Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
I don't know that unions would necessarily negotiate for no use of AI. The SAG-AFRA deals don't preclude all use of AI; they just requre consent and negotiation in certain cases.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
I don't have a voice or likeness in my code. Sure, I have a very specific style in all the code I wrote for the past couple of decades, but you can achieve the same outputs with completely orthogonal styles as well. (like AoS vs SoA) so what would I even negotiate for when everything I ever thought of got distilled into neural network weights to be high-pressure sprayed to the masses?
> so what would I even negotiate for when everything I ever thought of got distilled into neural network weights to be high-pressure sprayed to the masses?
For your unique approach to the problems at hand. Yes, 90% of the code written is CRUD, but when it's not, how it's solved matters.
This is why we have grown with id Software games. They solved the problems, created new paths and methods for limited hardware for their time.
This is why we praised DivX and XviD back in the day. They solved problems again which are caused by the limits of the computers.
The way one solves problems matter, makes one valuable. This is why we do research and create new ways to do things.
In short, your creativity is being sold/sprayed to masses.
Then do it. Hypothetically claiming the job can be automated as an excuse to pay people less is older than everyone alive today. Lying to exploit workers is nothing new.
Until you actually remove the need for a human, you have to pay full price for human labor. Which if you used AI is never really going to happen. Someone has to evaluate what AI creates to make sure it does what was asked. This trend of not prosecuting crimes conducted by AI cannot last forever. The CEO would be the only one arrestable as the CEO is the only person with decision power in the company.
I'm unsure how you reach the conclusion of "self-interest". Unions are about collective bargaining power, reaching (ideally) what's best for most of the people it represents, even if it's detrimental to you specifically.
This is the first time I've heard someone argue that unionizing is a self-interested pursuit. It's called "collective bargaining" for a reason; workers who cooperate in negotiations with their employers have more leverage than those who negotiate individually. The entire point is to work together for the betterment of the group!
See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor.
Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior ones.)
> Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior
In the US. In the UK all the major unions I know don't require membership and fight for all employees in the industries they represent. E.g. as a software developer on a research project at a University I got all the negotiated benefits of the academic Union.
In Italy too. We have national contracts that are negotiated by unions for the whole indistry and are valid for all workers of the same industry, not only members.
They've also been proven to increase wages for people in the same industry who are not even in the union due to raising the floor in general for what good labor should cost
> See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor
If you're talking about AB 1751 (Missing Middle Townhome Ownership Act) I think you have this exactly backwards.
> Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon
As opposed to what? You and the GGP phrase this as a dichotomy, but I'm really curious what the other side of this is, because "not being in a union" doesn't erase your self interest or all the many many groups of people doing the same that don't feel like they're apparently being overly self interested by forming corporations, governments, non-profits, advocacy groups, etc, etc, etc
I can't speak for the OP, but I don't think their point was that they're against the self-interested nature of unionizing.
I read it more like they're against trying to stop, hinder, or prevent the use of new technology, simply because it's personally threatening.
And I feel the same way. If I was part of a union, I would believe in the collective bargaining power, but I wouldn't necessarily believe we should use that to pursue every single possible agenda that might benefit us. And I've personally pooled my capital with others in the past in order to achieve certain outcomes. And in those situations I also didn't attempt to reach so far as to limit the totally valid freedoms of others just because I knew it might be better for me.
Acting in the interest of a collective doesn't mean one must also abandon the ethics they usually employ when acting in their solo self interest.
Have you ever not been able to send your kids to school for weeks (or years in the case of COVID) because the teachers refused to work? Have you ever been unable to get timely medical treatment because nurses refused to work? Have you ever been unable to work yourself because the transit workers refused to work?
People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.
Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.
But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.
We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.
"Competition is universally good" is what has decimated American manufacturing since Reagan. It's hollowed out the US middle class, which affects what the country can build, purchasing power, and innovation. Free trade policies have destroyed cities, eliminated millions of well-paying jobs, cut social services, and ripped the social fabric from communities. There were no alternatives to just "take a job at a better company"; most manufacturing jobs that left had no alternatives.
It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.
Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)
Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).
You realize his examples are public sector unions. Which mean the “employer” you are referring to is the citizens? Not some evil corporation, government mandated monopolies which then get taken over to serve their union members.
I don’t have any objection to voluntary unions. Meaning people can join them for support or collective bargaining, but that citizens can just opt to not employ anyone in the union. Unions could be support structures for workers, instead they are mafia bosses.
