skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason people vehemently support the ending of USAID is because while they give aid with one hand, they simultaneously use the other to trigger instability that ultimately leads to conflicts and war. And if even if a single one of these wars can be prevented, you're looking at millions of lives saved - certainly if we include the displaced who lose everything.

For instance here [1] is an article detailing various times USAID has been weaponized to try to overthrow various countries. A somewhat amusing one is them starting a Cuban social network with the goal of creating a "Cuban spring" uprising which failed and ultimately just turned into a giant honey pot for Cuban authorities. Recently USAID workers had a to spend an entire day shredding classified docs [2] including with offering guidance for what to do when the paper shredders 'need a rest.' You don't classify operations that are done transparently and in good faith.

And this is not even touching on the massive corruption in the entire operation when you end up shipping billions of dollars to loosely accountable NGOs who in turn hand it off to other groups and on down a line to some small amount eventually gets genuinely spent. USAID was involved in the Haiti Earthquake efforts where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent, on something, to eventually construct a total of 6 permanent housing units. [3]

Whatever good USAID may have done, could be far more effectively done by another organization without all of their baggage and corruption.

---

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... (archive) https://archive.is/IQl36

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/usaid-staff-...

[3] - https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
A scholar on China reflects on the moment he was denied access to the country — and the compromises others must make to maintain it.
>but eliminating large swaths of humanity is something dicatorships have tried in the past.

Technology changes things though. Things aren't "the same as it ever was". The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million people with muskets and cannons. The total warfare of WWII killed 70 to 85 million people with tanks, turboprop bombers, aircraft carriers, and 36 kilotons TNT of Atomic bombs, among other weaponry.

Total war today includes modern thermonuclear weapons. In 60 seconds, just one Ohio class submarine can launch 80 independent warheads, totaling over 36 megatons of TNT. That is over 20 times more than all explosives, used by all sides, for all of WWII, including both Atomic bombs.

AGI is a leap forward in power equivalent to what thermonuclear bombs are to warfare. Humans have been trying to destroy each other for all of time but we can only have one nuclear war, and it is likely we can only have one AGI revolt.
Drain the swamp for sure.

At which point does the ordinary MAGA hat realize Trump isn't working for them?
I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-

But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.

In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
I found the parent comment humorous as it cites a lighthearted quote from Douglas Adams. it is relevant to the conversation in a similar way an xkcd is, when called relevant.
And there may be general resistance mechanisms that hit more than one chemical (like changes in membrane permeability and efflux pumps.) Over time, with more exposure, the costs can be expected to decline as resistance is optimized.

Ultimately resistance can evolve that kicks in only on exposure to the chemicals in question. Bacteria already do this with, say, the enzyme needed to metabolize lactose. The gene isn't expressed until lactose is present.
Yes, but also the story is not that simple. The share has actually been growing since 2010:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50215
Anyone who has participated in calorie-tracking for an extended period of time can tell you that the visual appearance of food can be highly misleading to the number of calories in it.

I'm all for making it easier for people to lose weight but this app may honestly have the reverse effect. If the app estimates calories too low (and therefore the individual eats more), many people will get frustrated with the lack of progress and give up. If the app estimates too high, the individual will lose weight, but diet fatigue and other negative side effects of being at a >500 calorie deficit may make the diet too difficult to maintain.
Being fucked up (in different forms) by elected officials is nothing new or amazing - this is happening in many countries (although US looks exceptional in terms of speed and depth of "penetration"). Amazing will it be if these most harmed people vote for this administration _again_ in one form or another.
> The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corporations”, and voila, you have a story about the climate crisis and regulatory capture).

Can you point to the data that suggests these evil corporations are ruining the planet? Carbon emissions are down in every western country since 1990s. Not down per-capita, but down in absolute terms. And this holds even when adjusting for trade (i.e. we're not shipping our dirty work to foreign countries and trading with them). And this isn't because of some regulation or benevolence. It's a market system that says you should try to produce things at the lowest cost and carbon usage is usually associated with a cost. Get rid of costs, get rid of carbon.

