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▲ EGreg 7 hours ago

Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.

It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…

Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.

▲jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And it does force you into some difficult choices.

I gots to know...

▲EGreg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Just read this: https://paulgraham.com/say.html

Paul Graham years ago: “I can’t publicly comment on all this stuff. I would turn into Noam Chomsky.”

Paul Graham on X last couple years…not exactly following his earlier advice.

They get you eventually.

▲jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Paul staying on X was a real failure of judgment imo. He made the right call and then backed out of it. I don't remember if they invited Elon to startup school before or after, either way I don't think that that is the kind of connection you want.

▲EGreg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yup and that’s just ONE guy. The fact that I was able to bring an example on HN of literally the guy who founded YC, imagine what chance the rest of the “plebs” have to resist the siren song.

If you want to know what I think … they make both parents work long hours for corporations, stick their kids in government schools, which are run like prisons[1] where now if they act too rambunctious they are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed amphetamines. Meanwhile the elderly parents who took care of you when you were little are put into nursing homes because their adult children have no time to take care of them either. The amount of medications for the elderly in nursing homes is even greater than for their children. The teenage girls have record levels of depression, coinciding with the rise of Instagram and TikTok. But they call it “sadness” because they don’t want to link it with clinical depression, which is also quite high. Men are on opiates while one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And many people are now glued to their latest feed of doomscroll or video AI slop. Which is even worse than before…

So yeah. If you think the software is “bad for our kids”, you should look at what it does to the adults. Endless arguing online with strangers for no reason. Maybe a bot will read it. Maybe a random person will reply or downvote it. Either way it wins because the system needs profits and the algorithm will prioritize “engagement”, which means one-sided outrage narratives that triggers someone to write an angry rant. We don’t really need those user-generated arguments anymore because AI can generate those, but then again we won’t need humans to do most things online at all…

(Ironically, the above was an angry rant too, to open some strangers’ eyes on HN, a social forum. But once you see it, you can’t really unsee it.)

1. https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

▲Pxtl 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He was inching into anti-dei culture war stuff so I'm not sure how much he actually disagrees with Musk's political goals so much as he rightly observers that Musk and Trump are complete maniacs.

▲jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Or just scared. These guys don't play nice with people that publicly cross them.

▲teiferer 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.

The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.

Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.

▲sda2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

True homies will invite you over to chill nude in their Faraday cage.

▲EGreg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Come to think of it … this lady was smarter than I thought when I first saw the movie: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=52PogPwbfZw