Do you have any qualms about Chinese surveillance of the USA? Is it cool for them to gather info on you?

What is a qualm? It's their job to do it, and our job to stop them from doing it.

Under their moral framework, Israel has no moral obligation against bombing the shit out of Palestine.

And the sheer irony of Americans proclaiming Anthropic as morally superior because of it. Do they think America is the only country or something? I thought that was just a trope.

I suspect any 5 eyes countries can get any information they want on any citizen in any of the countries in that unholy agreement.

Does that apply to all moral obligations?

Does Iran have a moral obligation to not nuke the global population? What about Israel and Palestine?

Yeah this industry was cooked before AI and AI will just accelerate the decay. There will still be a place for programmers who care about their craft and want to build quality systems, but the average software engineer reinventing the wheel on some product that brings little value to people (90%+ of software btw) is probably going to find themselves replaced.

> The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure.

> Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has spread beyond its academic origins, and is now affecting every aspect of human existence. In just one generation, it has expanded from worthless theories of mind and society (behaviour- ism, structuralism, universal grammar, etc.) to worthless concepts in the field of programming (structured programming, object-oriented pro- gramming, the relational database model, etc.) to worthless software-related activities that we all have to perform.

> What is worse, our mechanistic beliefs have permitted powerful software elites to arise. While appearing to help us enjoy the benefits of software, the elites are in fact preventing us from creating and using software effectively. By invoking mechanistic software principles, they are fostering ignorance in software-related matters and inducing dependence on their systems.

> Increasingly, in one occupation after another, all we need to know is how to operate some software systems that are based on mechanistic principles. But our minds are capable of non- mechanistic knowledge. So, when the elites force us to depend on their software, they exploit us in two ways: by preventing us from creating better, non-mechanistic software; and by preventing us from using the superior, non-mechanistic capabilities of our minds.

> The ultimate consequence of our mechanistic culture, then, is the degradation of minds. If we restrict ourselves to mechanistic performance, our non-mechanistic capabilities remain un- developed. The world is becoming more and more complex, yet we see only its simple, mechanistic aspects. So we cope perhaps with the mechanistic problems, but the complex, non-mechanistic ones remain unsolved, and may eventually destroy us.

Wow, I'm immediately hooked. The book is free online as well to download.

I wish he went on a podcast

I'm not so sure I buy that. AI written text is fairly obvious to good writers with exposure to LLM output. Is it a case where it's sort of an average of writing styles, but that average is not human and thus humans can detect it?

AI writing you can recognize as AI writing is obvious. Newer models are better about this and the line will only get more blurry. Here's a benchmark where good writers make the assessment rather than different LLMs ranking each other: https://surgehq.ai/leaderboards/hemingway-bench

The top models are also the latest:

Gemini 3.1 Pro: still a bit of a gremlin, but will probably stay on top until the other model makers go xkcd 810 and target this benchmark

Gemini 3 Flash: current favorite of writers using it as a helper for its speed and decent prompt following

Yeah I think it's more about effort than anything - if the user puts in effort to make the writing indistinguishable from human writing, I'm not so sure it's really a bad thing. Low effort slop is detectable however, and that's a good sign to just not continue reading it.

Yeah this place has been depressing lately. The hope is that AI could be used to automate the parts of our lives that bring us no joy or growth and help us become fully actualised human beings, but instead it seems like it's just used as a tool to boost profits while making the world a worse place.

It's the denigration of any and all intellectual pursuits that gets me. It's the myopic lead the blind, in a race to empty their brain fastest before the singularity can rupture them into the mainframe heaven.

Their irl counterparts at the university make me think it must be envy, the same as with AI art: they were never good programmers but have always envied the their prestige; and using this new wonderful machine, they can now live out their fantasy at the expense of others. For others it's just nihilism: why not cheat through your entire higher ed if it's now entirely possible?

But many AI-boosters here on HN were once respected programmers, so what else can it be? Fatigue setting in with age, exacerbated by too many levels of indirection in modern software, AI becoming a crutch to avoid noticing you're slowing down?

Or it’s just a useful tool that lets me build more stuff and focus on what I’m more interested in, and can use it to learn.

AI becomes problematic when its exceeds the role of a tool.

It can be a useful tool to do all that, that's what I use it for. Unfortunately a lot of AI boosters have the sfba move fast and break things mentality and that leads to all sorts of slop being pushed.

I think broadly speaking, we need less software that's higher quality. Commercially at least, LLM's seem to be creating more lower quality software. Less software but much higher quality, and then let the gaps be filled in by houseplant programming. Instead we get half-baked vibe coded Cloudflare-isk slop being promoted, or CEO's of saas-slop providers salivating at the chance to fire half of their workforce.

I want to see more houseplants being posted here, LLM generated or not. At least they would tend to have more care and love put into them.

As someone said, "Machines were supposed to rid us of tedious work. Instead they write poetry and create art, and we fill captchas to prove to them that we are human"

I prefer a quote from Dune - "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Yeah, something like "I want AI to do my laundry and clean my house so I have more time to write and create art. Instead the AI writes and generates art so I have more time to clean my house and do laundry."

How do you know it's secure?

I voted for the middle option because to tell you the truth, I dont think it's possible for anybody to predict where the next 5 years will go. For those who do, polymarket et al exists!