'But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. '
This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.
Even George Orwell who fired a rifle at fascists eventually concluded that "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’"
I think the Charlie Kirk thing scared people straight for a few weeks but I've definitely seen an uptake of submissions to HN about various tempests in teapots such as the recent drama about an open source project that was big in 2005 and only niche since 2012 or something about waffles and now a laptop maker that tweeted a link to the wrong thing or something.
There is still this emphasis by certain on canceling people at conferences and stuff because they are "fascists" but a lack of recognition that the democratic institutions that they like so much are putting "fascists" in power throughout the world -- and if they want it to be different they're going to have to stop dehumanizing people who vote the wrong way and talk to them. The message of "you are bad", "your society is bad" just doesn't sell, in fact Black people don't want to hear about they weighed down by the legacy of slavery, they want to maximize the life that's in front of them.
Thing is that people find meaning in believing "society is bad" so it serves the interest of this selfish meme to put "fascists" in power; the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or Fox News couldn't have done a better job engineering a fifth column for the left which would keep the right in power permanently.
In what sense is the current administration not a fascist one? They are consolidating plenary authority in the executive, erasing democratic norms, enacting lawfare against political enemies with the DOJ, abducting undesirables to torture camps in legally untouchable countries, pardoning convicted insurrectionists, and treating Blue areas like enemy territory -- up to and including military occupation. This is unprecedented in American politics since the Civil War.
Not everyone to the right of the "far left" is a fascist, but the administration in power undeniably has a fascist core. And people who actually study this stuff professionally largely agree.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
Whether or not it is, the repetition of that word by you and your friends is a magic spell that brought that administration into reality. For years it has been "Kier Starmer is a fascist" or "White people are fascists" or "Your local police department is fascist", etc.
A certain amount of blame can be laid at centrist politicians who can't take advantage of left-wing populist sentiments because they are too afraid of donors. [1] But an ultra-left that is obviously warming up the ovens for DHH because he said something stupid once and might come for me because I'm cisgender just seems fascinated with fascism because they're jealous the same way Charlie Kirk was fascinated with "cancel culture" because like David Horowitz he wished he could punish anyone in academia who he disagreed with.
[1] Look at the donors who will give money to anyone who isn't Mamdani no matter how bad because they don't have faith in the ability of blue state institutions to completely frustrate and hamstring anyone who tries to do anything.
As a somewhat conservative Christian -- not some frothing-at-the-mouth liberal -- reading this left me feeling vaguely nauseous and made me want to ensure that no amount of my money went into this guy's pockets again. This is not some witch hunt over subtle ideological differences. It's literally the kind of thing that David Duke would have been saying a decade ago.
"Whether or not it is, the repetition of that word by you and your friends is a magic spell that brought that administration into reality."
Based on my observations over the last decade, I vehemently disagree on the direction of causality here.
And to be clear, DHH was deliberately aligning himself with Tommy Robinson - a British street agitator who rose to prominence after being kicked out of an avowedly fascist party because of his insistence on prioritising violence over electoral politics (the party's "political soldier" leadership at the time sought to give equal weight to both).
Using the term "fascist" in that context isn't about cancelling someone, or targetting them unfairly - it's an accurate description of the specific ideology that they're advocating.
Your answer to a long list of very specific arguments is vague gesturing in the general direction of an imaginary group of people whose only connection is that they happened to use a certain word sometime in the past 10 years?
And these people who have never talked to one another are somehow to blame for the fascist reality they find themselves living in right now because a few of them made hyperbolic comments? I think labeling it victim-blaming doesn't do your rhetoric justice.
Yes this administration definitely has strong, disturbing authoritarian tendencies. The censorious tendencies of the "far left", though, took us a meaningful distance here. Executive power and Congress's uselessness has been accelerating for decades now, but it's not hard to see the place we're at as an extension of where we were.
Jimmy Kimmel's attempted cancellation was just a more state-sponsored attempt at cancelling than the social pressure cancellations of the late 2010s. Sure state-sponsored is what makes it technically censorship but the practical difference it makes for the individual and their platform is almost none. Generating massive amounts of outrage over calling the default git branch "master" is how you get Anduril and Palantir virtue signaling to the right about how their work is keeping America safe and competitive. College student bodies insisting on their administrations doing land acknowledgements is what brought contrarian shit-stirrers like Charlie Kirk to colleges in the first place.
