>No, the people in power do not have our interest in mind and anyone believing otherwise is an enemy, and I don't find them cartoonish at all, I find this all very very serious and terrifying, I will not comply.
Do your elected representatives support such legislation?
If the answer is "yes," and you live in a place that has free and fair elections, that's on you for not electing folks who will actually represent you.
Sure, feel free to blame the people you voted for. But since you and your neighbors elected those folks, it's hard to see how it's only the fault of those you elected.
That's not to say there aren't other forces/special interests trying to tilt things in their favor, but the solution is electing people who will have your (collective) "interest in mind," not blaming those you had a hand in electing.
In a representative democracy, the voters are the government. We decide who will represent us. If you don't like those that do, look in a mirror.
>Um, why would you do that instead of waiting for someone more knowledgable to reply, and learn from? Replies are not mandatory, and experts/insiders participating is one of the best parts of the human Internet. Let them shine.
As Isaac Asimov pointed out[0]:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
This thread runs through many cultures and isn't just a problem on the Internet, although the Internet certainly has accelerated/worsened the problem. And it has created a distrust of experts which (as has been obvious for a long time) has made us, as a whole, dumber and less informed.
I recommend The Death of Expertise[1] by Tom Nichols for a sane and reasonable treatment of this issue. If books aren't your thing, Nichols did a book talk[2] which lays out the main points he makes in the book. During that talk, he also gives the best definition of disinformation I've heard yet.
Again, the question is who blesses the expert? There’s a difference in having a voice and your voice being taken seriously.
If someone posts a link on a a new laptop, who should respond? I am not an expert on the current laptop market, but I have options about it. Maybe my English is not the best so I run through an AI to clean it up of ambiguities or wrong wording. Maybe I say “I like to take my laptop from behind” when I meant “I lift my laptop from the back”. An AI could point out this type of error.
>But I think there will always be that feeling of: a human being took the effort to write this. No matter how informative or well written an AI article or comment is, it isn't something we instinctively want to respond to, the way we do when we know there is a person behind the words.
Over and over again, when reading comments from some folks who lionize the usage of LLM outputs, as well as other folks who demonize such usage, I'm reminded of this bit from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle[0], specifically from the "Books of Bokonon"[1]:
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds
himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people
who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
And I wonder if, (myself included) those who demonize LLM usage are those who "came by their ignorance the hard way."
I'll admit that the analogy isn't great, but there is something to it IMNSHO. Mostly that many who distrust (and often rightly so) LLM outputs have a strong negative impression (perhaps not "murderous resentment," but similar) of those who use LLMs to spout off.
I suppose this is a bit tangential to the topic at hand, but if it gets anyone to read Cat's Cradle who hasn't already, I'll take the win.
>I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.
Your point is well taken.[0]
Personally, I take a different approach. I use a 5 minute delay for comments on HN so I can look at the post after I submit it, but before anyone else sees it.
This gives me the opportunity to read over my comment and the comment to which I've replied to make sure my prose is decent, my point is clear and any typos or other inaccuracies can be corrected.
I don't use LLMs as an editor as I've found that I'm probably a better editor than the average internet user, which is what LLMs represent.
Perhaps that's arrogant of me, but I'm much more comfortable standing by what I write when it's me writing and editing.
[0] Please note that this is most certainly not a swipe at you or anyone else who uses LLMs as an editor. I just have a different perspective which pushes me in a different direction.
>This is a known dark pattern called "price anchoring friction."
It is and it really sucks.
>By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google.
If that's what they actually did all the time, you'd be right. However, pretty much all the time (except in the past few hours), Amazon does not do that.
All you need to do to confirm that is a web search. What's more, if that were the case, sites like CamelCamelCamel[0] couldn't exist. Yet they do.
Amazon is and does objectionable things all the time. If you wish to dump on Amazon, more power to you.
But if you're going to do so, why not do it based on actual issues and not ones you made up based on what appears to be a back end outage (which seems to be resolved now, with prices, as is normal, prominently displayed on product pages ) at Amazon over the past few hours?
Do your elected representatives support such legislation?
If the answer is "yes," and you live in a place that has free and fair elections, that's on you for not electing folks who will actually represent you.
Sure, feel free to blame the people you voted for. But since you and your neighbors elected those folks, it's hard to see how it's only the fault of those you elected.
That's not to say there aren't other forces/special interests trying to tilt things in their favor, but the solution is electing people who will have your (collective) "interest in mind," not blaming those you had a hand in electing.
In a representative democracy, the voters are the government. We decide who will represent us. If you don't like those that do, look in a mirror.
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