I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.

Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down.

The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system.

We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.

I totally forgot to mention the patronizing attitude that so many people come to this conversation with. Thank for you for heads up.

The labor movement gave us the 40 hour workweek, weekends off and the minimum wage. They're the reason you have time to opine online right now instead of working.

https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw... https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/unions/labor/living-wage

Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.

Saving for college? Yeah right, state schools are gonna cost $100k per year by the time my kid would going off to school. Retirement? Inflation is already killing my parents' retirement so I've got to bank that I'm still probably not saving enough right now anyway.

More power to people who want that in life, but I can't tell you how many coworkers or family members I've met that had kids and just seemed like shells of themselves afterwards.

I think AI is going to enable spammers and scammers in ways that we haven't seen before. Once spammers can fully integrate these chatbots into their email systems, it's going to put pressure on email providers to find new ways to detect spam. Thinking in the purely cynical, nefarious case, scammers are going to make fortune robbing people with this stuff.

Maybe this is what will force us to acknowledge and address that using the internet for social interaction isn't scalable from a content moderation standpoint.

The irony is that they now have no problem going to the government (specifically the courts) and asking for help to get their money back. It's only government waste if it's not directly helping them.

These models are capable of generating high quality discussion on a variety of topics. I think the days of human-only text-based forums are numbered, especially as AI model trainers look for high-quality content to train their systems with.

Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.

But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.

No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.

I've toyed around with the idea of creating a service that logs into HN and replies to posts just to see how easy it would be to get people to respond and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought about doing that.

Do you see the problem now?

I just don't see how AI won't be used to manipulate these kinds of barriers. Once AI reaches a point where it can truly equal or surpass humans in terms of operating online, how are we going to prevent it from circumventing those barriers? If AI can generate code from a chat prompt, who's to say it can't solve a captcha in the future? And once that happens (because we all know it will at some point), how are we going to be able to differentiate?

The better that computers get at generating content and behaving in ways that only humans used to be able to is going to make it harder to determine if a source is human or not.