It's the "incredibly banal" comments that upset me. The ones that just re-state the article in one or two uncontraversial sentences.

Often lean slightly pro-AI, but otherwise avoid saying much about anything.

You might be surprised how little money there is in chess.

Total purse was $300k, Magnus got $100k of that for winning.

Which confirms the point, right?

It's not chess but a variant. Maybe it has ~10-100 times less viewer base.

I wish it was more popular - it’s more enjoyable to watch and play since it’s not nearly as much prep / memorization

I suspect Magnus draws a similar level of attention regardless, it's probably closer to half the viewer base

100%.

That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.

And by "Deleted immediately" they might mean they delete the image but keep the hash.

It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed.

Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while.

Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine.

The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero.

We have burned the web.

I've been miserable over the last few weeks after coming to that same conclusion. Its so bad that i doubt the people that were pulling the strings can even tell whats going on anymore.

If the web is burned, something new will arise in its place (with new constraints) as long as there's a need. It's not like we only get one shot at this.

The constraints being different already make the replacement tangibly different

Maybe it will kill the veil of (perceived) anonimity which tangibly changes how people behave, or maybe the filter will be monetary and the filter will just affect the underclass shifting whatever discourse will be had

We can't act like whatever replaces the current web won't be different, because then there's no reason to change at all

Depends on if someone ends up launching nukes over this, which there isn’t a non-zero chance is going to occur.

This same type of info war tends to muddy, confuse, and get everyone on edge.

Hence dead internet theory has turned into dead internet reality.

It corrupts future AI models too, so we might be holding onto today's models for a long time, as a least biased version as a checksum.

Worked for me in firefox, my best is 2 strokes, the hole in 1 is proving difficult.

Have you considered picking a new name for a different concept?

Or have ctrl+o cycle between "Info, Verbose, Trace"?

Or give us full control over what gets logged through config?

Ideally we would get a new tab where we could pick logging levels on:

  - Thoughts
  - Files read / written
  - Bashes
  - Subagents

etc.

That's what ethics are. If you don't make sacrifices for them they aren't ethics they're just conveniences.

This is easy to say until you're an immigrant worker in a foreign country - something one probably worked for their entire life up to that point - risking it all (and potentially wrecking the life of their entire family) just to stop some random utility from having a Copilot button. It's not "this software will be used to kill people", it's more like "there's this extra toolbar which nobody uses".

In life you have to choose your battles.

I hadn't made more solid connections between the current state of software and industry, the subjugation of immigrants, and the death of the American neoliberal order until this comment thread but it here it lies bare, naked, and essentially impossible to ignore. With regards to the whole picture, there's no good or moral place to "RETVRN" to in a nostalgic sense. The one question that keeps ringing through my head as I see the world in constant upheaval, and my one refuge in meaning, technical craftsmanship, tumbling, is: Why did I not see this coming?

"why won't other people make sacrifices for me?"

Because the society in US is arranged as a competition with no safety net and where your employer has a disproportionate amount of influence on your well being and the happiness of your kids.

I'm not going to give up $1M in total comp and excellent insurance for my family because you and I don't like where AI is going.

Just having the option of giving up $1 million in compensation put one far far far above meaningful worries about your well-being and the happiness of your kids.

Not really. We would have to downsize our life.

I'll have to explain it to the wife: "well, you see, we cant live in this house anymore because AI in Notepad was just too much".

I'll dial up my ethical and moral stance on software up to 11 when I see a proper social safety net in this country, with free healthcare and free education.

And if we cant all agree on having even those vital things for free, then relying on collective agreement on software issues will never work in practice so my sacrifice would be for nothing. I would just end up being the dumb idealist.

I posed my comment poorly and trollishly.

I don't think you should make any change you don't want to, I'm not arguing for collective agreement on anything, and I'm not convinced there's a big ethical case for or against AI, even in Notepad.exe. If you can make $1M, go nuts, I just think it's not a great example of dealing with ethics & tradeoffs.

I was more just reacting to your the contrast between ideas early in this thread, and your implication of a $1M comp. Early in the thread there was implication that poor/exploited/low-level workers with few other options were either being blamed for AI in notepad, or should not be blamed. Then you casually drop the $1M comp line. Maybe that's real, maybe it's not but regardless, it felt silly to compare the earlier population with people who can or have made $1M. Of course we all face challenges, and the hedonic treadmill calls for us equally at $1K/year and $1M/year, I just think people in the latter have objectively more options, even if the wife complains, than people in the former, and it's tough to take the latter seriously when they talk about lifestyle adjustments.

I use that a lot, but I find it is useful to avoid purity spirals. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral )

I didn't see it as closing down discussion, so I'll be mindful of that in future.

There is a real danger when presented with a problem to discard a partial solution because it fails to tackle a much larger problem.

It's a call for pragmatism over idealism.

Companies do it with email unsubscribe categories to, which is skirting laws for sure.