> When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do?
They'll hire the person who knows AI, not the human clinging onto claims of artisanal character by character code.
It's entirely possible to engineer well-designed and intentional systems with AI tools and not stochastically "vibe" your way into tech debt.
AI engineers will get hiring preference. That is until we're all replaced by full agentic engineering. And that's coming.
Here are just some of the things you can do with tracking:
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
I disagree with almost all of your political opinions, and some of your positions I very much hate. But we should be free to have the argument, without the thread of handcuffs or the threat of starvation. Although I use my real name here, sometimes I prefer not to, and that should be allowed.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
Regardless of how we (mis?)align on social and economic issues, we should align on dislike of authoritarianism and surveillance. It is our common enemy.
----
Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:
> "your team"
Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with some others.
I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.
But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as potentially dangerous as this one issue.
Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).
These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
> ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
The government can do a whole lot more than embarrass CEOs and powerful people they don't like. Look at how China controls its tech CEOs by making them disappear until their views align.
You've accurately described what could happen with right-wing authoritarians in power. You've not described what could happen with left-wing authoritarians in power.
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get waaaay worse.
We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.
The problem is that, as a constituency, we are and have always been a tiny minority. Call and vote all you want, it won't change a thing because most people just don't care - or at least don't care enough. And there aren't any good (as far as they are concerned) arguments to convince them otherwise.
My understanding is that Abraham Lincoln literally had all the nation's telegraph lines routed through DC during the civil war, and AT&T has been an honorary branch of the US government ever since.
Are you the same "you" that went to sleep last night? (Thought experiment: what if we die every night we go to bed? Seriously consider this for a moment.)
Are "you" a "you" at all?
What if "you" is just a prediction machine linked to prediction capability + history + planning + objectives + online learning? Your memories are just seasoning for the weights?
Personality, nostalgia and frisson are just hallucinations of experience. Biochemical complexity feels alive and conscious in large numbers and at scale, but it's all simple physics.
Microtubule dynamic instability etc. etc. is just how evolution stumbled upon a runtime learning algorithm. It's not the only solution.
I'd be even happier if everyone adopted the old school Lotus 1-2-3 password behavior.
I was much too young to use it myself, but I saw other people log in and it was amazing.
The glyphs denoting hidden password characters changed on every keystroke to indicate you were typing. And IIRC, they were cool characters like Egyptian hieroglyphs too. (Presumably this wasn't some hash of your actual password - that would actually be dumb. I do think it indicated password length, which could give away info, but it's also useful for the user.)
You're thinking of Lotus Notes, a completely different product.
IIRC, originally it echoed one glyph per character typed, but later it definitely echoed 1 to 3 glyphs at random so it wouldn't leak your password length.
The password thing was pretty cool, but it's literally the only good thing about Lotus Notes, which was the most archaic and primitive piece of commercial GUI software I've ever used in 45 years of software experience. I last used it in 2003, and even then its UI was so archaic, it didn't adhere to behaviors (like keybindings, and other basic UI elements) that had been standard since the 80s.
I need speakerphone when I'm home alone and attempting to be on a phone call while doing other things. Some of those calls are even about instructing me to look for something, so it necessitates me to be moving about. Speakerphone is an incredibly useful utility.
Don't take functionality away because of a few bad actors. That'd be like getting rid of drones because a few people are assholes.
Put rules in place to correct the bad behavior. Kicking them off planes seems fair.
This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.
We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.
> We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
> How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.
Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.
Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside.
The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business.
Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster.
Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort.
We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.
This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world.
Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
I'm pretty confused about what your point is at this point. No one can throw rocks at an open source effort, except for ones that cross a certain threshold of capital? I don't buy the argument that it's impossible for any company smaller than Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. to be a bad actor who deserves to be called out. I don't know enough about Deno to make my own judgment on whether they're a bad actor or not, but I don't find your arguments here to be particularly compelling that trying to criticize them is unfair.
I will agree with the sentiment that a lot of these companies even pivot from open source because its quite hard to make money from open source in general, and yes the point of hyperscalers taking the same code and selling it as their own service at cheaper rates/ more integratability with other suite of products is also another point.
The hyper scalers are built on running and offering managed versions of open source software (Linux, reddis, postgres, elastic, java, python, JavaScript/node, docker, kubernetes,etc)
That's cute to think that they're unrelated, but open source is fundamentally about freedom.
The walls around us are constantly being built up and caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more of the commons.
The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel, communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from us.
Open source is just a family of licenses. Nobody is "open source". There is no single entity nor there is a single unified community with shared values behind it. There are just many many projects/applications developped by entitites completely different in nature from the single hobbyist developer to the giant hyperscalers you mention with pretty much everything inbetween with vastly different goals, sizes, profesionalism, funding. And there are many different reasons to choose an open source license, some do it to attract contributions, others for the freedom it offers to the users and developpers, some want to force the license to stay the same, others do not mind if forks are proprietary, some companies will just do that for the optics/marketing and have more featureful version of their product sold under a proprietary license, etc, etc. You can't just put them all under a single "open source" banner and pretend "they" (whoever they are) need to fight against anyone else.
Rust is accessible to everyone now that Claude Code and Opus can emit it at a high proficiency level.
Rust is designed so the error handling is ergonomic and fits into the flow of the language and the type system. Rust code will be lower defect rate by default.
Plus it's faster and doesn't have a GC.
You can use Rust now even if you don't know the language. It's the best way to start learning Rust.
The learning curve is not as bad as people say. It's really gentle.
We're rarely going to need to attest anything is "real" or "human". It's basically only going to matter in civil and criminal court, and IDV.
We don't need to attest signals are analogue vs. digital. The world is going to adapt to the use of Gen AI in everything. The future of art, communications, and productivity will all be rooted in these tools.
It’s probably a mixture of things including direct control over how the api is called and used as pointed out above and giving a discount for using their ecosystem. They are in fact a business so it should not surprise anyone they act as one.
It might well be a mixture, but 95% of that mixture is vendor lock in. Same reason they don't support AGENTS.md, they want to add friction in switching.
It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.
They'll hire the person who knows AI, not the human clinging onto claims of artisanal character by character code.
It's entirely possible to engineer well-designed and intentional systems with AI tools and not stochastically "vibe" your way into tech debt.
AI engineers will get hiring preference. That is until we're all replaced by full agentic engineering. And that's coming.
reply