This coupled with the hot mike incident yesterday where Trump was saying how El Salvador needed to build more mega prisons for the "home grown..terrorists" is beyond concerning. Sure sounds like DOGE is compiling lists of 'less desirable s' that will soon be swept off the streets in unmarked vans. America has turned fully fascist.
Of course Musk's coterie of government hackers are young. They might have technical skills, but their still developing brains haven't really developed any morals. Any ability to think bigger than themselves, other than to try to impress their idol steers their actions. Eager to please they don't ask themselves "whats the bigger outcome of this" To them it's all for lolz, and technical clout.
Elon himself has said he uses ketamine in order to 'not feel bad feelings'. Let that sink in for a minute. Maybe, Elon, you should feel bad, rather than numbing any unwanted feeling..
That's not close to true, but even if it were, it doesn't make it ok for you to break the site guidelines. Commenters here need to stick to those regardless of what anyone else is doing. Otherwise, we just end up in a downward spiral, since everyone always feels like the other side started it and did worse.
HN has fallen. It's infested with operatives and shills. Waving the site guidelines at me for offering a modicum of balance is the wrong way. Either ban all political commentary or let 'em cook. Putting me in a timeout for mild snark? It wasn't always like this.
HN's standards haven't changed. I think it's just that everyone underestimates their own provocations ("mild snark") and overestimates the provocations of others. This leads to an "objects in the mirror are larger than they appear" kind of effect - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
"Infested with operatives and shills" is a feeling that a lot of internet users have when they encounter views that are different from their own. It feels like these can't possibly be in good faith, so they must be "operatives and shills". But there is a much simpler explanation: the range of differences between people is just a lot larger than one expects it to be. I've written a lot about this over the years—here's one example, with links to others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.
This is why the HN guidelines ask people "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Strong disagree. I don't think the standards have changed, I think they have become obsolete. I personally believe the HN community have taken over the self-censorship role with the downvote mechanism, like a kind of digital Red Guard policing anything that smacks of wrongthink. It's a way of disappearing contrary opinions by abusing the moderation tools. I'm not arguing for parity. There really is no expectation that there would be political balance when the audience is global but the politics are heavily US-centric. But should people who think opposition voices are not to be platformed be given censorship powers? Please fix the downvote problem.
I don't believe that "shills" or "operatives" need necessarily be a large percentage of posters to influence the discourse towards their ends. If the overall discourse is already biased, then the role of operatives is simply to suppress dissent by demonstrating that some comments are simply to be dismissed and downvoted. This talk of "evidence" is outdated and will not fix this particular issue. HN has some kind of acquired autoimmune disease. Fix the downvote mechanism.
If dissent were allowed to survive the downvotes, then the risk is that the fence-sitters or those without political or other interests might see the "majority" view is a paper tiger. Some combination of true believers and bad faith actors can easily suppress other voices. The result is that heterodox opinions aren't allowed even to be read. Other voices are driven out. If it isn't fixed or if politics isn't banned outright, then HN will fade into a parody of discourse. I urge you to fix the downvote mechanism.
These rules about tone are all well and good when diversity of opinion is permitted. But understand that 99% of the time I am responding TO one commenter but AT another (potential) reader with a more open mind. Provocations and heretical opinions must be allowed in order to attract THAT reader's attention.
Many people can see the range of political opinion on HN is heavily skewed. If you want to argue your data says otherwise, your data or your method is flawed. Fix the downvotes, the rest will follow.
My favorite comment from the article was from the Hollywood/media exec lamenting that what IA was doing was 'theft'.
Didn't Hollywood come about from people trying to outrun Edison and his patents?
The hubris is astounding.
I wonder the same thing. It had a lot of 'renegade cool kid' energy early on, I suspect this was done on purpose. However, if you look at the investors, and people working on the project now (lot of industry types) it's moved slowly into the corporate sphere. I think rather than legal assault, they are going to slowly start to boil the frog and users will find themselves in a system that differs radically from what they expected (or want) and by that time moving all their files etc will be too much.
I stayed far away, and have supported Kodi the entire time.
oh look. Some techbro billionaire fretting about his billions.
Why is this news? What's next, an indepth look at finding 'just the right bunker' for the apocalypse.
I mean, yeah a bad thing happened. His family survived, and he's gotten a better life than 99% of the population on the planet. Cool.
Maybe rather than worry about hoarding his stuff he could find ways to improve the planet? Or better yet, collect some digital thing, obfuscated behind other digital things all with some arbitrary value - that won't feed you, keep you warm and or provide clean water in a real emergency.
The creation of a whole new federal branch - "homeland security" was created under BushII. Cushy federal jobs with pensions all funded off that sweet sweet defense budget.
So now airline travel is ruined all for security theater..and you think ACA is overreach?
