throwaway323929

None of these protesters are from Hermantown, they're useful idiots from Duluth losing their minds over crazy and factually wrong anti-datacenter posts on Reddit, fueled by Chinese agitprop campaigns designed to prevent the US AI industry from leading in the space. The idea that this is anything other than that is fan fiction. Hermantown city council did a brave thing and stood up to the non-resident psychos trying to mob rule their city law. They were literally getting doxxed by the protesters, if a crazy person goes to their houses and tries to kill them (this happened to the MN speaker of the house recently so don't tell me this is a crazy thought) they'll have blood on their hands.

If these pitchfork mobs get what they want, don't be surprised when you ask the future frontier LLMs about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and they refuse to answer you.

I like them and I think they're cool, but Norway is a country of 5.6 million people that discovered a massive oil deposit and has an enormous public fund per-capita because of it, so making it a referendum on how bad the United States is is pretty weird. Saudi Arabia has indoor ski resorts too, yes if we had that much oil per person I bet we could have some pretty sweet toilets.

I'm totally fine with the pit toilet design they came up with for the parks. I'm not there to take an instagram poop, I'm there to go hiking.

We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now to work on all the cool ideas I've always had but never had the time and money to finish. You used to have to go to VCs and raise millions to do things you can now do for cheap as a hobby.

I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been junk food and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.

If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.

Completely agree with you. It's stopped being a calm discussion of the pros, cons, neither, and implications of emerging technology, and started being "us vs them" football team fans shouting at each other, but it really feels like the anti AI people are the home team right now, and every other position is the away team.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I seem like the AI booster in these conversations but in reality I'm fairly middle of the road, and have plenty of concerns about the technology. But we can't even get to that discussion until we can move the overton window from "AI is bad, how can we ban it from HN", and "AI is cigarettes, it will kill half of its users".

The proverbial AI piss is in the pool, it's not going away, I don't know what to tell anybody that doesn't believe that or doesn't want that. It's time to start integrating this into your psyche as something that will be a part of the rest of our lives in a big way.

They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.

HN is a forum made by angel investors for entrepreneurs, startups and hackers. We like technology, we like Ruby and we like AI because it's useful for what we want to do, and we would like to continue talking about it like we've talked about every other emergent technology before it (including other "controversial" things like Bitcoin).

Instead of trying to torture HN into something it was never designed for, why not go to lobste.rs and unselect the AI button and you won't see AI? Or make your own version of HN that bans AI discussion? You can even be really ironic and use Claude Code to make the forum for you so you can do even less work on that then you do on posting about how much you hate AI here in a forum designed for and by people that understand it and want to discuss it. I ask, once again, why are you here?

They're absolutely doing this as a hedge against litigation, and given the trillion dollar lawsuits flying around, it's hard for me to blame them. Regulation by litigation rather than law creates ambiguous legal precedents that make it much harder to do business safely. That's why the most economically successful countries in the world tend to have the strongest rule of law.

The actual root cause of this is our culture moving away from the idea that individuals and families should be free to make these sorts of decisions, and instead believing that heavy-handed authoritarian governments should dictate those choices to us instead.

Why do you want to add friction to teens having a creativity tool that can help them learn and build things?

I don't know what kind of kid you were, but as a kid I would have loved access to my own 24/7 polymath, it would have been an incredibly positive thing in my life. I often think of how much more cool stuff I would have accomplished with that ability. It would have actually benefited my mental health issues a lot, which often rotated around the boredom of living an isolated life in the suburbs and my imagination being unable to keep up with my free time and abilities.

If you add friction to good things in addition to bad things, you're just increasing the likelihood that the bad things will be chosen more often. You're also increasing the chances that people will not trust you when you say the actually bad things are bad, because you lied to them about the other thing so maybe you're lying to them about all of it?

Are you being sardonic, or can you seriously not tell the difference in harm between smoking cigarettes and Claude?

I genuinely don't understand how you can survive in the world with a risk assessment system this damaged.

Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.

But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?

HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language and ecosystem for making web applications, and most of the companies at the time were web startups. It's a solid language, still one of the better ones for making real, practical web apps.

If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.

Why don't you try doing some work that's actually useful for someone else, instead of just endlessly, ceaselessly posting junk on a web site you don't even like? Are you surprised that nobody wants to pay you to do this? Provide something of value to others and you will be rewarded for that.

I'm sorry you don't live in an alternative universe where you can just post low value opinions on HN all day and get rewarded handsomely for that, but I don't think you should be surprised why you can't figure out how to make a successful life while you do it in the present one. And I don't feel like working more to subsidize you to do that via handouts, and almost nobody else does either. Good luck.

It's better than siting on a web site dedicated to technological development you don't like and complaining.

Why are you surprised you got laid off? Go do something with your life.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?

There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.

I fell off the OSS ideological wagon around the same time, and probably for the same reason.

When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.

Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.

That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.