All around us a societal contract is disintegrating. It's unsurprising to see the same with faked disabilities to gain an academic edge. It was the case years ago but it seems like there's a more formalised industry to support such endeavors now.
These days you can assume any loophole must be exploited by people who not only are unashamed in doing so, but rather proud of their prowess to exploit. It is an ADD diagnosis for extra time, a disabled placard for better parking - hell the new meme is motile people pretending to need wheelchair access for priority boarding at airports.
It is the metastatic presentation of a society too fat, gluttonous, and imbalanced to function in the face of any actual adversity.
I don't blame anyone - American society is cruel, untrustworthy, alienating, and unforgiving. Spoils are awarded to the least scrupulous actors and all negative outcomes are externalized. Take what you can and fuck everyone else, right?
You'd have to expand on that because I don't see why one is related to the other. People get value out of giving their data to OpenAI. They don't care. So what?
I share your abhorrence but are you really shocked? "Think of the children", "Stop the terrorists," these have been the foundations for the erosion of personal liberty for the past thirty years.
I am unconvinced from a practical standpoint that this vision of the world that you wish to live in is even possible today due to the increase in sectarian communal tensions, dense cities, widely available cars/guns/etc and stresses from cost of living and income inequality, as well as the spread of ideas that mass casualty attacks might be a thing to do (the US did not have school attacks until it became an unfortunate "thing" in the culture that sick people glommed onto).
An absence of surveillance causes increased frequency of terrorist attacks which causes people to demand solutions (necessarily involving surveillance and other authoritarian measures) which leads to increased surveillance. It's an unfortunate negative feedback loop.
If you lack solutions for too long, the negative feedback loop becomes severe and instead of just surveillance within a liberal democratic context, you get public safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte.
"Surveillance doesn't materially reduce terrorist attacks" - I am not sure about that based on the number of arrests of plotters and the lack of visibility I have into the tools and methods they used to find those plotters.
"Terrorist attacks still happen even with surveillance" - Yes, but if they happen less frequently, this reduces the demand from the public to ratchet up authoritarianism. See the problem?
"Terrorist attacks are a price worth paying for our freedom." - I mostly agree, but feeling like this doesn't make any difference to the negative feedback loop, does it? Regular people want public safety from physical danger almost as much as food and water.
In most countries, death by terrorist is at least an order of magnitude less likely than death by bee. Strangely, we do not seem to be on a campaign to lock all humans in-doors to protect them from bees, nor have we declared a global war on beeism. These stats hold from before the modern surveillance regime, and so can hardly be credited to it. It's not actually a problem in particular need of urgent solving. Regular people are safe from terrorism, much safer than they are against most kinds of tragic accidents. What regular people are actually in danger of is losing all of their human rights to fearmongerers, who constantly invoke terrorism to erode them further and further.
Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism, so I don't know why you thought it relevant to bring them up. I think it is really sad to see comments on HN of all places advocating that if we don't implement chat control we'll spiral into a lawless hellscape.
India saw 779 million dollars lost to cyber fraud in the first 5 months of 2025.
The degree of cyber fraud in India is beyond insane.
Also - funnily enough - Indian telecom companies are meant to be fined for every SIM card given out under false data. There is already meant to be a check that stops this.
Sincerely, you misunderstand what I am saying, or you didn't read until the end where I said that some level of terrorism is a price worth paying in my subjective judgment.
My point is that my subjective judgment counts for nothing, because the negative feedback loop that I described is a society-wide phenomenon beyond my control as an individual. Asking the majority of people to think the way you do about terrorism is somewhere between wishcasting and virtue signalling. It doesn't interrupt the causality behind the negative feedback loop, so it therefore fails to outline a path that can be trodden in the real world to achieve your desired vision of no surveillance.
I urge everyone to banish this mode of thinking which fixates on what "should" happen without first checking whether that desired end state is a possible world we can exist in once you factor in the second and third order effects beyond the control of any individual.
> Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism
Move your abstraction one level higher. They arose out of public safety concerns around murder and drugs and gangs. Those are not terrorism, but they fit under the same umbrella of public safety concerns that motivate regular people to demand authoritarian solutions.
I suppose my point was that it’s detached from reality to say that real engineers refuse to build “dangerous” systems.
All of the most dangerous systems are built by engineers and outside the most progressive circles it’s quite obvious that these systems must exist amidst the anarchy of geopolitics.
> Was it a distraction for UK or Argentinian leadership?
