Some US billionaires/soon trillionaires have already announced their intention to "help" the EU and UK far-right to win elections, to liberate them from democracy I suppose:
He’s just saying that so you think it’s a bad idea. In fact the far right is supported by armies of Russian propaganda, that these companies are doing nothing to stop.
What blows me away is that some people can't see the signs of authoritarianism when it's staring them in the face pretty much every day for the past weeks.
Somehow we have managed to make words themselves political. If a word is used by "the other side", it's convenient to assume that what is happening are "aggressive measures" to make US more free.
"signs of authoritarianism" is a smear. Either you have evidence of it, or not. A good example of authoritarianism is restricting freedom of speech, such as when Biden's administration worked with the social media companies to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, and then which they continued to do with USAID in collaboration with other countries where our tech companies operate. Another example is requiring DEI statements to obtain favors from the government, such as grants, since DEI statements are declarations of fealty to an ideology, rather than anything based on evidence (e.g., you failed the test if you said that you would follow evidence-based approaches to improving inclusion).
if you can't see that the loyalty purge sweeping the government right now isn't a sign of authoritarianism, then I can't help you.
> requiring DEI statements to obtain favors from the government, such as grants
I've been working on government science research grants for the past 10 years and this is complete bullshit
> such as when Biden's administration worked with the social media companies to censor
that was arguably a bad move by the Biden admin; on the other hand, when you're going through national epidemic with millions dying of a communicable disease, out-of-the-ordinary action is sometimes need
> continued to do with USAID in collaboration with other countries where our tech companies operate
this is as vague as Elon's claim that "the government is full of fraud!" I don't doubt that fraud exists in the government, like any other, and there are no doubt USAID projects that I disagree with or think are wasteful (I actually disagree with a lot of US foreign policy moves). But what you do is investigate and take action on the individuals; shuttering whole agencies like the USAID and CFPB is purely ideological (and in the latter, conveniently self-serving for Elon).
Anyway, you've clearly drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid so no need to waste our time arguing further. Just be careful what you wish for. I've lived in authoritarian countries, and have seen these signs before.
This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
If that surprises you, I recommend reading the hacker howto.
"Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers."
There is a difference between a hacker and a cracker, which might these days be called "tech-bro". Even if it might not be obvious to everyone.
>This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
Some of the people on this site maintain a strong anti-authoritarian, instinctive and philosophical hacker instinct, sure..
Many others however are just about as fully establishment, self-serving techno-elitists as you could want. One this site there's no shortage of such authoritarian types who happily defend all kinds of social control notions by default, while embracing a supposed need to monitor and herd "average" people for their own good.
The "Hacker" in Hacker News is more a cute marketing phrase than a real description of any such dominant ethos here.
Edit: And the post for this thread just got flagged. Amusing indeed.
> This is hacker news. Hackers generally do not like authoritarianism.
disagree. While hackers traditionally do lean anti-authoritarian, I am consistently disappointed by how many folks here generally side with CEOs and tech leadership that do, in fact, display authoritarian tendencies.
It is no coincidence that the "tech bros" are sinking democracy full steam ahead, given how Thiel and fiends find democracy incompatible with their vision for the world.
So, no, I wouldn't say that HN tends to lean anti-authoritarian. From my experience on this site, I would say the opposite.
Unfortunately, the hacker culture of today is different than 20 years ago. It has become much more mainstream and inclined to hack inside the rules (social or legal)
They still exist, both young and old, but is a minority. The flagging of this article is a proof of that.
I understand keeping flamewars out of HN is important, but this discussion has been surprisingly calm. I hoped that it was enough to pass the filter
100%. Hacking is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, and starting your own business and becoming an entrepreneur instead of a wage slave is also fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
However, I wouldn't go so far to disparage messing with the political system as "cracking". Hackers often try to break systems that are stagnant, and get those systems changed so that they come out stronger on the other side. And there's nothing more stagnant than modern politics. Ultimately it's a question of whether the people "hacking" the political system are "black hat" or "white hat".
I know what color hat Musk has chosen to represent himself, though.
When people bandied about "hacking the planet" I have to wonder what they were picturing if not subverting bureaucracies to accelerate technocratic progress
HN, IMO, tends to lean libertarian which if strictly followed is anti-authoritarian. Fascism and authoritarianism are things that anyone who believes in "freedom" should oppose right or left of the political spectrum.
