kerkeslager

I did read it, and I guess if you intended anything other than what you wrote you should've written what you intended, buddy.

Classic advertiser nonsense.

Sure, let's entertain the possibility that you're one of the not-very-intelligent people who thinks ads are there to help them, and you like having ads shown to you. That's great for you, have at it! If you want to spend your money on shit you don't need from companies that spend their money on advertising instead of producing quality products, that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean it's okay to ram ads into the face of everyone else who doesn't want ads. And outside of the self-serving Hacker News bubble where you wrongly assume anything profitable must also be popular, most people don't like ads.

To borrow your analogy--sure, me not liking pineapple on pizza is just a preference. But advertising is like if they offer free pizza on the condition that it has pineapple on it, and if I pick the pineapple off they have someone follow me around and try to put the pineapple back on the pizza as I put it in my mouth, and when I decide I'm going to pay for pizza to avoid the pineapple guy, they still put pineapple on the pizza, and people follow me around trying to put pineapple on the pizza that's in my lunchbox and sneak into my house and put pineapple on the pizza in my fridge. And at some point you have to admit that while not liking pineapple on pizza is just my preference, maybe my preference is valid and you pineapple on pizza people need to leave me the fuck alone.

For the record, I like pineapple on pizza.

Yes! Finally you get it!

Not once in my entire 40 years on this planet has a single ad or cold outreach been welcome. Every single one is full of lies and partial information that is vastly inferior to me going out and researching products that I want.

I don't care what you think I'll be interested in. I might be, but you're too biased for me to trust you to give me reliable information about the product. Leave me alone.

The arrogance of thinking targeted advertising knows more accurately what email I want to receive than I do is staggering.

No, buddy, I do actually know what email I want to receive.

There's a fundamental disconnect going on here.

You're talking about what humans believe are human rights. I'm talking about what human rights are.

The right to privacy is a human right, even if no government on the planet actually respects or formally recognizes it.

The right to privacy was always a human right, it's just that formal protections of that right have become more necessary as technology and society have advanced, resulting in more and more violations of that right. In 1791 the prohibition of unwarranted government search and/or seizure was close to adequate to protect the right to privacy, but with recording devices in our pockets, pervasive public surveillance, metadata tracking, and corporate involvement in surveillance, the 4th amendment no longer adequately protects the right to privacy.

This doesn't mean the right to privacy is new--the right to privacy has existed as long as humans have had a psychological need for privacy. It just means that new attacks on the right to privacy require new legal and technical protections against those attacks.

Quoting "It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin." as "I [..] help Russians criticize Putin" is one of the most bizarre responses I've ever received here. I think I'm pretty safe saying what I actually said given Russian intelligence is probably capable of reading English.

> Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?

I don't know your political beliefs, but I'll say that conservatives make this nonsense argument all the time.

Focus: the person you're responding to is talking about people going to jail for criticizing a leader or being gay or trans. These are violations of human rights. I can't speak for noir_lord, but for me, human rights are more important than any law, full stop. If human rights are being violated by the law, the law is wrong and it is our ethical imperative to do everything within our power to hinder the enforcement of that law (note that what is within our power may not be much).

So when you say, "Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?" my response is that if any country has laws that violate human rights, then it is our ethical obligation to ignore those laws. To be clear: I'll happily break the laws of my own country if those laws violate human rights. Human rights supersede laws in every case.

> I think comes down to what influence you think you have. I'm a backend developer and sys admin, when it comes to international law, I think of it in relation to hosting content in other countries or serving users in other countries. Judging the quality of laws on another country is beyond my scope, if it conflicts with my ethical constitution, I just don't provide service to that country, I don't provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local law because I find the law may contain bad parts.

Standing up for human rights isn't beyond your scope, nor is it beyond your influence. You can provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local laws, you just choose not to. And look, we all have limited resources--I'm not saying you're obligated to help with every human rights issue that you come across. But it seems like you're saying that nobody should help people break local laws, even when those laws are unethical. And frankly, that makes you unethical. It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin. If you're trying to get other people who want to protect human rights to stop doing that, you're de-facto supporting those human rights violations, whether you explicitly agree with them or not.

> What I'm not sure is whether you think of your influence on the subject as a sysadmin that actually wants to provide such services, or whether you think of it as some individual posturing, like a random citizen voicing their opinion on Israel v Palestina knowing full well you have no influence.

Disingenuous nonsense. Certainly a lot of what is done in the name of human rights is ineffective. But I'm not even seeing any indication you care about human rights. Why should someone who does care about human rights be taking strategic notes from you?

No, that's not "in fairness", that's misunderstanding the entire problem.

Having worked 20 years in this field and managed a few projects, no, I wouldn't make a dozen mistakes, because I would refuse to take on work I can't responsibly do.

Invasive and risky work IS the thing I want to be working on because it's the place where I can be most valuable, but part of my value comes from asking the right people the right questions. If I'm working on something invasive and risky, I'm going to work directly with the people who wrote it, and only when THEY think I understand it well enough am I venturing in alone.

Absent access to the people who wrote the code, I'm going to start by writing tests around the code and spend a lot of time checking my initial assumptions upon reading the code, because I know that I don't know what I don't know.

Yeah, if I did foolishly just started making changes, I'd make mistakes but that's missing the point: a good senior engineer knows not to do that.

That's the failure point of AI: it's arrogant. It will provide you statements without any idea if they're true and make changes without any idea if they're correct. It will never tell you "I don't know how to do that" or even "I am not sure if this is correct". It just does the work with infinite confidence even when that confidence is not justified and often it will be just as hard to figure out if the AI's work is correct as it would be to do the work yourself.

When the LLM presents what it learned as its own thoughts without any attribution, that's the theft.

And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense.

This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.

Donations.

I don't think these complex institutions can be viewed as having a uniform ideology.

Yes, any university understands that many (most?) of their students are simply there for a diploma that opens up opportunities, and the parts of an institution that view it as a business are going to want to maintain the value of that product.

But the faculty of a university isn't typically in it for the money--in most fields you can make more money in industry than in education. A lot of teachers just want their students to learn, whether their students want to learn or not. Faculty senates aren't powerless in steering an institution, and sometimes knowingly make unprofitable decisions--something a lot of HN can't imagine or understand. ;P

And a lot of students are there for that--in fact some of the most profitable students are. Do you think a Saudi prince need a diploma to open up opportunities? No--they're there because they, or someone in their family, values something else about the institution, be it knowledge, networking, etc.

> I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.

I'm not, that's why I said "Students are at school for a lot of [...] reasons".

> College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.

> For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.

Sure, but that's irrelevant:

1. A cheater is capable of not cheating when they're taking a proctored exam, but it doesn't make them honest--they'll just cheat later in life when given the opportunity.

2. People don't suddenly become cheaters when they're given the opportunity to cheat--the people who would cheat when an exam isn't proctored were going to cheat in other areas anyway.

Integrity and honesty are values, and it's pretty difficult to change people's values. I don't think either policy changes anyone's values. That's particularly true of integrity and honesty as those are how people behave when nobody's watching--if you watch and people know you're watching, everyone behaves honestly.

If you want to change people's values, I'd argue universities are pretty poorly-situated to do that. Philosophers are better at finding ethical ideologies that justify unethical behaviors than they are at getting anyone to give a shit about what behaviors they find ethical or unethical. Changing people's values is best achieved by a society that rewards values we uphold and gives us leaders that embody those values. What we have for leadership is pedophiles and grifters, and a lot of those came from our most prestigious educational institutions.

I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.

Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.

And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.

All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).