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?

#441

Post by seer » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

baal80spam wrote: post #36

lukev wrote: post #17

This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

I think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced.

Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year).

And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer.

So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some.

I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.

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

#442

Post by chungusamongus » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #329

chungusamongus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, people are talking about the butlerian jihad without any sense of irony or subtext. Dune is literally a feudal hellscape that takes place in the wake of that event. It didn’t make things better. Lmao

You think his argument was that we should welcome the likes of Google controlling the direction of our cognition? The book was about the dangers of asserting our independence from those who control technology? Admittedly, I haven't read the sequels.

They didn't assert independence though. That's my point. They just siloed computation to biological organisms, and it led to the concentration of power anyway.

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

#443

Post by bccdee » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:00 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…

Writ very small, though. You can easily fit a dozen bikes into the space of one parking spot, if not more (double-decker racks exist!), and it is a lot easier to contrive a spot for your bike in the absence of bike racks than it is to park a car when there's no parking.

Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.

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

#444

Post by chungusamongus » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #390

chungusamongus wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is funny. I don't know. I always kind of cringe when I hear the term clankers. I know people often aren't serious but it seems like maybe we shouldn't be trying to invent new slurs.

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

#445

Post by Animats » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models."

Yes.

For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility.

It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austen's novels are a good start.

The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales.

So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

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

#446

Post by throwanem » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

chungusamongus wrote: post #434

throwanem wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of families who feed their kids just fine on something less than a quarter million US a year. Just about all the families I know with kids, these days.

If we want to get into anecdotes... most of the people I know with kids are seriously struggling. And that aligns more closely with economic data than what you said. Most people do not have a robust emergency fund at all.

I understand why you would rather "get into anecdotes" than answer my point. I don't understand why you keep posting, save perhaps that "the guilty flee where no man pursueth." The account you're using is without history or reputation. All you have to do to make this end is stop.

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

#447

Post by mrob » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #417

dpark wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes. Uncomfortable, yes, possibly extremely so. But you can bike in a downpour so severe that it’s unsafe to drive specifically because you’re not in a 2 ton deaths machine. Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars. The biggest factor is that people s…

Safe for cars/bikes, or the passengers vs the bicyclist? Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going. We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike -…

>No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.

Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.

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

#448

Post by ahartmetz » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

I think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.

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

#449

Post by lamasery » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

PsylentKnight wrote: post #435

TaupeRanger wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting t…

The problem is that all the infrastructure that cars need (roads, parking lots) makes everything WAY further apart. For example, downtown Houston is literally like 25% parking lots by area. And that's not even counting other car infrastructure like roads. So to some degree, cars are just satisfying a demand for transportation that they themselves create Denser, less car-centric areas are more economically productive…

Put simply: The existence of motor vehicles is good, from most perspectives. It's fairly hard to argue they're not.

The development of cities caused by unrestricted, broad private car ownership without lots of careful coordination on that development, is in the reverse situation: it's fairly hard to argue it's net-beneficial, because it's so incredibly expensive in all-told money, time(!), liberty(!!), and, if we'll allow consideration of such things in a basically-economic analysis, pleasantness of environments for humans to exist in.

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

#450

Post by adolph » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #289

Waterluvian wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum. Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads). In the car centric places, a few generations later they beco…

> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:

  The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots 
  crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned 
  into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons 
  and presidents.

https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...