The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization.

I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today.

I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now LGBT, moderate, atheist. I did my undergrad in molecular bio and computer science. Without the internet, I really don't think that would have happened.

Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along.

There was mud-slinging, to be sure, but nothing like what we see today. The platforms today willingly feed on this hate. We reward outrage and division. We ban posts and people we disagree with and then rub it in their faces.

Freedom from censorship used to be a liberal idea. Conservative culture dominated in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's. Conservatives were the chief agents of censorship. (There were tv shows about God and Jesus on prime time TV back then! "Touched By An Angel", FFS.)

It literally "wasn't okay" until Ellen and "Will and Grace" started breaking down barriers. Until that point, it was the more liberal minded folks on the internet that espoused freedom from censorship, sharing of different perspectives, acceptance, and understanding. (Interestingly, the ACLU at that time supported both sides of the political aisle! No favoritism - our rights matter regardless of politics or beliefs.)

After Obama's win, liberal culture and values started taking over. The internet was reaching widespread adoption throughout not only America, but the rest of the world.

It was shortly after this point that "Tumblr culture" started giving platform to more extreme and less tolerant liberal ideas. The people that used to uphold the values of freedom from censorship started being overshadowed by the ones that instead weaponized censorship against political enemies at the platform level. The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives.

The first Trump presidency flipped the pendulum back. Media censorship used against liberals. The second Trump presidency got censorship at the platform level and garnered tech company alignment.

We just need to stop.

Stop the algorithmic ranking of content. Stop the extreme polarization. Stop the tit-for-tat banning of people. The indoctrination into hating the "other side".

I appreciate that we won't easily come together and find unity. But at the same time, why use that as an excuse to stop trying? When people and ideas can freely be exchanged without folks attacking one another, there can be friendship even amongst disagreement.

If we keep building tools to censor "the other side" they will eventually be used against us.

We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.

> Stop the extreme polarization

LITERALLY THIS. I hope I can stress more point on it but we need to stop extreme polarization and the social media and how its centralized and controlled by a few too.

> We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.

You just have to convince the masses that 1984 is something that serves them when it doesn't and sell that I suppose to seize power yourself bribed by lobbying too.

I think that censorship grew because the internet did.

When the crowd grows bigger, it becomes a market. Then you get people who are only here out of self interest, and you need rules to deal with them.

When the crowd gets too big, the conversation is too loud and fast to be polite, and the loudmouths take over. Only hot takes anger people enough to speak above the miasma.

I don’t think it’s a red versus blue issue because there exist people outside of the United States. About 8 billion of them.

> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along

Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.

It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.

> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives

This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.

No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.

Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet

> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant

Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.

The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.

This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.

Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.

Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.

It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.

What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.

> 4chan

I remember an internet before 4chan.

Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.

Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?

I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.

I feel like icons subconsciously turn O(n*m) into O(log n).

Without icons, you have to read many or most of the words.

Without text labels, icons are difficult or even impossible to interpret.

But with both icons and text, you have quick visual search and filtering that involves the whole brain.

Atlanta has been an early market for both scooters and various food delivery robots. Both have been a boon for the city.

We've had these delivery robots for about six months now, and they've grown to the point where I see hundreds of delivery robots on the sidewalks each week. Scores of them daily. They're flooding our city, making the long commutes people don't want to.

The reason this is great is that Atlanta's infrastructure is car-centric and spread too far apart to make walking or even biking make sense.

The biking infrastructure we have does no good when it rains and you're twenty minutes from your destination. That same infrastructure also doesn't serve our children or our elderly. Or help when you're sick or tired and need a pick me up.

It's easy to order for a group of people from one of these. To imagine the same group of four people hopping on bikes together to travel twenty minutes to food - that's never once happened in my life. Only certain types of people bike, and you'll invariably find yourself in groups with lots of non-cyclists.

I feel that cyclist culture is bright eyed and idealistic, but not practical. You need a city designed around it, and all the people need to grow up loving it. These delivery robots, Waymo, Lime bikes - they're much more sensible middle grounds for cities like ours. Where people can't bike, or simply don't want to.

Why don't the delivery people bike and you can stay at home.

That would add $20/hr per biker, plus put the delivery folks at risk of bodily harm. Just so we can say we don't use robots?

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry.

Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately win.

I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the top leadership.

Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.

At this point "we're going to make all office work obsolete" feels more like a marketing technique than anything actually connected to reality. It's sort of like how Coca-Cola implies that drinking their stuff will make you popular and well-liked by other attractive, popular people.

Meanwhile, my own office is buried in busywork that there are currently no AI tools on the market that will do the work for us, and AI entering a space sometimes increases busywork workloads. For example, when writing descriptions of publications or listings for online sales, we have to put more effort now into not sounding like it was AI-generated or we will lose sales. The AI tools for writing descriptions / generating listings are not very helpful either. (An inaccurate listing/description is a nightmare.)

I was able to help set up a client with AI tools to help him generate basically a faux website in a few hours that has lots of nice graphic design, images, etc. so that his new venture looks like a real company. Well, except for the "About Us" page that hallucinated an executive team plus a staff of half a dozen employees. So I guess work like that does get done faster now.

Well, tbf the author was hired to answer newbie questions. Perhaps the position is that of an evangelist, not a scientist.

I couldn’t have made a worse take if I tried

Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.

GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.

They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.

Academics as a service.

Python's type hinting is horrible.

It's not checked, it's not required, and the bolted on syntax is ugly.

