It's easy to miss the value in something you don't do. I do fermi estimates in my head all the time and it would be exhausting to constantly pull out my phone to calculate things, to the point that I would stop attempting it as much as I do.
Nothing. American empire isn't yours to control - people can hate what America is doing without recommending any personal change to your involvement in it.
That's fair, but I'm open to change. In fact, coincidentally, my wife and I were talking about it tonight. We feel frustrated that we might not have done enough.
My guess is that people on HN make a lot of money. Finding effective places to donate it is useful. While this won't be able to directly influence international saber rattling, it can still help protect people from Trump's criminal presidency.
Donate to organizations that provide legal information and legal defense to people at risk of abuse by ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food for people who are frightened to leave their homes because of ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food to people who are threatened by SNAP funding changes. Donate to independent media organizations that are willing to aggressively criticize the Trump administration. If thinking internationally, donate to organizations that target problems that USAID was targeting before being gutted.
For political change we need two things: democrats to win in 2026 and 2028 and democrats to have the guts to dismantle the systems that enabled Trump and charge people involved for their crimes. Existing dem leadership is clearly not willing to do this. So we need involvement starting at the local level all the way up to replace dem leadership with people with guts. Find community groups involved in local elections.
If you live in a region where ICE is highly active, document. Making their crimes undeniable to as many people as possible is what will shift public opinion so much that a new government will be forced to act.
I listed things that are more likely to bubble up into changes to US foreign policy below. Trump is doing a ton of horrible things. I listed various options that tackle various outputs of his regime.
Those are good ideas, but none of them will actually address this problem. It's a combination of charity and the same partisan battle mentality that alienates many people. For instance:
> For political change we need two things: democrats to win in 2026 and 2028 and democrats to have the guts to dismantle the systems that enabled Trump and charge people involved for their crimes. Existing dem leadership is clearly not willing to do this. So we need involvement starting at the local level all the way up to replace dem leadership with people with guts. Find community groups involved in local elections.
That just reads like a Trump-like ideological power grab: "we need to make sure our opponents can never win again." But what does that do for people who aren't partisan Democrats? They want Trump to lock in his power, but they don't want Democrats to, either.
The first step is to acknowledge that voters dislike Democrats so much that not only did a guy like Trump have a chance of winning, but he won. Twice. The response needs to be for the Democrats to reform into a party with broad appeal across diverse regions. The first step to that is saying no to the technocrats, and taking some pages out of Trump's economic playbook (and Sanders's). The second steps is saying no to the activists, and stop alienating large fractions of the electorate by pushing too hard and too fast on a lot of issues.
>>>> The first step is to acknowledge that voters dislike Democrats so much that not only did a guy like Trump have a chance of winning, but he won. Twice.
I think this is too extreme. Trump lost the popular vote, twice, then won his second term by a slim margin. And this was after betting the entire farm on propaganda campaign of racism, misogyny, conspiracism, and pseudoscience, abetted by capture of social media.
I don't think driving the entire Republican Party out of existence is a realistic goal. For one thing, ours is a two party system, and if one party vanishes, another will form in its place. The parties rearranged themselves after the Civil War, and during the Civil Rights era, so I don't think "Republican vs Democrat" is a permanent institution.
See that right there. Oh Trump is not that popular, he barely won the second time.
Then why is he sitting in the White House running the country?
Your democratic institutions, your constitution, allowed him to win elections. Your group of Americans are incapable of enacting meaningful change that will prevent his brand of fascism from taking root in America.
> That just reads like a Trump-like ideological power grab: "we need to make sure our opponents can never win again." But what does that do for people who aren't partisan Democrats? They want Trump to lock in his power, but they don't want Democrats to, either.
No. The goal is to make sure that presidents who commit crimes or direct the executive branch to commit crimes are prevented from doing so or held responsible for doing so. For example, legislation that expands Section 1983 to include federal agents and legislation that limits the availability of qualified immunity would go a long way in mitigating lawless action by federal law enforcement.
> The first step to that is saying no to the technocrats, and taking some pages out of Trump's economic playbook (and Sanders's). The second steps is saying no to the activists, and stop alienating large fractions of the electorate by pushing too hard and too fast on a lot of issues.
These two things are opposites, in my mind. Things don't become less big or fast when they are focused on economic policy. Heck, even Biden's cancellation of student loan debt (something I consider to be on the technocratic side) was considered a Major Question by the supreme court to justify their reversal of the policy.
Not as I had in mind. By "social issues" I meant the non-economic stuff. That stuff has been key to pushing a lot of people to the Republican side.
> Things don't become less big or fast when they are focused on economic policy. Heck, even Biden's cancellation of student loan debt (something I consider to be on the technocratic side) was considered a Major Question by the supreme court to justify their reversal of the policy.
