6 ms·

In case someone reading this is thinking similar thoughts: there's no version of reality where doing this will solve any problem. Don't.

by avaer 6mo ago

s5300 6mo ago
[dead]
d3ff 6mo ago
Its not really about that though is it? The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on. A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  They’re some combination of deranged, depressed and looking for a thrill. In most countries they fail to stab someone. Here they have guns.
  - add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
    Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
    - d3ff 6mo ago
      [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > that's not necessarily the case for others Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
    - lesuorac 6mo ago
      Tyranny of a bunch of rich white men having to pay taxes lol. There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
      - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        >There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk. Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame. (the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
        collingreen 6mo ago
        Super good joke. Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
        cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        To a first order approximation half the founders were from New England (no slavery) and the other half were from Virginia (no realistic chance of being important/rich enough to be a signatory without owning slaves). So call it 50-50
    - abenga 6mo ago
      > a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny Do you have an example of such a country?
  - d3ff 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > There isnt a well known CEO in europe whos been the target of a failed stabbing Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP. If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
  - hackable_sand 6mo ago
    You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability. Here's your canary.
    - andsoitis 6mo ago
      > You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability. People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
      - hackable_sand 6mo ago
        Okay
      - s5300 6mo ago
        [dead]
      - c_o_n_v_e_x 6mo ago
        >People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
        munksbeer 6mo ago
        This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted. But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf. Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned. With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen. So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
- ikr678 6mo ago
  I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment. Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
esbranson 6mo ago
[flagged]
- alex1138 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - the_gastropod 6mo ago
    “I’m not right wing” “Antifa attacked a guy!” I’ve got news for you, friend!
    - alex1138 6mo ago
      [flagged]
- arcfour 6mo ago
  "The other side are where all of the bad guys and crazy violent lunatics are. The side I align with is the only sensible one; we would never do anything like that." This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want! It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
  - the_gastropod 6mo ago
    Nope. Both sides are not equivalent. The political right, in the U.S., has been significantly more violent than the political left for quite some time. And it’s not even close. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
    - esbranson 6mo ago
      > We included individuals whose public exposure occurred between 1948 and 2018. The times they are a-changin'.
ropetin 6mo ago
While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  I read this comment as saying that you (100-k)% do not support violence against Sam Altman, for some positive real number k.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
  - abenga 6mo ago
    The billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.
      - vkou 6mo ago
        > They don’t flip people on positions. They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq. Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11. A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess. Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
tptacek 6mo ago
This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side. All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context. I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
- afpx 6mo ago
  In high school the 90s, I learned about what the founding fathers said about violence. But, I guess that's too 18th century now.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lesuorac 6mo ago
    Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French. Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents. That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
    - afpx 6mo ago
      I meant more that we wouldn't have the Bill of Rights if it wasn't for Patrick Henry.
      - tptacek 6mo ago
        There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.
Rekindle8090 6mo ago
[flagged]
samrus 6mo ago
Interesting way to put it. If it did solve problems, you would be ok with it happening?
- __MatrixMan__ 6mo ago
  Not gp, but if they were exceptionally large problems... Yeah.
  - locao 6mo ago
    Violence is never but sometimes the answer.
- drivingmenuts 6mo ago
  If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
    > If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal. FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
    - ratrace 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - ivewonyoung 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - treetalker 6mo ago
        The truth is somewhere in the middle. Overview: https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/florida-gov-ron-desantis-oks-running-over-no-kings-protesters-fleeing/84182693007/ https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/fl...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
infamouscow 6mo ago
[flagged]
- kelseyfrog 6mo ago
  I'm all ears on what the non-violent resolution to the French Revolution some seem to think exists.
  - infamouscow 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vig...
    - kelseyfrog 6mo ago
      How would this have addressed the grievances the Third estate had with the cens, champart, corvée, and taille?
eudamoniac 6mo ago
[flagged]
asadotzler 6mo ago
[flagged]
tavavex 6mo ago
To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
- mbgerring 6mo ago
  We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it. We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
  - remarkEon 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - heylook 6mo ago
      This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
      - ethbr1 6mo ago
        Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history. Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it. Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance. Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence. Fix the issue: don't complain about the symptoms.
nsingh2 6mo ago
This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round. There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future. Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it. Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
- CaptWorld 6mo ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/are-unions-the-saviors-of-workers.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
  - nsingh2 6mo ago
    > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null. > https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/are-unions-the-saviors-of-workers.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar... Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
  - thrance 6mo ago
    Serf mindset like that won't get us very far...
hax0ron3 6mo ago
In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed. In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power". Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed. You know. In theory.
- red75prime 6mo ago
  Hitler survived 40 assassination attempts, BTW. I don't know what to make out of it. Non-professionals have low chance of success maybe?
- dTal 6mo ago
  >Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor. >it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
mancerayder 6mo ago
The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top. I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
- deleted 6mo ago
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- deleted 6mo ago
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- deleted 6mo ago
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- colpabar 6mo ago
  I love when the comments start out a little spicy, all the spicy comments get flagged or removed, and the top comment becomes "wow, I can't believe all these spicy comments, I thought HN was better than this."
minimaxir 6mo ago
Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse: > I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. > Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106
- ratmeadow 6mo ago
  I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit. Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context. [1] https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x
  - ItsHarper 6mo ago
    I think you meant condemn, but otherwise, well said.
    - ratmeadow 6mo ago
      Ah yes in the second paragraph I definitely meant condemn, thank you.
  - jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
    only on this site would people need a neuroscience lecture to understand elements of human nature that are apparent to most elementary schoolers
thefz 6mo ago
But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- red75prime 6mo ago
  Many members of the revolutionary tribunal lost their heads. Quite literally.
Arodex 6mo ago
There Is No Alternative, again?
Voultapher 6mo ago
This "violence never solved anything" mindset is in stark contrast with recorded history.
- ethbr1 6mo ago
  Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
- IAmGraydon 6mo ago
  I very much agree with you, but also consider that there has not been a single instance (I can think of) that violence was able to stop the spread of a new technology. The human race is just a moth to the flame, and it simply cannot resist.
- 7bit 6mo ago
  It goes both ways. Afrika Had eight military coups since 2020. Many of its countries are plagued by civil wars and terrorism. I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.
laughing_man 6mo ago
Agreed. I'm not, by any means, a fan of Altman's. But this kind of nonsense is counterproductive. By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.
lores 6mo ago
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish? The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power. Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
- mplanchard 6mo ago
  Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to wealth). I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
  - ndiddy 6mo ago
    In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.
- 6mo ago
hettygreen 6mo ago
found sam's account

