It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".
Not in this instance. People don't stop being people when they join an organization. If we can recognize that getting ignored, suppressed, or met with hostility "discourages people from posting", why can't we recognize that it can also discourage organizations from posting?
You don’t think people have different goals than organizations?
Do you think the goal of EFF posting on HN is the same as some random user posting on HN?
Of course not. So it’s not surprising they have different actions under similar circumstances. Nor is having different actions indicative of differing morals.
You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.
Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.
Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.
I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.
I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.
EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.
There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.
Just noting that I saw this, but I don't really see a point in replying outside of this comment at this time because I don't feel the need to prove myself to you, and I don't know how I could change what I'm writing to satisfy you personally anyways.
> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.
I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!
But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.
I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.
I wonder why this post is worthy of staying on the HN front page but all the articles about Trump's threats that "A whole civilization will die tonight" got flag killed. I guess the president making genocidal threats isn't "interesting" enough to meet HN's moderation standards.
We all know he’d say something like that and that there’s a chance he’d actually do it. It isn’t really newsworthy. This isn’t the set of minds that needs to change to affect change in the short term anyway.
It's a problem that our society is designed for and judged in relation to capital. Most people are paid in dollars, not shares of the S&P 500. 38% of the population doesn't even own any stocks[1]. We can't act like the dropping dollar value is fine simply because stock investments are outpacing those losses. Maybe that tradeoff benefits the people reading this, but it hurts a huge number of Americans.
And by "real wages" you mean "Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over". You chose a number that specifically factored out the negatives like dropping participation rate[1] and underemployment (couldn't find the isolated number for underemployment in 30 seconds of googling, so here's one that's tempered by including unemployment too)[2]. It also glosses over the heart of the problem by using median. If 38% of the population suddenly had their wages drop to $0, it wouldn't show up when looking at the median values.
I also don't see why you're citing the nominal federal minimum wage. The nominal value is totally irrelevant to the conversation. $1 is still nominally $1, but according to the link it is also now $0.51 in purchasing power.
> by "real wages" you mean "Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over"
Yes.
> You chose a number that specifically factored out the negatives like dropping participation rate[1] and underemployment
I chose a consistent dataset. One of many. (Dropping participation rate is affected by stuff like demographics in addition to underemployment.)
If you have a credible source that shows declining real wages since 2000, I'd love to see it.
> don't see why you're citing the nominal federal minimum wage. The nominal value is totally irrelevant to the conversation. $1 is still nominally $1, but according to the link it is also now $0.51 in purchasing power
If $1 is 51¢ today, then $1.40 is 71¢ today. Rising nominal wages is how real wage gains are generated.
>If you have a credible source that shows declining real wages since 2000, I'd love to see it.
My original comment was about growing inequality and my second comment was describing why the metric you cited and median real wages in general don't address that issue. So no, I will not be looking for a better real wages metric, because it is not the appropriate measure to capture inequality. You can find plenty of numbers and charts on that problem here[1].
This is legitimately one of the strangest responses I have ever gotten on HN. You brought real wages into the conversation. My complaints weren't a non sequitur, they were a direct response to you. Now you're criticizing me for engaging with what you said? I guess I should have refused to engage from the start, but you know the proverb about the second best time to plant a tree, so I'm done with this conversation.
I guess I didn't see the inequality focus in your first comment. At least, not beyond the qualitative assets as cash and sundries vs assets as financial assets. I pointed out that real wages are up in response to your claim about people being paid dollars. (The dollars we're paid are worth more. They're individually less. But the total take home is more. Hence real wage.) I think it's a non sequitur to then turn around and say well I was actually arguing about inequality from the start.
Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)
That said, this is the second time I've come across this myth on HN in less than a week. Where did you hear that price indices don't track healthcare and housing costs?
The point isn't that CPI excludes healthcare and housing, CPI shelter sub-index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAH1 and the medical care sub-index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAM2 have grown ~500% and ~770% respectively in the same time frame. The _overall_ CPI they are blended into grew ~300%, which means real wages are deflated. So if personal spending is weighted towards healthcare and housing (anyone who rents or pays a mortgage below a certain income) then your purchasing power is declining faster than the real wage would suggest.
EDIT: saying real wages is deflated is ambiguous, the headline CPI understates the effective inflation experienced by people whose spending consumption is weighted towards housing and healthcare. So the "real wage" is inflated relative to the lived experience of those people.
> have grown ~500% and ~770% respectively in the same time frame. The _overall_ CPI they are blended into grew ~300%, which means real wages are deflated
If you spend a third of your income on housing and 8% on healthcare [1], then those components–assuming your 5x and 7.7x multiples–will raise your cost of living by 2.25x. That leaves 1.75x for the other components (to get to the overall 3x). That sounds reasonable as a median estimate.
> if personal spending is weighted towards healthcare and housing (anyone who rents or pays a mortgage below a certain income) then your purchasing power is declining faster than the real wage would suggest
Sure. If you spend a lot on imported dates, your purchasing power will currently be declining faster than the median American's. This is a problem. But it's almost by definition not one that can be widespread.