Even if the types were checked, they'd still fail at runtime and some code paths wouldn't get exercised.

We need a family of "near-scripting" languages like Go that check everything AOT, but that can be interpreted.

> It's not checked, it's not required,

It is both of those if you use a typechecker, which is the whole reason it exists (in fact, the first popular typechecker existed before the annotation syntax using type comments; type annotations were developed specifically so that it could be accommodated in the language rather than becoming its own separate language.)

That's the problem! The code should not run if the types are wrong. Having an external tool is an antipattern.

Having to rely on process for validity is a recipe for bad. We already know how the greater python community has been with requirements.txt and dependencies. I've spent days fixing this garbage.

It's a tooling problem. Good tools make good habits part of the automation and stop you from having to think about it.

A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.

Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance.

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis

[1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.

I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.

In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.

Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.

0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge

> The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.

Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful, especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main" reason.

Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.

That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.

The article you linked to makes a different claim.

Oh well fair enough. I'm claiming what the article says.

> On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

Focusing on GDP handwaves away so much around externalities that it's hard to know where to start with it.

How much worse off would people be if the US GDP was 20% lower but FB/Instagram/Google/everybody-else weren't vacuuming up ad dollars by pushing as-addictive-as-possible mental-junk-food in people's faces to make them feel bad about themselves? How much of that GDP is giving anyone optimism for improving their own individual condition?

How much of the nostalgia for the olden days is about agency and independence and perceived trajectory vs purely material wealth (from a material standpoint, many people today have more and better stuff than boomers did as kids, when a single black and white TV may have been shared by a whole family)?

Would regulation preventing the heads of big-tech advertising firms from keeping as much of that profit for themselves really be a net drain? Some suggestions for that regulation, harkening back to US history:

1) bring back super-high marginal tax rates to re-encourage more deductions and spread of salaries vs concentration in the top CEOs and execs. worked for the booming 50s! preventing the already-powerful, already-well-off from having another avenue to purely focus on "better their own lives" seemed wise there. seems like there were mega-wealthy super-tycoons both before the "soak the rich" era in US history and after it, but fewer minted during it?

2) instead of pushing more and more people into overtime or second jobs, go the other way and revitalize the earlier 20th-century trends towards limited work hours. get rid of overtime-exempt classifications while at it. Preventing people from working 100 hours a week to "better their own lives" and preventing them from sending their kids to work as early to "better their own lives" seems to have worked out ok.

3) crack down on pollution, don't let people "better their own lives" by forcing others to breathe, eat, and walk through their shit

4) crack down on surveillance, don't let people "better their own lives" by monetizing the private lives of others; focus on letting others enjoy their own lives in peace instead

> It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1].

Eeeeeh. Very debatable. One could argue that both extremes of the bi-partisan political spectrum are laser focused on making the individual businessman powerless. They just hide it all behind altruistic rhetoric.

1850-1950 is much closer to a norm over human history -

3+ catastrophic major wars

3+ other minor ones.

2+ great depressions (each of which was as large as ever financial panic 1951-current combined)

3+ financial panic events

At least one pandemic - plus local epidemics were pretty common.

When I tell people "its never been better than it is today" they dont believe me, but its the honest to god truth.

> The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience.

All countries who had participated in WWII experienced it, winners and losers.

What you said is the compete opposite of the truth.

Having grown up in East Germany, that is the truth. From both my grandparents, born early 20th century, to me things continuously got better. Apart from the war of course. They started little better than servant class and ended up with their own big nice houses, and in comfort. That is true even for the GDR. They lived through war and famine and at least four different currencies and types of government.

They also got more and more educated. From the lowest education to ever higher education degrees, one more step in each new generation. My grandfather tried many new tech hobbies as theY appeared, from (actual, original) tape recorders over mechanical calculators to at the time modern cameras and color slides, to growing hundreds of cactuses in a glasshouse, maybe as a substitute for being unable to travel to those places. I still have lots of quality 1950s and 60s color slides of people and places in East Germany.

Looking around. even the GDR until the end experienced significant improvements over what existed before, at least for the masses. Except for the environment especially near industry.

>A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

>The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

Especially ironic when perpetrated by youth from countries outside of America - like mine. I'm not a boomer, but my parents generation had it rough and my life was much easier in comparison. Importing "boomer" memes is a bit stupid in this context. Hell, even the name makes no sense here, because our "baby boom" happened later, in 1980-1990s.

This is early days, too. We're probably going to get better at this across more domains.

Local AI will eventually be booming. It'll be more configurable, adaptable, hackable. "Free". And private.

Crude APIs can only get you so far.

I'm in favor of intelligent models like Nano Banana over ComfyUI messes (the future is the model, not the node graph).

I still think we need the ability to inject control layers and have full access to the model, because we lose too much utility by not having it.

I think we'll eventually get Nano Banana Pro smarts slimmed down and running on a local machine.

>Local AI will eventually be booming.

With how expensive RAM currently is, I doubt it.

That's a short term effect. Long term Wright's law will kick in and ram will end up cheaper as a result of all the demand. It's not like there's a fundamental bottleneck on how much ram we could produce we're running into, just how much we're currently set up to produce.

It's temporary. Sam Altman booked all the supply for a year. Give it time to unwind.

I’m old enough to remember many memory price spikes.

I remember saving up for my first 128MB stick and the next week it was like triple in price.

Do you also remember when eveybody was waiting for cryto to cool off to buy a GPU?