I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.

If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I seem like the AI booster in these conversations but in reality I'm fairly middle of the road, and have plenty of concerns about the technology. But we can't even get to that discussion until we can move the overton window from "AI is bad, how can we ban it from HN", and "AI is cigarettes, it will kill half of its users".

The proverbial AI piss is in the pool, it's not going away, I don't know what to tell anybody that doesn't believe that or doesn't want that. It's time to start integrating this into your psyche as something that will be a part of the rest of our lives in a big way.

HN is a forum made by angel investors for entrepreneurs, startups and hackers. We like technology, we like Ruby and we like AI because it's useful for what we want to do, and we would like to continue talking about it like we've talked about every other emergent technology before it (including other "controversial" things like Bitcoin).

Instead of trying to torture HN into something it was never designed for, why not go to lobste.rs and unselect the AI button and you won't see AI? Or make your own version of HN that bans AI discussion? You can even be really ironic and use Claude Code to make the forum for you so you can do even less work on that then you do on posting about how much you hate AI here in a forum designed for and by people that understand it and want to discuss it. I ask, once again, why are you here?

The actual root cause of this is our culture moving away from the idea that individuals and families should be free to make these sorts of decisions, and instead believing that heavy-handed authoritarian governments should dictate those choices to us instead.

I don't know what kind of kid you were, but as a kid I would have loved access to my own 24/7 polymath, it would have been an incredibly positive thing in my life. I often think of how much more cool stuff I would have accomplished with that ability. It would have actually benefited my mental health issues a lot, which often rotated around the boredom of living an isolated life in the suburbs and my imagination being unable to keep up with my free time and abilities.

If you add friction to good things in addition to bad things, you're just increasing the likelihood that the bad things will be chosen more often. You're also increasing the chances that people will not trust you when you say the actually bad things are bad, because you lied to them about the other thing so maybe you're lying to them about all of it?

I genuinely don't understand how you can survive in the world with a risk assessment system this damaged.

But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?

If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.

I'm sorry you don't live in an alternative universe where you can just post low value opinions on HN all day and get rewarded handsomely for that, but I don't think you should be surprised why you can't figure out how to make a successful life while you do it in the present one. And I don't feel like working more to subsidize you to do that via handouts, and almost nobody else does either. Good luck.

Why are you surprised you got laid off? Go do something with your life.

I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?

There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.

When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.

Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.

That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.

When you're not being paid to do something, the only benefit you get aside from software you use yourself is friendly peer recognition, and when it becomes too abrasive, when people are treating you like politicians and trying to scare you into adopting their political views, when users come in and trash talk your project like they're your boss because you didn't implement some feature they want, a lot of people just give up and leave. I largely left the space because of this, and a lot of really good OSS contributors I knew did too.

I'm not sure what the solution is at this point but it's probably not a continuation of the entitlement mentality, purity tests and witch hunts that this site is perpetuating.

That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out. Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?

And unlike in the US they actually do enforce the laws there.

If you drove a car drunk and it turned into a police chase, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you snuck across the Japanese border with intention to live there undocumented, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

Literally anything involving a gun and a crime, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If the answer is "no", you're probably feeding too heavily from ideology. The reality is that most countries, including far more stable and peaceful countries than the US will ever be, are far less tolerant of crossing borders illegally, drunk driving, gun offenses, etc. With their own citizens, to say nothing of foreigners on visas.

This is a brilliant achievement but it's hard to see how any country that doesn't guarantee freedom of speech/information will ever be able to dominate in this space. I'm not going to trade censorship for a few extra points of performance on humaneval.

And before the equivocation arguments come in, note that chatgpt gives truthful, correct information about uncomfortable US topics like slavery, the Kent State shootings, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Iraq war, whether the 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, etc.

From the article https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-firm-s-faste...

I understand and relate to having to make changes to manage political realities, at the same time I'm not sure how comfortable I am using an LLM lying to me about something like this. Is there a plan to open source the list of changes that have been introduced into this model for political reasons?

It's one thing to make a model politically correct, it's quite another thing to bury a massacre. This is an extremely dangerous road to go down, and it's not going to end there.