This submission might be an HN record for highest % of commenters who skipped reading the article. I'm sure it's always high but so far there are 125 comments and maybe 3 or 4 referencing what was in the actual article.
Yes, from the title and first few comments I thought it was about getting customer support and having to talk to a chatbot first. For anyone else who didn't read, this article is about how mindlessly copy-pasting LLM output is comparable to "making me talk to your chatbot".
Honestly I pretty much never actually read the articles and I don't see anything wrong with that. HN is more like discussion club, and the article is just a starting point for the discussion. If the discussion stays on topic that's great, if it moves onto better topics that's even better.
Do us all a favor and down vote those posts. I do, because I agree with the author and it doesn't matter if the text was human or AI generated. And if you're reading this and confused by my comment, try to RTFA, it's not long
No. This person should not try to circumvent moderation by creating new accounts. They should ask the moderation team for reinstatement of normal posting privileges, but be willing to accept a refusal. They've behaved appallingly.
I havnt seen this before Does (dead) mean they got downvoted or that everything they write is voided? How do you know what they wrote is appallingly bad?
We can accept the other side of the curve, but it has consequences that many are unwilling to discuss, let alone face.
Many social services & benefits are designed under an assumption of growth. Ofc we can change the assumptions but this also requires changing the programs, either making them less generous or raising taxes. Neither of those are vote getters, so politicians & govt staff feel a strong incentivize to try anything but those. We can try to make it up with immigration too, but at the scale required, immigration is also unpopular.
Cop out.
Your contribution to big tech is not apolitical. Go be a monk if apolitical is what you want (and even then, that wouldn’t be fully apolitical).
Men are political animals. If you say you want to be apolitical, you are already making a political choice, i.e. deferring your choices to established power.
Doing the ostrich is a political choice.
I think this is reaching. Plenty of humans are passionate about <x> and completely uninterested in how <x> applies to some current political concern.
Is the problem that some people are like that, or is the problem that they refuse to go along when you tell them that they have to be interested in it?
It’s hard to align the two groups. As someone who used to prefer apolitical discussion I now find it very hollow to talk about <x> without including the societal implications of <x>. Like it’s possible to be interested in nuclear physics without ever considering how nuclear physics impacts politics but it just doesn’t feel complete. As Dr Ian Malcom so eloquently stated: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
You have intentionally chosen aa area of interest that is easy to be politicized. Is it possible to be interested in vector graphics without ever considering how vector graphics impact politics?
Surely you're interested in vector graphics for a reason? Maybe you think it's superior to raster graphics because X, Y, and Z. Yet you look around and see that society overwhelmingly prefers raster. So you write neat programs that clearly demonstrate how superior vector graphics are. You help others with their problems by reaching into your toolkit of vector graphics knowledge and show them the light. You submit upstream patches to improve vector support. Etc.
What's the fundamental difference between this something more obviously political like advocating for privacy by building platforms to track bills, or submit letters to elected officials? Seems to me that the main difference is whether others are likely to be offended by your views and/or actions.
In other words, politics is fine, just don't be a dick. This is the rule many tech spaces enforce, HN included. It's challenging to scale this to large communities because the scope of what might be offensive expands, but that's a very different discussion.
And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
If you could magically make HN "apolitical" it's not that tech political discussion would vanish, it's just that different people with different interests would end up in different spaces. And as you have experienced, many people will move between those spaces at different points in their lives.
I am very interested in tech & politics and I am not interested in trying to prevent either. All I ask for is one site where I can go to nerd out without having to wade my way through 400 treatises about why Marx was actually right when I just want to learn more about hierarchical caching or whatever.
I think it's very telling that the issue at hand isn't a bunch of nerds brigading /r/marxWasRight demanding that political nerds include tech considerations in every post.
>And there's nothing wrong with that. The question is whether or not it's ok for people like your current self to try to force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
I hate the political discussion around AI. I think there's a lot of wrongheadedness on every side. But I am not stupid enough to imagine that its because AI is apolitical.
>force people like your former self to have the same interests as your current self.
Theres no force lmao. You can just skip certain comments.
>I am very interested in tech & politics
Ah but you are interested.
>All I ask for is one site where I can go to nerd out without having to wade my way through 400 treatises about why Marx was actually right
Yeah sorry, doesnt wash. Seems like you want to use force to push this community in a direction you approve of. IE, you are engaging in politics. Stop shitting up the website with your politics. Please leave it exactly where it is right now, which is apolitical.
I don't think the author is asserting that you can't talk politics with your coworkers?
The context is specifically about online sites like HN and the well known phenomenon where the technical usefulness of the site is inversely proportional to how many participants are trying to bring their preferred politics into it.
If you are able to have productive discussions about tech & politics with your coworkers, that might be because you are exceptional humans, or because you were in person rather than online, or because you already shared your co-workers political opinions. None of those apply to an online space like HN.
I’ve also changed my mind because of HN and other technical forum discussions. I brought up the counter example at the workplace because it is a case the article mentions without argument.
I think it’s ridiculous to pretend there isn’t massive overlap between political discussion and tech. Obviously there can be too much of a thing, obviously there are uncurious partisans, but I don’t think that is particularly different from the other kinds of flame wars HN guidelines already discourage.
I'd argue that a large, international forum is the kind of place where this kind of conversation adds much more noise than signal. There are too many people of too many age ranges who live in too many different places for political conversation to meaningfully result in situations where, on balance, the space agitates for change moreso than collapses into a negative-sum bash fest.
Political activism still seems to be most effective in democracies when folks go in person and try to talk about why they think their positions are good and useful ("canvasing") or when individuals talk to their representatives about issues. IMO many of the problems of democracy right now originate because too many people think that emoting online about politics is a substitute for building consensus in focused groups that have the power to change the issue at hand.
Not watching/reading "news" or engaging in mass or social media is not withdrawal.
Rather it is doing that which opens the space in your mind to be able to "choose a small area where you can make something better".
As long as you are on a hamster wheel of "Trump said this" "Trump said that" you can't make anything better in your life, nor be of much service to anyone else.
I'm all in on a healthy information diet. I was more concerned with comments like:
"I am apathetic to everything because there is nothing I can do about any of that. I am a speck of dust on a cog of a machine. There is absolutely no point of worrying about any of this."
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