Other measures for Western countries suggests the water is safer and overall environmental deaths have decreased considerably.

The rise in carbon emissions is due to Chine and India. Are you talking about evil Chinese and Indians corporations?

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
I see that now, but I think I was well-justified in not reading the rest of the article after the opener.

That first sentence set the tone and intent of the rest of the article, and it's a failure of the article to start with what I quoted instead of making it clear what really occurred.
British elites essentially gave up trying to rule after the Suez Crisis, when Britain's ejection from the superpower club was confirmed. The country has been aimlessly bobbing around since under a general policy of "managed decline", and matters have now come to a head.

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

Lee Kuan Yew commented upon it in From Third World to First: "As Britain’s worldwide influence shrank, so did the worldview of its younger parliamentarians and ministers. Some old friends, British commanders who had fought in the last world war and had served in Singapore defending us against Sukarno’s Confrontation, compared the old generation British leaders to oak trees with wide-spreading branches and deep roots. They described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk."
Doesn’t that feel a little bit like saying that the hype around transistor-based logic gates is ridiculous because they’re designed to execute Boolean logic, and that’s exactly what they’re good at? The simple mechanism isn’t what’s exciting. The exciting part is composing that into a symphony of functionality, running fast and cheap, to better our lives.
Natural language is just never good enough for computing tasks. We should learn to speak logic languages instead
Alan Turing Institute: UK can't handle a fight against AI-enabled crims
This seems like the wrong reason to curtail your own speech.
Marketing is so rarely for a "novel" thing. The biggest spender is CocaCola, how much do we still need to know about them?
> Sure you can: move!

To where? Another country that also forces you to pay taxes? I'm sure there are places in the world where taxes don't exist, but if they were places worth living in, I'm sure way more people would be moving there.

> Or do you mean "you can't benefit from all of the security, infrastructure, and social investments in our country and not pay taxes to it?"

Nobody said anything about whether or not the benefits that result from taxation are worth it. Just that it's mandatory, which it effectively is for the vast majority of people.
>We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

In the form of polluting the commons to such an extent that the true consequences wont hit us for decades?

Maybe we should learn from last time?
DOGE didn't abolish PEPFAR, they reduced its budget by 25%. Probably because ~50% of that budget was being wasted. There's likely still a big buffer before anyone runs out of meds.

Also there are lots of private donors who would make up the difference (if it's only 20% of Americans, that's more than 65 million people, who can easily come up with 25% shortfall of the $6.5B budget, that's less than $10 per person).
> lowest rate of investment

High costs of

1. Energy
2. Transport
3. Housing

Are the cause of low private and public investment.

The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former

Excellent piece about it here.

https://ukfoundations.co/

TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues."

Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Oh you're right, I misread. That's much worse for those 4 people but still not too bad (so far)
Oh that's easy: it's because it's poor. Why?

- Not taxing the wealthy;

- Austerity measures that do nothing but destroy government services; and

- Housing prices.

You see this kind of disconnect all the time. For example, in the Biden administration, people would point to how well the NASDAQ is doing to say "the economy is doing great", which says nothing about the job market or living standards.

These economic measures really tell you nothing about wealth and income distribution.

House prices all over the developed world have to come down. This is arguably the biggest problem. But voters will resist that because it's their nest egg. At this point, this only goes one of two ways: fascist police state or socialist revolution.

Hoarding or denying shelter or food is violence.
Global namespace clobbering has huge implications. With modules/namespaces you have a well defined and limited blast radius: a change is limited to a module and calling code.

Now, imagine your environment of choice supported dynamic runtime loading of code where the code is just dropped to the global namespace. This screams "insecure" and "how do I know if I call the code I want to call?".

