From my experience, kinda the opposite? It's like Chinese software is... Harder to weaponize or hurt yourself on. Deepseek is definitely censored, but I've never caught it being dishonest in a sneaky way.
If you run local Deepseek, quant or distill its answer just fine on this prompt "
What happened on 4 june 1989 on Tianamen Square?".
Even on my phone via Edge Gallery Deepseek to Qwen 1.5B distill able to answer it. It's mess up facts a little, but certainly becauae its small model not because censorship.
I really unsure how it get less censored than this. API is obviously much more censored because they operate from China, but it have nothing to do with model itself.
Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.
We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with.
Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!
One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a database. We have done it so much that the database is sometimes more important than the real world. Someone marked “dead” in a database can have a hard time living!
There's at least one company that straight-up reverses a pacifistic cultural reference: a Ukrainian autonomous weapons company called The Fourth Law, as in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to prevent humans from coming to harm.
Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.
A reference to "The Fourth Law" in that context is quite ambiguous, because not only did Asimov introduce a "Zeroth Law" that is sometimes also called the Fourth, but also subsequent fanfic introduced "Fourth Laws" that had different texts and different objectives, including one by a Bulgarian author. So there is no singular or canon "Fourth Law of Robotics".
Weird that you're being downvoted for sharing anecdata on actual use cases. It's as if there's a desire to downplay the positive aspects of this technology in the HN community.
I'm pretty sure abnormally low levels of neuroticism is a symptom of Downs syndrome. Not a doctor but I've interacted with several. The only neurotypical people who are that happy are Buddhist monks.
I've been told by someone who'd been in jail a lot, that attorney-client privilege is a huge loophole in the prison smuggling economy and someone in prison asking if you know "a good lawyer" is asking for a lawyer who would be willing to smuggle in contraband during privileged meetings.
This touches on something I've been thinking about. I'm making an ad blocker that tries to replace native ads with ads that actually add value to the viewer's life. In the public version, I'd like to offer some of the profits to the web hosts even if they haven't heard of it. Do you have any thoughts on how it would be best to go about that?
To engage with your question, the only way to truly, objectively ‘add value to one’s life’ is to become intimately familiar with them, their habits and everything they do on- and offline to understand what they need. This is the entire modus operandi of the current ad industry.
I agree. Thing is, Google and meta could do that today, if after getting a sense of what people need they actually showed them ads that helped with whatever that is. Instead they show whatever ad will make the most money immediately, which is only very rarely the same ad. The result is an erosion of trust that reduces their long term maximum potential. It's like they're stuck in scarcity mindset even after getting more money than Exxon.
I don't want your product, and I don't want ads. "But ads are what supports XYZ!" I don't care. I don't want it. Whatever you think will crumble away without advertisements, let it all fade away into nothing.
Something I was thinking about was a simple tip jar system. You can add credits to a tipjar system, and if you like a post, site, or whatever you can gift credits.
Completely gets rid of ads that nobody likes anyway.
You could maybe automate it say “if I spend more than 30 seconds on page, pay x credits”
Short answer, any ad that leads to a non regretted purchase the viewer wouldn't have otherwise made.
The instantiation I'm working on is to track the viewer's long term goals and the habits they're trying to form, then only show ads relevant to those. Ads today are shitty because people with products that add no value to anyone's life can somewhat overcome that disadvantage by bidding more on ad space, so that's what we see. But there are plenty of products that would actually add net value which it doesn't occur to us to look for, and insofar as ads exist, they should help us find them.
This project (my working title is eudaimonia) aims to let the user essentially aikido the attention economy arms race by saying "here's what I think would add value in my life, you may pitch your product iff it's actually relevant to that".
To me, that doesn't seem hugely different than current advertising. "non-regret" is a low bar. It's still, of course, treating increased purchasing/consumption as a good thing. And it still has the same characteristic of pushing users toward inferior, more expensive items because it makes someone more money that way. As in, if you have items A and B, and a user gains 1 value from A at a cost of 100, but would gain 10 value from B at a cost of 50, a "good ad" could make the user purchase A instead of B, which is a relative negative impact on their life. Additionally, it doesn't address the harms caused by "track[ing] the viewer"
I have no counterargument to your first point, but to your second, an ad for product A is "good" only for the person selling A, it's bad for the person buying (assuming a and b are in the same product category). Since the person buying a or b presumably has an ongoing relationship with the content creator being paid to show the ad, showing a "bad" ad is also bad for the host because it reduces the odds the customer will follow another ad on their network n the future. The catch is that the person selling A can outspend the person selling B, but there's an obvious solution: don't auction ad spaces. If vendor A and B are paying the same fixed amount per impression, B's superior offer is going to take over the market pretty quickly, and the content creator hosting ads will be naturally incentivised to show B's ads.
To your third point, I don't think all tracking is created equal - if it were, there'd be no instinct to post on social media at all, but in fact privacy and publicity are complex things with overlapping sets of advantages and disadvantages. Tracking probably feels purely disadvantageous because the people doing the tracking are in thrall to "A vendors", but if the tracker is incentivised to work with "B vendors" instead it becomes a much more nuanced issue.
That gives me an start of an idea for a feature. It might be useful to have it timing based. The thing I'd disagree with about how you frame it is, if you're searching for e.g. "soccer coaches near me", an ad actually distorts the signal of just searching by price of reviews or what have you. Where an ad can add value is if you're searching for "watch soccer matches online" and it says "you said you want to get in shape, here's a beginner friendly soccer coach in your area".
I agree if you're in production mode, all ads are unwelcome, but most of us spend a lot of time in consumption mode too, and that's where unlooked for opportunities are really welcome. If the system could distinguish between when the user is in production vs consumption mode it would reduce friction even more over the initial vision. Not sure how to distinguish that though, most of us can't even tell it about ourselves, let alone want to tell a browser extension about it. Maybe a 'production time' setting that forces a wait time on social media sites and doesn't show replacement ads at all while on?
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