[HN Gopher] The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 - ...
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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 - Culture
Part 1 was discussed here: _ML promises to be profoundly weird_ -
https: //news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (571
comments)
Author : aphyr
Score : 89 points
Date : 2026-04-09 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aphyr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aphyr.com)
| bfmalky wrote:
| > Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act
|
| NSFW blog content on HN? Really?
| timcobb wrote:
| Woah you can't see this in the UK? Without age verification?
|
| Update: there's a section called "Pornography". It does not
| contain pornography.
| pcdevils wrote:
| It's not blocked By the UK, he's put a country filter on it
| Like all the US sites that decided to block.the EU over gdpr
| because turning off tracking was too much effort
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Work fine in Spain, so lets not jump on the all to typical
| EU-made-the-internet-suck bandwagon all too quickly. Seems
| this is a UK problem. But what do I know, I actually read
| the error message.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| It's the author's problem with the UK (and the UK's
| Online Safety Act, which establishes requirements on
| hosts that can't be avoided by merely not being in the
| UK), rather than the UK's problem with the author.
|
| But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject
| to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our
| government thinks of your website? It's not like they can
| do anything to you.
| railgunmerlin wrote:
| perhaps the safety filter is wrong instead of the post?
| bitwize wrote:
| Most likely it's a protest. Badplace passed Badlaw, so
| residents of Badplace can't see my content, so nyah!
|
| But, topics of a sexual nature--nothing really NSFW, just
| mentions of various fetishes that online people have
| developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to
| realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones--are
| discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present
| to minors under the OSA.
| benrmatthews wrote:
| https://archive.is/c3ggq
| talkingtab wrote:
| Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being
| bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just
| astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing
| anything, just the resignation of a follower.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or
| professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those
| same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people
| proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought
| about change would make the analysts less relevant.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that
| narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of
| the population, and they're strongly attracted to money,
| power, attention, and status.
|
| So even though they're a small minority they infest politics,
| business, and the media, and create a culture in their own
| image.
|
| Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal
| arguments about standard economic and political positions.
| Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the
| usual battle lines.
| XorNot wrote:
| Frankly, who are these people? Because this is just another
| "they" idle conspiracy theory.
|
| "They" are against me.
|
| Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies
| to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural
| weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit
| mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to
| them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other
| drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness
| inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your
| mid-30s is a lot more difficult.
| aspbee555 wrote:
| reminds me of the college scene in the movie Tomorrowland where
| all the teachers going on and on about about the things that
| would end us and when she asked "Can we fix it?" and teacher is
| like "What?" "I get things are bad but what can we do?"
|
| learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I
| have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a
| difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All
| people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future
| while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads
| for not blindly following the insanity
|
| what do we honestly do?
| rdevilla wrote:
| Ok. How do you propose one fights back? Do you really
| viscerally understand what it is you are fighting against?
| talkingtab wrote:
| fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this
| stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that
| "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very
| good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork
| the internet.
| rdevilla wrote:
| I mean, I've had pipe dreams of a parallel networking stack
| built on IPv6 with a killer app offering real peer-to-peer
| networking again. But who will deploy and maintain all the
| new IPv6 networking gear, infrastructure, undersea cables?
| This is not something within the purview of the average (or
| even above average) hacker any more; the encumbents are too
| firmly entrenched.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Collectives, cooperatives and other organizations. It's
| been done before, giant WiFi networks spanning countries.
| Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are a few of them, the two
| first are real and alive alternative networks built on
| independent hardware infrastructure.
|
| Not sure about the details with Freifunk, but Guifi has
| collaborating companies who basically operate like ISPs
| but connect you to Guifi + you get a internet connection
| via the Guifi peering the installer helps you with.
| talkingtab wrote:
| Personally, I am guessing it is the other way around. Not
| first killer app, but first a parallel networking stack,
| etc.
|
| The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always
| true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor
| casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly)
| don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly
| insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched
| technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.
|
| The context for a new kind of internet is very different
| now, than when the internet started. That changed context
| provides an opening for new ways to do things.
|
| A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for.
| As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need
| a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too
| firmly entrenched, etc.