"In the period leading up to the war—and, in particular following the transfer of power between the military dictators General Jorge Rafael Videla and General Roberto Eduardo Viola late in March 1981—Argentina had been in the midst of devastating economic stagnation and large-scale civil unrest against the National Reorganisation Process, the military junta that had been governing the country since 1976.
In December 1981 there was a further change in the Argentine military regime, bringing to office a new junta headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri (acting president), Air Brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo and Admiral Jorge Anaya. Anaya was the main architect and supporter of a military solution for the long-standing claim over the islands, expecting that the United Kingdom would never respond militarily."
This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.
It's mind-boggling to me how many commenters are here to defend the honor of a serial adulterer who broke the hearts of the people most related to and dependent upon him. Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
There are a number of comments here that read like "yes, but you have to understand those things benefitted the father". It's like people think if you're doing something that hurts other people, it's OK if that's for selfish reasons? I guess I'll try not to think of how this reflects on our industry as a whole.
Are people defending his honor, or just offering sympathy? Because I don't find sympathy strange at all. He betrayed the trust of a lot of people he claimed to care about, but also barely had any unfettered happiness in a too-short life. He was complicated, as we all are.
For all we know that entire account is fiction. None of us know the man or the author yet we feel content to pass judgement on his life from a few paragraphs of from a narrator who has made it clear they also didn't know him well.
>Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
It's because they have no experience with have such a bad person in a supposed "caregiver" role in their life so their minds literally can't imagine it. They think he just MUST be misunderstood instead of just callous and uncaring.
Or they are a parent and can't imagine not carit about their own child, so they assume it must be a universal thing, and the father MUST have loved her, even if he didn't show it. Truth is, a fuck ton of people don't love, like, or give two shits about their own children. These people do exist.
That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with.
So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I also grew up with abusive parents (plural). Poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, violence. The whole nine. You can check my comment history, I talk about it openly on here. Here's one previous comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400583
Others extend clearly bad people who do bad things more grace than they deserve if they are parents. You hear things like "I'm sure they love their children but are stressed and don't know how to express it. It's probably hard for them." (Ignoring how hard it is for the innocent CHILDREN!)
However, I know from experience there's no love there. No like. Only hate.
And there more to this story than a closeted gay man. The author made it clear he was also distant as a father and wasn't at all a caretaker to her either. All evidence from the post points to the fact the father was callous and uncaring to those around him. Using others for his own gain. The followup shows he was having affairs from his affair partner before he died. This is not someone who would have been a kind man if he was just allowed to come out.
The other thing that immediately stood out to me that nobody else is noticing - the father encouraged a man half his age to give up his entire life in China to come to Canada on a fucking student visa (which is inherently temporary) with the, most likely, promise (stated or unstated) that he'd marry him and sponsor him as a permanent resident and they'd build a new life together. All evidence points to deception here. He wasn't making moves to legally divorce his wife and was having affairs with other men on top of that. You can't legally work on a student visa, so the partner would have been entirely financially dependent on the father.
None of us here ever knew the man, and the only reports we have on his life are from a pseudo anon author who admits that they also did not know him very well. That any of us, including the author, are justified in calling him "villanous" is a big stretch in my opinion. It feels more likely that the author, and perhaps you, simply disagree with the decisions he made. Which is fine, but a far cry from villainy.
We don't have a 24/7/365 video feed of the man's life with which to throughly judge him on, this is true. So casting him as a villian based on this shadow caricature version of a story we've been told might be unfair to the actual person. We're not Michael at the heavenly gates or Osiris or Anubis though, we're just going off of what's been written. Do the actions of that man as described not qualify as villainous to you? It’s small, affecting only the lives of those in his immediate vicinity. But it’s still not good. Maybe little V villainy not big V villainy like Voldemort?
You can be sure that, like most people who espouse such open-borders views, he has never been impacted by the negative externalities of such policies.
Like the Uk Green Party leader who lodged a complaint about planned migrant camp in her town. It’s all about optics and as soon as it impacts them directly they revert.
I also believe it’s a bubble but how can it be a bubble if everyone thinks it’s a bubble? It seems like bubble is the general consensus but there hasn’t been something like a “pop” yet.
I don't see how it can be a bubble (or at least a risky one) without much debt. Places like Google and Meta profit $100B a year from operations and are funding most of this from cashflow. The risk is that they have to write down a bunch of overbuilt data center assets in a few years, but lenders won't be going under because there aren't any lenders involved. And without lenders being at risk, the system isn't at risk.
*There is some leverage. Coreweave has borrowed a bit for example. But none of this is really systemic and no one is levered to the eyeballs in the AI space.
