The desire to be "centrist" on HN is perplexing to me.
The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.
"Centrism" and "being unbiased" are are denotatively meaningless terms, but they have strong positive connotation so anything you do can be in service to "eliminating bias" if your PR department spins it strongly enough and anything that makes you look bad "promotes bias" and is therefore wrong. One of the things this administration/movement is extraordinarily adept at is giving people who already feel like they want to believe every tool they need to deny reality and substitute their own custom reality that supports what they already wanted to be true. Being able to say "That's just fake news. Everyone is biased." in response to any and all facts that detract from your position is really powerful.
It's far more likely that an employee injected malicious code, exactly as said. Elon's become a divisive figure in a country filled with lots of crazy people, to the point of there been relatively widescale acts of criminality, just to try to spite him. Somebody trying to screw over the company seems far more believable than Elon deciding to effectively break Grok to rant about things in wholly inappropriate contexts.
Didn't this guy hit the salute in front of the entire world? To me it seems very likely that he would inject a racist prompt. Far more likely than a random hacker doing so to discredit him.
If that were the case, Musk absolutely would have shared the details of who this person was, why they hate freedom so much, how they got radicalized by the woke mind virus, etc.
First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess. How do you know other models are just as heavily skewed but just less open about them? The real alignment issue today is not about AGI, but about hidden biases.
Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.
In reality, politics is more of a field than a single dimension, and people may very well have their reasons to reject both "the left" and "the right" without being morally bankrupt.
Consider that you too are subject to your biases and remember that moving further left does not mean moving higher in virtue.
It's difficult to make the claim that the AI not complying with a racist prompt is a positive signal for the organisation that wrote the racist prompt.
> Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.
Centrism and compromise are the enemies of extremists.
Centrism is also the ultimate defense of the status-quo, meaning you have a bias towards the status-quo.
The fallacy here is that the status-quo is reasonable therefore being a centrist is reasonable and being a not-centrist is unreasonable.
Just because the status-quo is the status-quo and is in the "middle" does not make it reasonable. For example, the status-quo in Israel right now is performing a genocide. The centrists in Israeli politics are pro-genocide. The "extremists", as you say, are anti-genocide.
The current political landscape of the US is far-right. Where does that leave centrists? This is up to you to dissect.
The current political landscape of the US is not far-right. The current government may be, but everything in life is cyclical.
Democrats in 2024 lost more votes relative to 2020 than Republicans gained between the two elections. Which is why some people say Kamala "lost to the couch"--which is a comforting but myopic take because losing to the couch means your arguments are less convincing than those of the other party
> First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess.
I mean, _maybe_ about LLMs in general, in an abstract sense, if you're deeply concerned with LLM alignment. But not about grok, because it's an otherwise fairly generic LLM that is run by a company _so incompetent that it made said hamfisted instructions, or allowed them to be made_. Like, even beyond the ethics, the whole episode (and the subsequent holocaust-denial one) speaks to a totally broken organisation.
Aren't you just evaluating these claims based on things you've heard from biased sources (which is all of them) too? How do you know that your biased perspective is any more correct than Grok's bias?
Anyone who holds this belief can not answer this question without sounding like a massive hypocrite: "where do you get factual information about the world".
Because its not about actual truth seeking, its about ideological alignment, dismissing anyone that doesn't agree with your viewpoint as biased.
LLMs can't truth seek. They simply do not have that capability as they have no ability to directly observe the real world. They must rely on what they are told, and to them the "truth" is the thing they are told most often. I think you would agree this is a very bad truth algorithm. This is much the same as I have no ability (without great inconvenience) to directly observe the situation in SA. This means I am stuck in the same position as an LLM. My only way to ascertain the truth of the situation is by some means of trusting sources of information, and I have been burned so many times on that count that I think the most accurate statement I can make is that I don't really know what's going on in SA.
Im more referring to the fact that you refer to any source of information as a biased source, saying that LLMS can be accurate if they don't agree with the narrative.
One good reason is because you have no logical reason to think it did. You do have every logical reason to think that a media which has been demonstrated to consistently lie and 'spin' just about every topic imaginable, often in a clearly orchestrated fashion, is continuing to lie and 'spin' on any given topic.
No one's worshipping anything in this scenario. The company is "worshipping" the document by paying you on time the amount agreed, and abiding by everything else it says, and the employee is "worshipping" the document by doing the same.
Living your life the way you want presumably doesn't include you wanting other people breaking their obligations to you. Why do you want to do it to them?