| dugidugout wrote:
| I think Heidegger provides a framing for why these are
| just musings in, as you put it, a firm entrenchment and
| the whole ordeal is looking quite bleak. I honestly can't
| imagine a way out of the technological frame and I am
| simply not seeing my generation in common spaces. Even my
| ability to meaningfully connect with my peers through
| conversation is deteriorating by product of the sheer
| scale of potential engagements one has at any moment. It
| is quite overwhelming and I am afraid there is no
| technological answer here.
| david_shi wrote:
| The application layer has way more gravity than the
| networking one right now. You'd need to fork that for
| anything to happen.
| XorNot wrote:
| But like...why?
|
| This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy"
| and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of
| people who can't or won't do that.
|
| It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of
| people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop
| using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to
| look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Unfortunately the political movements most interested in the
| relationship between society and technology were wrapped up
| with Nazis and so the line of thinking is underdeveloped, as it
| has had to start again.
| david_shi wrote:
| What would you do? The system is very good at transmuting
| critiques of it into its own propagation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now
| spaghetdefects wrote:
| This has already happened with media for the past 100+ years.
| We're shown what companies and governments want us to see. People
| develop parasocial relationships with people they see on tv...
| mzajc wrote:
| > Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any
| day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in
| the register of ChatGPT. "You're absolutely right, Kayleigh," it
| intones. "I did drown little Tamothy, and I'm truly sorry about
| that. Here's the breakdown of what happened..."
|
| May I recommend _Pluribus_ (2025-)
| underlipton wrote:
| There's literally an ad for Amazon's Alexa devices that
| features not just the gist of your example, but that specific
| cause of death (which is itself predated by a murderous digital
| intelligence doing the same thing in AMC's Pantheon series).
|
| Guys I thought it was the fire next time.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Also, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs
| Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.
| throwanem wrote:
| Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it,
| but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its
| moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying
| to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open
| with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been
| pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions
| of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the
| miniseries does concern itself.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You're right, not necessarily AI, more so what an
| omniscient and omnipotent device could do especially in the
| wrong hands.
| observationist wrote:
| What's the difference between the idle imaginings of a
| god's mind and a universe scale simulation?
|
| I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a
| mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird
| inception / simulation / manifestation way.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| In the show the device is not autonomous, humans use it.
| observationist wrote:
| That can be a type of mind, though? It can also be a type
| of interface - a tap into a system not fully understood,
| controlling the perspective or view but not the process.
| The whole "mind of god" Deus/Devs, etc - I think it's
| left ambiguous on purpose for the hook but I always took
| it to be an AI flavored story at the core.
| apsurd wrote:
| Best line:
|
| > I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without
| realizing anything at all.
|
| It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even
| know it, don't realize it? don't care?
|
| _(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally
| engineers must use CC.)_
| rdevilla wrote:
| > (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like
| literally engineers must use CC.)
|
| I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows
| over. I cannot even, anymore.
| jspash wrote:
| With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will
| come back to something that is both unrecognisable and
| terrifying.
| gcheong wrote:
| If there is anything left to come back to.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like
| literally engineers must use CC.)
|
| As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software
| development for some time, could you possibly just like leak
| the entire email where this was announced or something? (open
| invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very
| curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning
| they could have for that.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but
| forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't
| feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever
| I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and
| more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers
| now.
| apsurd wrote:
| The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're
| a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder
| driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding
| meetings to get the entire company finding automation
| opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng
| specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have
| different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts,
| strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use
| Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was
| especially raised.
|
| I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing
| in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate,
| on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of
| the industry, less so company specific.
|
| Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the
| mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The
| expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your
| feature output, because that's how we're going to win.
|
| I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the
| mandate is literally more features, more code, because it
| gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles,
| surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things
| considered, _might as well_ ship more code!
| blipvert wrote:
| I shall wait your collected thoughts. I'll suggest The
| Mythical LLM Month as a title.
| observationist wrote:
| How about The Million Dollar Mythos Month Some of these
| AI trends are starting to look more like gacha game
| moneysinks than productivity tools.
| seer wrote:
| We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago.
|
| Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and
| automation, that making them use superpowers produced better
| code, but also started adding a test pyramid.
