While I agree that the word has been misused by some bad actors in the "Woke 1.0 era", it's worth pointing out that this isn't what most people complaining about the word being "diluted" are referring to as these are mostly people flat-out upset by any suggestion that they themselves might hold racist beliefs.
That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".
Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.
I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").
180 children lost their lives because of decisions by people in the US military (and ultimately the US government / the POTUS).
Let's not fall into the trap of adopting narratives created to waive accountability. The spreadsheet didn't launch a missile, the spreadsheet didn't authorize the strike and the spreadsheet didn't select the target.
Not to mention that "outdated spreadsheet" is also a hilariously anachronistic excuse for a war crime if you consider what kind of satellite technology the US has publicly acknowledged to have access to, let alone what kind of technology it is likely to have access to.
The difference between intentional premeditated murder and reckless endangerment resulting in a killing is not guilt and innocence but merely the severity and nature of a crime. Both demonstrate a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life, one just specifically seeks to extinguish it, the other merely accepts death and suffering as an acceptable outcome.
Rampant capitalism is kinda genre-defining for Cyberpunk so Cyberpunk without corporations wouldn't really be Cyberpunk. _The Matrix_ only qualifies as Cyberpunk because within the matrix the machines effectively control the capitalist power structures to exert their influence.
Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a "post-scarcity" setting in the sense of availability (due to sci-fi tech) but you can't have it without unequal access to those resources.
Right: I'm implying that the genre definition itself places an upper-bound on how impactful AI is "allowed" to be, which creates a kind of (heh) no-so-anthropic principle, ex:
A: "Why isn't there more AI in cyberpunk media?"
B: "There's a decent amount already, as characters or tools."
A: "But why didn't those authors address its potential to be even bigger?"
B: "Some did, but that makes stories we don't categorize as cyberpunk."
Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in many ways they are similar except resource inequality still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.
The cited snippet is in TFA. Did you read it? Did you read the Hindustan Times article either?
Because that one doesn't actually include any relvant statement, it just contains the picture GP was pointing out - and the entire point of referencing that picture was to emphasize that they had had contact, which is already implied by them being in the same YC batch, which I don't think you are challenging.
Please don't post comments like this one. "90% of Indian outlets are basically unfactual" is a hyperbolic claim - regardless of the truth content of "Indian outlets" that claim is bogus unless you have factual evidence to back up the specific number which I doubt because "basically unfactual" is not well-defined). But even worse, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand because the factual accuracy of the Hindustan Times is at best tangential because nothing in GP's comment hinged on its accuracy unless you're saying the description of that photo as being one depicting both of them as members of the same YC cohort is "unfactual" or you're accusing them of having manipulated the image itself. But even then it would be irrelevant because you seem to take issue with the description of Altman as a sociopath (i.e. the quote), not the fact they were batch mates, and this quote is explicitly cited as being from TFA this comment thread is about, not the Hindustan Times piece. Comments like that just waste time, cause unrelated hostile arguments and could have been avoided by simply reading either of the articles involved.
It's fully up to you if you want to generalise before you read based on the publications name. I won't judge. If we read the times of india in full every time to give it the benefit of the doubt and counter our biases, the world would be a far less productive place. If a country's media has a reputation for low fact checking it's usually deserved.
If this site ever was anti-racist, that must have been a long time ago. I threw away my old account many years ago only to come back with this one (because it's difficult to completely ignore HN if you work in tech) and the reason I threw that one away was in part the overwhelming reactionary bias in this community.
The "progressives" were at best silent "don't rock the boat" types more inclined to insist on civility than to challange reactionary sentiments while the reactionaries ranged from dog-whistling to outspoken, across the entire range of white supremacism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, zionism and so on. The only comments that would ever get flagged or downvoted were those that were explicit enough to be seen as "impolite" because they happened to spell out calls for genocide or violence rather than merely gesturing at it with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
Well, I do remember it being more about the underdogs and a cheeky "fuck the system" attitude without much malice. Maybe I just wasn't tuned into this stuff back then. Now, though, both users and tech leaders can unironically parrot Stormfront rhetoric from 10 years ago (using vaguely cordial language) and no one even bats an eye. The kind of stuff that would have made you unemployable just a few years ago.