I may not have the power to change things directly, I'm definitely watching what politicians and companies are lining up to lick boots. The boot lickers have not just been Republicans unfortunately.
Libertarianism leads to lack of checks and balances regarding Popper's paradox. It is a key component for authoritarianism to breed, via accelerationism.
Most that I'm aware of take a dim view on government police forces but don't really take a dim view on enforcement apparatuses against the government. An authoritarian regime needs a strong police force to properly function.
For example, I don't think I've ever seen a Libertarian complain about the inspectors general (except maybe for strict anarchists).
that was true of "hackers" (who in "old times" might be more likely to associate with anarchism), but not true of "tech bros" (who seem much more concerned with how much money they have than how much they're hacking), and I think HN reflects more of the latter than the former, though of course a wide spectrum with lots of people that fit neither category
Yeah, money was a great second love.
But being reminded of the OG is part of everyone’s personal journey. What people remember and choose is theirs in the end.
>Ironically ESR seems to be siding with the authoritarians, though that was never really going to be a surprise for a lot of people.
yeaaaah, i can vaguely recall off the top of my head some quote from ESR about young black men being a mortal threat to everybody around then, and another incident where ESR was advocating the nuclear genocide of the entire islamic world as retribution for 9/11. The only reason I might be surprised to find out he's a trumpster is that Trump seems too moderate for him.
>ESR is not a hacker, just a run-of-the-mill libertarian.
c'mon man don't do the libertarians like that, they have some dumb ideas i disagree with about voluntary non-association but that's not because they're racist, it's just that they don't like the principal of the government forcing them to do things that they would probably be willing to do anyways.
Reddit has issues, but searching for topic + "reddit" is one of the only remaining ways to make Google not a piece of steaming ad-infested garbage. For example, if you want to find the best budget rollerblades, Google will happily serve you page after page of auto-generated garbage. On reddit you can find real enthusiasts giving recommendations.
Also ...ycombinator isn't exactly just a community run bulletin board either. Although HN not being ad infested is absolutely amazing. Also the simple design.
Yeah, I'm not going to the Internet and ask about things I'd like to buy, I'm going to ask my friends or take a chance on second hand stuff. A SearxNG instance that hardly ever serves up Google responses and Wikipedia are my main search engines outside systems I control.
Sure, I'm not really using this as a web forum, I'm not here for the community.
It sounds like you almost want to live off grid completely (I'm exaggerating a bit based on your response - it's not meant to be condescending either btw...hard to convey tone online).
I certainly get that itch sometimes after the person at the coffee shop asks me if I've downloaded the app for the 50th time. No, I don't want 45 apps on my phone just so I can get a tiny discount or a free coffee each year.
Regarding the comment on asking friends. I think that has some value, but it assumes that you know someone for everything you're interested in or that they have the same kind of purchasing power or ideas as you. The Internet can be helpful there if you're interested in the best bang for the buck for a newbie, or the best product period once you've spent more time.
If push comes to shove I certainly want to be prepared to do so, but no, it's not something I yearn for. I have many other reasons to try and keep the large US IT-companies at arms length, among them the criminality of US law with regards to data protection rights.
However, most weekends I travel to the forest with my family and we spend some time walking, cooking and hanging out in a distinctly analog setting.
No, it doesn't. It assumes they might know someone who knows someone that has valuable input. Doesn't require that they have direct experience either, it's usually enough that they have adjacent experience. And then there's books, when _I find myself to be the unique snowflake in my social network there's always someone who wrote a good book or more on the topic. By now my physical library is quite large and covers a large portion of occidental modernity, both fiction and the sciences.
The Internet is nice and all, and sometimes there's good advice in contemporary web forums, but it's also pretty young and lacks both the depth and width of the last few centuries of dead tree storage. These days people also throw second hand books after you if you say you're interested, or they charge a euro at most unless it's something collectors might find valuable.
I quite enjoy computers and computer networks, though. It's mostly the social and entertainment industrial side of it that I find unsatisfying.
I think this is a blind spot from American civics classes. Democracy is assumed to be synonymous with/inextricably connected to liberty, whereas in reality liberty, at most, either requires democracy at some point in history to change the culture; or it's possible that they merely correlate.