In case someone reading this is thinking similar thoughts: there's no version of reality where doing this will solve any problem. Don't.

by avaer 6mo ago

In case someone reading this is thinking similar thoughts: there's no version of reality where doing this will solve any problem. Don't.

s5300 6mo ago

[dead]

d3ff 6mo ago

Its not really about that though is it? The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on. A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
They’re some combination of deranged, depressed and looking for a thrill. In most countries they fail to stab someone. Here they have guns.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
  Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
  - d3ff 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > that's not necessarily the case for others Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
  - lesuorac 6mo ago
    Tyranny of a bunch of rich white men having to pay taxes lol. There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
    - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      >There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk. Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame. (the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
      - collingreen 6mo ago
        Super good joke. Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
        cucumber3732842 6mo ago
        To a first order approximation half the founders were from New England (no slavery) and the other half were from Virginia (no realistic chance of being important/rich enough to be a signatory without owning slaves). So call it 50-50
  - abenga 6mo ago
    > a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny Do you have an example of such a country?
- d3ff 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > There isnt a well known CEO in europe whos been the target of a failed stabbing Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP. If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
- hackable_sand 6mo ago
  You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability. Here's your canary.
  - andsoitis 6mo ago
    > You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability. People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
    - hackable_sand 6mo ago
      Okay
    - s5300 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - c_o_n_v_e_x 6mo ago
      >People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
      - munksbeer 6mo ago
        This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted. But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf. Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned. With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen. So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
ikr678 6mo ago
I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment. Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.

esbranson 6mo ago

[flagged]

alex1138 6mo ago
[flagged]
- the_gastropod 6mo ago
  “I’m not right wing” “Antifa attacked a guy!” I’ve got news for you, friend!
  - alex1138 6mo ago
    [flagged]
arcfour 6mo ago
"The other side are where all of the bad guys and crazy violent lunatics are. The side I align with is the only sensible one; we would never do anything like that." This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want! It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
- the_gastropod 6mo ago
  Nope. Both sides are not equivalent. The political right, in the U.S., has been significantly more violent than the political left for quite some time. And it’s not even close. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
  - esbranson 6mo ago
    > We included individuals whose public exposure occurred between 1948 and 2018. The times they are a-changin'.