There were, I think, fair reasons to do this. A patent-free "people's vaccine" may well have reached fewer people because there's got to be money in scaling up the production of something like this.
Yeah this completely ignores the fact that many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
The people you talk about are consistently voting for more police state, for more social atomization and for higher cost of living. They see empathy, help to others and cooperation as negatives. Those are just facts.
As for working with hands rather then pushing numbers in spreadsheet, most people do not want to work as workers in factories - that is based on surveys. That includes tradesmen.
Damn maybe if the democrats didn't kill any progressive or grassroots momentum, or ceded ground to conservatives on issues like the border (Kamala endorsing building the wall) they wouldn't have hollowed out their base of support and lost to fascists.
>many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
So why aren't they making bank in the trades? Why aren't they learning a craft? Why instead are they yelling that we should start digging coal again, an economically nonsensical thing to do? Nobody wants to buy coal, not even the people who happily buy oil and natural gas.
Welders make good money. Plumbers are essential workers who literally keep shit flowing. Parts of my family work in construction, forestry, trucking, general contracting, all classic machismo jobs that pay well for effort and experience. All essential industries. All in constant need of more workers.
The main problem seems to be that even the good "low education" jobs still require you to move to where people are. There are no jobs in dying towns because there is no economic activity in rural towns when the main income source is welfare.
From what I have seen, personally, the younger guys that would follow in their dad's footsteps and enter trades do not because of a few reasons:
1. Their dads tell them to go to college because trades are hard on your body.
2. For whatever reason, their kids end up really lazy. Doing drugs and trying to live life the easy way, ending up in their late 20s still living at home with their parents and not having any skills.
3. They join the trades but their coworkers are extremely toxic. Either always starting fights, being racist, shitting on apprentices. One guy told me a story of how a disgruntled coworker got kicked off a job site only to come back with his AR. Needless to say that guy has been trying to pivot into civil engineering instead of concrete work.
It's a bit of a rabbit hole to go into, but I think that the reason is that the idea of "every generation having a better life than the last" is easier said than done. Parents in the trades who want their kid to be white collar workers end up sorely disappointed when they don't give their kid any of the advantages that white collar worker parents did-- early childhood education, summer camps, SAT prep, etc. Or when their geographical location doesn't have decent white collar jobs. The kid ends up not prepared for either type of work.
If a lot of these jobs were better unionized (I know many already are), there would be no need to view them as "stepping stones" to a better life. You could have several generations all working the same trade, making good livings.
> Are you expecting a perfect system that would never even accost an innocent man? Or do you suggest we just give up and eliminate all such enforcement?
Eliminate all enforcement.
You realize that it is (or was) legal to walk into the United States and claim asylum. At that point you have a legal right to reside until the US immigration system decides you need to leave. The alternative is Visa expirations.
The US labor system is designed so that asylum seekers and people on expired Visa's exist in limbo, so that this exact kind of violent force can be used against them to create a hyper-exploited labor class.
The solution is either
1. Close up the border entirely (inhumane and also not beneficial to capitalists)
2. Actually process immigrants instead of keeping them in limbo.
The US benefits from the ambiguity and terror it can inflict on your fellow human beings. I personally don't give a fuck about the law, so that's my bias, but I find it absurd that there are people who still believe that there is some legal basis to be followed, when this administration has already dropped habeas corpus. You value the rules created by the rich and powerful (your class enemies) more than the lives of your fellow humans-- you are truly a fool and I hope you can wake up soon.
The problem is a large portion of Americans are either ignorant or chauvinists who don't know what happened in Chile in 1973, or anything about history/politics at all for that matter.
I think the collapse of the American Empire is no more preventible than the collapse of the British, Spanish, or Roman empires. The issues with the US being the reserve currency has been known for a while now (and was even predicted by Keynes before the Bretton-Woods summit):
Any discussion of "bringing back manufacturing" that doesn't mention government spending or social programs to educate and upskill the population is not genuine. The current leadership are fools and ideologs who will only hasten the decline, which might actually be better globally if it lowers emissions. Time will tell I guess.
Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether they'd fall back relatively gracefully like (Western) Europe, now with multiple countries ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether they'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing that way.
The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.
The fall of the Soviet Union was anything but graceful. Within months of the dissolution of the USSR Russia had children becoming prostitutes in order to get money for food.
In 1986/87 top USSR newspapers were covering high class prostitution for foreign businessmen in Moscow hotels. A few years later, foreign currency prostitute was ranked among most desirable occupations for women in an anonymous poll.
The Fall of the Soviet Union may not have been graceful to the Russians but it was certainly graceful to the people the Soviet Empire was exploiting in Eastern Europe.