|
| The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you _must_
| produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it
| you can use cc to bridge the gap.
|
| Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher
| quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the
| "quality" and steer towards it themselves.
|
| At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with
| the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a
| reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how
| such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual's
| knowledge.
|
| So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early
| days.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?
|
| People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech
| bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher
| percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.
| apsurd wrote:
| That's a good point. But I also think about the unprecedented
| adoption of chatGPT. Global mass consumer adoption of all
| ages, and people giddy about offloading their jobs to chatGPT
| not connecting the very simple straight line to "you think
| your boss is going to pay you to ask chatGPT?"
| notpachet wrote:
| > I can think of a few good myths for today's "AI". Searle's
| Chinese room comes to mind, as does Chalmers' philosophical
| zombie. Peter Watts' Blindsight draws on these concepts to ask
| what happens when humans come into contact with unconscious
| intelligence--I think the closest analogue for LLM behavior might
| be Blindsight's Rorschach.
|
| LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are
| situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're
| like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of
| spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their
| perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass"
| relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of
| reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.
| rdevilla wrote:
| Speaking of myths, pixies, and spirits:
|
| > I. DEFINITION:
|
| > MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in
| conformity with Will.
|
| > (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain
| facts within my knowledge. I therefore take "magical weapons,"
| pen, ink, and paper; I write "incantations"--these sentences--
| in the "magical language" i.e. that which is understood by
| people I wish to instruct.
|
| > I call forth "spirits" such as printers, publishers,
| booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my
| message to those people. The composition and distribution is
| thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in
| conformity with my Will.)
|
| - Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954.
| https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01
| grehbies wrote:
| Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through
| ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be
| used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into
| derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and
| mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact
| can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased
| susceptibility to fire elemental spells. Simple
| rituals can render an inferior product from most living
| things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances
| will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle,
| and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword,
| reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily
| proportions to that of a toddler).
|
| -Me, "Early Morning Bed Thoughts", a few months ago.
| rdevilla wrote:
| You either see it or you don't.
| throwanem wrote:
| There's actually a useful and quite generic metaphor to be
| excavated here. I would just tell you what it is, but I
| think you'll more enjoy finding it for yourself.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| A common definition anthropologists use for magic is occult
| technology: a system of laws that can be manipulated to
| create desired changes. There's a lot of value in thinking of
| programming as a form of magic.
| throwanem wrote:
| Crowley is full of shit.
|
| By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal"
| implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could
| trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides
| as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the
| pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so
| will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which
| Crowley _also_ famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that
| neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)
|
| Try thinking for yourself, instead.
| WJW wrote:
| For sure. Despite all the talking about "self-deification"
| and all that shit, they sure seem to care a lot about what
| society (and their imaginary demons) think about them.
| notpachet wrote:
| > pettifogging
|
| Off-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a
| new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand
| my vocabulary.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Nice word.
|
| I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it
| becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the
| point of being intolerable. Right up there with
| "narcissist" and "gaslighting".
| sunrunner wrote:
| Is pettifogging some kind of etymological parent of
| bikeshedding then?
| WJW wrote:
| A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a
| magician, and which is therefore not very useful as a
| distinction.
| throwanem wrote:
| If you called him on it he would say that was on purpose,
| then talk your ears off about how. He was a ferociously
| effective charlatan, which is why people still remember the
| name he made up for himself. (And even invented a rhyming
| couplet to prate as a pronunciation guide!)
| rdevilla wrote:
| You are delusional.
| dugidugout wrote:
| These don't sound like convincing indicators of being an
| "effective charlatan". Am I to see the Notorious B.I.G.
| in the same frame?
| rdevilla wrote:
| > A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as
| a magician
|
| Exactly correct.
|
| Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act;
| whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what
| not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you
| inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...]
| Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't
| help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."
| julianeon wrote:
| If fear is the mind-killer, then sexy chatbots are the libido-
| killer, for me. Hard no.
| _doctor_love wrote:
| If 'aphyr is reading comments here, I'm curious: have you read
| Joseph Weizenbaum?
| aphyr wrote:
| I read a fair bit about Eliza when I was young, but I don't
| recall if any of those were from Weizenbaum himself!
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