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

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#201

Post by sofixa » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #129

schrototo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.

There's currently no real democracy on earth. Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now. For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle. The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making…

> There's currently no real democracy on earth.

That's a claim.

Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#202

Post by wongarsu » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #107

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.

Each government just adds shit on the previous, with small optics differences, anyway. Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.

ICE does a lot of objectionable things no matter what you think about deporting illegals

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#203

Post by namdnay » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

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.

That’s a strange argument. If my postman shits in my letterbox, is that proof that the whole concept of postmen is a bad idea?

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#204

Post by boppo1 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #91

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 year…

AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#205

Post by roysting » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

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.

It’s the insidious dualistic emotional trap that so many people are in, “my team is good and your team is bad”. People scoff at things like WWE but it’s really no different if you have a “my team” in sports (look around your space) or a side/team in the political theater where you vote really hard, pulling levers that have even categorically been shown are not connected to anything [1]. Please control the urge to respond or even think that your political team the controllers gave you siding with is somehow better. Your political WWE wrestler is not better than any others, it’s still all “scripted”, only actions and activities within system accepted bounds are permitted.

Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.

It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.

It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.

Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.

[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#206

Post by simonask » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

flanked-evergl wrote: post #173

simonask wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This betrays a simplistic understanding of democracy. In short, its meaning cannot be derived from decomposing its etymology, and your take here is ... certainly unique. Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the major…

> Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good. It's the same thing with the…

> This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept.

It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.

Did you think democracy was not a modern idea? It unequivocally is. The word comes from Ancient Greek, but what they did had almost nothing to do with the current definition of the word.

This focus on ethnic groups that you have is simply just not germane to this discussion. Democracy as it is currently understood does not have anything to do with "ethnic self-determination" (reeks of Blut und Boden - what the hell does it even mean to have an "ethnic self"?).

I don't know if you are inspired by neo-fascist thought or what's going on, but your understanding of democracy is extremely unconventional.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#207

Post by graemep » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

cbg0 wrote: post #195

graemep wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Deepmind is headquartered in the UK and has R & D in multiple countries. How would the US ban non-nationals from using something that is largely developed outside the US by people who are not US nationals? Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business. Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough. I have not had much of a chance to tr…

The US can create sanctions with legal repercussions, the same way they've done with Iran or Cuba in the past.

Certainly to stop people with US businesses from doing business with Iran or Cuba. To stop an American owned British company from doing business in the UK? To stop a French company doing business in France? To stop either doing business with the rest of the world? To stop anyone doing business with China?

Its really not comparable.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#208

Post by boppo1 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

jrowen wrote: post #124

jeroenhd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the…

>Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race?

Probably convincing humans that untrue things are true. Think less "AI launches nukes" and more "AI convinces people in country A that country B is trying to subvert & destroy them, while it does the same for country B wrt A."

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#209

Post by roryirvine » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #174

usef- wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they? From the original 2019 release: > We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate): Generate misleading news articles Impersonate others online Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media…

> The public at large will need to Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait… They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit abou…

I'm not an AI booster, but in this case I'd say that pausing the rollout for mitigations (such as public education) to be put in place was the responsible course of action.

With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#210

Post by FiberBundle » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

boppo1 wrote: post #196

imjonse wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.

No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism. It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.

Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.