> the "real wage" is inflated relative to the lived experience of those people
Well, yes. There are regional CPIs and income-indexed CPIs and all manners of privately-calculated costs of living. Paying attention to lived experiences or whatever is important, especially in politics. But it's no substitute for broad measures when conducting a national economy.
> Well, yes. There are regional CPIs and income-indexed CPIs and all manners of privately-calculated costs of living.
Great. So we agree, you are just dismissing the distributional analysis and equating fungible goods with inelastic ones. You can't substitute away from something like region-locked housing supply so those folks face higher effective inflation (BLS R-CPI-I).[1]
> you are just dismissing the distributional analysis and equating fungible goods with inelastic ones
No, I'm not. You're the one moving goalposts.
The thread started by someone claiming, wrongly, that housing and healthcare aren't included in CPI. (A common myth.) I showed that was wrong. You said it's underweighted. I pushed back. You're now saying it's underweighted for some people, which, like, is how distributions work.
Variance doesn't make a central tendency meaningless. And the truth is for most Americans, real wages are up. Lived experience and all. It's painfully not for a section of Americans in housing markets locked by policy from expansion or in bad health and luck. That's unfortunate and deserves attention. But it doesn't negate the whole.
> You can't substitute away from something like region-locked housing supply so those folks face higher effective inflation
Straw man. Nobody claimed universality.
If we were having a discussion about the Midwest, I'd quote different numbers and reach a different conclusion. That's how scoping works. Americans, as a whole, have experienced real wage growth since 2000. That doesn't mean literally every single American has. And it doesn't mean that people outside America have.
> It's a problem that our society is designed for and judged in relation to capital.
Cash is also capital.
If you were trying to say it’s a problem that our economic system favors deploying capital into investments instead of hoarding cash, I disagree. An economy where everyone is incentivized to hoarde cash instead of deploying it to investments doesn’t progress because the smartest thing you could do with your money is to not invest it in new businesses or buildings. It doesn’t work.
> Most people are paid in dollars, not shares of the S&P 500.
You’re conflating income and savings.
It wouldn’t matter if you got paid in dollars or in S&P 500 shares of the same dollar value. You can exchange one for the other. In the year 2026 you can do that instantly from your phone with an app and not pay any fees.
The point was not that S&P 500
shares are a superior unit of trade, because they’re not. I’m trying to explain that long term savings needs to be in an investment, not sitting around in actual cash.
I think the problem here isn’t the preference that we create with the way inflation is chosen as a target but that we try to exert influence at all. It should be possible for many people to lead good lives without investing cash in the stock market. And the stock market should be a good place to raise capital. But when our retirement savings are bundled up in the stock market it creates a perverse incentive to manipulate the market to prevent us from losing our retirement savings.
The problem I was hitting on is that large portions of our population don't have any investments are therefore are being left further behind by this tradeoff of stocks in favor of cash. You can't just tell people not to leave their cash sitting around when they don't actually have any cash sitting around.
One thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that agree. For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman will happily say something that he knows/believes isn't true, there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with.
I don't know if it's just getting older or some deeper change in society, but more and more the reading of how my peers view the world depresses me. Even beyond the specific issues with prediction markets, there is a whole lot more to understanding our world than merely knowing the rough odds of possible outcomes.
Or perhaps a more appropriate analogy, its sounds like the sycophantic language of most of these LLM systems.
Which makes me wonder whether these companies actually dogfood their own tools with this sort of stuff? Was this announcement written by ChatGPT? Honestly, I would find either answer to be a little concerning in its own way. It's either vaguely insulting to their customers or showing a lack of faith in their own product.
Poe’s Law meets The Big Short’s convergence of confessing and bragging[1]. It adds up to being completely opaque in terms of veracity and intent, but either way it highlights the real problem at the center of this story.
Yes, but is it "intelligence" is a valid question. We have known for a long time that computers are a lot faster than humans. Get a dumb person who works fast enough and eventually they'll spit out enough good work to surpass a smart person of average speed.
It remains to be seen whether this is genuinely intelligence or an infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters situation. And I'm not sure why this specific example is worthy enough to sway people in one direction or another.
Someone actually mathed out infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, and it turns out, it is a great example of how misleading probabilities are when dealing with infinity:
"Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 1080) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys."
Often infinite things that are probability 1 in theory, are in practice, safe to assume to be 0.
So no. LLMs are not brute force dummies. We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.
> It is unsurprising that an LLM performs better than random! That's the whole point. It does not imply emergence.
By definition, it is emergent behavior when it exhibits the ability to synthesize solutions to problems that it wasn't trained on. I.e. it can handle generalization.
Emergent behavior would imply that some other function was being reduced to token prediction. Behaving "better than random" ie: not just brute forcing would not qualify - token prediction is not brute forcing and we expect it to do better, it's trained to do so.
If you want to demonstrate an emergent behavior you're going to need to show that.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
>There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
I still have no idea what you're attempting to convey here, but the way you answered a genuine question with what reads like an attempted insult tells me that I shouldn't care about whatever you were trying to say.
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