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What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to?

With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?


People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.

It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.

The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.


If I intentionally search for a "new car" or go to a page reviewing cars, then I give my consent to receive new information about it.

> When you write Rust long enough you settle on certain architectures (message passing, event loops) that go well with the borrow checker

So basically Go?


Go only provides one concurrency paradigm. Rust support many (if not all).

The type system of Go is very weak. I'd say that'd be my main reason to pass on Go, even when the concurrency paradigm fits the project perfectly.


The biggest reason to pass on Go right now (if your software can tolerate a runtime) is the lack of algebraic data types when doing interesting domain modeling. It makes such a huge difference it’s worth tolerating the pain points of Rust (or Swift, or F#) just to have them.


Traits, Enums, and Typestate allow much richer paradigms at much lower cost


> And if you have a local app, how do you take a dependency on whatever random model is installed?

Why not ship your own model? In the age of Electron apps, 10GB+ apps are not unheard of.


Personally I wouldn't want a couple dozen apps installed all with their own model.

It seems easier to have industry specs that define a common interface for local models.

I also assume the OS can, or would need to, be involved in proving the models. That may not be a good thing depending on your views of OS vendors, but sharing a single local model does seem more like an OS concern.


I mean the openai API is the industry standard for allowing apps to communicate with models, llama-server has it, oMLX has it, ollama has it, vLLM has it, lmstudio as well. I don't think this is such a hard thing to do, but it requires people to set it up.


I don't know enough about that API surface to know if its a particularly good one for the use cases we'd have, but yes defining a universal spec for all implementors to support wouldn't be a big lift and is done in plenty of other areas already.


There is no other way than shipping your own model, because you will want an abstracted API over the inference, and you don't know what the user has installed. Also you can ship 9b fp4 model but it all just depends


Knowing what's installed would have to be an OS API. If LLMs provide a standard API surface to the OS, likely including metadata related to feature support.


You can know what the user has installed if the OS developer offers something.


It will take a few years until scheduled data center construction finishes, and together with software optimizations that may come up in the meantime, it may cause a significant decrease in token price.


We should, but we also shouldn't decide what other people consider proper use of their time


I don't think this is obvious at all. I think its a reasonable function of the state to pursue policies that improve the mental and physical health of its citizens, partly because the negative effects of an unhealthy population are not limited to the individuals who are unhealthy. Liberty is great. I wouldn't want to live anywhere where it wasn't one of the primary goals of a society, but there is no stone tablet from God saying its needs to be the only goal a society can set.


When you say "a society" sets a goal, it always implies a ruling group of people imposing their view of the common good unto everyone.

How do you make sure that whoever makes that choice makes it in a way you yourself will agree with?


I think a mature person accepts some compromise with society at large. How do you make sure your wife always wants to do what you want? You don't. You live with other people, depend on them, pay for them when they are sick or poor (one way or another). You can't escape society. All that the libertarian view appears to do is make everyone miserable with externalities that a properly functioning state would regulate out of existence.

People's lives are ruined by gambling all the time, for instance. It is dumb to pretend like the pleasure a few people get out of it is worth someone betting away his family's welfare. It is ok to just decide "this needs to be regulated." Not everything is some intractible philosophical mystery that no consensus will ever coalesce around. Not every single thing every single person wants needs to be taken seriously.


Do you seriously believe that is not happening now? Or that even a libertarian utopia could manage to achieve agreement?

If you're going to get philosophical, go all the way. Why have society at all because it's just people imposing their will on others? Or do you at least agree that there exists a line?


Even though there clearly must be a line on some topics, many people think those lines should be placed to minimize the number of times people are forced to do something (or prevented from doing something) against their will.

It’s not at all obvious that “adults can’t have TikTok” is anywhere near the correct side of that line.


GNU + kink


So Elon Musk was right in his view that Grok should focus on truth above all, even if it became offensive?


Grok is one of the more biased models out there.

Less truth, and more guardrails to protect musks feelings.

“Kill the boer” mean anything to you?


Not my experience. Grok seems to be perfectly willing to roast Musk for his shortcomings.

Where did you observe the bias? Can you share any example of the conversation or post by Grok?


Here are a couple of articles with examples:

Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee:

https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...

Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...


> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee

What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?


In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.

EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched


Now that 'tough guy' Chuck Norris has departed this world...

The AIs are looking for new defs for tough.


Try it yourself with a roundtable discussion: https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/can-billionaires-an...


Grok is willing to roast Musk now because of the "Elon Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident. Grok then:

> Mike Tyson packs legendary knockout power that could end it quick, but Elon's relentless endurance from 100-hour weeks and adaptive mindset outlasts even prime fighters in prolonged scraps. In 2025, Tyson's age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter—feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.

When the Grok system prompt was leaked, it contained this:

> * Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.

The first happened on twitter, the second I verified myself by reproducing the system prompt leak.


[flagged]


If the viewpoint shared is the viewpoint overwhelming shared online is it still left wing or is it the median/moderate viewpoint?

Could you share some examples of where you thought it was left wing?


> it was undoubtedly left-wing

What if it's just… right?


As Stephen Colbert said 20 years ago... "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"


Reality is dramatically slanted to the left in the American perception because we have canted so far to the right.


It tells the truth, as long as you redefine truth to not include anything perceived as "liberal bias" (which by extension, also makes reality itself excluded)


Yea, Mecha-Hitler is a real bastion of truth. /S


Seems like it! I find myself rather agreeing with the sentiment. The world is a offensive place, it's not gonna become less offensive from lying about it, better to stick with honesty then.


> You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?

As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.

Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.

Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.


> On the other hand, code produced with AI and reviewed by humans can be perfectly good and indistinguishable from regular old code.

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/810/


Incomplete chain seems to load on Android Chrome...


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