Well… yeah. But I didn’t blame the employees, I blamed the employer who must have seen the writing on the wall for a long time and yet let it come to this.
Where do I say that nurses shouldn’t have good working conditions or good pay? Most of us have figured this out already: you can take a job at another company that’s better to work for. Most nurses do have pretty good working conditions and get paid well. Competition among employers is the solution here. Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.
The average nurse in the southern US is paid roughly ~$30 an hour. Given their responsibilities, long shifts, and overall stress, do you think that's a fair wage?
>Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.
Sometimes the system needs to grind to a hault to get peoples attention.
So she doesn't enjoy her job and only works there because you can't make up the $15 hour difference between her working in a book store for minimum wage vs her working for $30 an hour? Why don't you take a part time job on the weekend to lighten her load? There are many people who become a nurse because its a calling.
>So she doesn't enjoy her job and only works there because you can't make up the $15 hour difference between her working in a book store for minimum wage vs her working for $30 an hour?
She loves being a nurse and couldn't do anything else. But that doesn't mean it isn't exhausting for her.
>There are many people who become a nurse because its a calling.
And that excuses the shit pay and unsafe working conditions for nurses?
as an art enjoyer, i do not feel that having less media written, drawn, or voiced by a computer is a loss.
a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste. it can only make product. i also think artists should be paid living wages with good working conditions.
thank you SAG-AFTRA, WGA, IATSE, AEMI and Teamsters.
Nope. That is what's called a rhetorical question and a pretty good one because obviously it stirred some emotion in you.
Was your question supposed to be profound? Surely someone has explained to you that record players don't compose music.
Perhaps you could be a little more charitable and less toxic here and answer my obviously non-rhetorical question: Why shouldn't I enjoy things that were created through an automatic process? Hmm?
> Nope. That is what's called a rhetorical question and a pretty good one because obviously it stirred some emotion in you.
I guess if your goal is just to get any reaction, it was good, since it definitely stirred up annoyance in me? Unfortunately it also showed that you're fundamentally misunderstanding the arguments brought against AI media, be it willfully or accidentally. Either way, it gives me zero reason to want to discuss the topic with you.
> Was your question supposed to be profound? Surely someone has explained to you that record players don't compose music.
No, it's a stupidly simple question. GP is equivocating two things that obviously show fundamental qualitative differences, but did not give any reasons why this equivocation is supposed to make sense.
When I see comments where the only interpretation I can see has major and obvious logical gaps, I sometimes ask the obvious question in the hopes that they can show me a perspective I haven't properly encountered before. Because surely all of us are capable of recognizing how weak arguments based on "two topics look vaguely similar once you strip all nuance", when you can do the same with almost any two things?
> I guess if your goal is just to get any reaction, it was good, since it definitely stirred up annoyance in me?
Do you think that my goal is only to get a reaction and not to try and make any other point? I think someone who was "just" trying to get a reaction probably would just curse at you or do something else. Reactions are signals though and annoyance in particular is a very useful signal, hopeful to the one who experiences it. More importantly though, why, when you responded to me the first time, did you not address the very obvious non-rhetorical variant of my question though and instead, decide to appeal to me with sarcasm about the profundity of the rhetorical variant?
I'm trying to engage here and not put my trauma on display so I'll try to be as straightforward as I can. I am sincerely trying to respond in kind to you by telling you the truth and I will be glad to explain, in detail, my point of view. So, let me do that:
> GP is equivocating two things...but did not give any reasons why...
Yes. And I had hoped to correct that equivocation by pointing out the many random and/or automated processes that produce beautiful or otherwise enjoyable things. I wasn't agreeing with GP, I was improving the position. And I did, because very many useful things are created without any human interaction.
> fundamentally misunderstanding the arguments brought against AI media
Okay and you haven't engaged with the point that I'm making at all. It's different than the GP's. You also haven't given me any reasoning to backup your point that I am fundamentally misunderstanding the arguments brought against AI media. You want reasons why and I want reasons why. Let's engage in a civil manner.
The point that we're engaging on, really, is not the GP's. It's what computerliker said about how "a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste. it can only make product" and that "having less media [created] by a computer is a loss".
Nothing to misunderstand there and I disagree strongly on both the implications of the first and the conclusion of the second quote. That's what I'm attempting to address and not every possible argument ever made about AI creations.
