orleyhuxwell

Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media.

Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.

So called 'IP BOX', but it's very rare, as most people consider it risky and it requires a lot of paperwork. It's also frowned upon a lot.

This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.

The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.

Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).

'Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century.' - wikipedia

We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real.

At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her.

And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense.

Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.

Thanks for sharing that! I actually know very little of Pilecki, because I was mostly hearing about him from far-right teachers & I have an allergy to personality cults.

Ironically I've spend a lot of time reading about Gandhi .

But I will read more on him, and also about the 3 revolutionaries you mentioned.

> I hope that you are proud of your heritage/nation.

We're in this weird limbo in Poland, all the patriotic stuff has been hijacked by the virtue signaling (far)right and the centrists and left didn't bother to fight for it (even though all the remaining veterans of Warsaw Uprising were protesting the takeover).

I am proud, but it takes an actual effort to remind myself, that a real thing exists below the surface layer of daily politics...

Yes it was my mistake, exactly the case you've described.

I'm Polish and I was positivity shocked that we oppose it. I remember attending some protests against ACTA which as far as I remember was supposed to be something similar, back in my student days. It was -17°C and people still showed up. Apparently we have some culture of opposing censorship and invigilation by state. May come in handy if the democratic decline keeps progressing...

I'm confused after reading this thread; the Xen levels are long in original HF, or in Black Mesa?

> Unfortunately, by the end of the earth levels and certainly on Xen, the levels switch over to original designs

By original designs, do you mean HF1 version, or pre-HF1 designs that didn't get implemented in HF1?

Yeah, but to me it's like arguing 'smoking can be more beneficial than harmful to your help, because you take a break and meet new people and loneliness is bad; you should just be disciplined to never smoke more than 2 cigarettes a day and another hard limit is 6 a week'.

Yes, that VERY RARELY would work, but for most (and I mean 98% not 51%) people it doesn't. It's non symmetrical.

> bit sides can make slop, which is true but irrelevant

Idk, to me avoiding slop seems like the most ethical thing a professional can do these days.

For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better. That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff.

So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'.

*Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep.

Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.

Sorry, but I don't think so.

I think without AI the effort of producing slop code or art that sort of looks like a real thing on the first glance is let's say 5% of the effort needed for the real thing that actually works flawlessly. LLMs and diffusion models bring it down to 0.5%.

They are also really good at faking comprehension and make recognizing real experise from phoney cosplayers harder for busy managers, officials, execs, politicians etc.

So while AI CAN be used for useful things, it very rarely is and it requires more discipline than most people are willing to invest.

Also, the way AI is trained on stolen and random low quality content is deeply disturbing.

So yeah, while I'd like anti-AI rants to be more precise and nuanced, in general AI in 2026 is mostly a missuse of a technology with great potential.

I am not tired by this anti-AI stuff. As a person who uses it in very limited capacity, also as an ML/computer vision developer and researcher with 10 years of commercial experience with it, I want much more anti AI stuff.

Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.

Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more. It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.

So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. The counterarguments don't address what AstroBen noted.: newbies get high gains from any kind of stimulus. The paper has simply confirmed the common knowledge teached in universities.

The problem is, after you are no longer a newbie you may train for years with very little progress, and that's when you need to start differenting stimulus, being strategic about it - otherwise you may stay stuck.

And unfortunately the paper doesn't address or refute that, while it's coverage (or even the title of this hackernews) may suggest otherwise.