ETH_start

Had it not been for crypto, there would be massive covert espionage on US information systems. Crypto has acted as a canary, leading to hackers exploiting those vulnerabilities in a very dramatic and public way. That has led to a massive hardening of networked computer systems, which has likely saved far more money, in prevention of corporate espionage, than has been lost through the crypto heists.

And that's just on the cybersecurity front. In terms of economic empowerment, reducing financial friction, enabling greater participation in commerce via stablecoins, it's been a massive boon. There would be totally law-abiding people right now who would have practically no international banking options if it were not for blockchains.

Sure, but that's a zero-sum situation. There are many areas of life where you producing more doesn't harm anybody else.

I mean strictly positive from a general welfare position. Competition through innovation is not a negative externality or else the automobile would be a negative externality on account of wiping out the horse-drawn carriage industry. And the camera and photography would be a negative externality because they eliminated most of the portrait drawing industry.

Automation will of course harm whichever sector of the economy remains on the manual processes, but it leads to more abundance overall.

Even the people who lose jobs due to automation are better off overall. If you personally consume goods and services produced by 100 different classes of professionals, and you yourself work in one of those 100 classes of professional work, and your job gets automated, you lose out in that narrow sense, but you gain from having the products and services produced by the other 99 classes of professionals, become more abundant through automation.

With respect to authenticity, that's easy to prove. Take coffee for example. People are willing to pay more for coffee that was made by hand. So what do companies do? They simply have the baristas make the coffee in front of the customers. Market incentives will produce efficient ways of proving authenticity.

There was nothing normal about the whole movement that MLK Jr led. He presented himself as a holy man while participating in rape.

His close advisors included major organizers of the Communist Party. And this was at the height of the Cold War. The steelman argument for the FBI's decision is that it faced an extraordinary threat to national security in the person of MLK and resorted to extraordinary measures to try to neutralize that threat. And as far as the FBI went there were certainly lines that the FBI wouldn't cross.

There are also, of course, very strong arguments against the FBI's covert action against King, and those are well-known.

Exactly. There's never an excuse for a bailout, for any industry.

It's incredibly hard to maintain your own voice while using LLMs. It requires deep discussion with the LLM itself so that it comes to understand your perspectives and also explains to you the premises on which its own recommendations are based.

I haven't really done a systematic analysis to compare the quality of fully human-written content and content generated via this kind of deep human-AI collaboration, but my intuition is that the latter is vastly superior. Perhaps AI at its best is a research tool, but a genuinely intelligent one that we need to engage in conversation with in order to use to its full potential.

The sense that I get is that as a conversation gets more in depth, the LLMs start behaving more like reasoning engines and less like statistical averaging machines. The former is vastly more useful to a person who wants to develop an idea and articulate it well.

I think it's because the FBI had tapes proving that King was involved in rape.

This is an incredibly partisan take and I don't think it's appropriate for Hacker News, which is not supposed to include flamebait comments.

Ah yes, white people are oblivious to racism and black people are systemically abused. This is just the standard Democrat narrative. And it's fine to believe that, but again, it's far from an objective non-partisan, non-flame-baity take.

The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.

I did. The article treats modern arguments about reduced spending for the disabled as Nazi ideology.

It's surveillance of anyone who is receiving money. They don't have to be playing a formal merchant role to be under that surveillance.

Nazi ideology justified sterilizing and eventually killing the disabled. Arguing that less taxpayer money going to subsidizing the disabled amounts to Nazi ideology is quite an inflammatory leap. It frames lack of not taking on the responsibility to provide for another as equivalent to murder, and hence, those who reject social democracy as Nazi-like mass-murderers.

Perhaps the word "spying" implied the wrong thing. I did not intend to imply that this is in secret. This is an overt surveillance system that uses a known backdoor, not a covert one that uses a secret one.

My initial statement might not have been clear: when I use the word creative, I do not mean it in this narrow sense of creative arts. I meant in a sense of creation, producing valuable goods and services for others.

Even if we're talking about creative arts, if people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content, then how are they being harmed by the AI-generated creative content?

Assuming they value them equally and they prefer to have more content, AI is strictly a positive for people.