So, do you still think that I'm misunderstanding something? Also, what about my point? Do we really want fewer things created by random and/or automated processes simply because a human didn't create them? I don't think so.
People also forget the role they play in protecting and helping corporations. Without unions as a legal and negotiating intermediary you get things like factory workers burning down the factories when they are overly exploited.
Sorry, but I don't think that makes sense. Any mutiny-preventing deal that a union negotiates could instead have been offered voluntarily by the employer to all employees from the outset, no union required.
>Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested
Caring about your ability to pay your bills, and support your family is "self-interested" in the same way that choosing to not drive into oncoming traffic is "self-interested".
Has it occurred to you that it isn't only self-interest but concern for others that drives collective bargaining? It's essentialy a way for the little guys to stand up to the 1% to fight against the unending series of abuses and diminishment of the average person's ability to earn a livable wage and work under fair conditions.
Yes. But there's a clear difference between, say, stealing someone's voice, identity or intellectual property, and preventing someone from using automation to do labor.
The former is obviously unfair to the person whose identity is stolen. The latter is sour grapes from people who want to control the future.
I also can't bring myself to get incensed over someone using a robot to write code. It's literally the modern equivalent of smashing knitting looms.
You keep framing it as getting incensed over other people using ai to write code; but that isn't what it's about. A dev union would not attempt that; it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible. It isn't about policing entire industries or other entities; it is about DEFENDING those who they would, do, and always have exploited when binding contracts or legislation don't prevent them from doing so.
Union = a group of people defending their rights and that includes the right to a life that isn't at the utter mercy of perpetual enshittification due to the infinite mechanical plodding of heartless (by definition) megacorporations that would never hesitate to eradicate peoples' livelihoods and treat humans as material for the orphan grinder if they could get away with it.
> it would attempt to ensure quality of life for your class of people (and their families) as much as possible.
What is “your class of people”, and why is it threatened by what other people do with coding robots?
You can try to dress it up as an intellectual argument, but at root it’s the same thing that the luddites were trying to do: defending your preferred lifestyle from technological advances.
We, the ditch diggers of the world, support your unqualified resistance to the use of steam shovels! Fewer holes, slower!
Your argument boils down to the idea that human life is not worth defending, even when capital actively undermines it by undercutting honest people's honest efforts to work for a living.
Thank you for outing yourself as a low-empathy, capital-aligned individual who makes bad-faith arguments, I'll know not to engage you from now on.
> Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested.
Yes, exactly. Do not advocate for yourself and your colleagues by joining them in a united front. Your voice does not matter. You will continue to adapt to widening wage disparities.
You will accept a pay cut and increased productivity goals and be happy to continue adapting as your cost of living keeps on climbing.
Right, but in your apathy there is a well organised group of capitalists who are vying to instrumentalise your existence. A union is just levelling the playing field.
You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
>The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
If they still have to pay an actual person though to license their likeness then they are much more likely to actually employ that person directly to get a better result. And in the cases where quality is not needed the person still gets paid for their AI likeness.
In the 21st century, the only professions that can successfully unionize are those you can't replace with workers from a non-unionized country.
If your students are in Oklahoma, your teachers also have to be in Oklahoma. If the Oklahoma teachers unionize, you have no option but to hire those unionized teachers if you want your students taught. If your bank is in Oklahoma, you can hire programmers in London or buy a SaaS from a company based in Geneva.
Programmers also have much less of a reason to unionize, as "quit and go work somewhere else" is often a realistic option. This is usually not the case for teachers, where the only employer seeking their skills in the area is the government, whose idea of what teacher salaries should be is not based on market forces.
I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.
e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
I think I sit somewhere between these two descriptions. I've always supported unions and other "for the common good" type machinery. At the same time, I desperately also don't want to end up doing something the equivalent of barring the use of calculators just so I can toil away at a 9-5 crunching numbers more slowly instead. If AI really does replace all of the meaningful jobs we can do... great - I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
Agreed, but I must've severely messed up my message if that was supposed to be a spoiler. To be clearer: I think the unions, economic policy, and such should help with that part rather than us wield the very same to hide from replacing the work we do with something much easier. I.e., don't be ashamed to work towards that, just come together to ensure we all share the spoils.
> it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
I thought HN was mostly people who hated doing 'the thing' and would procrastinate until they build a system that does 'the thing' and then they would work tirelessly to never do 'the thing' themselves ever again.
