5 ms·

America Lost the Mandate of Heaven

99 points by mefengl 6mo ago

ben_w 6mo ago
> Take the Mythos vulnerability finding thing. They didn’t just point Mythos at the codebase and say go, they built a harness where they asked it about each piece of code and if it was vulnerable. They triaged and spent more time looking at things that were flagged more, until eventually they passed it up to “uppper management” aka the people. > You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities? Imagine, sure. But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity. AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription. That's the danger. * by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fusa%20population http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...
- conartist6 6mo ago
  It's not a question of quality. If you wanted quality, a motivated team of humans still can't be beat. That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
  - ben_w 6mo ago
    A motivated team of humans is neither necessary nor sufficient for quality (an individual can be high quality, a team can mess up); but even if it was, there's not enough people for such teams to re-examine all the code. This is because the code that actually exists was made by unmotivated teams at varying skill levels from intern upwards. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, a thousand lines inside a if statement's main block, an entire pantheon of god classes in a single project, something something like tears in rain. > That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them 1) They report increasingly using AI to improve the AI. 2) Apples to oranges. The best humans can still beat AI in *AI research, per unit time*, but the AI beat the typical team at *finding exploitable bugs, per line of source, per unit cost*.
- morkalork 6mo ago
  There was another article where they basically said their security company's practice was hiring a bunch of eatsern European zoomers, giving them vyvanse and the codebase to examine
pm90 6mo ago
I was expecting a more nuanced article that talked about the “Suez Moment” in America but this is basically a (not even a good) critique of deindustrialization.
- Phui3ferubus 6mo ago
  I don't expect anything from the guy who declared self driving cars are easy, everyone is just doing it wrong, and he could do it better in a just a year; 5 years ago. The fame totally went to his head :P It is somewhat common issue for Nobel award winners, in this case the scope is limited "I am great at security and reverse engineering, that makes me an expert for anything IT related".
  - 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
    Nobel Nacre.. The nobelprize is hyper destructive to the scientists receiving it. Its hard to one up from there or return to your field- everyone is bombarding you with high expectations. You can only fail after you received olympic gold. Thus, as scientists inflict change on society, and society hates change, it is like a oyster, trying to protect itself from a grain of sand, wrapping it in Nacre, protecting itself from further change, by encapsulating the changing factor which remains neutered from its ability to do science.
    - daymanstep 6mo ago
      Nobel prize is usually awarded many years after the work was done and by the time its awarded the scientist is usually well past their prime
      - curio_Pol_curio 6mo ago
        GP might be making a prediction about Demis Hassabis, who happens to break the mold you've just described (but he is not a member of "the Physics community" so their expectations won't mean anything to him?)
  - 6mo ago
derelicta 6mo ago
The US Empire has reached the limit of its capitalistic mode of production. Now is time for Americans to consider the next step of any industrialised capitalist society; scientific socialism. It did wonder for China, Vietnam, and many more, and it can do wonders for the American people too.
- BirAdam 6mo ago
  Except that America is not, and never has been, capitalist. Much like socialism or communism, capitalism has never been achieved. The closest I know any society to have come is the USA between the late 1860s and 1913. Yet, that still wasn’t a capitalist society. Half of the country was under military occupation, people were forced to segregate by law, and the USA was conquering people militarily and committing genocide in the Philippines. For capitalism to exist, people would be sacrificing in the present for investment in the future in a free market. There are no free markets, and the world operates under financialism where the future is sacrificed for the present via debt based currency and debt based capital markets. The most free market of the last 70 years has been information technology, and that is slowly changing. As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete. To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
  - Luker88 6mo ago
    > There are no free markets Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital. > As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action. When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair". When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated". You don't get "fair" without regulation.
kdilner 6mo ago
[flagged]
- robot_jesus 6mo ago
  It’s typical to complain about AI slop that hits the front page here, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the (presumably) human-written content is slop in its own right. This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
- jamesrom 6mo ago
  That egotist got you to create an account to post that.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago
    I think loads of people regularly create new accounts. Also the HN account creation process is quite painless.
roenxi 6mo ago
> It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t. As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity. > A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people. The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones. There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it. > Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid. And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths. [0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
- fakedang 6mo ago
  China's actually far ahead in the AI adoption race for manufacturing. They're investing heavily into hardware AI, robotics and the like. The only reason we're not seeing fears akin to the US is because the financialization isn't as intense, layoffs are still controlled, and the population is aging out of employment.
vrganj 6mo ago
Yes, America is a declining empire, but it has nothing to do with the reasons listed. Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top. Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all. The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
oezi 6mo ago
The article is certainly firebranding, but the core tenet strikes a valid point: how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia? From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
- direwolf20 6mo ago
  America has never been that. With everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped working as well and people can see that it isn't.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > with everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