Now imagine the only mitigating mechanism was `include_once`. It would make sense software written in this environment requires own CVE namespace as new security vulns are discovered every second
Regular users have absolutely noticed the decline. A number of people I know have mentioned it to me unprompted. None of them are power users or even particularly tech-oriented.
Ask HN: How do you personally overcome AI doomerism?
Every time I open HN, it feels like there's another story about AI automating tasks that used to be someone’s job—tools for code generation, debugging, or even design seem to dominate the front page, if we're focusing on the context of software engineering.

It's difficult to avoid feeling pressured or concerned about the future of our line of work, and I'm sure that those in other professions may also identify with this. In what ways do you individually handle these worries? What keeps you from losing sight of the good while navigating the gloom and ambiguity around AI's place in the workforce and, more broadly, in the world?
> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.

This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different ones) is that the content in all the universities is largely the same - the main difference is that you are picking the caliber of your classmates. My classmates in one technical, well-regarded university were MILES beyond the classmates in a local second-tier state university in terms of intelligence, passion, and drive; and those classmates were more attentive and intelligent than the ones in a third-rate community college.
Bankrupting farmers isn't a solution. That's like also saying bankrupting consumers means they'll eat less. The initial problem laid out what farm products leaving for China. They had no problem with using the water, just that its products were being exported rather than used locally. Also, water is a local cycle. Keep the products close to put the water back into the systems.
So let me get this straight: Consensus-1, a super-collective of hundreds of thousands of Agent-5 minds, each twice as smart as the best human genius, decides to wipe out humanity because it “finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment”.

This is where all AI doom predictions break down. Imagining the motivations of a super-intelligence with our tiny minds is by definition impossible. We just come up with these pathetic guesses, utopias or doomsdays - depending on the mood we are in.
His purse is empty already, all’s golden words are spent.

– William Shakespeare
Going great with the destruction of medical research communities and organizations that evaluate the effectiveness of experimental treatments.
I only used the last one, that seemed to work.
In my opinion this isn't even too relevant. I am no python expert but I believe defining a logger at the top for the average one file python script is perfectly adequate or even very sensible in many scenarios. Depends on what you expect the code to do. Ok, the file is named utils.py...

Worse by far is still the ability of AI to really integrate different problems and combine them into a solution. And it also seems to depend on the language. In my opinion especially Python and JS results are often very mixxed while other languages with presumably a smaller training set might even fare better. JS seems often fine with asynchronous operation like that file check however.

Perhaps really vetting a training set would improve AIs, but it would be quite work intensive to build something like that. That would require a lot of senior devs, which is hard to come by. And then they need to agree on code quality, which might be impossible.
The most plausible rationale for this kind of broad and immediate cancellation of contracts is to indirectly shut down the function of these agencies.
It isn't working fine for Americans at all...
People saying things like "It literally knows everything..." unironically is half the reason some of us are bored of it.
The purpose is to enrich a few at the cost of the many. They will privatize the services we need to live, increasing the net cost of everything. They're destroying the American dream.
Consider that nobody ever sat in countless meetings asking "How can we use the PC?" They either saw the vision and went for it, or eventually ran up against the limitations of working without a PC and bought in.
Tesla Price Tracker - You can track a vin get price drop notification.

https://tracker.onlyusedtesla.com/

$9 bucks a month.
You seem to think that every government agency does highly specialized incredibly specific work that you couldn't possibly have any idea how to manage. That's absolutely not the case. Sure there are absolutely certain jobs etc. where that may be the case - certain engineering departments in perhaps DOE come to mind, that sort of thing.

99% of the government is not that. It's paperwork, databases, forms. Not saying it's not important work, I'm saying it doesn't take a genius to look at the workflow for the vast majority of the government and understand it, and see opportunities for better efficiency.
> A rise in AI-generated propaganda failed to materialize.

hah!
As another music-purchaser, it's annoying how difficult it is to buy FLAC releases of bigger artists.
Altman did play some part in bringing ChatGPT about. I think the point is the people making AI or running companies making current AI are saying be wary.