I agree with your point, but I don't think it's funny at all. The whole field is changing because of this. The career, except for those ones lucky enough to have jobs where they're valued and they can decide how to use AI tools, is turning into shit because of this and software engineers have become a lot less valuable as management is trying to turn them into reverse centaurs.
What options do you have? If you're the 10x engineer you'll be a 100x one and do just fine. Otherwise what can you do besides holding on as long as you can or start searching for a new career.
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
Software engineers and VFX workers also tried to unionise back in the day and there was a giant wage fixing and anti competitive hiring scandal that was majorly illegal. Perpetuated by some of the biggest names in tech.
They settled for a large undisclosed sum out of court. But largely won unfortunately as unionisation efforts failed
Yeah, the problem is, someone has to start the union. It takes work. You have to get the whole workforce to vote on it. A lot of software engineers believe (or believed) that they were too smart and professional to need a union. And of course, if management gets wind of it while you are working on setting up the vote, they may do all kinds of trickery, legal or illegal, to block it.
It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US.
And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever.
But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions.
Tried out the simulator and was surprised to find that the movement keys are ZQSD; then realized that's the equivalent of WASD on an AZERTY keyboard. Checked and sure enough, Pollen Robotics is a French company.
They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.
As a French guy who grew up playing CS 1.6 on an AZERTY keyboard, I have a feeling that the people who made this website are either a generation above or below Millenials.
Because it doesn't make sense: you don't make a website in English, with prices in USD... while expecting users to have an AZERTY keyboard.
I'm a millenial and can say you can absolutely make a site with i18n + currency conversion without knowing what keyboards people use. Especially Americans, who are much less familiar with "other markets", because companies can stay within US customers for so long.
It is a bit weird. As someone from Belgium (we also use our own variety of Azerty) you are very frequently reminded that you're on a weird keyboard. At least for someone who games, you wouldn't make ZQSD the default. It's the first thing you do in every game, change WASD to ZQSD
Another Belgian here, the first thing I did when I started working is switch to International English keyboards. Some employers wanted me to use local keyboards but I always managed to convince them to let me get another one in the end.
When I started out playing Quake 1 many moons ago, when I complained about how to reach keybindings as I was using the arrow keys, a veteran player on the server told me patiently to use ESDF like a normal person. So I did, and learned, and it stuck with me. It wasn't until years later I realized that was more a rarity and people usually use WASD. I kept ESDF because I was used to it, and because it's nice have those two extra left keys as additional bindings.
All that's to say, if they'd used ESDF this wouldn't be an issue. You've been vindicated, kind hero.
Given the amount of controls that modern games have, I'd propose RDFG for movements instead, so we have all the new QWEAS on the left-hand side for even more keys available, together with TYHJ on the right side. Shortcuts galore :)
Interestingly, the 10-lines-of-basic competition, which has been running the last 15 years (https://itch.io/profile/bunsen), has this covered in the rules:
15. If the game is controlled with the keyboard, use "O" for left, "P" for right, "E" for up and "D" for down if possible; this takes into account the most important keyboard layouts (no disadvantages for emulator users with QWERTZ, QWERTY or AZERTY keyboards)
Huh, when I tried it WASD didn't work like I expected, hence I went back and checked and saw that it was ZQSD. Looks like they might have fixed it now since I posted. Either that or the lagginess caught me up; it takes a second before it starts moving forward, it might be I got caught up by that, went back to look at the instructions and noticed the ZQSD, then went back and used the arrow keys since that was easier.
edit: just checked the code, and they cover both layouts by using the physical key code rather than the character. And that was committed before I tried it. So it must have been the fact that it was a bit slow to respond that got me.
They should do a deal: “We fix this for QWERTY users, and in return American web devs vow to stop filtering out Shift in numeric fields, which is fine on QWERTY but prevents AZERTY users from typing top-row digits because those digits require Shift.”
Having tried (and failed) to use Issac to do the same thing, the fact that their simulator actually works out of the box, "batteries included", is a big deal for home hobbyists.
They do, which is why WASD (or whatever the positional equivalent in your layout is) work despite the text saying to press ZQSD. This only solves the input though, it doesn't let the page know ahead of time what letter it should tell you to press for those 4 positional inputs.
Chromium based browsers support navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap() to tackle this exact problem. Safari and Firefox do not due to concerns over fingerprinting. Still, it wouldn't hurt to add this second half for those users https://caniuse.com/?search=navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap%...
Nvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets.
Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others.
I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware.
I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.
The worry is not that Nvidia isn’t open about their models.
The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.
Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference.
This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't.
The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others.
DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
> DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
> but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing".
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
> forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He uses a word that is a slur for the Romani, an ethnic minority in many European countries. He never discusses nationality.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
I'm not just trying to score points about whether he sucks, but specifically point out the types of policies that he advocates for, and there are a number of people in this thread trying to claim somehow that he doesn't advocate for policies that he clearly has been.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Something like "mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area" I suppose, but also, I really don't have any energy left to discuss something I don't care about. I don't like that guy, I don't like his views, and I don't want to argue against others who also don't like him.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
“when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population” which I don’t think this really clears, as objectionable as his comments may be
DHH hasn’t committed a crime against humanity. He just said he would not consider one entirely bad if it made him feel safer when walking around his house.
I don’t recall him being specific about which Roma are wolves and which aren’t. Were he talking only about “criminal” migrants, he’d make a point about that distinction.
I don't think he's been literal about ethnic cleansing, even though I strongly disagree with his political views on the matter.
Anyway, he also supports open weights models, which IMO is a good thing.
So maybe separate the artist from the art? He's not running for elections, that's for sure, so as a citizen he can have the political views he likes, doesn't mean the software is bad because of them.
As I've said before, I strongly disagree, but what I read is that he calls for the removal of those behaving in a way that (in his opinion) make the city of Copenhagen less safe, or at least that change the perceived security of the people living there.
Gypsies create issues almost everywhere in Europe, but it's not based on ethnicity, most of the ethnic Roma are fully integrated, some of them are not, in Italy many Sinte families are linked to mob and criminality in general.
Do they deserve special treatment because of their ethnicity?
And what if they are not regular citizens?
It's an open problem, DHH's solutions it's absolutely not my solution, but there's a still a difference between what he said and calling for ethnic cleansing.
No one will reply to you because it requires thinking through this problem with the same nuance they accuse DHH of not appreciating. I'm right there with you.
I think there's such a strong difference between remigration and ethnic cleansing. And if you are misinformed, maybe take a minute to actually read his blog posts. But if you are and willingly misrepresenting his viewpoints, then maybe take a step back and think about what that says about you.
Not an endorsement of his viewpoints, but if we're going to debate people, we should do it on the actual words they say rather than the things we make up in our head about them.
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via
mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants
and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
That is not what he is doing and you know it. It's funny how people like to pretend that fake news somehow only originate from the right when in fact it's a method used by all the political sides.
He calls for the removal of people who are bothering the general population at large because they occupy illegally the public spaces, defecate in the parks, set up illegal camps in the parks when they actually have homeless shelters in the city which are usable and beg insistently.
If it was a group of Slovenians or Japanese doing the same thing, would we have the same conversation? I think not. I think we would say look how these people come to our towns and bother everyone else and in the end the cops would get involved.
But because these people are Roma who are not even from Denmark, then they should just get a pass and everyone should just have to go to another park if they want to take their kids to a playground because the one they have near their home has been turned in an open-air toilet.
Being from a minority does not give you the right to make everybody's life worse.
I'm not interested in having "nuanced discussions" about whether the Roma people have some kind of Nuisance Gene that makes discussion of extermination valid
If you'd like to make an argument that isn't just "ethnic cleansing is okay sometimes if the ethnicity is REALLY annoying" go ahead
I specifically use Android because of this, among other requirements, that Apple imposes on software development on their platform.
I do not own general purpose computers that I am not allowed to develop software for without permission. I have always avoided consoles for that reason as well (Steam Machine and other similar platforms would be fine, but I've been avoiding consoles for long enough that it's not something I really look for any more).
I was a major Apple fanboy up until the iPhone. Left the ecosystem after the iPhone and macOS started moving in that direction as well.
I'm going to miss having a smartphone that I can use with my banking and EV apps, but probably for the best to get out of Google's ecosystem. Hoping that GrapheneOS will still allow me to use some of the apps that I like.
I switched to an iPhone last year, mostly because I was getting sick of Samsung’s shit, and google doesn’t sell their pixel phones locally (and I don’t like Oppo).
But the other reason is that most of Android’s openness is quickly disappearing, so my main argument against iPhone is gone. And on the topic of privacy, I actually trust Apple way more than I trust the company that makes most of their revenue via advertising.
