Is this how low we've sunk - that even below taking a single personal anecdote and generalizing it to everything - now we're taking zero experience and dismissing things based on vibes?

I've seen lots of LLM-slop-lovers doing the same thing. Maybe it's a pattern.

Normal and sane people understand this intuitively. If someone goes to a mechanic because their car is broken and the mechanic says "well, if you can tell that you car is broken, then you should be able to figure out how to fix it" - that mechanic would be universally hated and go out of business in months. Same thing for a customer complaining about a dish made for them in a restaurant, or a user pointing out a bug in a piece of software.

> Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash

And if you look up Hashcash on Wikipedia you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash which explains how Hashcash works in a fairly straightforward manner (unlike most math pages).

You clearly did not, because nobody who actually read my comment and has functional reading comprehension and basic logic skills would have written these responses:

> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?

> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.

And:

> and disagreed with it.

Disagreement is only relevant for matters of opinion. For matters of fact, like this one, there is no opinion - only facts and arguments. Can you not tell the difference between opinion and fact?

> Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance.

OK, now you're just trolling, because I already addressed this point in both of the comments you've responded to.

> Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.

You've proven that you're either unable to read or unable to use basic logic, so it's not even that I've won - you've eliminated yourself. You haven't been able to make a single valid point - you've just misread, misunderstood, and mischaracterized my arguments, and then failed to make any coherent response whatsoever.

Factually incorrect. US privacy laws pose a huge burden to US intelligence. The 4th amendment still applies. Warrants still exist.

> Thanks to Snowden, we all know that the US government has extremely sophisticated and wide-ranging ability to get access to any data we share with American companies.

Citation needed.

> And why so?

In the PRC, there are no privacy laws to protect you from the government. "Private" companies are an extension of the government and all of the larger ones are required to have a CCP party member on board to ensure that they are "aligned" with what the party wants. The party happily disappears dissidents at will, threatens dissidents in other countries, requires that all domestic companies provide encryption keys (or otherwise made encrypted data accessible) on demand with zero warrants or other legal protections, maintains the largest network of surveillance cameras in the world (several times more than the total number of those in the United States), and many more things.

This is extremely common knowledge, easily searchable online, and is factually and categorically different than anything the US, or any other Western country, does. Only the terminally ignorant or the propagandists believe that the PRC's surveillance is remotely similar to that of any western country - the available evidence comprehensively disproves that conspiracy theory.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index

Yeah, you have nothing, and the absolute drivel in the rest of your comment reflects that. These values are categorically not accepted as a proxy for value in any educated country.

That's not a valid reason. Nice try, though.

> Now who's committing a whole catalogue of fallacies?

Calling a fallacious and manipulative comment that literally follows a country's propaganda playbook "propaganda" isn't a fallacy - it's just true.

It's extremely telling that you didn't comment on any of the actual points that I made, such as it being a false dichotomy and whataboutism - because you know that I'm right, and so you had to resort to insinuations and redirections yourself. Congratulations, you just proved me right.

(again, I'm not saying this is a good thing - read my parent comment again)

This is novel to me - what's the kneecap specifically? How do you only kinda sync browser history??

Nobody mentioned the US upstream of your comment until you did. This is obvious propaganda - one of the classic maneuvers in the PRC influence playbook is, when called out on anything, to try to implement whataboutism with the United States (even if it's not relevant, like here, which is equally sad and funny).

This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)

> even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2]

You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.

> Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes.

Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value). If you respond, I'll do my best to debunk your arguments for future HN readers, but it's useless to try to convince you while your basic mindset is that you're shilling for a particular political point.

Through the platforms they choose to use. Coarse and inefficient and frustrating? Yes. Effective at demonstrating mass preferences and thereby imposing those preferences on platforms? Also yes.

> That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.

Using an ad-blocker is obviously extremely different than what I'm describing here.

An ad-blocker is a composable feature that you can graft onto any particular market.

What I'm describing is a relative prioritization among different features, where one has to rank what they truly value, and sacrifice some of the lower-ranked things for the higher-ranked ones. That's categorically different than just being able to flip a switch and turn off ads and save bandwidth with negligible downside.

> Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?

This is irrelevant - see above comment about relative prioritization. Features are one of the "dozens of things to optimize for in software development" that I mentioned above. I can point to many platforms where the bloated ones are winning - because they have the features that users want, and they value those more highly. That's my whole point.

No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse. Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect? This is the economic corollary to that.

> Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.

Correct. Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value (that also happens to strongly correlate with businesses remaining solvent and individuals remaining off the streets) that can be used to measure value delivered to individuals, and that there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.

Everything else in your comment is incoherent. "First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset." doesn't mean anything.

> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.

You clearly didn't read my comment before responding, because I very clearly made the point that it's not about users wanting worse performance, but a matter of relative priority. Suggest reading before responding.

> Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).

And yet, clearly enough people are getting enough value from the site that it's worth the bloat to them, otherwise Reddit would have reversed the redesign years ago. I also know multiple people who voluntarily use the redesign while being aware of the classic interface.

So, you're literally proving my point.

So much for "Resolving inconsistencies between my ideas is the entire reason why I come here to discuss them."[1] - you're just here to engage in propaganda.

(propaganda that, for the future record, isn't even true - corporations do not get votes and do not get to "buy the laws they want")

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384481

Irrelevant.

> A just system would not perpetuate unjust laws indefinitely

Can you point to laws that the majority of the population agrees are unjust that have existed since the beginning of the United States? If not, then there's zero unjust laws being perpetuated indefinitely, and so your conclusion is invalid by your own argument.

But, your own argument is wrong to begin with - the vast majority of humans will acknowledge a system as being essentially just even if it perpetuates some unjust/irrelevant/silly laws.

> In fact, there's no such binary.

That's true, you can "just ignore those laws" - and you'll be a hypocrite. The binary that I'm describing is clearly moral. I'm not saying that you physically must take one position or the other (as you're implying) - just that if you pick a value in the middle, you're a hypocrite, and your opinions are worthless, because you don't really believe them - you're just saying whatever is most convenient/advantageous for you at the moment.

> Either you believe the system is just and you follow all the rules (and work through the system to changes the individual rules you believe are unjust) [...]

I believe the system is just. That does not change in the presence of those unjust rules that you listed above, because those laws can be changed and are changed regularly, and because they're not egregious enough to constitute a failure of the system.