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So if I'm a game dev that lives in the US outside of California, do I have to care about this? Or do I have to explicitly block Californians from buying my game if I don't want to be affected by it?

Because the average person is incapable of telling that it's AI generated

I came up with an analogy the other day -

The 'camp 1' people in the pre-LLM days were probably the ones that often just copy+pasted code from SO they didn't really understand, but since the code seemed to work when they ran it, they thought it was all fine and continued on.

Whereas the 'camp 2' people when trying to find an answer to something, discarded 99% of SO and other similar answers, having the knowledge to see how they had broken edge cases, were limited in some way, didn't actually solve the underlying problem, etc.

Nowadays, 'camp 1' people just use the LLM output and it "seems to work" and consider it all fine. Whereas the 'camp 2' people still continuously see all the faults with it.


Being faster than humans at mundane and verifiable tasks is a useful thing. Great for format conversions. Api mappings etc. if you don't understand the algorithm you are asking it to implement, you better at least understand how to generate a large set of correct input and output pairs yourself, because it will absolutely make stuff up and adjust the test cases to pass.

What's interesting is the creator of the site has listed on their linkedin that they're ... wait for it ... a co-founder at some generic AI startup with the goal of using AI agents to automate away manual jobs.

What if the intended takeaway was something else like this?

"Jumping so late onto the bandwagon by buying shares like that is for losers! Winners are people bold enough to be entrepreneurs who make the stuff and sell the shares. (Like I'm going to do, because I'm smarter than that crow.)"

I must warn that it isn't the most charitable random-ass-theory of a stranger's worldview... but it would resolve the apparent inconsistency.


We know what the intended takeaway is because the author helpfully explained it in a blog post [1], and it's way less cynical than what you guessed:

> A world where a majority of the population is suffering is not a world good for anyone. Even from a selfish perspective, does you making it into the elite class mean the people you care about will too? Who wants to eat caviar alone on the moon?

I agree, though I would have stopped at the first sentence.

--

[1] https://www.jasonwu.ink/signals/2026-05-27-permanent-upper-c...


So he's obviously on the winning side of this transaction. Hopefully the losing side is someone who isn't you. Maybe it's a VC fund.

This is filthy undercrow talk!

are we not all slaves to the top hat?

Are we the Baddies? Yes, and how interesting. I could vibe a game about that.

> Are we the Baddies? Yes, and how interesting. I could vibe a game about that.

The author's actual take is way less cynical. It seems he wanted to point out that a world where you try to save yourself at all costs while the majority suffers is not a good world.

See: https://www.jasonwu.ink/signals/2026-05-27-permanent-upper-c...


There’s a lot more ways automation can turn out than “permanent underclasses”. It’s kinda like how some people build planes without supporting crashing them into things

He isn't building a plane but a device.

What does the device do? He doesn't know.


Understandig how the hammer falls tells you where to stand to avoid it.

Unless the hammer ultimately destroys the world. And it seems our escape rocket is no more.

I grok that as the author having a sick sense of humor. I like it....

Write what you know.

When did peddling dietary supplements and crypto go out of fashion?

When AI took the spotlight.

Maybe he strongly supports UBI or a national dividend and understands how automation makes these much easier.

The author explains his opinion in a blog post, and it's not that: https://www.jasonwu.ink/signals/2026-05-27-permanent-upper-c...

It's simply: saving yourself (by getting rich or whatever) before AI puts us all out of a job is not good, because the majority of the world will suffer and that's not good for anyone.


Is the theme that any direction US tech advances in results in a persistent campaign of negative hit pieces aimed at trying to halt/destroy any achievements? Written by "journalists"/publishers that have never, and will never, say a single negative thing about china? Sure seems like that's the theme.

What does your tangent about feelings have to do with the fact that the money is illegally allocated? That is the theme OC is pointing out.

My understanding for the money to be "illegally allocated", the court system would have to declare it so.

The article do not mention any lawsuits that overturn the allocation, just a couple senators disagreeing with the interpretation of the law. The senate does not interpret the law, but the judicial branch.


> But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.

That is the theme. Illegal use of public money. It’s called crony capitalism.


That is basically the theme. You've figured out the actual grift. The crazy thing is how these same magazines will promote actual fake industries like crypto, while demonizing industries that produce actual results like AI. The goal seems to be to get Americans to invest assets into currencies likely already controlled by foreign entities while discouraging them from developing their own potentially revolutionary technology.

Um sorry have you heard about the gutting of the NSF?

Yeah that sucks balls but America's private capital markets are still robust.

