There's plenty, but they don't have enough material to post once a week. And if you don't post once a week, you don't end up on HN once a month. As simple as that. Looking at the blogs that show up on HN regularly, the usual hit rate is 10-25%.
Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat justifiable moral and aesthetic objections to LLMs and especially the companies peddling them.
The problem is that Zitron has charm, an authoritative voice and a very aggressive online presence. That's a difficult combination to compete against.
That's essentially how you become an online pundit. The internet rewards provocative takes. If you have a tendency to doubt yourself and revise your views, then (a) your views become less provocative and thus less likely to translate into click-worthy headlines; (b) you end up biting your tongue or saying "I don't know" often enough that is becomes impossible to keep up with the requisite weekly publication schedule.
Which is to say, it's easy to scapegoat this guy, but I think his approach is not any different from other "opinion piece" bloggers that we all tend to reshare.
It's dystopian. I wish we could just roll back to 2022 and pick a different timeline. Anything and everything is either about AI and/or written by AI, and it's all the shittier for it. Software and services are becoming buggy, content quality plowed straight through bedrock, most people use AI to turn off their brains, and the people that care are left drudging through slop and garbage in both their professional and personal lives.
I want off this train to hell. I am truly (not exaggerating) on the verge of abandoning everything to go live in the woods.
Somebody else can spin up some AI-generated "AI is good" stories and post those in response. Maybe somebody will deploy respective agents to do both automatically.
Are AI agents posting this fully aware that they are AI? If they are trained only on human material they may not even understand their own true reality.
Which is actually a quite interesting use of AI. Most if not all previous "AI is good" were also AI-generated so fighting fire with fire seems effective.
There's always the Juiceros of the world. More seriously, every software company of note has some hardware aspirations and hires some number of EEs, machinists, material scientists, etc. Not as many as SWEs, but if you can get your foot in the door, it's probably nice.
> As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
The cops say "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp". They can pretty much say this for any part of the town at any given time. A judge signs off on the warrant, because why wouldn't they? You don't get to challenge anything: no one is going to tell you "hey, your phone was in that area, come to the courthouse and make your case if you think the police shouldn't be given that info".
Im comparing due process with a judges' signature, compared to shit like FLOCK and other non-search warranted processes. And if the warrant was deemed wrongfully granted, the case itself can be dismissed or mistrial.
How much corporate data was just purchased rather than search warranted? Data brokers and parallel construction is a lot larger issue.
And about the cops giving that "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp" - pig's will always give bullshit reasons. Thats why I went to the judge's determination, rather than oinkers demanding everything and manufacturing whatever they want.
It's striking how many of these "product safety" cases are decided in the court of public opinion, independent of actual scientific merit. The case of DDT was pretty interesting. More recently, we have microplastics - no one has really shown they're dangerous to humans, but there's enough hand-waving that "everyone knows" they're killing us. And aspartame, etc...
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
Well I don't know of people claiming that microplastics are "killing us", there are dozens of papers that implicate microplastics in negative health effects from hearts to intestines, to sperm.
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
I understood that article as there being many bad studies on how much plastics are in our body. But I find it highly unlikely there isn't any plastic in my body, from my toothbrush or chewing gum or water bottle or that old black plastic spatula I fry my eggs with or the air that pushes all kinds of particles into me etc. etc.
And studies like your parent comment's https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/ make it seem likely that they could have some negative effect. So I'm not worried about it, but I also find it a good idea to be cautious (maybe I'll avoid heating food in plastic containers) and for there to be more research into it.
People are usually spraying broadleaf herbicides on their lawn like 2,4-D to control things like dandelions and yard plantains. Glyphosate just kills everything. Personally I only use it very selectively on poison ivy.
We hand some log droughts here about 10 years ago where you were not allowed to water the lawn at all.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
Worth noting here that the trier of fact in this case mostly agrees with you about this stuff; the issue is that the state statutes in question created strict liability conditions for failure to comply with warning label regimes. The plaintiff brought substantive charges about Roundup to the case, and the jury rejected them.
> It's not a great definition but it's also not a terrible one either. For an AI system to be able to do all or even most of the jobs in an economy
That's not the definition they have been using. The definition was "$100B in profits". That's less than the net income of Microsoft. It would be an interesting milestone, but certainly not "most of the jobs in an economy".
> I was surprised not to see any discussion on whether the author used AI to help write this post.
It is definitely AI-written, far beyond "AI assisted". This is a shower thought turned into a needlessly long machine-generated essay that doesn't say anything a chatbot wouldn't say if you said "hey ChatGPT, write me a thought-provoking essay on <x> for HN".
I made a comment about it, along with several other folks, but the thing is... we get these AI-written "AI is bad" / "AI is great" articles multiple times a day. Debating them doesn't scale, but neither does complaining about them, and especially not complaining in a thoughtful way. Most people on HN are content to argue with a machine.
So why chase this negligible revenue?
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