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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
Part 1 was discussed here: ML promises to be profoundly weird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (571 comments)
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- bfmalky 6mo ago> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act NSFW blog content on HN? Really?
- timcobb 6mo agoWoah you can't see this in the UK? Without age verification? Update: there's a section called "Pornography". It does not contain pornography.
- pcdevils 6mo agoIt's not blocked By the UK, he's put a country filter on it Like all the US sites that decided to block.the EU over gdpr because turning off tracking was too much effort
- embedding-shape 6mo agoWork fine in Spain, so lets not jump on the all to typical EU-made-the-internet-suck bandwagon all too quickly. Seems this is a UK problem. But what do I know, I actually read the error message.
- andrewaylett 6mo agoIt's the author's problem with the UK (and the UK's Online Safety Act, which establishes requirements on hosts that can't be avoided by merely not being in the UK), rather than the UK's problem with the author. But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.
- pseudalopex 6mo agoVisitors are subject to UK law.
- railgunmerlin 6mo agoperhaps the safety filter is wrong instead of the post?
- bitwize 6mo agoMost likely it's a protest. Badplace passed Badlaw, so residents of Badplace can't see my content, so nyah! But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.
- Slackwise 6mo agoThis is not a safety filter. The owner/author is explicitly geolocation IP blocking UK users: https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-nginx https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n...
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- benrmatthews 6mo agohttps://archive.is/c3ggq https://archive.is/c3ggq
- minebreaker 6mo agoHe has an article for that https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-nginx https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n... > This is, to be clear, a bad solution. MaxMind’s free database is not particularly precise, and in general IP lookup tables are chasing a moving target. I know for a fact that there are people in non-UK countries (like Ireland!) who have been inadvertently blocked by these lookup tables. Making those people use Tor or a VPN sucks, but I don’t know what else to do in the current regulatory environment.
- talkingtab 6mo agoOur collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.
- anigbrowl 6mo agoThere's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo agoIt's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of the population, and they're strongly attracted to money, power, attention, and status. So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image. Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.
- XorNot 6mo agoFrankly, who are these people? Because this is just another "they" idle conspiracy theory. "They" are against me. Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.
- anigbrowl 6mo agoI was thinking specifically of political pundits who are doing a roaring trade (in opinion columns, TV hits, book promotions etc) talking about authoritarianism and its many causal factors. They're curiously mute when it comes to discussing solutions, with very generic advice like 'go to a protest' or 'vote for the opposition' despite the abundant evidence from authoritarian regimes around the world of these tactics not being very effective. You never hear them talk about things like general strikes or mass civil disobedience campaigns for some reason.
- spaghetdefects 6mo agoThis has already happened with media for the past 100+ years. We're shown what companies and governments want us to see. People develop parasocial relationships with people they see on tv...
- mzajc 6mo ago> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…” May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)
- underlipton 6mo agoThere's literally an ad for Amazon's Alexa devices that features not just the gist of your example, but that specific cause of death (which is itself predated by a murderous digital intelligence doing the same thing in AMC's Pantheon series). Guys I thought it was the fire next time.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoAlso, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.
- throwanem 6mo agoEh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the miniseries does concern itself.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoYou're right, not necessarily AI, more so what an omniscient and omnipotent device could do especially in the wrong hands.
- observationist 6mo agoWhat's the difference between the idle imaginings of a god's mind and a universe scale simulation? I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.
- apsurd 6mo agoBest line: > I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all. It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care? (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)
- rdevilla 6mo ago> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.
- jspash 6mo agoWith the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.
- gcheong 6mo agoIf there is anything left to come back to.
- usefulcat 6mo agoMore likely you’ll return to an industry utterly swamped in technical debt.
- pocksuppet 6mo agoYou could be the only one producing sane products in an insane world. But you won't get paid for it. The people mandating Claude Code are the people dictating large-scale money flows.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that. Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.
- notpachet 6mo ago> I can think of a few good myths for today’s “AI”. Searle’s Chinese room comes to mind, as does Chalmers’ philosophical zombie. Peter Watts’ Blindsight draws on these concepts to ask what happens when humans come into contact with unconscious intelligence—I think the closest analogue for LLM behavior might be Blindsight’s Rorschach. LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.
- rdevilla 6mo agoSpeaking of myths, pixies, and spirits: > I. DEFINITION: > MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. > (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct. > I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.) - Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01 https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01
- grehbies 6mo agoOil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells. Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler). -Me, "Early Morning Bed Thoughts", a few months ago.
- julianeon 6mo agoIf fear is the mind-killer, then sexy chatbots are the libido-killer, for me. Hard no.
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- _doctor_love 6mo agoIf 'aphyr is reading comments here, I'm curious: have you read Joseph Weizenbaum?
- aphyr 6mo agoI read a fair bit about Eliza when I was young, but I don't recall if any of those were from Weizenbaum himself!
- _doctor_love 6mo agoSee Computer Power and Human Reason - many powerful lessons in there.
- sethev 6mo agoIt's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.
- forgetfreeman 6mo agoIs it? The observation seems patently obvious if one has even the most superficial understanding of how LLMs work? Why is this not common knowledge?
- elzbardico 6mo agoUnderstanding LLMs require a few pieces of knowledge that are not very common in the industry, not only ML stuff, but I think that having worked in the past with NLP helps a lot.
- forgetfreeman 6mo agoI fucked around with dissociate press 30 years ago just to see what would happen if you fed it a combination of random chapters from Alice in Wonderland and the book of Revelations. This hardly represents insider knowledge.
- wolvesechoes 6mo agoGood article, but I cannot help myself to not bring up lack of appreciation for humanities in tech circles. Article mentions Searle and Chalmers, but we literally have at least two centuries of critical thought that expressed itself through Nietzsche, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, and many others (obviously I am mentioning those I am most familiar with). If you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, you'll find that slop isn't something that had arisen in last few years. If you read Discipline and Punish you'll find that surveillance and coercion isn't a problem that was born with internet or Palantir. And Baudrillard had few words to say about simulation and reality. But STEM crowds for decades cried we don't need such thinking, and science and technology are all that we need. Historians, philosophers, culture critics etc. supposedly have nothing to offer us. Who needs to read Marx or Marcuse if sci-fi novels offer all you need, maybe sprinkled with some PG essays and blogpost from you favorite tech blogger, and we happen to live in the best of possible worlds with the best of possible economic systems.
- Nevermark 6mo ago> Bored houseboys might download licensed (or bootleg) imitations of popular personalities and set them loose in their home “AI terraria”, à la The Sims, where they’d live out ever-novel Real Housewives plotlines. I can't wait to put myself into a sim world and give myself super powers. Statistically, I should already be one of them. But where are my powers? It's another Fermi paradox for sure. The workaround is to schedule the creation of many many copies of myself, each with its own sim world, just after I fall asleep. So I will have an arbitrarily certain chance of waking up as one of those copies, and the ability to fly.