want to give other nice people the benefit of the doubt

Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site. If we were talking about an individual OSS maintainer, sure, that's possible. But large corporations have been doing the opposite for as long as they've existed and there's evidence presented to that fact nearly everyday.

> Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site

You must be new then, welcome :)

I'm not saying I never believe any individuals in a company intentionally do bad stuff, just that I require evidence of it being intention before I assume it to be intentional. Personally I don't think that's naive, and it is based on ~30-40 years of real world life experience, but I guess I'm ultimately happy that not everyone agrees on everything :)

Just came to say (since the person you’re responding to has a different view of the world) that I agree with you that this is both a more accurate, and easier way to live. Assuming malice as the default sounds like a recipe for being very, very unhappy.

This attitude of ignoring what is true in favour of what makes you happy is exactly how corporations made up of mostly good people can do bad things.

Humans are great at hiding evidence of malice, and leading people to believe they're just incompetent.

Things that have never happened with USD. Glad we have a truly clean pure money that is incorruptible unlike bitcoin.

Likely because they are fully aware of the power dynamics in a job and understand of when they are being taken advantage for performative theater.

Am all for it if law enforcement were held to the same standards. Plenty of cases where LE murder is simply not enforced. Thus LE becomes a haven for those seeking impunity and ability to nefariously track anyone.

The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public.

Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.

> The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability

Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.

I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.

True, but motivations for mass production also are motivations for making things worse off overall.

Agree with this. I think LLMs allow more time to bring these things to the fore and more leverage to do them cost efficiently.

  computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right

Computation however requires a vast supply chain where certain middlemen have a near monopoly on distribution of said "fundamental right". The incentives for lobbyists seems clear.

I don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but until profit is shared with taxpayers, this is a one-way transaction of taxpayers bankrolling AI companies.

I find your claim that there is a monopoly on computing laughable. No other technology has improved in quality or dropped in price as much as computers over the last 40 years. If this what you get from a monopoly, then we need more monopolies.

Modern semiconductor fabrication is a very narrow field.

As far as monopolies go I don't think it's our biggest concern, like you say.

If we want to continue to wage wars and seek conquest, it's not great to have it located in one/few countries. But instead if we want to work towards peace, we should continue breaking down barriers to trade (while maintaining protections for labor).

Sadly, "using the bathroom" will cause a more immediate visceral reaction for most people than "maliciously manipulating your entire life via ad networks and media".

My first thought was of people who may have been wearing them while entering passwords or viewing sensitive information.

Do we really care what it is that will cause the visceral reaction? If I said it might reveal ways/means or private IP or any of a million other examples, few would really care as not everyone is involved in that. However, everyone goes to the bathroom.

I care a little bit - I think it's genuinely disappointing that your privacy can be so thoroughly compromised by interesting uses of metadata... but I also won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It'd be great is people truly understood the dangerous of invasive monitoring outside their physical forms (a, imo, relatively minor privacy to have compromised compared to your behavior) - but if it gets folks riled up I'm all for it.

  If we could all spread the knowledge of what is actually going on to the wider public, it would make my meetings easier, and prevent very smart folks from outside the field from saying dumb-sounding stuff.

This is an example of why LLMs won't displace engineers as severely as many think. There are very old solved processes and hyper-efficient ways of building things in the real world that still require a level of understanding many simply don't care or want to achieve.

As Disney took open source IP (fairy tales, etc) and pulled the ladder up behind them, so too are tech companies.