4 ms·

I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is. Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a

by nunez 5mo ago

I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is. Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.

oredbored 5mo ago
[flagged]
snapplebobapple 5mo ago
Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo
- snapplebobapple 5mo ago
  man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.
  - eszed 5mo ago
    Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-) For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
    - Gormo 5mo ago
      There are plenty of people who care about the underlying concerns that "anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement" is trying to correct, but recognize that the only mechanism ever proposed for addressing those concerns usually involves concentrating ever more power into the hands of an even larger and less accountable monopoly. The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else. A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
      - eszed 5mo ago
        I agree with (very, very, nearly) everything you say - particularly about the naivety of the "left"'s assumptions about political interventions being necessarily well-intentioned and competent. On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it. The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.
        Gormo 5mo ago
        > The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics. We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions. I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.
        eszed 5mo ago
        Indeed. That's the failure mode into which several (at least) western democracies seem to be tipping. Russia, among other states, is all the way down that "performative democracy (only)" road. Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    > upvoted +5 Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
    - snapplebobapple 5mo ago
      yah, I was on there in the literal 90's and drifted away in the late 2000's. It's still in my rss reader but I never look at it anymore. Other places have a better smattering of news I care about and I never see tech or other things I am interested there first. It probably was going down hill at rob Malda was prepping to leave and then left but I noticed it in the quality of the output and drifted away more than anything. Did it turn into a virtue signalling cess pool along with reddit and the large portions of the web after I left?
  - verisimi 5mo ago
    I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.
acdha 5mo ago
I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product. New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
- nunez 5mo ago
  > New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed. Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful. Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
  - acdha 5mo ago
    I think we’re talking about the same thing but slightly differently: I was thinking more narrowly — someone who graduated this year certainly heard that their degree would be in demand, in many cases that’s why they chose it, but they know now that they’re not going to personally experience that favorable job market.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1] That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied. I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW? [1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-lower-value-human-capital-with-ai-13545809 https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...
xantronix 5mo ago
Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?
- Gormo 5mo ago
  Perhaps some of the same people and organizations who have poured funding into AI firms that have yet to attain profitability.
wwweston 5mo ago
And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.
bluegatty 5mo ago
No, the narratives are flooding in all directions. A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight. AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
> Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA. That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.
tim333 5mo ago
The graduation messages along the lines of well done for studying years but it's redundant because AI can do that might well get booed without any astroturf.
tencentshill 5mo ago
That was literally coordinated action. They distributed fliers at the event, and it was mostly due to his sexual assault allegations. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-booed-at-university-of-arizona-graduation-amid-sex-pest-allegations/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-boo...
- nunez 5mo ago
  so why did the boos grow loudest every time he mentioned how AI is the future? and why did that real estate lady who gave a speech at UCF get the same treatment whenever she (also) said that AI is the future?
ekianjo 5mo ago
Half of the booers boo because others boo.

by nunez 5mo ago

oredbored 5mo ago

[flagged]

snapplebobapple 5mo ago

Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo

snapplebobapple 5mo ago
man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.
- eszed 5mo ago
  Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-) For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
  - Gormo 5mo ago
    There are plenty of people who care about the underlying concerns that "anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement" is trying to correct, but recognize that the only mechanism ever proposed for addressing those concerns usually involves concentrating ever more power into the hands of an even larger and less accountable monopoly. The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else. A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
    - eszed 5mo ago
      I agree with (very, very, nearly) everything you say - particularly about the naivety of the "left"'s assumptions about political interventions being necessarily well-intentioned and competent. On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it. The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.
      - Gormo 5mo ago
        > The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics. We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions. I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.
        eszed 5mo ago
        Indeed. That's the failure mode into which several (at least) western democracies seem to be tipping. Russia, among other states, is all the way down that "performative democracy (only)" road. Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.
- danaris 5mo ago
  > upvoted +5 Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
  - snapplebobapple 5mo ago
    yah, I was on there in the literal 90's and drifted away in the late 2000's. It's still in my rss reader but I never look at it anymore. Other places have a better smattering of news I care about and I never see tech or other things I am interested there first. It probably was going down hill at rob Malda was prepping to leave and then left but I noticed it in the quality of the output and drifted away more than anything. Did it turn into a virtue signalling cess pool along with reddit and the large portions of the web after I left?
- verisimi 5mo ago
  I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.

acdha 5mo ago

I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product. New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.

nunez 5mo ago
> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed. Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful. Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
- acdha 5mo ago
  I think we’re talking about the same thing but slightly differently: I was thinking more narrowly — someone who graduated this year certainly heard that their degree would be in demand, in many cases that’s why they chose it, but they know now that they’re not going to personally experience that favorable job market.
somenameforme 5mo ago
Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1] That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied. I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW? [1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-lower-value-human-capital-with-ai-13545809 https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...

xantronix 5mo ago

Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?

Gormo 5mo ago
Perhaps some of the same people and organizations who have poured funding into AI firms that have yet to attain profitability.

wwweston 5mo ago

And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.

bluegatty 5mo ago

No, the narratives are flooding in all directions. A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight. AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago

> Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA. That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.

tim333 5mo ago

The graduation messages along the lines of well done for studying years but it's redundant because AI can do that might well get booed without any astroturf.

tencentshill 5mo ago

That was literally coordinated action. They distributed fliers at the event, and it was mostly due to his sexual assault allegations. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-booed-at-university-of-arizona-graduation-amid-sex-pest-allegations/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-boo...

nunez 5mo ago
so why did the boos grow loudest every time he mentioned how AI is the future? and why did that real estate lady who gave a speech at UCF get the same treatment whenever she (also) said that AI is the future?

ekianjo 5mo ago

Half of the booers boo because others boo.