https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

> After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.

I appreciate them both, so that isn’t meant as a slight to Sean Evans, but rather a compliment of the depth and breadth of both their research and staying power as interviewers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nardwuar

https://youtube.com/@nardwuar

Surprisingly (to me, anyway, as I didn’t know this prior to looking it up for this comment!) Evans even credits Nardwuar specifically as one of his influences in this Brother Ali interview, which would explain a lot of the similarities:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9bGXwvyyvGU

It seems fair to say that you might be right about the conclusion that you’re drawing from what OP said, and OP could be honestly mistaken about which story they were referring to, but it seemed charitable to assume that they know better than I do.

I don’t mean to assume that you were wrong, either, as it’s entirely likely that you’re right, or at least that it’s reasonable for you to assume that the story you mentioned fits your interpretation of what OP referred to better than the one they mentioned. You’re the authority on what you believe and understand about what you read from OP’s comment, and I can’t disagree with another’s opinion about what something seems like to them.

Given what OP omitted and stated, I don’t disagree with your assessment, as I haven’t read the story OP mentioned, and it’s been a while since I read the one you referred to, if I remember correctly.

To be honest, my first thought was that you were both referring to the same story, and that the title differences were due to one or the other of you reading the story in a different language.

My point in commenting was to perhaps add context in hopes that it would bring clarity to the discussion, as it seemed that you were bringing into question whether or not the story OP mentioned existed at all as such, and I myself wasn’t sure that you and OP were referring to two different independent stories rather than the same story with different titles in different languages.

This comment has probably gone on Tlön-g enough, and is leaning more Borges than anticipated. I apologize for perhaps coming across more definitively than intended in my original comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...

I am not an ornithologist, but I’m assuming that’s a typo for barred owl?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barred_owl

I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.

When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.

For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.

As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...

In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)

> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.

> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...

Related:

China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920315

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

The current amount of horsepower on the hoof is a rounding error, but before mechanized farming and war-fighting, these distinctions were the difference.

If we consider the capacity of technology to act as a force multiplier, it is reasonable to assume that current and future AI-assisted fighting forces can achieve more with less traditional materiel and with fewer personnel.

Drones are an especially likely way that these many AIs will become embodied and diversify, in which case I don’t think the percentages are so far-fetched.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o

> Further ahead in the future, it wants its machines to be programmed to travel autonomously to a location, carry out its task - such as watching out for advancing enemy soldiers and engaging them if necessary - and then return to base after a certain time.

iirc HN threads automatically close, due to inactivity and (/or?) based on time since the original post. I wasn’t able to find a thread with the comments still open from 16 days ago, let alone a “few weeks”, but in good faith I’m assuming that you already know that, and aren’t using that as an out to avoid replying, not that anyone is “owed” a reply by you, or by anyone.

This is all to say, I appreciate the thread as a bystander, and would thus naturally eagerly await your reply if and when it arrives before the closure of individual this post’s comment section.

https://github.com/zhouxinan/airsnitch

Edit: it’s the same repo as linked in the paper, so it seems likely to be the correct repo, though I didn’t originally find it via the paper.

It’s fair to ask you to write your comment, which was all I was suggesting. I am interested in what you had to say, and am genuinely curious in the point you were trying to make.

Otherwise what are we even doing here? The site is for human interaction, not AI mediated interactions steered by humans.

Please don’t take my line of inquiry as being opposed to you, rather can curious about what your prompt was alluding to. I’d rather get the information from the person who wrote the comment than assume any potential AI output generated by your prompt was what you meant, which is why I asked for clarification.