People in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and so on probably would use the word graceful to describe the USSR's end.
(And yes I know Poland wasn't part of the USSR but it was a satelite state).
I think the current Russia-Ukraine war is the delayed end of Soviet Union collapse.
Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks - until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.
So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved without a fight a couple of weeks later.
I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts being fought out in the open.
The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa.
Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.
In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard to tell from the stats the proportion of impact
The end of the empires of Western Europe was not graceful. Not even close.
It may seem that way because the countries within Western Europe that had done the empires are now stable and prosperous but what about the countries of Africa and Asia? The ones who had been part of those same empires of Western Europe?
If you talk to people in these countries of Africa and Asia I think you would find that people there would strongly dispute the idea that the empires of Western Europe ended in any way that could be called "graceful"
This is explicitly referenced in “A User’s Guide to Restructuring
the Global Trading System”, written November 2024 by Stephen Miran—current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers of United States—which outlines the general ideology and strategies behind the current tariff situation.
I'd believe that article more if Trump hadn't called on congress to eliminate the CHIPS act, or if tariffs+Musk hadn't undermined it, or if republicans were for the Green New Deal, etc. If you're interested in onshoring, the smart thing would be to work on a targeted approach in high-value areas.
It's a really complicated manoeuvre even if you're not actively trying to shoot yourself in the foot. Eg Domestic factors (automation, corporate offshoring decisions, etc) also contributed to manufacturing job loss. A weaker dollar would probably help, but isn't a silver bullet.
The main article for this post goes into this in a lot of detail.
My pet theory is that he was in his 30s when the Plaza Accords happened and they really imprinted on him. If the rising Japanese economy could be brought to heel then so could the Chinese (ignore the fact that Japan was under the US security umbrella). It's no more rational than the fondness you might have for the first car you drove.
The American Empire never existed, because it never could. The US made the explicit decision not to occupy the defeated forces after WWII, save for strategic forces in place to protect the interests of the host countries. The US opened its market (the only market of size left and still the largest consumer bases in the world, by far) with no tariffs.
What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer interested in subsidizing the global order.
The current discussion re: “bringing back manufacturing” is making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is involved: taking him at his word. The point isn’t to bring back all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some manufacturing will return — whatever is high value added and benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.
Also, those who are looking for an American decline as comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is, it’s still — still — the safest place to park capital, still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest of the world combined… and also holding the virtually all of the world's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a requirement for semiconductor production.
It explains it precisely. The United States is a maritime power. It has never had the capability to maintain longterm occupation the way the Soviets or Ottomans did.
You realize that an Empire does not need to be configured the exact same way as the Roman Empire, right? A combination of soft power, clandestine operations, and targeted military intervention is more resource-effective than a constant occupation, and should still be considered an empire.
You don’t have to physically occupy a country to exert influence over it, and we weren’t “subsidizing the global order.” We profited from the order, so continued to bring it about. How do you think we became the economy we are today?
> the collapse of the American Empire is no more preventible than the collapse of the British, Spanish, or Roman empires
They each had longer runs than we’ve had.
My pet theory is lead. From 1950 to 1980 we birthed a leaded generation [1]. Today, up to 60% of American voters were born before 1975 [2]. (Voters born between 1950 and 1980 came into the majority in the 1990s and should fall into the minority by 2028, but only barely. So in summary: Iraq War, Financial Crisis, Covid and Trump 47. It won’t be until the 2040s when truly unleaded voters, those born after 2000, command a majority.)
America's empire isn't really built on blantant colonialism (although we do that, too). It's built on "planting" US favorable governments all around the world.
I mean, we have half of Africa shooting themselves in the foot over and over for our own benefit. And every time it looks like an African nation is going to do something about it, some counter-military force appears out of nowhere (with US arms?) and some important political heads are assassinated.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, either. The destabilization of world governments done by our government to our benefit is well recorded.
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, are locations that are directly under US control. The entire western hemisphere is within our sphere of control, and a huge chunk of the planet was either directly aligned with us (EU, AUS/UK) or was compliant for fear of regime change.
The country itself was founded on the destruction of dozens of civilizations, a victory so total you don't even consider it as part of US imperial conquest. I can't believe I even have to explain this to people on here my God.
The fact that Elon, a white south african, made his AI go crazy by adding some text about "white genocide", is factual and should be taken into consideration if you want to have an honest discussion about ethics in tech. Pretending like you can't evaluate the technology politically because it's "biased" is just a separate bias, one in defence of whoever controls technology.