I think they should go big and fast on economic policy, especially on the kind of goals Trump campaigned on. For instance: tariff the heck out of China, figure out how to tax offshoring, plow the money made into re-industrialization, cultivate a trade-bloc of established high-income democracies.
But you know, Trump was for tariffs, so they had to be against them. All the sudden they sounded like the re-animated corpse of Milton Friedman.
The student loan debt thing was dumb because it came off as elitist, and it was to some extent. The Democrats need to listen to and serve people they don't like talking to anymore, instead of their staffers with student loan debt.
"Social issues" does not appear in the text of your comment.
I do not understand how one can do economic things that are substantially larger than cancelling student loan debt while also not "pushing too hard and too fast on a lot of issues."
That was my mistake. I wrote "issues" when I could have been more specific and said "social issues."
I don't think addressing economic issues can be very alienating, except when they signal messed up priorities that exclude you. I don't think student loan forgiveness would have been that controversial if it were a smaller part of a larger package that overall addressed higher priorities or a broader base of people (e.g. a bunch of tariffs and programs to re-industrialize).
The Inflation Reduction Act was a large piece of legislation that had huge programs for re-industrialization, which produced measurable improvements in employment in these sectors.
Zero GOP legislators voted for it. It was pilloried on right wing media constantly.
I do not believe that there is any large scale economically-focused legislation that the democrats could push that would not be controversial.
That's insane. I think about 80%+ of the projects I see attempted succeed in at least some limited fashion. Even the failures in retrospect produced some insight into the right way forward and were necessary as part of research.
But not in the causal chain. The building happened because someone was willing to pay for a fungible asset. An asset is only fungible if there are buyers.
> The building happened because someone was willing to pay for a fungible asset.
Building often happens because a developer believes someone will buy the homes they build. A lot of the time, they are right; some of the time they are wrong. Some developers will get buyers lined up first, to minimize the risks of being wrong; many do not. In the latter case, there's no inherent connection between the building and subsequent buyers.
On that note though, the other day I asked Opus to write a short story for me based on a prompt, and to typeset it and export it to multiple formats.
The short story overall was pretty so-so, but it had a couple of excellently poignant quotes within. I was more impressed that I was reading a decently typeset PDF. The agent was able to complete a complicated request end-to-end. This already has immense value.
Overall, the story was interesting enough that I read until the end. If I had a young child who had shown this to me for a school project, I would be extremely impressed with them.
I don't know how long we have before AI novels become as interesting/meaningful as human-written novels, but the day might be coming where you might not know the difference in a blind test.
i am in the process of finishing up a role doing annotations for these, for a company i cannot name (basically clicking lots of box hundreds of times a day)
So the endless hosepipe of repetitive , occasionally messed up, requests has probably not helped me endear myself to them.
Anecdotally having chatgpt do some of my CV was ok but i had to go through it and remove some exaggerations. The one thing i think these bots are good at is talking things up..
Yes, as it stands now, all frontier models are still downright corny. But a lot of elements of good storytelling are there: the story Opus generated used symmetry and circular storytelling, created tension and release, used metaphor appropriately and effectively... all of those things are there. But the actual execution was just corny.
But you should read the stuff I wrote when I was young. Downright terrible on all accounts. I think better training will eventually squeeze out the corniness and in our lifetimes, a language model will produce a piece that is fundamentally on par with a celebrated author.
Obviously, this means that patrons must engage in internal and external dialogue about the purpose of consuming art, and whether the purpose is connecting with other humans, or more generally, other forms of intelligence. I think it's great that we're having these conversations with others and ourselves, because ultimately it just leads to more meaningful art. We will see artist movements on both sides of the generative camps produce thought-provoking pieces which tackle the very concept of art itself.
In my case, when I see a piece of generative art or literature which impresses me, my internal experience is that I feel I am witnessing something produced by the collective experience of the human race. Language models only exist because of thousands of years of human effort to reach this point and produce the necessary quality and quantity of works required to train these models.
I also have been working with generative algorithms since grade school so I have a certain appreciation for the generative process itself, and the mathematical ideas behind modern generative models. This enhances my appreciation of the output.
Obviously, I get different feelings when encountering AI slop where in places where I used to encounter people. It's not all good. But it's not all bad, either, and we have to come to terms with the near future.
The cost of free users is much lower because they are served lite models, hit quota limits quickly, and can't soak up tokens by using agents. The main capacity usage is from agent loops, which is universally behind a paid tier.
Alternatively, we might have entered either a limited or a worst-case nuclear war scenario.
Russia may have just continually pushed the envelope until it became clear there wasn't a bright red line, and eventually someone would push the button.
> It's pretty clear you don't have a solid background in generative models, because this is fundamentally what they do: model an existing probability distribution and draw samples from that.
After post-training, this is definitively NOT what an LLM does.
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