There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing • Hacker News Board

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#91

Post by jeroenhd » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

andrewparker wrote: post #34

OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card. But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model. The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.

To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.

Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.

I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#92

Post by flanked-evergl » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

simonask wrote: post #70

flanked-evergl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.

I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development. I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many de…

That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy.

A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.

Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.

Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.

Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#93

Post by dakolli » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

uludag wrote: post #21

> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and…

[flagged]

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#94

Post by modeless » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

stult wrote: post #77

modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

[flagged]

I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#95

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:33 AM UTC

woggy wrote: post #24

Any reason to think that open models will not catch up, given enough time?

By all indications, Fable is way too big to feasibly host locally. Even Opus is probably near enough to the limit.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#96

Post by temporaryacc2 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:33 AM UTC

The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse.

The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.

Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.

AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.

I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#97

Post by mvdtnz » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:36 AM UTC

dxuh wrote: post #64

modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#98

Post by airport_barfly » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:36 AM UTC

Everyone's focusing on marketing and market manipulation here, but the real consequences are more serious IMO.

If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#99

Post by echelon » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

temporaryacc2 wrote: post #96

The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse. The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI. Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level an…

Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.

There simply won't be jobs for them.

The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#100

Post by MachineBurning » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

uludag wrote: post #21

> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and…

Game design is hard. Back in the day I released 4 flash games. 2 completely tanked, 1 did ok, and one went quite well (hundreds of years total time spent in game).

There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.

I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).