ropetin 6mo ago

While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.

tptacek 6mo ago
I read this comment as saying that you (100-k)% do not support violence against Sam Altman, for some positive real number k.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
- abenga 6mo ago
  The billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.
    - vkou 6mo ago
      > They don’t flip people on positions. They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq. Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11. A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess. Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.

tptacek 6mo ago

This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side. All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context. I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.

afpx 6mo ago
In high school the 90s, I learned about what the founding fathers said about violence. But, I guess that's too 18th century now.
- deleted 6mo ago
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- lesuorac 6mo ago
  Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French. Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents. That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
  - afpx 6mo ago
    I meant more that we wouldn't have the Bill of Rights if it wasn't for Patrick Henry.
    - tptacek 6mo ago
      There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.

Rekindle8090 6mo ago

[flagged]

samrus 6mo ago

Interesting way to put it. If it did solve problems, you would be ok with it happening?

__MatrixMan__ 6mo ago
Not gp, but if they were exceptionally large problems... Yeah.
- locao 6mo ago
  Violence is never but sometimes the answer.
drivingmenuts 6mo ago
If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
- WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
  > If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal. FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
  - ratrace 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - ivewonyoung 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - treetalker 6mo ago
      The truth is somewhere in the middle. Overview: https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/florida-gov-ron-desantis-oks-running-over-no-kings-protesters-fleeing/84182693007/ https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/fl...

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infamouscow 6mo ago

[flagged]

kelseyfrog 6mo ago
I'm all ears on what the non-violent resolution to the French Revolution some seem to think exists.
- infamouscow 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vig...
  - kelseyfrog 6mo ago
    How would this have addressed the grievances the Third estate had with the cens, champart, corvée, and taille?

eudamoniac 6mo ago

[flagged]

asadotzler 6mo ago

[flagged]

tavavex 6mo ago

To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.

mbgerring 6mo ago
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it. We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
- remarkEon 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - heylook 6mo ago
    This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
    - ethbr1 6mo ago
      Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history. Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it. Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance. Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence. Fix the issue: don't complain about the symptoms.

nsingh2 6mo ago

This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round. There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future. Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it. Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.

CaptWorld 6mo ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/are-unions-the-saviors-of-workers.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
- nsingh2 6mo ago
  > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null. > https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/are-unions-the-saviors-of-workers.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar... Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
- thrance 6mo ago
  Serf mindset like that won't get us very far...

hax0ron3 6mo ago

In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed. In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".

cindyllm 6mo ago
[dead]
bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power". Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed. You know. In theory.
red75prime 6mo ago
Hitler survived 40 assassination attempts, BTW. I don't know what to make out of it. Non-professionals have low chance of success maybe?
dTal 6mo ago
>Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor. >it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.

mancerayder 6mo ago

The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top. I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.

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colpabar 6mo ago
I love when the comments start out a little spicy, all the spicy comments get flagged or removed, and the top comment becomes "wow, I can't believe all these spicy comments, I thought HN was better than this."

minimaxir 6mo ago

Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse: > I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. > Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106

ratmeadow 6mo ago
I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit. Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context. [1] https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x
- ItsHarper 6mo ago
  I think you meant condemn, but otherwise, well said.
  - ratmeadow 6mo ago
    Ah yes in the second paragraph I definitely meant condemn, thank you.
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
  only on this site would people need a neuroscience lecture to understand elements of human nature that are apparent to most elementary schoolers

thefz 6mo ago

But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution

deleted 6mo ago
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red75prime 6mo ago
Many members of the revolutionary tribunal lost their heads. Quite literally.

Arodex 6mo ago

There Is No Alternative, again?

Voultapher 6mo ago

This "violence never solved anything" mindset is in stark contrast with recorded history.

ethbr1 6mo ago
Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
IAmGraydon 6mo ago
I very much agree with you, but also consider that there has not been a single instance (I can think of) that violence was able to stop the spread of a new technology. The human race is just a moth to the flame, and it simply cannot resist.
7bit 6mo ago
It goes both ways. Afrika Had eight military coups since 2020. Many of its countries are plagued by civil wars and terrorism. I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.

laughing_man 6mo ago

Agreed. I'm not, by any means, a fan of Altman's. But this kind of nonsense is counterproductive. By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.

lores 6mo ago

Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish? The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power. Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.

mplanchard 6mo ago
Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to wealth). I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
- ndiddy 6mo ago
  In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.
6mo ago

hettygreen 6mo ago

found sam's account