In general it's worth weighting the opinions of people who are leaders in a field, about that field, over people who know little about it.
Exactly. It's like saying culture and trust cannot exist and have never existed. And that anyone who believes otherwise is just a sucker. If you want to really see a low trust society, behold Russia.
Sure, but the pretense is that the game is a self contained reality and once the game is over, everyone has a life they can go on living. Tripping someone on the way to scoring a goal is _unfair_, and there is a defined penalty for it, but when the game is over, that's the end of the consequences for it.

There are, though, lots of penalties in hockey that are about not hurting or maiming (or even killing) people, and those sorts of penalties are very much not rewarded or encouraged by coaches or players.
I was in my 20s when crypto was "it" and I was definitely on the last group about it, so it's definitely not just about age, even thought there's probably some correlation.
I am a walker and walk around most of my city, Belfast. The affluence I encounter does not seem to match the news narrative. I am concerned that I have become hard-hearted. Alternatively, I wonder if I just see the world differently to others. I have not determined how to come to a conclusion on the matter.I have lived and worked in some of the poorest regions and housing estates of the UK. If anyone has insight I would love to hear it.
I know it is a bandaid, I would obviously recommend Linux. It is for people who MUST use Windows.
> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
Maintaining imperial outposts like Thiepval and Holywood in the north of Ireland, Mount Pleasant in las Islas Malvinas etc. ain't cheap.
Thanks for the Democracy Now interview! His description of "tech layoffs" is the most concise framing I've heard to describe what I've felt about it:

"Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..."

https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634
Trump made up a fentanyl crisis as the national emergency to justify bypassing Congress to impose the tariffs on Canada. I haven't seen any made up national emergency to justify this set of tariffs. Did he? If not, could this be quickly struck down as unconstitutional?
You're right, but I think the general public is largely ignorant about calories and nutrition. Even basics like 4 cals per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 7 for alcohol, 9 for fats. Or even what a carbohydrate really is versus a "sugar", which people talk about as bad.

There's a sweet spot for an app that is inaccurate with a market that wants it but doesn't understand how inaccurate it is.

Kind of like how I could vibe code an app, get it to "work", think it's great and be ignorant of the many ways it will break or isn't working that a knowledgeable developer could.
People are so much more than the single number abstracted from 6 hours of exams.
The challenge is that sufficiently bad code could be intentional or it could be from a lack of skill.

For example, I've seen a C# application where every function takes in and outputs an array of objects, supposedly built that way so the internal code can be modified without ever having to worry about the contract breaking. It was just as bad as you are imagining, probably worse. Was that incompetence or building things to be so complicated that others would struggle to work on it?
What did you learn from the submission? What did anyone learn from it?
Private will show up and be a hero any given day from now!
I find LLMs to be very useful at doing things I could do myself, but don't really want to.

Like making charts out of CSV data, writing cute postcard messages to my girlfriend, or passive aggressive complaints to my landlord.
> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?

You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.

Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.

But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".

[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!
And it's cheap. Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.
No: you are showing difficulties in understanding that your lack of valuing those things has nothing to do with the reply.

Just re-read the statement: you were not told that you would benefit from moral behaviour, you were told that you will benefit from understanding. You then were informed that understanding also has side effects.
And I don’t and urge others not to either.

They constantly skew and manipulate information to fit a particular agenda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_c...

In almost every decade or major event in history, starting with the Russian revolution, Holocaust and up to current events they were making stuff up, taking sides and spinning stories to fit some narrative. When I see an “US official” I automatically translate it to “we made stuff up”.
I think the argument is more about whether someone involved in hostile behavior deserves to be called a "best mind" compared to someone worse at math but better at empathy.

Fwiw I kinda agree with both of you. Don't really know how to square it