You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.
I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments.
Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about.
It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.
Of course there's a heavy dose of childhood nostalgia driving this, but I do love everything about this design style and outlook. It ties into the "early" days of the internet and web, when the vibe was around having a "Library of Alexandria" in your family home, the computer as a bicycle for your mind and just a general feeling of "abundance" that permeated the environment. I would come home from school and watch Star Trek TNG and get a utopian view of the future, flip over to PBS and watch Carmen Sandiego or Square 1, have dinner, then crack open Microsoft Encarta on the family PC and browse through random topics. The world of technology felt like it held infinite promise.
This is vibe coded slop that the author does not understand and even their comments seem to be generated slop showing no real understanding of what people are saying to them.
Thank you for taking the time to look through the repository. I’m continuing to iterate on both the code and the documentation to make the intent and technical details clearer. You can find my research paper(under peer review) here:
One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.
I guess the reason it won all those awards is the same reason I dislike it as much. It's more of a political pamphlet than a sci-fi. Definitely far from "Best SciFi Ideas".
Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.
After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...
It's not crazy. It's routine. That's what the mainstream media does best. Remember just a couple months ago when the mainstream media bought the line that a standard SMS fraud operation was actually a terrorist thread against the UN?
This book was generated by an LLM, and if I look at the Github organization that manages the repo, it looks like a bunch of other written material, all generated by LLMs. I scanned through the material a little bit and it seemed like exactly the sort of surface level gloss of topic that you'd expect an LLM to output. I didn't feel a ton of motivation to thoroughly go through the whole thing, in the same way that the author didn't feel a ton of motivation to actually learn about Lisp and then synthesize their knowledge into something novel that could potentially help other people. So it possible that there is more to this document than meets the eye, but right now I don't think I'm wrong in saying most people won't miss anything by skipping this.
I didn't really have a firm top 5 in mind, I meant it more in the sense of "this was very memorable indeed".
But what the hell, it would be fun to reminisce some more.
Kind of cheating because the book is a classic, so this is just for the story: I was 15 years old in 1996, and we took a family vacation near Westhoek in Belgium. There's a nature reserve with sand dunes. I spent a few days lying in the sand dunes while reading "Dune" for the first time. This was at the same time that Hale-Bopp was visible in the night sky. It's still one of my favorite books just because of how visceral that reading experience was.
"Diaspora" by Greg Egan starts in 2975 when the majority of humans are disembodied computer programs running in simulated-reality communities. Originally, humans were uploaded/digitized but by this point, new digital consciousnesses come into being. The first chapter describes the "birth" of such a consciousness, and again, I found reading this to be a very visceral experience, and rather beautiful. Given that this was written in 1997, it is also surprisingly prescient of today's understanding of auto-encoders and how LLMs train.
"The Carpet Makers" ("Die Haarteppichknüpfer" in the original German) completely blew my mind as a teenager because of how the story was structured. It starts with a description of a family that - like many other families - is working on an elaborate carpet made from human hair, a carpet that it will take them an entire lifetime to complete. Then the book begins to zoom out and you learn more and more about the universe it is set in, but not in an annoying fashion where a curtain is being pulled back and the author feels very clever. Its unusual structure exposed me to the idea that Sci-Fi didn't have to be primarily about rockets, if done well, it could just be quite good literature that happens to be set in space and speculates about technology and it's sociological impact. Other works demonstrate that better, but this is the one that made me realize that.
And then finally, and from quite recently, my hands down favorite short story ever. And it's actually metamodern! First you'd need to have read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) by Ursula K. LeGuin, who is generally worth reading. In 2024, Isabel J. Kim wrote "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole" (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/), and it's great. I re-read it every now and then, and it chokes me up every time. The way the prose is a complete juxtaposition to the original story: rough, unpolished, conversational. It pulls no punches whatsoever, and bounces between humor and moral horror. 10/10, will read again, many times, whenever I happen to think of it.
It's not an ad-hominem. When people are talking their book, you should know that they're talking their book, and that knowledge doesn't have to negate any sound points they're making or cause you to disregard everything they're saying, it just colors your evaluation of their arguments, as it should. I don't think this is controversial, and seeing that comment flagged is pretty disheartening, adding context is almost never a bad thing.
It is quite literally an ad-hominem, in that it is aimed at the person, not the argument. The issue isn't that more context is bad (I agree with you, it's useful), it's that as a policy for a discussion board I think allowing this kind of thing is a bad idea. People can be mistaken, or lie, and comments get ugly fast when it's personal. Not to mention the fine line between this and doxxing.
(e.g. here, the OP has claimed that they do not in fact have a vested interest in AI - so was this "context" really a good thing?)
I appreciate this response and I’m also as confused as you are. It’s information relevant to the conversation, not an accusation (it would be an odd accusation to make, no?)
I don't care, in part because the claim is false, but there's literally a guideline saying you can't do this, so I guess it's worth knowing that you're wrong too.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
In this case it’s relevant to the discussion as the user was questioning why you were making the points you were.
It’s not an accusation of shilling, it’s context where context was requested.
As a test imagine if you changed the context to something good such as “AI achieves the unthinkable” and the responding user asked why someone was so optimistic about the achievement.
It’s relevant context to the conversation, nothing else.
I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
This comment is completely untrue, the place I had read the information was incorrect and I was wrong in passing on second hand information I hadn’t personally verified. One of the people in question has clarified and corrected this comment. I can’t edit the comment at this point otherwise I would, so this is the best I can do.
One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.
Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently making little games, got nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked directly for a company again.
We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent and related expense at our current rate, and so we could afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly 10 years now that we live aboard.
We're super opened with our finances and how we made this possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :) Cheers!
Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)
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