komali2

I'm genuinely curious what your understanding of American culture is such that you find it surprising that Americans wouldn't tolerate government intervention in how they name their kids.

Especially because you could just buy your name as a domain, then put all your projects as subdomains off it. I have like, a billion projects off my co-op's subdomain, which costs us, idk, a hundred bucks a year?

I agree with you on UX. In terms of contributing to these projects, most maintainers are still opposed to LLM contributions, perhaps not for bad reasons considering they're interested in the long term maintainability not only of the software, but of a community of contributors knowledgeable enough to maintain it.

Regarding Photocraft, I've been following it with interest. My impression is that it comes off initially as an incredible accomplishment, 1:1 with Photoshop, however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGShygDux9o

This is my general impression as well with overall excitement around LLM assisted reverse engineering: very easy to get something that looks like a slam dunk, until you actually try to use it. Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.

> but that the downside isn't worth it.

This is also my argument against militarization and armed revolution as a strategy of establishing anarchist or communist society. The downsides are illustrated and argued against in "The Anarchist Cookbook," a rewrite of the original by Keith McHenry. So, I'm interested in what you think the downsides may be here, since I'm not immediately able to think of any - at least not any caused by me as an individual activist.

It does seem that AI was used effectively recently in the defeat of Bolsanaro's son in Brazil, which I use as evidence for. I'm at this moment looking more into that when I really should be working, heh. Thanks to user solyin, sibling to you.

I've been threading the needle between my AI loving techbro indiehacker friends and my AI hating artist and FOSS geek lefty friends for the last year now and the dogmatism has been interesting. The extreme of it for AI lovers I don't really get in my friend group since I think it manifests mostly in AI psychosis meltdowns by tech CEOs like with the Proton Mail guy, or religious worship by the anyone with one degree of separation or less from anyone on the the AI doom cult temple sex priestess gang bang Sankey diagram.

For the AI haters the dogmatism turns AI usage basically into a moral contagion. I saw similar with the cancellation of Framework: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/moral-contagion/#where-i-pus...

To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.

I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!

Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.

Hah, glad I wasn't the only one that had this idea. Been chewing on it ever since malus.sh or whatever that joke clean room reimplementation of FOSS software project was.

I noticed that others are taking a shot at the big boys like Photoshop, but I don't think that makes sense since 1. Jesus Christ imagine trying to rewrite Photoshop, with or without Astra and reverse engineering, let's be real! And 2. GIMP already exists and people don't use it for various reasons an ultra nerd that doesn't have osx or windows on any device in his house (me) could understand. Instead I'm looking for small niche markets that are locked in by the software equivalent of a petty village despot. Decent examples so far include quilting software and funeral home SASS. I'm also looking for anyone stuck on old dead software with no migration path because of no export functionality or nothing supporting whatever given file format anymore. Apparently QuickBooks desktop falls into this category, but the space feels full enough, with e.g. GnuCash, that I don't think I would be much help there.

https://genairosity.com/

Investigations so far: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity/issues

Basically leveraging subsidized tokens to liberate proprietary software. A bit of a petulant table flip maybe, but it kinda feels like the only thing left to us. Either we can kill ourselves scrambling around doing 996 for startups to try to avoid being a permanent underclass... Or we can light it all on fire.

Also inspired by open weight models tanking possible profit margins on frontier LLMs. One form of anti capitalist activism could be to just make it impossible to monetize something. The Manfred Macx form of activism.

Many other people in this thread with similar projects seem to be following the same workflow:

1. LLM agents sent out to find locked in proprietary software without a FOSS alternative

2. Targets selected by a human for deeper research on feasibility and alternatives

3. Clean room plan established

4. Human uses the software and takes notes

5. Feed notes into a token subsidized frontier model for orchestration. Architecture and plan written, beginning normal agentic development flow.

I'm slowed down significantly by step 4. Perhaps I will look into contributing my efforts to a larger project such as the one linked instead.

> And, I don't think this is what Moxie wanted.

Moxie as far as I know is still involved in the project and is the source of decisions such as requiring a phone number. My understanding is he is leaning hard on "encryption for anyone and everyone" over all other considerations such as decentralization.