And as a result the modern Democratic party is broken. The "far left" has been obsessed with destroying the Democratic party's coalition because of their insistence on ideological purity. The center left moderates have been vilified and alienated and are too shy to endorse populist left candidates like Mamdani because of how much they've been punched. Free speech advocates have been exiled as progenitors of "hate speech", only for the current administration to use the same "hate speech" rationale to silence the opposition (labeling something as stupid as "Antifa" dangerous.) Left libertarians have been sneered at for so long as agents of greed and enemies of state capacity that now that the state is trying to quash the freedom of those on the left, the left libertarians don't want to speak up.
So yes we're in bad shape, very bad shape. But I have zero confidence that it's the "far left" who is going to save us. If anything I think if the "far left" and the MAGA-ites continue the way they do we're going to end up in an American version of the Spanish Civil War. I think the MAGA-ites just realized that nobody is willing to adhere to historical American norms on liberal democracy; the emperor has no clothes. Might as well push liberal democracy as far as it can go since nobody is willing to fight for it.
EDIT: I'm expecting downvotes for this opinion and it's one I don't share on lefty social media spaces because it's always a very disliked one but I'd welcome actual discussion on this. The closest I've seen to a rebuttal is "if we need to moderate our positions then we become as bad as the other side, so what's the point?" which I also disagree with. An inability to talk about this is yet another mark that shows how far the gulf between the sides are in the US.
I think I agree. From personal experience, even when I ask for scathing critique, the need to placate and make me feel better seems to bleed through ( both on 4o and 5 as far as I could tell ). I am not sure what to make of it.
We go back to this original prediction that the tool will help those, who both want help and are painfully aware of LLMs peculiar issues.
The incentives align: when the success metric is engagement, it will be optimized for engagement. It makes perfect sense that it is going to agree with you.
I want to support them. I actually bought their ai desktop with unified memory ( DOA and can't do RMA cuz they are out of stock...so returned it ). Anyway, my point is: we should be focusing on tech and whether it works for us not some moral alignment. At best, it is a distraction.
edit: And for the record, I know nothing about either party of this fake controversy AND have no intention of learning it. It does not matter since I just want to get hardware that works for my use case.
I live in Chicagoland. Nothing is stifling it except state government itself. I don't want to get on my high horse, but I actually have a choice and it is bad enough now that I opt to drive on a highway. And that is the 'good' mass transit example.
FWIW, I originally came from an old EU country. Mass transit was the way to move around and let me assure you that the government is not better there. The issue is more cultural than anything else.
I would argue that it's cultural specifically due to the decades of lobbying and back-room deals. Yeah, the government isn't helping things because it's beyond their ability now. It would take a similar decades-long approach to shift course, and cost gobs of money.
Eh, I guess I am talking to militant anti-SUV people.
Allow me to rephrase:
- Your environment imposes restrictions upon you
- Even if you can control your actions, optimal choice is to move within those restrictions
- Doing things that attempt to move outside those restrictions are not optimal
- Some people choose the optimal path
- Some people are upset that the optimal path is chosen
Good grief, why am I bothering with nonsense so early?
> Doing things that attempt to move outside those restrictions are not optimal. Some people choose the optimal path.
Optimal for what?
> Some people are upset that the optimal path is chosen.
Person A chooses the "optimal path" (according to whatever definition of "optimal" A has) for their benefit. Their "optimal path" puts person B at risk and forces them to deal with unwanted costs and changes their environment. Do you think that person B is wrong to be upset about the choice of person A or not?
<< Do you think that person B is wrong to be upset about the choice of person A or not?
Oh boy. I am not responsible for you. By this tirade, you only demonstrate to me you are willing to make suboptimal choices so that you can feel better about yourself. That is cool, but don't drag me down with you.
By your logic, each time you breathe out CO2, it forces me to deal with unwanted costs and a change to my environment. Can you hear how ridiculous that argument is at its core?
