This can be for e.g. sales acquisition or marketing engagement, but also includes cookies to simplify login, so not everything is "stupid stuff." A cookie that stores "was here, skip the splash page" may already fall afowl, if you put any session metadata in it.

Except, what actually has happened is that the annoying pop-ups became ubiquitous, and then relatively standardized, so that now an extension like Consent-o-Matic (because the browser companies don't want to upset their advertisers) can automate away your actual choices.

If you want to allow websites to track you, tell the extension to make those choices. If you don't, then tell the extension that. It does a great job almost instantly clearing the popups, and you have more control over your digital identity.

It is thoroughly documented that social media and the modern web are designed to be addictive, by psychologists who specialize in this. We regulate access to other addictive things, because addictive things break humans' normal control systems.

> "the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes"

only when things are "normal" and if you're a default power-holder in a community. For everyone else, really no.

They were fun times :D

Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.

When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.

Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925440

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They're already having a negative, contaminating effect on our upper atmosphere

Sending up bigger ones, and more (today there's some 8,800, but they target 30k), sounds ill-advised.

1: https://www.fastcompany.com/91419515/starlink-satellites-are... 2: https://www.science.org/content/article/burned-satellites-ar...

The Model 3 manages < 140 Wh/km, and many seem to be under 150/160/170.

Lighter motors for mobile robots could also be cool.

Cost centers in businesses are early canaries of expected pain, and a reduction in security roles may reflect belt-tightening irrespective of AI impact.

The US has since gotten bad at dealing with companies like this. A company like Google or Amazon could/should be broken up into a few parts and would likely result in those parts together being worth more than when it was just the one company, and more competition in each industry.

Too early and the break-up can kill innovation. Too late and the company will have been a rent-seeking operation for so long that it chokes out dynamism.

It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.

That would seem to be counter to the "impact" goal for research.

We also don't know, in situations like this, whether all of or how much of the research is true. As has been regularly and publicly demonstrated [0][1][2], the most capable of these systems still make very fundamental mistakes, misaligned to their goals.

The LLMs really, really want to be our friend, and production models do exhibit tendencies to intentionally mislead when it's advantageous [3], even if it's against their alignment goals.

0: https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/oversigh... 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/australia/australian-lawyer-so... 2: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... 3: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18058?