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> Most on the left would consider it authoritarian despotism if Trump started "Confiscating" companies. Most on the right would consider it the same if Biden or whomever did the same.

Eh. I disagree. It really depends on the company, the why, and what's done with it afterwards.

If the other party nationalized the big frontier labs or AI data center operators, with the rationale that AI is just too disruptive to privatize the gains and/or the companies are acting recklessly, I wouldn't consider it "authoritarian despotism," and I don't think many others would either: those companies are unpopular across the political spectrum.

There's a certain amount of reflexive opposition to "the other side," in that some people will oppose anything it does, but that's just really dumb, so I wouldn't read too much into it on any particular issue.

Now, if the Democrats confiscated "The Trump Organization" on some flimsy rationale because they really hate Trump, that particular action would be seen as you describe.

> In general, the US has strong opposition to the state unilaterally confiscating companies

Thankfully, things can change.

> and it is the kind of thing seen in Nazi Germany, revolutionary Cuba and Iran, or the Islamic state.

That's a dumb argument. "Confiscating companies" is not the reason those regimes are considered bad. And the fact they did some particular thing is irrelevant. I'm sure they also penalize murder, and your not going to get me to question my opposition to murder by saying "the Nazis had anti-murder laws!"

> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode.

Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.

Is this Proton as in ProtonMail?

> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.

> ...

> I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.

It "solved" inflation by being deflationary (and then you have the massive volatility layered on top of that).

I think it's probably impossible to have a stable currency without some kind of dynamic governance, like a central bank.

Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.

IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.

> Some people find authoritarian despotism attractive as long as it targets their perceived enemies

It's not that simple. For instance: a prison sentence is "authoritarian despotism" from the perspective of a murderer subject to it (or his apologists).

> So, theft. Got it!

> That will make a lot of businesses focus on success here and not somewhere else.

You have a weird definition of theft. We're talking about nationalizing them instead of handing their shareholders a bunch of free money to bail them out. Not getting free money is theft now?

But, more broadly: there's more to the social contract than private property rights. And it's really hard to bring myself to care too much about the private property rights of entities who have shown themselves to not be very respectful of that contract.

> Yeah totally not israeli hackers... it has to be scary kim.

The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.

> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.

Don't forget to add "don't make mistakes!"

> Wow, Japan has a lot

Of course: it's long been a developed country and it's densely populated.

The only thing that surprised me was that Canada was so small compared to other Western countries. But I suppose that might be an artifact. The map shows IPv4 proportional to land area, but a "fair" allocation would have IPv4 proportionate to population, not land area, and I'd assume Canada is (overall) less densely populated than most other developed countries.

> This is an interesting corollary to a thing I'm seeing where "devs who thought their job was writing code" are in like existential danger.

I think you're misunderstanding that anxiety. I think this is what's going on:

1. For a lot of people, using technical skills like coding is the part of the job they enjoyed.

2. Closely related to the above point: for a lot of people, technical skills was the part they were good at.

> Technical skills aren't worth shit and never were, except as far as they enable you to engage with other people in ways you and they find valuable. This used to be really far! It made it easy to believe that the technical skills on their own were what was valuable.

> But the engagement was always the valuable thing, generating technical insight was a necessary prerequisite for it. Now anyone with a $20 claude sub can generate technical insight into niche problems, so what's left is everything else. Everything of value.

3. More broadly: if "they" don't find the "technical skills" you provided valuable anymore, why do they need to keep you around? Why not cut your 10-person team down to 3 people (the manager, architect, and technical lead) and fire you and the other 6? Not everyone can re-invent themselves as a product person, even if they had the skills. It's a game of musical chairs.

> I just had one of my posts removed from the front page here which was disheartening because it feels as though what was judged was prose rather than the technical insight in to a niche problem, which seems counterintuitive considering i've always thought of Hacker News being an inclusive place for the technical and engineering skills rather than their level of the english language.

The problem with LLM voice is that it sends the signal that it's a likely waste of effort to try to figure out if there's any "technical insight" there, because more often than not, there isn't.

Maybe it's not fair that you're paying the price for others using LLMs to abuse their readers, but it's the reality that you have to deal with. It's also not fair to expect readers to wade through all that abusive LLM prose in order to find your (assumed) non-abusive post.

Once LLM writing becomes indistinguishable from human writing, it will be really sad. There will just be a collapse of human engagement, and you might as well just talk to your machine because then at least you know what you're getting and aren't being deceived.

You raise good points, and I think there are actually at least two phenomena here:

1. The liars: people cynically playing up fears of "losing democracy" as a political tactic to support some other political programs. I think this is especially obvious from candidates, activists, political operatives, etc. -- people sophisticated enough and engaged enough to know and think about what they're doing in a serious way.

2. The un-serious people: those you describe. Basically irrational people who believe a jumble of things without exercising the ability to prioritize or disengage the contradictions.

I don't think the boundaries between these phenomena are hard ones (e.g. you can often push un-serious people into liar territory by challenging them to prioritize).