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Magnifica Humanitas

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Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#641

Post by thegrimmest »

mullingitover wrote: post #508
idiotsecant wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully that to a ton of people it no longer means 'people who are different are made valuable by that difference'- it's been demonized into essentially meaning 'give black people and women jobs they don't deserve'. It's a prime example of propaganda through language pollution. For whatever reason HN has been slowly goose ste…

> We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully Whatever term you pick to describe a concerted effort to overcome the tendency to bigotry, they'll just hijack that, too. There's a whole industry built around this, and the media is so receptive to the right-wing that they'll openly describe how they'll do it[1], will execute the plans in public, and the mainstream…

I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let private people discriminate freely.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken

I think people should be allowed to make their own choices in terms of whom to hire/associate with, with absolutely no outside intervention. That doesn't make me a bigot.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#642

Post by dang »

Related ongoing thread:

Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270497 - May 2026 (50 comments)

Also:

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187201 - May 2026 (235 comments)

Others? (I seem to recall others.)

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#643

Post by jauntywundrkind »

nickvec wrote: post #417
alecco wrote: post #390

Yes it's a very dangerous concentration of power. But I don't believe strong words or proposing regulation by just another elite would change much. Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Support truly open source companies. Let's walk the walk.

Which open source companies would you recommend supporting?

Allen AI (ai2) is doing ridiculously good work, with such a clear focus on enabling others. https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social

Their work on SERA (open training, open weights) is fantastic. 40 GPU days of time, training a competitive model, but also, a model built for further close fine-tuning. That refining and distilling models down, especially for complex code-bases, to make the model want to do the right thing, to know the process you use, has such promise. And it's done so in the open, with so much work to help you train or refine yourself, at such low costs! https://allenai.org/blog/open-coding-agents

I'm so so so happy AI2 is helping bring up NSF OMAI compute center, some modern equipment they'll have access to. https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mlbihzxsei2a https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mlbii3d37t2u

Incredible company. And such versatility! Earth sensing/geospatial models MolmoEarth, their own benchmarks for example for Instruction Following IFBench, MolmoAct robotics / VLA, and radical new MoE models EMO, https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mm7udixycs2h https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mm7udixycs2h https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3ml4pooclic23 https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mle56nehfz2w

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#644

Post by jimbokun »

ako wrote: post #427
vermilingua wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only builders, the greatest takeaway for me is that everyone has a responsibility in shaping the discourse, culture, and usage of transformative technology. This "the builders will do the right thing" mentality is even (in my interpretation) explicitly called out in several places: > It is the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a livi…

Agreed, I think the builders are the wrong people to ask for this self reflection. Anything can be used for good and bad. A knife can be used to prepare food, or to stab someone. A drone can be used to attack a country, or to defend a country. A wooden beam can be used to build a house, or to build a cross to crucify someone. Same way AI can be used for good and bad. And it’s up to the person using the tool to act mo…

You are welcome to your opinion, but human civilization was even more biased towards instrumentality before the broad spread of Christianity.

I am well aware of the abuses and scandals of Christian churches throughout history. I am also aware that the Romans and other civilizations pre-dating Christianity had even less regard for the poor and powerless.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#645

Post by Findecanor »

xandrius wrote: post #165
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #127

This quote is from 1903. Times haven't changed that much: > Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people.

Yep but the anti-socialism/communism world did wonders to make that feel like kryptonite whenever those words get brought up, even though anyone who is doesn't see themselves as "rich" in that sentence who fully agree. That's why even factory workers are anti-communism or anti-union which are literally the best way to fight back the imbalance of power.

I think we should not use the word "communism". It is imbued with a lot of different values depending on who you ask, and is therefore utterly useless.

Marx and Engels had originally envisioned a liberal democratic society with lots of high ideals but they had allowed the transition to it to be tough. Every self-proclaimed "Communist" state never got through that transition: the people in charge never let it (often never intended to) and instead cemented their authoritarian dictatorships. So let's call those what they were.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#646

Post by jimbokun »

ctoth wrote: post #288
sethbannon wrote: post #22

The overarching message is that builders should deeply consider the impact of what they're building on civilization. "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it." Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility" because "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity." The questions shouldn't just be 'can we buil…

The strange part is how moral responsibility somehow always lands on the builders... the people with the least leverage... while the funders get to ask the ethical questions. Weird!

I’m only through the introduction but this encyclical makes clear everyone bears some responsibility to act, including but not limited to the builders.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#647

Post by [deleted] »

jdw64 wrote: post #248

>“technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it,” If critical decisions affecting human life—such as hiring, lending, crime prediction, and welfare—are processed in an opaque black box, people will lose their fundamental right to explain their context or appeal against the machine's algorithmic verdicts

[deleted]

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#648

Post by beders »

Nobody should take the Pope seriously or the Vatican.

An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#649

Post by jimbokun »

rectang wrote: post #406
mulr00ney wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers versus "engineers". I have fond memories of a boss who was an actual, licensed engineer while the rest of us were very much normal software devs. Boss was pretty chill except when someone someone suggested we should be called "engineers" rather than "developers", at which point they said "if you guys were building bridges, people would be dead." (I don't think all software needs to be built to rigorous engi…

I prefer the term "software developer" and that's what I use when I don't need the prestige of the term "software engineer". It's disadvantageous for organizations to do that with actual job titles, though. Absent US government intervention to codify the term "engineer", probably the only way out of the "engineer" trap is through further title inflation, where the developers all become "vice presidents". :)

People meeting the definition of Software Engineer while having that title may be rare, but we certainly need more of them.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#650

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power.

For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them. In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option.

So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

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