A common criticism is "huh, not very anarchist of him!" Which, maybe? If decisions like that can get Signal into as many hands as possible, and if Signal can continue to operate in such a way as to have basically nothing to offer governments that demand data other than account join date, I think that's an improvement in material conditions.

Your bio has a pretty frank indication of the maximally decentralized, encrypted alternative, and how user hostile that still is:

> If you want to DM, I am generally open to chat. Generate a https://SimpleX.chat invite and paste it into a file simplex-invite.txt, then run the commands below and include pasted contents of DM.txt in one of your comments in any thread we're both participating in.

In what way will your life change if you never access twitter again?

> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.

> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.

Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!

I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.

I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...

To clarify, your position is that everyone that works a tipped job is stupid. Correct?

So boy howdy, you must be a super smart guy! Smarter than all those dumbies. I bet you've leveraged your intelligence to accomplish incredible things.

> I feel like people posting on here have drastically lowered in quality. Am I speaking with bots?

It is trivially easy to determine I'm a real person by clicking my username and following through to my site. Within two clicks you can find a video of me talking. But since we're in the business of blame game here, why do you choose to interact with a website where you're not even sure it's humans you're talking to?

> You realize you're posting on a hyper capitalist website right? Even by socialist or communist standards, it shouldn't be up to the individual to choose to pay more for an arbitrary reason. That's not how any economic system out there works.

Your interaction with society isn't just through paying for things. You seem to enjoy a situation where things are cheap because the labor cost is subsidized via financial tricks like tip culture, and you can swim through the culturally established cracks by not tipping, basically the definition of antisocial behavior.

If you wanted to protest tip culture and low wages, you could, for example, protest. Or stop giving money to companies that do this. For some reason you've decided to blame humans for trying to make a living in this broken system rather than blame companies, who have far more bargaining power, for engaging in exploitative behavior.

Your purchase of the cheaper, tip culture goods over the more expensive non tip culture goods is a price signal rewarding the less ethical company. That's the incentive I meant. It doesn't make any sense for blaming people trying to make ends meet. I don't quite understand why people think their Uber drivers and waiters and whatnot super duper love these tip based jobs, there's a million reasons they are essentially forced to take whatever work they can get. Do you really believe working class people have the bargaining power or job opportunities to walk away from the minimum wage tipped job? You are here which means you have access to the internet which means you must know that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - that means they can't miss a single paycheck without catastrophic consequences. So no time to quit and find a new job.

YC may pay for the webservers but there's plenty of commies on here :) for some reason they haven't banned us yet.

Nobody actually likes tipping btw, the question isn't whether it's good, but rather whether we should as individuals punish individual workers for our own failure to not raise minimum wage or ban tipping.

Regarding the restaurant industry, I used to run a restaurant, and my conclusion is that the economy is fake.

There is no profitable way to run a restaurant legally. Somewhere in the supply chain, if not in the restaurant then in the delivery truck or farm, there are undocumented laborers being underpaid and working in unsafe conditions. If we actually applied the typical worker protections we've come to expect for other blue collar jobs, with the expected wages, the already razor thin margins of the restaurant industry would completely collapse. The only thing left would be vertically integrated oligopolies like McDonald's.

Every meal out, somebody, somewhere, is subsidizing your meal to make it affordable enough for you to buy it. Adding the 28-32% margin that Uber eats charges is just increasing that pressure to the breaking point. It all barely survives through psychological tricks that make it seem cheaper than it is like hiding the tip or tax until after you actually get the full bill.

I think the only way the restaurant industry could function fully legally is if the government was the only landlord. There's just not enough margin to include the margins a landlord expects, and landlords pathologically increase rent to be just below causing a restaurant to collapse, or simply cycle through restaurant after restaurant, not caring about months of lost rent revenue because the high rent cost increases the value of the property.

You're also welcome to buy from a company that doesn't offload the fair labor price onto the customer, but instead, you actively incentivize these companies to continue the practice, and punish the worker meanwhile by not tipping. You take advantage of the subsidized lower cost that's normally borne by tipping, actively profiting off this broken system.

Why do you hold humans to a higher standard than corporations?

Why does your personal activism stop after the point that harms fellow humans but not before the step of rewarding an exploitative corporation that subsidizes its labor cost with tips and your tax dollars through welfare to its laborers?

