jameslk

The comments in the HN post you linked do a very good job of explaining why HN is working as expected when political posts get flagged

Quoting tptacek from your link: “Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.”

HN guidelines make it clear: “Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”

It may be that there are politics in everything, but that doesn’t mean we need to discuss those politics here. Especially because those politics usually drown out the curiosity. Curiosity is what makes HN interesting for so many

So wait… are you supporting Meta’s censorship here or not? Another weird comment

It just seems like these comments want to stir the pot

Kind of a weird comment to make. Are you admitting they were right, or are you supporting the right for platforms to censor?

Or are you trying to elicit emotions?

Instead of enacting laws to regulate all of AI, perhaps the government can just pass laws scoped directly to OpenAI and Anthropic. After all, they’re the ones asking for regulations and they’re the problem actors right now. These “rogue agents” would stop pretty quickly

It's Dropbox vs rsync. The agent providers are making it stupidly easy to use something like OpenClaw/Hermes with zero set up and a very low learning curve. Also, in their technotopia, you don't use your computer to host the agent, you use theirs. When you need to drive, they give you screen sharing access, but its still on their servers. The benefit to the user is they don't have to make an upfront expensive payment for computer hardware anymore, and the agent provider gets to own all of your compute and data in their cloud

Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud

Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services

For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many

In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane

For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware

A rando on the internet that put together a table of presidents and numbers has no bearing on facts, it falsifies nothing

Presidents cannot pass fiscal policy. They can only sign or veto new fiscal policies or act on existing policies passed by congress that give them fiscal latitude

I’ve explained this many times in this thread. We’ve reached the heat death of useful discussion so this will be my final comment in this thread

Higher inflation rates started before any of those, but those things didn’t help

Congress is the one that largely makes the fiscal policy choices. For example, during Clinton’s second term when the deficit was almost eliminated (some claim there was a surplus, but there wasn’t because of social security liabilities), you had a republican controlled congress who were pushing for cuts and fiscal tightening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

> The (vast?) majority of the debt happened as the result of the Republican party both increasing spending and cutting taxes every time it lands someone in the White House and before midterms flip the House back to Democrats.

Both parties have run an increasing deficit, with the only outlier being a small amount of time in the late 90s. The deficit is largely caused by social security outlays, medicare/medicaid outlays, and military spending, none of which are going to meaningfully change under either party

Joe Biden didn’t cause a spike in inflation, congress did. And the policies that caused it wasn’t under Joe Biden’s term

Also, inflation wasn’t temporary

High inflation and large debt preceded the tariffs. That said, the tariffs didn’t help either. That’s why I said largely

Ultimately the president is enabled or constrained by laws enacted by congress

Neither party has realistic plans to reduce the debt. It’s been that way for decades. Kicking the can down the road gets more votes

The high inflation since Covid and $40 trillion in debt didn’t happen under one party

Both parties are responsible for the inflation and debt. Fiscal policy is largely driven by congress, not the president

> This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.

It’s the premise of the thought experiment: to be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve a competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment

I suppose you can claim that a profit can still be generated by offering a holistically worse service/product with no single advantage than a competitor because markets are not efficient, though this may be short lived

At what point does a company become a company if one person doesn’t make a company? What’s the threshold for non-labor where a company becomes a company?

Yes I would think that would be the endgame goal. But in practice, I’m very skeptical a purely AI-driven executor can stay competitive when the market and government supporting it and surrounding it is driven by humans

In a 1-person company, who or what generates a profit?

I get it’s a joke, and often a frequent cynical joke made here, but I actually think it’s a good thought experiment. Almost like a new Turing test

The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test

Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else

My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer

> Since it's a democracy, if it was an issue people cared about, they would have voted in someone in local/state/national level who would oppose surveillance, no?

The US is a representative democracy, which means US citizens can't vote directly on laws (most of the time--e.g. CA has a system that allows some direct democracy). Those elected decide, and usually those elected aren't elected because of their views on surveillance but rather something else (e.g. jobs). For example, there's been places where citizens have majority wanted Flock cameras removed, but the local government doesn't do anything about it. Similarly, most US citizens don't believe elected officials should be allowed to trade stock, but elected officials have never enacted that into law.

There's a constant force for the state to become more powerful and authoritarian. I think it's the natural state of things. Why wouldn't a politician want more power? Fewer in power would argue against that.

At least in the US, this was foreseen at its founding, so the original constitution was designed to water down the federal government's ability to lord over everyone's lives (e.g. the bill of rights). But those in power are constantly seeking to undermine it. And that's where we're at today. Constantly trying to uphold our rights against a state that naturally gravitates towards more power.