Exactly this. Once the writing was on the wall that deGoogled / FOSS Android was on borrowed time (at best), a ton of the argument against iOS dissolved overnight. We can argue that Apple's anti-repair policies and anti-user-customization policies are their own evils, sure, but at least my phone works for its core tasks, and works phenomenally well at that. My deGoogled Android phones were mostly hobbled together piles of "it sometimes works, as long as I don't look at it too funny". This tradeoff was fine for fully owning my data and being able to install absolutely anything I wanted on my phone. With arbitrary APK installation disappearing, and unlocked bootloaders to install a less hostile fork of Android becoming such a rarity these days, I may as well at least not fear looking at my phone the wrong way when the moon is in alignment with the wrong star.
Source: about 12 years of Android usage (11 of those on unlocked bootloaders and custom ROMs, ~6? of those deGoogled) -> iPhone 16e.
For the first half, custom ROMs were a massive boost to the experience, but I never really bothered after 2018; You had to install so much of google's stuff to get anywhere near proper experience that it just wasn't worth it, and even then many apps were starting to throw a fit when they detected a rooted device.
And at the same time, the stock android experience from most vendors was now good enough. I didn't even check custom ROM compatibly for my last Android two purchases (both Samsung). But it was nice to have the option of rooting and maybe finding/making a custom ROM Samsung removed that in their last update to One UI :(
For me it's the data-hoovering. I don't want Samsung (or Google, or Xiaomi, or whoever) background services phoning home my location every few seconds, or being able to uniquely track my device across apps, etc.
Once my ability to run a "background spyware-less" Android device went away, so did my willingness to put up with the negative sides of the usability tradeoff.
Apple probably sends some telemetry home, but at least their business model doesn't depend on knowing the exact Pantone color of the food I ate for dinner to market a matching wall paint to me.
Edit to add: oh, yeah, you mentioning 3P apps complaining if they detected root or MicroG reminds me of many a horrible night of debugging. Ugh. What a mess.
> You had to install so much of google's stuff to get anywhere near proper experience that it just wasn't worth it
What was it? Personally, the only thing I miss from stock Android is the Google Wallet/Pay/Wallet. (I do use microG to get push notifications and embedded maps working.)
Apple already have a huge chunk of the ad pie and are growing all the time. Dont think Apple are keeping you safe from ads and all the profiling of your behaviour that involves.
Apple are still far less reliant on advertising than google; They take far stricter stances against apps tracking users than google; And they actually let me an Adblock extension (or any other extension) in Safari.
Apple is not some magic solution to the question of on-device privacy. But compared to Android, the improvement is night and day.
Android has been a brutal disappointment on this front since the day it launched. Sure, you could hack various devices and spend too much time on xda-developers and get custom ROMs, but if you compare that to the openness of even a stock Windows PC it's an absolute joke. Android was supposed to be the open Linux phone, when I bought my HTC G1 full of hope; turned into an inferior iPhone wannabe with worse performance and a low quality walled garden that keeps most people in without keeping the trash out.
Ironically, LLMs are pretty good at finding stuff like that from vague descriptions. With that, I think the parent commenter meant Art Graesser's AutoTutor work based on the terminology used (hint/pump).
TLDR: Actual human tutoring sessions were recorded and analyzed and Socratic questioning was barely used at all. Instead the following pattern was observed:
Pump — "Uh huh?" "What else?" Costs nothing, so try it first.
Hint — points at the region of the answer. "What about the pumpkin's motion sideways?"
Prompt — fishes for one specific word, with the sentence frame supplied. "The pumpkin keeps moving forward at the same ___?"
Assertion — just says it. "It keeps the runner's horizontal velocity."
Yes, you're on the money. And this is a perfect example of how people should use llms. Use them to deepen your own research and understanding rather than use them to glaze and implement the first naive idea that comes into your head (or the first idea they suggest as a response to a vague prompt, which typically is substantially worse than if you get them into the right vector space using jargon)
They do maintain the Transformers library which is pretty much the core library for how you interact with LLM models in the open source world. So while they weren't using a model they've trained, they were a part of making just about all of the open models (maybe excluding OpenAI and Google's, I wouldn't be surprised if they have their own frameworks that predate the Transformers library).
3.6 Flash scores exactly the same as 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis index. Better on some tasks, worse on others. Mostly within what I'd consider the noise window. Looks pretty much indistinguishable from 3.5 Flash, at least on these benchmarks: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash
For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
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