The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here? • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#381

Post by shimman » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #250

masfuerte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse. We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.

I live in a walkable city. I cannot drive because I am blind. Cars make my life better. Uber exists. I use it to get many places that I otherwise wouldn't go to.

Yes it's a widely known fact that prior to cars blind people only stayed in a single room for their entire lives. It was only due to the motorized auto carriage could blind people finally ride around and experience the world! Pretty cool!

I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#382

Post by lazyasciiart » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #255

bluefirebrand wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet. I read this take a lot but I don't buy it. This isn't guaranteed by any means. And even if it does happen, isn't it just as likely that AI is deployed into those companies too and they don't actually result in any job growth?

[flagged]

This comment equates to saying “I don’t care what you think”, and is a perfect example of something that is literally never justified to say on a forum where you have no requirement to interact with them.

If you don’t care what individual people think then simply don’t talk to them.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#383

Post by JTbane » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

jmccaf wrote: post #67

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just started work on a project. Greenfield and "AI accelerated". PRs diffs are in the range of 10s of thousands of lines. In the PR, it is suggested to not actually read all the code as it would take too long.

If you push a change, or you approve, you're responsible for the change and its effects later. Regardless of size. If change is too big, tell your teammates its too big to review and to refactor to bite-size with their great coding agents. Use AI models also for review of large changes, consider a checklist . Setup CI and integration tests (also can be AI assisted)

Agreed, and something will go wrong (as every junior has experienced). You cannot lay blame on the AI when git blame shows your name.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#384

Post by nehal3m » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #350

recursive wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a hard argument to make that bikes can suck more than cars because of parking . As a bicycle enthusiast, I can provide you with some better reasons. You'll get rained on. You'll get sweaty. The helmet will mess up your fancy hair. You can't go as fast. Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

> Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO. I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up. At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't s…

The problem is smaller and that is bad? That’s getting pretty close to the definition of better.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#385

Post by TaupeRanger » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #97

TaupeRanger wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous. The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by…

There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning…

People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#386

Post by skrtskrt » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #372

skrtskrt wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff. “Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.

Most motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they…

I assumed comment is referring to people that advocate for transit as “anti-personal mobility”, they are counting cars as the only “personal mobility” which is beyond laughable.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#387

Post by shimman » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

grvdrm wrote: post #111

Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend. Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.” That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well. I think about that exchange all…

I really hope they increase taxes and stop letting VC firms gamble with pension funds. These people shouldn't have their current jobs already, and you're telling me they're also dictating how technology is being shaped in the country as well?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#388

Post by Supermancho » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

PsylentKnight wrote: post #142

Marha01 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones. The technology is the same. Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck.

> The technology is the same I mean sure, they both have engines and wheels, but they're already distinguishable in the eyes of the law. Commercial and personal vehicles are registered separately Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars. Just would be good to provide alternatives

> Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars.

Following the conversation, the subject has not ever been a yes/no referendum on cars.

It was if there has been a moral net positive/net negative for vehicular technology (as a comparable technology to AI)...which has consistently been walked back to a nebulous "personal vehicles are a net negative because of how they make people think". That's eerily close to the views on AI today.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#389

Post by thushar10 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

egonschiele wrote: post #18

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I don't know if it is possible to stop. I've been thinking the most impactful thing would be to create open-source tools to make it easier to build agents on top of open-source models. We have a few open-source models now, maybe not as good as Gemini, but if the agent were sufficiently good, could that compensate? I think that would democratize some of the power. Then…

Pareto almost never goes away. Democratization usually improves the baseline (rights, resources, time) but it rarely flattens power distribution. Even with open-source models, power will likely tilt toward those with the most compute or the best feedback loops. So considering the imbalance as inevitable , the discussion should be about ensuring the new 'baseline' for humanity is actually net positive.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#390

Post by ButlerianJihad » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

chungusamongus wrote: post #371

yubblegum wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it did "help". Mentats had supercomputer computation capabilities; navigators folded space and charted non-collision paths; warriors had robocop like abilities. These were developed precisely because the use of thinking machines was forbidden. I don't think feudalism is going away one way or another. It persists [in various forms] because of certain biological realities, ranging from genetics to loyalty engendere…

There are a number of different things being conflated here. My inital statement was just acknowledging the lack of appreciation of the subtext behind the Butlerian Jihad. People are unironically embracing it, which I gather is not really how the event functions in Dune. At the level of the text, none of those things you mentioned strike me as positive developments. They just siloed computation to a biological track…

The amusing thing and perhaps the reason I've embraced it as my username, is that people around here are bringing it to life in a certain way.

It may not prove to be effective or as momentous as the fictional one, but it began when I saw stickers slapped onto utility poles that read:

  DEATH TO CLANKERS

  BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW

And I stopped to read them (because they were posted in a neighborhood where my people's cultural center is) and I pondered the intents and methods of those who were slapping up stickers. Surely this was more than just an in-joke or coy sci-fi reference?

The next time I fell victim to the jihad was with a crop of Lime e-Scooters, again on a block where my people have established businesses. I wanted to rent a Lime. I found one with a full battery. I located it and tried to scan the QR. Guess what? The QR had been sanded completely clean. There was no code, no serial number, nothing to scan and no way to uniquely ID the conveyance. There was only a sticker slapped prominently onto its side:

  DEATH TO CLANKERS

  BUTLERIAN JIHAD NOW

At this point I began to suspect the initial aims and methods of the "real-life Butlerian Jihadis". It is sort of ironic that they should start so small, by denying micro-mobility to innocent consumers, but perhaps they will graduated to lighting Waymos and Teslas on fire.