Plenty of that on Ars Technica, even by the same author. Baseless silly whataboutism as usual.

Take a deep breath and get your meds updated.

"None of these claims is older than February 15, 2026"

All of the models they tested were trained on data from before February 15th ... being asked specific questions about things that happened after they were trained.


Two of the models used have retrieval capabilities and can access newer information via search. Valid point for the other 3 models. All of the claims were submitted after February 15, 2026, but many of them were not time-sensitive (e.g. did not cover events than happened recently).

An AI-generated article which summaries a pre-print release which surveyed 15 people at 15 companies about their thoughts on whether the arrangement was working for them. Of those 15, a grand total of 6 (unidentified) people at 6 (unidentified) companies (all in the same country), said they "thought" productivity had increased. Not a single data point was taken about whether it actually increased. The questions that these 15 people were asked was not disclosed.

An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.


It's 15 companies that adopted a technique and it's part of a broader constellation of experiments in this area which have been confounding the traditional logic that productivity would decrease. https://www.4dayweek.com/research

The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice.

Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention.

So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that.

I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.


Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.

Intelligent people in general have a better understanding of their knowledge, the limits of it, and uncertainty in that knowledge. If you ask them something and they don't have an answer that they know is objectively true, they'll often respond by telling you they don't know, or they "think" something is "probably" true.

On the other hand, people that aren't intelligent have very little self-awareness in that way and will just tell you whatever they "believe" is true, even though that belief could have extremely little connection to objective reality. They believe it because "other people believe it", or because that's just what they heard, etc.

I'm sure if you combined the study's findings with an assessment of the intelligence of those same people, you'd find an extreme correlation between intelligence and the conceptual map they fall under.


I'm not so sure there's a correlation to intelligence on this. I suspect it has more to do with whether or not people have learned how to, and are willing to, engage in critical thinking.

I suspect there is a correlation between "intelligent" and "learned how to think critically". Not 100%, but not 0% either.

The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.

I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this.

ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.


For a deeper dive on just how that funding is meant to circumvent constitutional protections that normally exist around law enforcement, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw

> ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight.

ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.


It is against the law, but I would wager it is morally coherent to smash them.

It's more coherent with moralities that put a relatively low value on property rights and rule of law.

On both points, sure, trivially, if I do not value property or the rule of law, I will not care about destroying it. But obviously we're talking about the moral value of the implications more than the direct value of the camera. Do keep up.

On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, the conflict of the law with morality _devalues_ the rule of law. Valuing rule of law does not imply only some sort of legalistic value of laws unto themselves, but of the value of a society with good laws, enforced well. This incentivizes analysis and evolution _of the law_ and, to some degree, forcing conflict to bring about those changes.


Well yes, not everyone plays make-believe all the time.

That make believe game is civilization. It's nice to have.

From TFA:

> Reddit threads show near-universal support.

If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...


9 out if 10 paid astroturfers and bot accounts agree with me!

Trying to imagine who would be paying for bots to support killing flock cameras. Who would profit from that? Seems more likely to go the other way.

Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.

Just curious, but what's the basis for this claim? I've heard it a lot. But I feel like this in itself is a political statement more than one rooted in sound facts.


Flock?

If flock is paying people to support destroying flock cameras, sign me up!

Well, semi-plausible, a wave of "violence" against their cameras would surely excuse installing even more cameras to prevent said "violence".

Never underestimate 5D chess mastery of big money and big agendas.


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Many things in tech have social and therefore political consequences

political discussion is worthless when only one side is allowed to participate.

> If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...

I'll write to President Sanders about this issue straight away!


“This thing thats easy to measure agrees with me.”

Shows lack of critical thinking and rigor.


I'd love to see smashing flock cameras so normalized it actually mattered.

Good.

Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".


I suspect you have no idea what the word communist actually means.

*fascist

those groups have a lot in common, when you look at historical implementation.

Both create an unaccountable set of elites who control the populace.


Fascism is a plugin host and communism is but one of its plugins.

"Forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

If you go through and click all the links and hunt down the source, the final source underlying it all is a comic author who says, without quoting anything, or any proof, that that's the reason why. Just a random guy saying that Stripe made them ban it, without any evidence.

I'm the King of England. There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.


The details sure are light, but it tracks with how banks and processors work. There's lots of indirect language and polite pressure involved, and famously, opaqueness behind decisions.

Consider this excellent article on debanking by an author who works at Stripe: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

The machine grinds on regardless if we agree with it or not.


>>There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.

Sir/Ma'am, this is HN, we dont actually read the articles here. WE just look at the title and get outraged


His(?) Majesty. You are addressing the King of England himself


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