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He randomly let me interview him for a doc 10 or so years ago as a young filmmaker. Super nice guy. Just let me stroll into his office and chat on camera for an hour as a nobody, all because I wanted to talk about net neutrality and other issues

A true man-of-the-people, a rare find in a world of "statesmen" and "robber barons" running everything.

I hope that Oregon can continue to elect people like him when he's gone. We really are a more free state than the rest of them (see our state constitution protecting rights to profanity up to allowing being topless in public legally, as just one tiny example)


I’ve volunteered with them before and it was great. Really felt like I was rolling up my sleeves and doing something (I went out and did interviews with small business owners about net neutrality years ago).

> It's probably different if you have a family

It truly is. I can’t emphasize this enough.


If you can’t distinguish between fake images and real ones why should you care?

That depends on the purpose of the image.

If it's used to create a false narrative (like a deep fake), sure, you should care. But if it's used as an alternative to a stock photo, or as an easy way to make an infographic then no, I don't think you should care.


> you should care

Why should I care? The world is full of false narratives.

How can I have the bandwidth to care about everything all of the time?

I swear that more than half of the complaining that I find here comes from priveledged people bike shedding over inane topics, and who have never had to really worry about serious survival-level (how am I going to eat today?) issues in their lives.


And when an LLM starts hallucinating, and I emphasize “when,” is that not the same issue as creating a false narrative?

> Or are you new to how phones work?

Ease off the gas


Corporate KPI-chasing culture ruins everything. “Publish or perish” has hit such an extreme level.

I imagine most academics would gladly not participate in this game if their entire livelihood didn’t depend on it


Every serious academic knows it is complete crap, the problem is finding a better metric. Although the crappyness competes with "no metric at all" and I think the latter would be superior.

The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.


Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.

The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.


You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.

I think an awful lot of people would rather receive their livelihood without being subject to measurement.

I didn’t say no measurements at all. I was very specific with my language

And they continue to act like opposition just wants a wild west/don't care about kids, which is the oldest trick in the book. We just don't want "protect the kids" leveraged to tear up our rights.

It's addressing a real problem in a bad way.


I mean, it's more than that. I _want_ to protect kids' right to be part of the human connectome. The "protect the kids" (by disallowing them their freedom of thought on the internet) is just naked ageism.

So do you want 5 year olds driving on the highway and 8 year olds doing shots of tequila or are you ageist?

Or perhaps protecting kids isn’t really ageism at all.


Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I did. Restricting children’s access to certain things is not ageism.

We can argue the merits of restricting children’s access to the internet, or certain books, or alcohol, or pornography, or whatever else. We can debate the merits of those various restrictions based on the benefits and costs to both the children and society at large.

But it is not ageism to attempt to protect children. It is not ageism even of the restriction is a bad idea. To claim it is ageism is an emotional appeal (“ageism bad!”), not a logical one.


You jumped to children behind the wheel of vehicles and doing tequila shots. There is no way that was a serious effort at good faith discourse.

I used a rhetorical device to demonstrate why restricting children’s activities is not simply ageism.

I don’t know how you can seriously come here and accuse me of engaging in bad faith when I’ve taken the time to make my viewpoint explicit multiple times in this thread now, including directly to you.


Hyperbole is a rhetorical device, if that’s what you mean.

Just because I had a hard time following your logic doesn’t mean I didn’t engage in good faith. You also seem to be arguing in a heated way with every person who responds to you.

Either way it’s probably best if we both move on


I did not accuse you of not engaging in good faith. You accused me of that.

I don’t think I responded to anyone in a heated manner, though I will readily admit to being annoyed when you accused me of bad faith.

Agree we should move on.


It depends on what you're restricting and why. Restricting access to things based on age can absolutely be ageism if the thing does not need to be restricted.

I don’t think it’s ever “ageism” in the normal sense to restrict children’s activities for their safety. But even if that’s the right term in some cases, it hinges on “if the thing does not need to be restricted”.

The burden is still to demonstrate that a restriction is wrong. If that can’t be demonstrated, then labeling it ageism is a purely emotional appeal.


If the 5-year-old has passed a proper driving test, why not?

It depends on what you're depriving them of too. Those are very extreme examples with little to no upside.

Disagree. We can discuss what restrictions are appropriate or reasonable without calling it ageism.

Calling it ageism is an emotional appeal, not a principled stance.


Ageism is a legally defined form of discrimination as well as the subject of ethical discussions. It's a real, defined thing. Just because we disagree on what qualifies as ageism doesn't mean you get to call foul and say it's irrational/emotional.

This is literally a “think of the children[‘s freedom]” appeal. You’re not arguing for or against the restriction on its merits.

In the US at least there’s also no such thing legally as age discrimination against minors so far as I’m aware.

Edit:

Let me frame this differently. “Ageism” is basically by definition bad, so applying the term “ageism” to a restriction is a an attempt to label the restriction bad without establishing that on its own merits.

If you try to provide a consistent definition of “ageism” that applies to restricting access to the internet but not restricting access to alcohol, you will most certainly have to resort to phrases like “reasonable restrictions” (if not, I’m very interested in your definition), which means that there’s still a need to establish what is reasonable. Applying the label “ageism” without establishing reasonableness is then a circular argument.


You’ve lost me.

You* are using “ageism” as a synonym for “bad”. You are also labeling restrictions as “ageism” without establishing that they are actually bad.

In effect you are saying “that’s bad!” without accepting the burden of establishing why it’s bad, but hiding this behind a different term that carries more emotional weight. It’s a very politically effective strategy but it’s not logically sound.

* actually jMyles


Quit arguing as though the topic is binary. It's not.

I’m not saying anything is binary. I’m saying it’s not ageism to restrict child access. It could be a bad idea but that doesn’t make it ageism.

Fair point

That's not what they said.

I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.

Which illustrates another problem: unscrupulous actors with big names can spread whatever information they want to millions of people with minimal effort.

Exactly. I chose to abuse my platform to promote Teresa T as the name of a whale.

Oh god I just realized the implication! I was not directing that at you haha

No I really did abuse my reach for this one! I figured it would be a relatively harmless demo of how easy it is to affect LLM answers if you have a decently trafficked website.

You could have named the whale "Whalie McWhaleFace" so thank you for not doing that at least.

Totally agree. I’ve definitely played the same game before, albeit with far less reach

Ever since the invention of the printing press, every new communication technology has reduced the effort needed to widely disseminate information-- and misinformation! So you could say this is nothing new. On the other hand, this is remarkably little effort.

Yes, they can. We can be glad that respectable newspapers and TV news channels have never done it and never will. You can even trust than the headlines are accurate summaries of the content of the articles. /s

The existence of a problem in one area doesn't mean that it's not also a problem for it to spread somewhere else

I started writing a response and realized I basically wrote the exact same thing the other day

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921829


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