Can you hear yourself and realize how ridiculous your reduction ad absurdum is?
Let me help you: taking your analogy to the other extreme, and it seems like you shouldn't be mad at anyone if they decide to light up a cigarette in an elevator.
I am not mad. At best, I am disappointed as I let the someone go by themselves as I don't get on the elevator. For every choice, a consequence. It is absurd that you think your response was a reduction at all.. Honestly, if you are on my side, please stop. You are explicitly not helping.
> disappointed as I let the someone go by themselves as I don't get on the elevator.
Ok, so you think that people are expected to just step down and be quiet about it. Others would certainly complain and rightly so.
Also, while you might feel okay about taking another elevator, we can not tell people "if don't like your pedestrian-hostile and accident-prone environment just go move away, or stop being a pedestrian".
I say "people are justified about being upset, because they end up facing the consequences and bearing the risks of the choices made by others" and you somehow imply am I saying this is an argument about "forcing" anything?
That is a seriously bizarre conversation. Peace out.
I am not sure if it is the future, but I am glad there is some movement to hinder centralization in this sector as much as possible ( yes, I recognize future risk, but for now it counts as hindering it ).
I am kind of militant about this. The ability to run great AI models locally is critical, not just for this sector, but for innovation overall. The bar of "build a few datacenters" is far too high for all but the largest countries and companies in the world.
100%. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. Things are evolving so quickly. Hopefully pushing back on centralization now will keep the ecosystem healthier and give developers real options outside the big two/three cloud providers.
In a sense, it is not surprising. The surprising part is the apparent overall yawn from.. well, everyone. One could easily argue that the current situation is, to put it mildly, problematic. And I am not just talking fiscal, or financial, or geopolitical. It is somehow all of these and yet, due to some interesting level of crisis fatiue, most are shrugging it off. 4k seems high, but it merely reflects current perpcetions and still does not crazy. My pet theory is that.. there is no safe haven this time so money is all over the place.
edit: I am mostly in bonds with some gambles here and there, but that was my position since the begining of this year.
The fatigue is that everyone keeps telling everyone will crash and it cannot last, for a what, a decade now? But especially the last few years. And then it just doesn't happen. Crypto will crash, gold cannot last, S&P is overheated etc and yet everything I have and other people have is going straight up. It has to go down, but at least when people said in 1998 a bubble is coming and will crash, it only took 2-3 years for it to blow up. Now it just goes and goes and goes. I think that gives fatique. I am spread, including local real estate and companies, but I missed a lot of money listening to people (and my own feelings) to think we were too high. Everything has to actually crash very hard to still not make a good profit and that it won't, at least not when we don't see it coming.
I guess what's happening ever since the housing market bust is that virtually all asset classes are guaranteed to appreciate at rates that outpace inflation, a guarantee paid for largely by workers whose real wages decrease due to inflation.
You would think "that can't go on forever" but so far workers have failed to organize or support reforms that could correct it. The "hack" to maintain this in perpetuity seems to be distracting workers with get rich quick gambling schemes and culture war xenophobia.
That is fair. I think you are onto something. I did miss out on some things as well, because I played very conservatively ( and at this point I am not that willing to change much ). Still, my own house appreciated a ridiculous amount. I see other assets appreciate as well ( just not as dramatically ).. I don't know how it can stay at these levels without some major re-alignment.
I think this is overall fair/accurate in terms of crash fatigue, but crypto has crashed by 85+% multiple times in the last decade. I'm not sure that's the best proof point in this list of things that don't actually happen.
I am not fan of crypto and dont hold any, not by reference (etfs etc) either, however, all the crypto fans that told me to buy and hodl did win the jackpot so far. But I agree, not the best example for not crashing: I was just, in the particular case of crypto, referring to that many believe(d) it would drop to 0 and dissappear: in case of bitcoin: did not come close in the past 10 years.
there are always people predicting the next crash. when in the bottom of a crash they are saying things will go lower.
you have to be careful about predictions in financial areas.
Remember if people are guarenteed right they would be investing money. In most cases talking about a truth will cause the market to change harming your ability to capitalize on it. Thus anyone talking is unlikely to have insight.
Hmm. What do you think his opinions mean?