The xz utils issue very likely included intentional efforts on the state actor to burn them out. That isn't something a culture change among users can fix.
Funny how Gemini generally takes into account all the words you type whereas Google search tends to ignore most words you type or otherwise direct you to results for thematically (or grammatically or semantically) similar words to what you searched but otherwise wholly irrelevant.
Google crippling search to bolster AI is a dangerous game. But without people going to competitors, what's the recourse?
They're already crippling their AI to perform what look like sponsored searches.
The plural of anecdote is not data but this does not feel like a one-off thing: I was trying to find where it would be possible to get to have a reasonable holiday, and asked Gemini to list me all the international airports in two named countries that had direct flights from my preferred departure airport. The response came back with a single proposed flight destination with "book here" prominently available.
Only once I told it that the search was NOT an impulse purchase intent and I really wanted to know the possible destinations - then did it actually come back with the list of airports that satisfied my search criteria.
Although if we are looking for the bright side, it did provide a valid and informative answer on the second try. I haven't had that kind of experience on SEO-infested Google search for quite a long time now.
I am so very tired of people who compare AI to smart phones or the Internet as large.
There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.
Nobody is "shaming" anybody into using AI but their jobs may require use of it. It's the same as all the secretaries who found themselves having to make the jump from the typewriter to the computer.
Bullshit. Comparing AI to smart phones and the Internet is an overt effort to shame readers into believing that not embracing AI is the equivalent to refusing to use smart phones or the Internet.
Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently.
How am I supposed to respond to someone who directly contradicts their own argument immediately after making it?
"I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though".
This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind".
It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince.
First, the guidelines apply no matter who or what you are replying to. If it were okay to ignore the guidelines any time we found a particular comment unpalatable, there'd be no point having them.
Second, your participation in the thread began as fulmination, with “I am so very tired of people who...”, and then continues in this belligerent style right through to your reply to me...
> This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented
> It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince
This style of argumentation is beneath what we're hoping for on HN, as it paints a simplistic conspiracy theory or narrow commercial incentive as the only plausible explanation for a trend. Things are never that simple, and arguments like that shut off curiosity, when the primary purpose of HN is to cultivate more curiosity.
I am not positing any sort of conspiracy. The sentiment is also frequented by people who have no commercial incentive to say it - possibly a result of a successful marketing campaign, possibly a conclusion they came to independently, or possibly some other reason - the reason is not something I would know. But I stand by my assertion that the argument is primarily an appeal to emotion - fear. And I do not see how acknowledging that (albeit in a less emotive way than I initially did) is beneath the standards of discussion for HN.
That said - I can keep my fulminations to myself and phrase my posts in a less confrontational manner. Those aren't exactly conducive to productive discussion.
If you think that people starting to use computers in their jobs (or even in their personal lives) was a completely seamless and controversy-free affair, you must be pretty young (or I must be getting old, as I definitely remember it).
I mean, it's still ongoing! Tons of people prefer to do things the analog way, and it's certainly not for a lack of companies trying, as the analog way is usually much more expensive.
In their personal lives, everybody should of course be free to do what they want, but I also doubt that zero people have been fired for e.g. refusing to train to use a computer and email because they preferred the aesthetics of typewriters or handwritten memos and physical intra-office mail.
Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.
And was there this massive, aggressive effort by a tiny handful of companies to mandate software developers use the Internet? Because I seem to recall people generally willingly choosing to use it as opposed to the aggressive efforts by blue chip tech companies to force the public at large to use it.
No matter what OpenAI or Nvidia says, they cannot force the developers of some company to use AI. They simply lack power to do this directly (with a very few exceptions, like their subcontractors)
What they can do, however, is they can run heavy advertising campaign targeted at executives. And once executives are convinced, they will write AI policies, and some will force their workers to use AI.
And this has been happening all the time, the examples are too numerous.
Executives decided the shops will now use computerized registers. The cashiers had to adopt, or get fired.
Executives decided - no more typewriters. All documents must be written in Microsoft Word, stored in Sharepoint. The workers have to learn Microsoft Word and Sharepoint or get fired.