    - direwolf20 6mo ago
      TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against showing Americans what their country does.
      - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
        > TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against shooting Americans what their country does If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
        iamnothere 6mo ago
ipkstef 6mo ago
[dead]
expedition32 6mo ago
Providing healthcare isn't your employer's job it is something that comes from the government. It is the original sin of the American healthcare system. America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.
- croes 6mo ago
  It was never on the road to socialism. Social benefits doesn’t have anything to do with socialism
huflungdung 6mo ago
[dead]
roncesvalles 6mo ago
The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it. For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities. We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
- wrren 6mo ago
  To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries Compared with China?
    - frm88 6mo ago
      Yes. You can get unemployment insurance payout between 3 and 24 months: https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/ https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/ For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072. https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/ https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/
  - roncesvalles 6mo ago
    The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
    - 6mo ago
xg15 6mo ago
> I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation. > This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor. I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country). The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
rock_artist 6mo ago
> When I was younger I used to think more negatively about jobs, I even called it the jobs problem in my 2019 agentic coding startup template. I have since come around, the point of a society is the flourishing of its inhabitants. That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time. It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky. While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
- puchatek 6mo ago
  So... What's your point? Sounds like what you identify as key is not relevant to the remainder of your comment.
  - metalman 6mo ago
    since they did not state the obvious, I will. a stable society is strong, it's stability is founded on contingency planning, which must be backed up with excess reserve capacity, maintaining that capacity requires the will to resist the greed and avarice of those who would steal the reserves required to survive a contingency. The chinese call this "the turning of the wheel", the wheel bieng society/civilisation and loosing "the mandate of heaven" was essentialy a political statement, but there is something much worse they refer to, along with that, when the "princes fail in there duty" and society is no longer maintained, and becomes obsessed with luxury and debauchery, and wild excess, military adventurism, and neurosis. more than 3 millenia of observation is behind what may seem to be simplistic or fatalistic, unrealistic, but anyone who thinks that red button mandarins are gone is fooling them selves. the most devistating thing china has done, is to not vie for the mandate of heaven and accept that final judgement of what is.
  - scruple 6mo ago
    Their point is that the jobs problem or flourishing is a mechanical necessity for maintaining the Mandate and surviving whatever things come next.
havblue 6mo ago
A problem with politics now is it becomes a debate on Trump and sidesteps existential problems that we're facing and in favor of dunking on the other party. Stocks are going up when manufacturing isn't and the clumsy tarrif system we slapped on top of our economy isn't going to right the ship. I think the article is on the right track as we probably need more jobs related to building physical goods and not inflating the price of financial products. I'm just not sure if it goes far enough into a positive vision on what we should do to correct that.
adjejmxbdjdn 6mo ago
Imagine using Hong Kong as evidence of a good society and saying “No homelessness anywhere”. One of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, where people are living 4-6 to the room. This is simply expat navel gazing and little more.
- A_D_E_P_T 6mo ago
  Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Despite having a crazy expensive real estate market, there really is no visible homelessness. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and I can't recall seeing a homeless person even once. (To the extent they exist, it's heavily stigmatized and they hide out of sight, in tents in the woods.) What's more: > "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation" > https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.htm https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.... Sure, there's a wait-list, but it's available in principle to all of the needy.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
yellow_lead 6mo ago
> I saw a society that actually works for who lives here – not homeless everywhere, not isolation in cars, not blatant stagnation. > I know I know, that’s a socialist platitude or something, society that works. What they say right before they argue for a dumbass tax on billionaires or banning plastic straws. Don’t worry I still think most socialists are degrowth morons. > "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation" > https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.html https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.... American goes abroad, sees socialist policies working well, then advocates to get rid of socialist policies in America. From his other post: > The government should never ever hand out money to anyone. Not poor people, not old people, and not corporations. This creates a society of beggars and lobbyists. You get what you incentivize [1]. What should I expect though? The author couldn't even fix minor bugs in Twitter, and coding is much closer to his specialty than solving social problems. [1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
blactuary 6mo ago
This dude is an absolute nutcase, and a perfect example of being smart in one narrow domain and thinking it transfers to everything https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-... In another post he's quoting Curtis Yarvin. Can't say on here what should be said
- OutOfHere 6mo ago
  All the linked articles of his site read like nonsense to me, but also dangerous nonsense.
  - georgehotz 6mo ago
    Dangerous nonsense? That's my favorite kind of nonsense!
    - nofriend 6mo ago
      nonsense can have the excuse of being benign, and danger can have the excuse of being well thought out.
  - potsandpans 6mo ago
    Oh no, not "dangerous nonsense"!
Ferret7446 6mo ago
The number and complexity of vulns coming out of Mythos far surpasses human ability. No, hiring a bunch of people to do it instead would not work.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
BergAndCo 6mo ago
[dead]