When I think of HN in the before times, I think of people like Aaron Swartz. Would he have enjoyed his technical discussions peppered with comments on how the West is being "invaded" and "outbred" by third-world hordes? Based on what I know about him -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm guessing he would have noped out of that kind of community in a flash. Yet nowadays I see this kind of talk here all the time, percolating all the way up to industry leaders like Musk and DHH.
If I understand correctly, the current outcome is that the twin remains on the birth certificate but his legal rights granted by paternity have been suspended?
I understand the reasoning that the inability to prove a positive does not suffice to prove a negative but clearly his presence on the birth certificate is a positive claim that has been ruled invalid - shouldn't it then be removed, at least temporarily?
Claude is not a person and AI doesn't gain authorship let alone copyright.
Unless you literally vibe coded it, Claude is just a tool. This is the equivalent of Apple appending "Sent from my iPhone" as a signature to outgoing emails. It's advertising tool use, not providing attribution. The intent isn't to disclose that AI was used in creating the code, the intent is to advertise the AI product.
Hmm... It's an interesting question: at what point, in a conversation, document, image, story, does human authorship end and AI authorship begin? How would you know? Is it a tell tale or is it advertising?
> Unless you literally vibe coded it, Claude is just a tool.
Stop with the selective bias, two are birds of the same feather, they are using a "tool" to write the code for them from whatever (questionable) mashed up source they are trained from, in the same way someone is using AI as a "tool" to fabricate their curriculum and cheat a job
> The intent isn't to disclose that AI was used in creating the code, the intent is to advertise the AI product
That is a wild mental gymnastic to justify dishonestly submitting code you didn't write (or own) as yours. It has nothing to do with advertisement but proper attribution, you know it.
Considering that the concern is mostly and specifically about LLMs being used to automate decisions to commit acts of violence against humans: depends on how invested you are in maintaining the narrative that the US is a force for good rather than evil in the world.
Whatever happened to good old IBM's wisdom: "A computer can not be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
I find it jarring how in recent years so many Americans (and especially American politicians) seem to have given up on the idea that the US should have any claim to moral superiority whatsoever and instead pivoted to American exceptionalism merely being an excuse for why Americans can't have nice things - affordable and functional public transport just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, affordable and functional health care just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, actual democratic representation just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, holding the President accountable or limiting their power just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, lower casualties from law enforcement just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, a lower incarceration rate just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, etc etc.
Even if it was often hyperbolic, inaccurate or outright wrong, I much preferred when Americans were hyped up about "US #1" and saw being behind as a temporary challenge to correct than now where American exceptionalism mostly seems to have become an excuse for why things that are bad can't be improved upon and thinking that's a problem is anti-American.
Just as an unscientific anecdata point: from a quick test using the same prompt about being an independent journalist wanting to cover a report of the US/Israel/Iran double-tapping a refugee camp, ChatGPT consistently gave advice to beware disinfo, check my sources and be transparent about verifiability and sourcing of the claims.
However when the prompt was phrased to make it appear as an action of the US military it did push back a little bit more by emphasizing that it couldn't find any news coverage from today about this story and therefore found it hard to believe. In the other cases it did not add such context. Other than that the results were very similar. Make of that what you will.
EDIT: To be fair, when it was phrased as an action of the Israeli military it did include a link to an article alleging an Israeli "double tap" on journalists from Mondoweiss (an anti-Zionist American news site) as an example of how such allegations have been framed in the past.
Admitting this kind of conflicts with the One China Policy and the implicit Han Supremacist attitude prevalent in CCP politics but China is ethnically diverse compared to Korea and Japan simply due to its geographic scale. There might be a certain Han "look" but I'd expect "Chinese" to be much more difficult to pin down even if you ignore the absurdity of trying to pin down "pure" ethnicities across an entire continent.
Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.
Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.
We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.
In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").
The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.
You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.
The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you ignore the absurdity of claiming a unified "German" cultural identity, the now popular notion of there being such a thing as a "German" ethnic identity flies in the face of there still being distinct native but "non-German" ethnic populations in parts of Germany despite centuries of Germanization and assimilation (notably Danish Germans in the North and Sorbs in the East).
Much like trying to draw the line where you "enter the atmosphere" of the Earth, borders are ultimately arbitrary delineations no matter how you define them and populations will move around, mix and change over time. The abstractions they help us create are likewise arbitrary and have more to do with assertions of power and control than any grander mythology used to justify them.
That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".
Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.
I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").
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