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> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!

I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.

It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).

This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.

Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.

By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).

I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.

You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).

Avoid walls when walking in hallways.

I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.

Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.

The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.

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.

In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?

> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).

>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.

I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".

I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.

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

Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.

“Advertising” vs “doing”

Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.

"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.

> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial

One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".

>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.

Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.

You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).

The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.

Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.

Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.

Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".

One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.

It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.

> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."

Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).

And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.

Agreed. It feels intellectually childish to say we can never have any government because of corruption. This government is flagrantly corrupt, has publicly ignored the courts, and weaponized the DOJ. This is not normal.

You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.

That's not a choice, that is theatre to convince you to not get together with your neighbours to go lop heads off. It is manufacturing governing consent. Democracy does not to empower you, it only exists to convince you [loosely] of the state's violence being righteous.

Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.

Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.

You say it, but you don't always get it.

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 you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.

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.

And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".

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

> where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment

Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?

Agreed.

HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.

Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).

I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.

> Over time the gems will rise to the top

I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.

Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.

A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.

These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.

This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.

I agree. I'm not a game dev. I had a game idea and vibe-coded it with Claude. I kinda got what I had in mind but the game is just not engaging. I don't even know what to prompt. I tried "how could the be made more engaging" but no good ideas are falling out. I just have a lack of intuition for this kind of development. And Claude doesn't help.

On the other hand it should be so much easier to port full games to mobile. For example Stacklands is a game that would feel right at home on a iPhone or iPad, but currently it's not an app I can download and play on a bus.

I've built a few little games for myself both with and without AI, and completely agree. AI can help prototype an idea faster, or clone something very specific, but it can't make your control scheme feel good, invent a unique mechanic, etc (at least not yet).

> 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 about everything else.

Thinking GPT2 was too dangerous is and was absurd.

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 best like with us?

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? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).

So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.

(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)

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.

AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.

I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.

Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.

With ai I can get government bodies to do their job. Escalate and make formal complaints until it’s done. Manually would take ages to find the right law and draft a proper complaint.

If the price to pay is total human disempowerment, I think it's worth getting everyone on the same page before we proceed.

>This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us.

We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.

The state is the farmer, and we are the cows.

It literally is for marketing dude, Dario loves this shit and it's been his modus operandi for years.

You think this is a coincidence that it's happening shortly before Anthropic IPOs?

How many people in the US government (at senior levels) are currently on track to profiting massively from a huge Anthropic IPO? The answer is, most of them. Most of the most powerful CEOs, senators, congressmen, Trump's retinue, are invested in Anthropic through on vehicle or another.

I use AI all the time and Opus 4.8 can't even get the most basic shit right about a very popular videogame released a few years ago. It's not going to steal your baby and eat your wife.

You sound like you have AI psychosis honestly.

Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.

I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..

I'll believe it when I see it.

>these very incredibly smart

The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.

> As a software developer I understand how others sees AI as a threat to their job safety

This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.

Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.

> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.

Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?

Sacks fraudulently obtained citizenship papers but the next administration will likely review the case and revoke his citizenship, which will make him eligible for deportation.

Sacks can choose to self-deport on his own, which will help his chances if he ever decides to re-apply for citizenship or entry into the US.

The US will try to ban them, for being too dangerous or for being an IP violation[0] of some companies we've deemed too big to fail.

[0] lmao how ironic

Even without those incentives, the messaging is clear: you don't want your inference to be shut arbitrarily. Export controls are nothing new but a lot of people have underestimated them due to globalization and the general nature of software. This is a good opportunity for entities around the world to get their setup going.

What makes that more likely than that people at the DoD are alarmed (with or without good justification) at Fable's capabilities plus finding a jailbreak (or what they interpret as a jailbreak while Anthropic seems to dispute the requests met the level Fable should refuse)?

Considering he cornered future production of DRAM, I believe it!

Profitability rests on subscribers. Never subscribe!

How is that going to help him? "Our models are so inferior they are not deemed a threat unlike anthropic's"?

I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.

And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?

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

MiniMax and Moonshot both literally just released the weights for their latest flagship models, a few weeks after DeepSeek did the same. One lab a pattern does not make.

Yes. Very much feels like the encryption story indeed. This is very normal in many industries. Explosives, space, chemicals etc.

The difference is that still the bio and space hackers are few and SWE are plenty so there is more of a collective voice.

I’d love to build a hobbyist space rocket. However, many tools and fuels required per my research can’t be obtained outside the US. So I didn’t even start.

But it already is.

You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.

RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.

Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too

Mistral in the EU, for one.

If you mean employment, the world is different because of rising debt, declining economies, and a crazy leader currently in charge of the most powerful country on the planet. If you asked me when I graduated if the world was drastically different from when I first entered university I would also say yes, and I graduated well before GPT2.

> which isnt even true as chatgpt has been ~ the 5th most popular site in the world for a couple of years now?

That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.

I mean, besides the fact that electricity and the internet are orders of magnitude more transformative than a statistical next-token prediction machine, none of the predictions behind LLMs were made of either in the first 5 years.

Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!

If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.

This is definitely what it feels like to me, especially since it was going to be taken away from the subscriptions anyway right? Plus I had been having huge reliability issues anyway. Now they got to tease something, put it behind a more intense paywall.