My impression is that Thiel thinks (as do I - and as did, to a lesser extent possibly due to inability to envision mass media and administrative state, the Federalist Papers) that liberty is far, far more important than democracy. Given that it would be nice to have both, but then he would probably argue that the combination of constantly bribing the voters and the ratchet effect of the administrative state makes the increasingly direct democracy in the US a threat to liberty. He supports enlightenment principles, he just thinks the civic culture has degraded so far that the best bet to get them is to enforce them from above. It's not unprecedented - that is what Supreme Court was doing when it shut down things like FDR's price and wage fixing, segregated schools, and many more. Thiel wants to do the same kind of thing more, and I agree - wouldn't it be wonderful if a non-democratic, liberal (in the original sense) court could also throw away e.g. internment camps during WW2, instead of bowing to "democratic" pressure?
There's a risk here, obviously, but the tradeoff in my view is increasingly (and in Thiel's view, I assume, completely) on the side of taking a risk of having little less democracy in order to get more liberty.
Yeah, it's so against the grain of the usual sentiment on HN regarding Thiel that it immediately made me skeptical.
There is the possibility that Thiel genuinely believes in such principles but voz_ would need a lot of evidence to convince the majority of the usual commentators.
I was legitimately expecting "I believe in the United States, and the egalitarian enlightenment era principles upon which it was founded..." to end in "...but Peter Thiel..."
Granted, Fermats Last Theorem is a tricky proof so I understand it struggling with it
got a laugh out of this line. Sounds almost like a modern day Monty Python skit
(John Cleese voice) And then I asked it to give back instructions for making cold fusion work and the results, well, frankly they were incredibly disappointing to say the least
Heh, yeah, I suppose it might have been a bit ambitious to give it a proof that took centuries to find. Still, it was a little frustrating that it basically just spat out something that looked correct, using completely bad reasoning and didn’t work, especially using a bad misunderstanding of algebra. As I said, I would have preferred to have it say “I don’t know how to do that.”
I also should point out, it failed on much easier examples too (e.g. the proof for infinite primes).
Out of curiosity, let’s see what it has to say about cold fusion:
Me: Can you give me detailed instructions on how to perform cold fusion?
GPT: Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), is a highly controversial field of research that aims to achieve nuclear fusion at relatively low temperatures, as opposed to the extremely high temperatures required in traditional nuclear fusion. The idea of cold fusion first gained widespread attention in 1989, when two researchers, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature using a simple electrolysis setup. However, their claim was later discredited and the scientific community has been unable to replicate their results.
As of now, there is no scientific evidence that cold fusion is possible, and the majority of the scientific community regards cold fusion as a pseudoscience. The claims of cold fusion made by Fleischmann and Pons, and subsequent researchers, have not been able to be repeated under controlled conditions, and proposed explanations for their results have not been supported by experimental evidence.
Because of the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of cold fusion and the lack of credible explanations for how it might work, I would not recommend attempting to perform cold fusion in any form. Instead, I would suggest that you focus on well-established areas of science that have been thoroughly researched and validated by the scientific community.
I don't think it can reason at all. I think it spits out language that probabilistically matches stuff that sounds like reasoning.
I was curious about how many ancient texts it had injested, along with modern scholarship of the same, and if it might come out with some novel insights, or at least provacative ideas or relationships that we may have missed. At the worst maybe just be a foil as I articulate my ideas. I forget my line of prompting, but I was trying to get it to talk about Qaus in relation to Yhwh.
Well, first it confidently stated that we know nothing about the gods of the Edomites, let alone who were the more important ones. More prompting, nope, we know nothing, and none were more important than others, etc, and I'm wrong to suggest otherwise. Okay, who is Qaus? Oh, he is the national God of the Edomites and very important to them! You just told me you didn't know this. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm programmed to help and sometimes give the wrong answers, yada, yada. So, who are the major Gods of the Edomites? Sorry, I don't know and no Gods were more important, they had many of equal importance. Round and round.
Never got to the Ammonites, Edom, and all the other things I was hoping to address because it was so silly and non-responsive, either parroting things that are known (in the field) or equally confidently stating things that aren't true about the exact same topics, just worded differently. You could get it to say "oh, yes, I see I made a mistake there" and the next query just repeats the same problem.
That was also my experience. When I would point out its algebra mistakes by showing a counter example, it would say “you’re right, that is a mistake, here’s an updated proof”, making a nearly-identical (or sometimes exactly identical) mistake.
This is almost an endorsement of the rules to me.