There is a bit of nuance to the cashflow. That $100 bn cashflow was used for something else before AI: mostly share repurchases and M&A. Now it's being redirected to capex. That removes some of the support for the stock prices; there's no longer a multibillion dollar bid every year for GOOG / META / MSFT etc. stocks.
But you're right that this shouldn't affect lenders, unless we see a lot more borrowing (which is coming, BTW: ORCL and GOOG just issued $10+ bn debt each for AI data centers).
I guess the trillon dollar question is what might be the signs that we're at the top of this bubble.
Looking at a couple of prior bubbles ...
In the subprime housing crash of 2007/2008, lending practices got so bad that there were low-doc and no-doc loans (aka "liar loans") where you could get a mortgage without any evidence of being able to repay it.
Immediately prior to the dot com stock market crash of 2000, EVERYONE was talking about how much money they were making. At work it was insane with people monitoring their stock portfolios all day, reporting how much money they'd made that morning, etc. Tons of people were beyond "all in" - buying on margin.
So what about now with AI market caps, infrastructure builds, etc. Are we in the bat shit crazy "all in" stage yet, or can it conceivably go further?
As the article surmised at the end; AI is most definitely not free (and infact is quite costly) but major players are subsidising the price and cost of tokens to developers, such that right now everyone is pretty much getting AI tools and processing power for free (or very very low cost).
The signs are many products and services adding AI cause they can, but there being very little logic as to how much this addition makes sense. In a way this is the artificial demand they can point to for their (untrue) ongoing growth narrative - look companies are still adding more and more AI.
Let’s take the example of Figma, which is listed on the market after a successful IPO. At its core it’s a very nice design tool that bought the innovation of collaborative live editing (ah la Google docs) to an adobe illustrator like product. It’s still great for this.
But in recent times much development has gone into their AI and MCP features, these likely bring some value; but the market sees these are offered features built like any other feature; when in fact there is a pay-for-use baked in that is being massively subsidised (on the basis that the future price will be high). So as a result customers see these are fun additional features to try out (for free). BUT when the time comes Figma is going to have to massively crank up the price (either overall or more likely for use of the AI features) as the mechanism that has subsidised low cost AI usage tokens runs dry.
The real question is: how many customers would really be willing to say pay double for Figma to keep the AI tooling they getting now? Or how many will be like screw that; those tools were fun but they are in no-way worth paying for - leading to customers stepping away from newly expensive AI features and products.
Figma offers a more valuable fundamental service than most digital products; in a world where AI tokens go way up in cost, think of all the dedicated AI apps that folks will just be like, nope I’m not paying. There’s your big bust.
This is the dynamic and reality to consider; what folks will do when the tokens stop being subsidiesed.
It's hard to say how sustainable free tier pricing is - it depends on how much money they are making from every one else. It is a bit extreme though, with apparently only 5% of ChatGPT users paying for it.
I don't see this as the bell ringing at the top of the bubble though.
It’s not “free tier” it’s all the tiers being significantly discounted (underpriced). It’s ALL pricing.
Per the article is all underpriced… run the logic.. assume when the funds run out that prices across the board go up 5x, 10x, more. Assess where u think it’d all be at.
What do u think downward affect on the market will be?
> It’s not “free tier” it’s all the tiers being significantly discounted (underpriced). It’s ALL pricing.
That's possible, but how would we know what the cost to provide the service is from any of the companies, which will anyways vary from company to company since they are using different models and hardware (e.g. OpenAI/Microsoft NVIDIA, Google TPUs, Anthropic/Amazon Trainium).
We also don't know how much the average chat subscriber is using the service. A low usage subscriber may be profitable at $20/mo, but a high usage one unprofitable.
Chat subscription prices seem to have been steady at $20/mo for a while, but cost of providing the service is falling very fast. In recent Dwarkesh interview, Satya Nadella says costs are falling 5/10/40x year over year, or evern quarter over quarter.
These days you can assume any loophole must be exploited by people who not only are unashamed in doing so, but rather proud of their prowess to exploit. It is an ADD diagnosis for extra time, a disabled placard for better parking - hell the new meme is motile people pretending to need wheelchair access for priority boarding at airports.
It is the metastatic presentation of a society too fat, gluttonous, and imbalanced to function in the face of any actual adversity.
I don't blame anyone - American society is cruel, untrustworthy, alienating, and unforgiving. Spoils are awarded to the least scrupulous actors and all negative outcomes are externalized. Take what you can and fuck everyone else, right?
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