99 points by mefengl 6mo ago

ben_w 6mo ago

> Take the Mythos vulnerability finding thing. They didn’t just point Mythos at the codebase and say go, they built a harness where they asked it about each piece of code and if it was vulnerable. They triaged and spent more time looking at things that were flagged more, until eventually they passed it up to “uppper management” aka the people. > You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities? Imagine, sure. But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity. AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription. That's the danger. * by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fusa%20population http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...

conartist6 6mo ago
It's not a question of quality. If you wanted quality, a motivated team of humans still can't be beat. That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
- ben_w 6mo ago
  A motivated team of humans is neither necessary nor sufficient for quality (an individual can be high quality, a team can mess up); but even if it was, there's not enough people for such teams to re-examine all the code. This is because the code that actually exists was made by unmotivated teams at varying skill levels from intern upwards. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, a thousand lines inside a if statement's main block, an entire pantheon of god classes in a single project, something something like tears in rain. > That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them 1) They report increasingly using AI to improve the AI. 2) Apples to oranges. The best humans can still beat AI in *AI research, per unit time*, but the AI beat the typical team at *finding exploitable bugs, per line of source, per unit cost*.
morkalork 6mo ago
There was another article where they basically said their security company's practice was hiring a bunch of eatsern European zoomers, giving them vyvanse and the codebase to examine

pm90 6mo ago

I was expecting a more nuanced article that talked about the “Suez Moment” in America but this is basically a (not even a good) critique of deindustrialization.

Phui3ferubus 6mo ago
I don't expect anything from the guy who declared self driving cars are easy, everyone is just doing it wrong, and he could do it better in a just a year; 5 years ago. The fame totally went to his head :P It is somewhat common issue for Nobel award winners, in this case the scope is limited "I am great at security and reverse engineering, that makes me an expert for anything IT related".
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
  Nobel Nacre.. The nobelprize is hyper destructive to the scientists receiving it. Its hard to one up from there or return to your field- everyone is bombarding you with high expectations. You can only fail after you received olympic gold. Thus, as scientists inflict change on society, and society hates change, it is like a oyster, trying to protect itself from a grain of sand, wrapping it in Nacre, protecting itself from further change, by encapsulating the changing factor which remains neutered from its ability to do science.
  - daymanstep 6mo ago
    Nobel prize is usually awarded many years after the work was done and by the time its awarded the scientist is usually well past their prime
    - curio_Pol_curio 6mo ago
      GP might be making a prediction about Demis Hassabis, who happens to break the mold you've just described (but he is not a member of "the Physics community" so their expectations won't mean anything to him?)
- 6mo ago

derelicta 6mo ago

The US Empire has reached the limit of its capitalistic mode of production. Now is time for Americans to consider the next step of any industrialised capitalist society; scientific socialism. It did wonder for China, Vietnam, and many more, and it can do wonders for the American people too.

BirAdam 6mo ago
Except that America is not, and never has been, capitalist. Much like socialism or communism, capitalism has never been achieved. The closest I know any society to have come is the USA between the late 1860s and 1913. Yet, that still wasn’t a capitalist society. Half of the country was under military occupation, people were forced to segregate by law, and the USA was conquering people militarily and committing genocide in the Philippines. For capitalism to exist, people would be sacrificing in the present for investment in the future in a free market. There are no free markets, and the world operates under financialism where the future is sacrificed for the present via debt based currency and debt based capital markets. The most free market of the last 70 years has been information technology, and that is slowly changing. As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete. To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
- Luker88 6mo ago
  > There are no free markets Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital. > As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action. When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair". When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated". You don't get "fair" without regulation.

kdilner 6mo ago

[flagged]

robot_jesus 6mo ago
It’s typical to complain about AI slop that hits the front page here, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the (presumably) human-written content is slop in its own right. This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
jamesrom 6mo ago
That egotist got you to create an account to post that.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago
  I think loads of people regularly create new accounts. Also the HN account creation process is quite painless.

roenxi 6mo ago

> It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t. As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity. > A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people. The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones. There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it. > Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid. And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths. [0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.

fakedang 6mo ago
China's actually far ahead in the AI adoption race for manufacturing. They're investing heavily into hardware AI, robotics and the like. The only reason we're not seeing fears akin to the US is because the financialization isn't as intense, layoffs are still controlled, and the population is aging out of employment.

vrganj 6mo ago

Yes, America is a declining empire, but it has nothing to do with the reasons listed. Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top. Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all. The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.

oezi 6mo ago

The article is certainly firebranding, but the core tenet strikes a valid point: how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia? From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.