This seems to be you choosing to live in an idealized form of your future vs the actual reality of today. My question is, if you're choosing idealized anyway, why stop at a mundane ideal where anyone has to work for minimum wage at all? Unless you've baked the lower class labor category into your ideal future?

You not tipping doesn't improve anyone's material conditions. You choosing to give money to the exploitative companies does affect material conditions, negatively! To me it sounds like you're trying to doordash your cake, eat it, have it, not pay for it, and get paid for eating it, all at once!

Customers don't necessarily drive to restaurants, they walk, bike, or take public transit. Most frequently they walk to whatever is nearby when they're hungry, in most functional cities.

I just had some American friends visit me in Taipei and now that they're back in the States they're telling me that if they want food they have to drive 20 minutes, so I understand the situation is different for most Americans, but the suggestion then seems to be the obvious ones: the USA should modernize its urban infrastructure.

Having nicer products or the overall state of technology being greater now than before doesn't mean people are automatically overall better off. Yes we can cure more cancers now. Yes we have less lynchings now, by the public or police. But people are, objectively, less financially secure. Cost of home ownership being 5x median income now vs 3.2x in the 90s, trending higher decade on decade, is a decent enough single number to point to. The long and short of it is that these benefits are being concentrated, as anything regarding wealth inevitably is, in the hands of a few.

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/fil...

This still doesn't make sense to me because people will often stay in the same place that they may not like that much specifically because the landlord hasn't raised rent that much, even if they can afford to move. They can't justify it. Or California landowners that don't sell because of whatever that rule they have is that figures property tax against original price or whatever.

It doesn't seem liquid enough to justify an increase in cost of rent the instant minimum wage goes up or UBI is implemented. My point is that a lot of these "markets" are really just price controllers setting price as they please, and landlords particularly feeling like they're special and get to lay claim to some arbitrary percentage of people's income. Which, for structural reasons, they can do.

Mostly seeing charts like this where people track posting activity of certain accounts

https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mxmourr...

What's a government if not a bunch of organized activists?

This is being documented across the internet. Pro AfD posting plummeted and pro Trump posting plummeted.

It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.

Why? People want to spend their money renting a second apartment? Makes no sense.

The Dutch government could protect its sovereign interests apart from the USA - for example by legalizing decompilation and antagonistic interrop with American software, or reverse engineering of American hardware, or suspension of copyright and trademark protections for American businesses. Dutch Mickey mouse cartoons for everyone!

There'd be short term economic repercussions when America throws a tantrum, but whose fault is it that this could significantly harm the Dutch economy? Better to rip off the band-aid.

> Psychologically they'll believe they earned that 20% raise through hard work.

Well, it's not just that. They've been telling us for decades that wages are alternatively a direct reflection of the value of our labor to the company, or, a price set by the market, depending on which is cheaper for the corporations.

Kind of like when people say that UBI would simply instantly raise the price of all rent to match. Oh, really? The supply of rentable units will suddenly have decreased? The demand will suddenly have gone up? No? Odd that the "market set price" responded then.

More like the people with power all serve the mechanism of power: Capital.

> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell

I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.

What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.

Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"

There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.

I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.

When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.

Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.

It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."

I'm a bit confused by the percentages. 6 billion people aka 75% of the population? What are we talking about, as if we expect 8 billion people to use or care about LLMs? A quarter of the world is under 15, what percentage is about 75? What percentage, for various reasons, has no reason to care about LLMs? What percentage is more concerned about the amount of calories in their next meal before everything else?

It just seems weird for Karpathy to throw around these numbers calculating percentage against the entire global population.

I mean, you know the answer, surely? In the USA, the more money you have, the more power.

It's what leads to a sort of cheat code that the Bay Area investment scene has discovered - if you burn capital quickly enough to grow your revenue fast enough (even hamstringing profit to do so), and in doing so generate more investment interest and more capital attention, you eventually become Too Big To Fail, like Uber did, or the AI companies are doing now.

> want to share and make things better for all

Heh but, isn't this an ideology? Including the non-proselytizing aspect of it?

I completely agree with you on the fake number strings.

It's morally expected, not required. And because that's the spirit of FOSS. It's just considered bad form to extract, profit, and not give back.

I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.