It's not exactly "US" so much as it is Trump and Bessent if you read the article. The obvious conclusion is that Trump will do anything to stay popular and avoid a Blue Wave at midterms. Other presidents, who at least tried to gin up public support for their wars, could ask the public to bravely make sacrifices. Trump can't do that. He painted himself into a corner.
I expect it has a lot to do with "AI". HN readers are early adopters, so they're probably getting Claude or Claw or some damn LLM to generate their comments in hopes of getting more karma.
I also think that Trump winning in 2024, and subsequently revealing himself as nothing but a grifter with authoritarian impulses has something to do with it.
Anyone with conservative leanings has either been disgusted by Trump and his admin (they've violated almost all previous "movement conservative" doctrines), or got on the metaphorical Trump Train, and are now utterly confused by why The Storm hasn't come, prices aren't lowered, and there's been nobody sent to Gitmo for a tribunal. None of the conservative people can argue that anything is going well, and are also suffering through an epistemological crisis.
The SV tech leaders have turned Libertarianism into a weird combination of an incipient aristocracy and a cult. Obvious legal, personal liberty and freedom violations are ignored in favor of cheering on cryptocurrency and Trump.
Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.
I definitely don't want to underscore this point. I agree with you that the sense that "nothing matter, everything is fake" definitely feels more real today than it did a decade ago, or even four years ago.
I'm honestly just surprised that it feels like it's showing up on HN right. I suspect that the proliferation of machine learning into artificial intelligence probably brings a lot more laypersons onto HN that would otherwise not have been here.
FWIW, I think there are HN voting rings, not necessarily on the submissions proper, but on comments. I hypothesize that the voting rings are real humans who collude informally to vote down pro-vaccination comments, and anti-Trump comments.
Wow, 12 bars of 26 notes constitute copyright violation, and I presume monetary damages.
Given that all the hyperscalers, Meta, Google OpenAI, anthropic, etc have all read the entire web for weights, why are the hyperscalers not committing copyright violation on a previously unimaginable scale?
it would not be useful. Even a large number of programming books will not overcome the weighting of all the terrible source code and pitifully inadequate and often wrong explanations of programming topics that an LLM has.
Beyond that, all the LLM will do is recommend best practices. Sure, it's great to keep best practices in mind, but you have to realize that best practices really lags current practice, and do not even come close to excellent programming. Religiously follow "best practices" without care and you will have garbage programming. I give you the example of large numbers of website asking you to create a password with really exotic character combinations. In an HTML "password" field that shows you dots, so you're doing it blind. Twice, to make sure you typed what you thought. It's bullshit, and it's a "best practice". There's also no incentive to rid ourselves of no longer relevant, or mistaken, best practices. Something screws up when you didn't follow a mistaken best practice? You're at fault for not following a best practice, no matter how horrible.
Fair point that blind rule-following is dangerous — but that's true of any checklist, not specific to this tool. The goal isn't religious compliance, it's surfacing relevant principles at the right moment so the developer can make an informed decision to follow or consciously break them.
Also — if LLM weighting on bad code is the core problem, isn't that an argument against using LLMs for coding altogether? Yet here we are, and they're useful anyway.
Your heart is pure. But people are going to "let the AI do it", just like people let calculators do it in the 1970s, or let computers do it in the 1990s. An LLM with a very small additional bit of weight is still probabilistic, and the weights favor "best practices" and median program texts. You're encouraging blind rule following
My point is that LLMs weights are full of misinformation, misconception and median code. Putting a few books in isn't going to change that.
Decent review, avoids falling into the "Wow! Fascist!" trap that seems easy.
Like almost all reviews of Starship Troopers, it misses the fact that the Terran Federation has a "mathematical logic" of ethics. Mr Dubois is given the lines:
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level.
Self-interest, love of family, duty to country,
responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing
an exact ethic for extra-human relations.
This same thing comes up when Rico is in OCS. A professor asks for a proof of an ethical assertion made by another officer candidate.
Because of this, the Terran Federation can be assured they're doing the right thing flogging someone, or summarily hanging them, or being sexist, or atom bombing the Skinnies or whatever. They've got mathematical certainty.
Unfortunately, our universe's mathematics doesn't work that way. Axioms and rules of deduction are a choice, and to some extent, mathematics can be invented, rather than being fixed and platonic and discovered.
The other thing this review misses is that Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 3 weeks. It's probably a mistake to soberly consider what Heinlein "meant" by something, or seriously considering that what he wrote was what he believed because he didn't have time to consider that kind of consistency, or possess that kind of underpinnings. This shows through in other ways, like: what kind of power did an armored suit have? Battery? Atomic? Those suits used a lot of power for sure.
I do think you should read and enjoy Starship Troopers, the book. It's well worth your time and energy.
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