direwolf20 6mo ago
America has never been that. With everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped working as well and people can see that it isn't.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > with everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
  - direwolf20 6mo ago
    TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against showing Americans what their country does.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against shooting Americans what their country does If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
      - iamnothere 6mo ago

ipkstef 6mo ago

[dead]

expedition32 6mo ago

Providing healthcare isn't your employer's job it is something that comes from the government. It is the original sin of the American healthcare system. America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.

croes 6mo ago
It was never on the road to socialism. Social benefits doesn’t have anything to do with socialism

huflungdung 6mo ago

[dead]

roncesvalles 6mo ago

The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it. For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities. We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.

wrren 6mo ago
To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries Compared with China?
  - frm88 6mo ago
    Yes. You can get unemployment insurance payout between 3 and 24 months: https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/ https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/ For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072. https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/ https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/
- roncesvalles 6mo ago
  The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
  - 6mo ago

xg15 6mo ago

> I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation. > This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor. I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country). The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.

rock_artist 6mo ago

> When I was younger I used to think more negatively about jobs, I even called it the jobs problem in my 2019 agentic coding startup template. I have since come around, the point of a society is the flourishing of its inhabitants. That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time. It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky. While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.

puchatek 6mo ago
So... What's your point? Sounds like what you identify as key is not relevant to the remainder of your comment.
- metalman 6mo ago
  since they did not state the obvious, I will. a stable society is strong, it's stability is founded on contingency planning, which must be backed up with excess reserve capacity, maintaining that capacity requires the will to resist the greed and avarice of those who would steal the reserves required to survive a contingency. The chinese call this "the turning of the wheel", the wheel bieng society/civilisation and loosing "the mandate of heaven" was essentialy a political statement, but there is something much worse they refer to, along with that, when the "princes fail in there duty" and society is no longer maintained, and becomes obsessed with luxury and debauchery, and wild excess, military adventurism, and neurosis. more than 3 millenia of observation is behind what may seem to be simplistic or fatalistic, unrealistic, but anyone who thinks that red button mandarins are gone is fooling them selves. the most devistating thing china has done, is to not vie for the mandate of heaven and accept that final judgement of what is.
- scruple 6mo ago
  Their point is that the jobs problem or flourishing is a mechanical necessity for maintaining the Mandate and surviving whatever things come next.

havblue 6mo ago

A problem with politics now is it becomes a debate on Trump and sidesteps existential problems that we're facing and in favor of dunking on the other party. Stocks are going up when manufacturing isn't and the clumsy tarrif system we slapped on top of our economy isn't going to right the ship. I think the article is on the right track as we probably need more jobs related to building physical goods and not inflating the price of financial products. I'm just not sure if it goes far enough into a positive vision on what we should do to correct that.

adjejmxbdjdn 6mo ago

Imagine using Hong Kong as evidence of a good society and saying “No homelessness anywhere”. One of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, where people are living 4-6 to the room. This is simply expat navel gazing and little more.

A_D_E_P_T 6mo ago
Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Despite having a crazy expensive real estate market, there really is no visible homelessness. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and I can't recall seeing a homeless person even once. (To the extent they exist, it's heavily stigmatized and they hide out of sight, in tents in the woods.) What's more: > "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation" > https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.htm https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.... Sure, there's a wait-list, but it's available in principle to all of the needy.

deleted 6mo ago

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yellow_lead 6mo ago

> I saw a society that actually works for who lives here – not homeless everywhere, not isolation in cars, not blatant stagnation. > I know I know, that’s a socialist platitude or something, society that works. What they say right before they argue for a dumbass tax on billionaires or banning plastic straws. Don’t worry I still think most socialists are degrowth morons. > "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation" > https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.html https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index.... American goes abroad, sees socialist policies working well, then advocates to get rid of socialist policies in America. From his other post: > The government should never ever hand out money to anyone. Not poor people, not old people, and not corporations. This creates a society of beggars and lobbyists. You get what you incentivize [1]. What should I expect though? The author couldn't even fix minor bugs in Twitter, and coding is much closer to his specialty than solving social problems. [1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...

blactuary 6mo ago

This dude is an absolute nutcase, and a perfect example of being smart in one narrow domain and thinking it transfers to everything https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-... In another post he's quoting Curtis Yarvin. Can't say on here what should be said

OutOfHere 6mo ago
All the linked articles of his site read like nonsense to me, but also dangerous nonsense.
- georgehotz 6mo ago
  Dangerous nonsense? That's my favorite kind of nonsense!
  - nofriend 6mo ago
    nonsense can have the excuse of being benign, and danger can have the excuse of being well thought out.
- potsandpans 6mo ago
  Oh no, not "dangerous nonsense"!

Ferret7446 6mo ago

The number and complexity of vulns coming out of Mythos far surpasses human ability. No, hiring a bunch of people to do it instead would not work.

deleted 6mo ago
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BergAndCo 6mo ago

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