Executives decided that that engineers (not computer ones, mechanical ones) should use CAD instead of drafting machines. The amount of engineers who were "let go" because they were protractor head wizards but could not figure out the mouse was truly large.
For something closer to CS, there was version control, automated tests, git, github... In a lot of cases, people where not "willingly choosing it" - if the rest of your team started using SourceSafe, you can't keep using your favorite shared folder anymore, not if you want others to see your results.
"willingly choosing it" only works for personal projects, it is never guaranteed for hired workers.
The endless copilot integrations and promotions and insistence of nudges from Microslop, Google search mandating AI usage without going well beyond what most users know to avoid it, misleading YouTube video summaries.....these are all examples you cannot meaningfully opt out of that goes well beyond advertising to executives.
It's been relatively easy to be a professional software developer for 40 years working on robust isolated applications that don't rely on or require the internet.
It was sold though it sure as hell wasn't to Rupert Murdoch. In 2016, Univision Communications bought a controlling stake in The Onion (during the election season) and later sold to private equity company Great Hill Partners in 2019.
Right, there's probably no other phone in the world that typically stops for hours within 1000 feet of my bed and typically stops on Monday-Friday within 1000 feet of my work-desk.
If all you've got is full political power and control over propaganda networks, your won't get the USSR. You'll get Hungary between 2010 and 2026. It works well, but in the critical moments when things start going wrong you need to kill people to maintain power, or else your nascent autocracy collapses as quick as Orban's.
I'm no fun of Stalin, but this meme about 20+ million victims needs to be purged.
"The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000[ deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era." [0]
Would it be? I'd argue the current US administration is entirely propped up by television. Hell, the president seems to "rule" based on what Fox News said last night.
A slightly different and no more charitable perspective is that the people pulling the president's strings are the same people pulling Fox News's strings.
Let's see, during Stalin's Rule 18 million people went through forced labor camps and roughly 10% died, around 1.8 million
Let's add around 5 million for man made famine, and probably a 2 million for arbitrary executions and deportations, while many estimate the full death count as between 15-20 million
As far I can understand the top range of estimates for CECOT, which is a non American facility, are that 500 died, of around imprisoned 20,000 inmates. So the scale is a bit... different
I think the issue here is that contrary to popular belief, not every wrong thing is the same
Death rates are particularly hard to compare because part of the idea of El Salvador's system is that people are expected to die there - there is no release policy - yet most of them are young healthy men recently detained.
If we just look at incarceration rates:
CECOT is one facility, but around 2% of El Salvador's population has been imprisoned by Bukele's operation.
In 1950 the USSR had a population of around 180 million, and the gulag system was at its height with a population of 2.5 million, very similar.
The US prison system has been around 1% from the peak of the War On Drugs until recent fads in liberalized sentencing, currently holding at 0.7%, one of the highest in the world if you exclude ethnic purges like Xinjiang or Gaza.
Imagine how lost your morale compass needs to be to defend Stalin because you don't like Trump.
Apart for the fact that people were released from El Salvador system, the population percentage is wrong for El Salvador, USSR and US, the difference between slavery camps and a penal system, Gaza not being a prison.
But what are you really saying, that the 200-500 dead in El Salvador, most non associated with Trump, makes Trump equivalent with Stalin's 15 million dead? Does that make sense?
I think this begs the question of what anonymous data means. Sure my visit to HN is "anonymous" in that it doesn't say "abustamam visited this site" but piece together all the other visits that have my "anonymous ID" then eventually it paints a pretty nice picture of who I am.
My point is that even completely anonymous data that conforms to what you just said can easily become de-anonymized when contextualized to other "anonymous" data.
> A marketer's definition of anonymized is worthless. It's a fantasy they want everyone else to believe in.
I'm using your definition.
> Does it map to a single, identifiable person or something close enough that the distinction is meaningless?
Also
> If it can be "de-anonymized" then it was never anonymous to begin with.
Well sure, that's the point I was trying to make in my rhetorical question above. Individual pieces of data may be "anonymous" but put together with other anonymous data that can be traced to a single source and suddenly you can figure out quite easily who this person is. The data itself is still technically anonymous but it can be pieced together.
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