I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?

We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.

I think the byline is a bit of a disingenuous sleight-of-hand: "The boom is not as untethered from reality as it may look" presupposes a majority view that the stock market "is untethered from reality," but whether or not that's an accurate read of prevailing sentiment, it subtly shifts focus away from what most people ought to understand: profits of the largest corporations are now mostly untethered from the financial health of individual citizens.

I've been seeing more and more of this type of underhanded writing from billionaire-owned media outlets lately (the number of which is growing on a nearly daily basis).

If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.

> I kind of love it, honestly. I think Silicon Valley got really lazy during COVID

Honest question: is this the type of culture that anyone outside of VC actually wants?

Do a majority (or a significant plurality) of people support this infinite-grind mentality, and if so, to what end? It's framed in the context of a "race" with China, but all I see is a race to the bottom. What prize do we win if we beat China in this "race"? What is the goal here, who benefits from achieving the goal, and what purpose does it serve? (Aside from enriching a handful of VCs and executives, that is.)

I like to challenge myself with a little "game" in which I attempt to guess the most commonly expressed opinions in WSJ comments based solely on the parent article title; it isn't a particularly difficult game.

Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!

In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.

Where has the bulk of all that "value" our work has created in this industry gotten off to? I certainly see less and less of it these days.

Read any of the Epstein emails? Many are nearly unintelligible, despite the "world-renowned luminaries" that wrote them.

The phenomenon was discussed in a post here yesterday that linked to post titled "Privilege is bad grammar": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038125

As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.

Speak for yourself.

  "If AI does to white-collar work what globalization did to blue-collar, we need to confront that directly," Fink told the crowd in Davos

  Fink's prescription, offered in a conversation at Davos with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was for pensions to invest more in AI infrastructure—the kind of assets BlackRock manages.

  "We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth," he said. "If they're just watching it from the sidelines, they're going to feel left out."

I suspect that your default assumption may be revealing an internal conflict that, in my experience, many parents seem to navigate at one point or another. Disregarding that and taking the statement at face value, I'm glad that having children is "the best thing in the world" for you and I hope that continues to be true. That said, I'd emphasize that your opinion is unlikely to be shared by everyone on the planet, and the implicit dismissal of other viewpoints as "nonsense" (including the evidence of the peer-reviewed journal paper described in TFA that would probably _bolster_ your assertion) is probably not the best strategy to convince the undecided.

A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.