Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

blog.samaltman.com

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#591

In all seriousness, what is the game plan for society moving forward as AI takes more jobs? The government doesn't seem to care. The AI labs don't seem to care. What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.? Nothing more dangerous than a man who has no reason to live... I don't advocate for violence, but I do foresee more headlines like this as things get worse.

AI will not take anyone's jobs. I, for one, don't consider AI something serious, it's still a toy, a curious tech demo, and will always remain one, outside of niche applications like NLP (there's no denying that LLMs are really good at this). The idea that anyone at all treats it seriously is just appalling to me. Mass-production and other optimizations that use economies of scale to their benefit do take jobs. There…

I mostly agree. In a technological society jobs and money are kind of virtual. The productivity gained by technology in the last 150 years made lots of work redundant and we've been managed by economists to still organise around wage labour. This is nothing new with AI. We could have abandoned wage labour 50 years ago during the 70ies and got neoliberalism instead. So we'll get more of the same with AI I guess.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#593
post #524

I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years. Here are some quotes from what used to be a pretty interesting and thoughtful community: > Ah, the Elon manoeuvre: trying to make would-be assassins hesitate by using your own child as a shield. > the words and narratives that Sam Altman promoted caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger that someone t…

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#595

Sounds like this was just a crazy guy upset at OpenAI. Not great but an isolated incident. That said… is anyone going to be surprised when the laid off masses torch a data center or worse? IMO, it’s only a matter of time before we see organized anti-AI terrorism too. When you have people out there saying “AI will kill us all” then it’s easy to justify using violence to stop that outcome.

Related: "A 29-year-old employee, identified as Chamel Abdulkarim, was arrested for allegedly starting a massive six-alarm fire that destroyed a Kimberly-Clark sanitary paper warehouse in Ontario, California, on April 7, 2026." He said "All you had to do was pay us enough to live" And this was caused not by a homeless or unemployed.

Filming himself doing something that will get him years or even decades in prison suggests he wasn’t exactly of completely sound mind when he did that.

Similar here with the guy going straight from the crime scene to OpenAI HQ to get caught

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#596
post #588
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years... HN (and ycombinator) has implicitly enabled, dogwhistled, or pretended to ignore all sorts of hateful and violent rhetoric. Sometimes it hides behind a veneer of "curious conversation" but other times its disgustingly blatant - last article I saw about sama was filled with horrific racism. I come here because there are sometimes good posts, but t…

> Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years The world I have lived in for longer than 10 years is HN. I'm gut-wrenchingly familiar with the worst things that people post here—probably more than anyone, simply because it's my job. If you can dig up a single example of a thread this bad that we knew about and didn't do anything about, I'd be shocked, because it would go against everything I b…

Well I'm not saying they don't get moderated eventually .. but the thread in reference

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135

There was horrific racism on display right here. Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you .. but at the time, some of those posts felt just as bad as calls to violence or worse.

But to compose something more substantial .. its probably all to much to neatly tie up in a single reply to a thread.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#597
post #524

I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years. Here are some quotes from what used to be a pretty interesting and thoughtful community: > Ah, the Elon manoeuvre: trying to make would-be assassins hesitate by using your own child as a shield. > the words and narratives that Sam Altman promoted caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger that someone t…

[flagged]

> he deserved it [...] I'll have a toast the day he croaks

As I said to voidhorse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150), this is obviously the kind of thing we ban people for—as anyone who reads https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html should know; but given that this thread is a mob and mobs derange people, I'm going to cut you some slack and not ban you. Just please don't do anything like this on Hacker News again.

> For a social scientist, you're either a really poor one, a poorly read one or one with a complete inability to read the room.

Personal attacks are also unwelcome here. Lashing out at a fellow community member is mean and shameful, and also undermines whatever argument you were making.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#598
post #596
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years The world I have lived in for longer than 10 years is HN. I'm gut-wrenchingly familiar with the worst things that people post here—probably more than anyone, simply because it's my job. If you can dig up a single example of a thread this bad that we knew about and didn't do anything about, I'd be shocked, because it would go against everything I b…

Well I'm not saying they don't get moderated eventually .. but the thread in reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135 There was horrific racism on display right here. Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you .. but at the time, some of those posts felt just as bad as calls to violence or worse. But to compose something more substantial .. its probably all to much to neatly tie up in a…

> Well I'm not saying they don't get moderated eventually

I'm going to interpret that as meaning that we do our job ok, just not instantenously—which would make sense, given that we're human and that would be humanly impossible.

> There was horrific racism on display right here

If there were any cases of that which we didn't do anything about, it would be because we didn't see them. I can't read everything that gets posted to Hacker News any more than you can; see "humanly impossible" above. But I'd like to see specific links.

> Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you

It does not "seem like part of the background noise" to me. What it "seems like" is wrenching my intenstines into an agonizing state on a regular basis and then driving a spike through them.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#599
post #561

Sounds like this was just a crazy guy upset at OpenAI. Not great but an isolated incident. That said… is anyone going to be surprised when the laid off masses torch a data center or worse? IMO, it’s only a matter of time before we see organized anti-AI terrorism too. When you have people out there saying “AI will kill us all” then it’s easy to justify using violence to stop that outcome.

I'd also call it isolated, but I mean it in a different way. I can't recall similar attacks against a tech bilionnaire. Which I guess makes it notable? > organized anti-AI terrorism too There were already memes about that > When you have people out there saying “AI will kill us all” It's the "clickbait" mechanism becoming more cancerous

> I can't recall similar attacks against a tech bilionnaire.

How about Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber)? Attacking the tech elite was his deal.

Post reply on HN