sigma around nudity. You're not going to get rid of deepfakes and nudes being leaked, but you might be able to change attitudes such that it doesn't really matter.
My friend ran one for years and was forced to close his late last year after doing layoffs earlier in the year.
I suppose it wasn't quite a "web agency" as they also took on some more complex projects, but demand really started to dry up in the back half of last year.
My understanding was that it was less AI competing, but that there was just far fewer companies with the budget or interest to spend. I live in the UK though and our economy is horrendous which I'm sure is 80% of it.
I think you're right though... Web agencies are probably more or less cooked. Not because there will be no demand for someone to build a website, but because increased competition and efficiency will make it a much less profitable business to run. If you can do in a day what used to take a week you won't be able to charge the same for the same project, so you either find 5x more clients or make far less money.
> Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating.
I very much agree.
A lot of tech job growth during the late 2010 and pandemic period were frankly BS for a ROI perspective. Late 2010s was really the first time in tech that I started to feel like most of the stuff that needed to be built was built, and increasingly I was working on BS projects offering less and less value every year.
Consider:
- In the 80s developers were needed to write fundamental business software for word processing and spreadsheets
- In the 90s computers became mainstream and there was a huge demand for consumer software
- In the 00s the internet took off and we needed people build the web
- In the 10s the smart phone revolutionised computing and we needed people to build apps and rebuild websites to be mobile-first
But towards the late 10s entrepreneurs and investors seemingly ran out of no-brainer tech investments so increasingly started trying mental stuff still promising tech-like returns – block-chain, metaverse, Web 3.0, [insert traditional industry here] but a tech company.
I'm not saying there's nothing to build or maintain anymore, but I also no longer see where people think the exponential need for new software and software developers could come from, and I suspect this would have become obvious earlier if it wasn't for ZIRP.
But it's not a lack of productive things to build. We also have other trends hurting demand for new SWEs today. Consider how today completely non-technical people can start and scale an ecommerce company without any developers. Things that would have taken armies of developers just 10-15 years ago, can now be largely done in an afternoon on platforms like Shopify. It's actual hard to believe that just 15 years ago selling things online used to be very hard if you weren't technical.
Similarly starting in the early 2010s even being a developer got significantly easier because increasingly there was packages for everything. Things I might have spent weeks building before could now be built in days or less. And another thing that changed was sites like stackoverflow and blogs which help you solve problems and learn new skills. I remember trying to learn how to do things before 2010s was hard, and before the 00s it very hard.
And of course now we also have AI coding tools which don't just hurt the overall demand for developers, but effectively expands the supply of developers to anyone with an internet connection and computer.
So to summerise:
- There's much fewer good investments to be made in new software today.
- Where there are investments to be made you need far less developers.
- When you need developers there's far more people who can do the job.
Even if tech companies are doing well and the number of tech jobs is increasingly, the above means the average person trying to find a job in tech today will find it much, much harder than they have in the past. People working in tech today genuinely should consider a career change if they're primarily in tech for the money.
Isn't the need right now the need for more intelligent, context-aware software?
I mean, I feel like we've barely touched on what applications AI could be used in, that we have only just begun to start developing. It's tech that can be used in more advanced robotics, video games (adaptive NPCs, PCG, narratives), better data analysis, search, and more.
I understand the fears and dislikes around AI at the moment, but I think people need to understand that it can never fully replace human labor. At least, I am not concerned about that aspect in the slightest. To me, the real thing to fear isn't so much the tech itself, but our fellow man, and the ways they might possibly use it against others.
Actually I am currently using claude code mainly for the UI purpose. I consider myself good developer and all the design and architectural decisions are taken by me. I use claude mostly for the code quality it gives. Do you think codex has surpassed claude in terms of UI and code quality ?
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
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