And a great deal of the talking shops/podcasts/keynotes/nonprofits around AI existential risk are all part of this same play. They receive funding from the large AI companies so that the latter can continue to talk their own books using this angle.
If, after all these years, Crypto has not become a stable store of value that can replace a fiat currency and let you buy your groceries with it, why do we suddenly 'need it' to do that now, and what would change that will enable that to happen?
You are missing the mass destruction of assets of the wealthy in WWII and the increase in bargaining power of labour in the post-war years (perhaps driven by loss of life/injury for those of a working age). The post-war public sentiment, at least in the UK, was that the lower orders of society had fought the most and suffered the most, and there was an appetite for a new social contract that saw Churchill voted out from office and gave rise to the National Health Service, etc.
Unfortunately, they will be replaced with those sympathetic to the nerd reich takeover and thus ultimately reduce friction and for those in charge looking to wield the wrecking ball. It feels like half the goal of DOGE and similar measures is to purge those with a conscience and loyalty to public service and replace them with those willing to do almost anything asked of them.
I've often wondered why HN so often seems to prefer to prefer to upvote some tangential rabbit hole rather than discuss the topic in the article itself.
There are plenty of legitimate points made in the article. It also seems uncontroversial at this point to claim that companies are struggling to justify the expenses and inflated share prices brought about by the rush to implement LLMs in as many use cases as possible.
As far as I am aware, the author is right to claim that there is no solution to AI hallucination on the horizon, which is a severely limiting problem. Also I understand we are reaching the boundaries of useful training data available. Both factors suggest current AI improvement simply cannot follow the same trajectory as transistors under Moore's law.
What you say makes sense for the kind of business that wants to scale quickly to try and build a moat and dominate a given market (that is, before it frequently goes downhill once the investors and founders have exited and the cheap money ends).
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the best move for some product that solves a very specific problem for a very specific group of clients. Why would such a product necessarily even need multiple rounds of funding to be profitable?
I found this guy's take on the AI safety scene to be quite insightful.
In summary, he feels the focus on sci-fi type existential risk to be a deliberate distraction from the AI industry's current and real legal and ethical harms: e.g. scraping copyrighted content for training without paying or attributing creators, not protecting those affected by the misuse of tools to create deepfake porn, the crashes and deaths attributed to Tesla's self-driving mode, AI resume screening bots messing up etc.
Finally. For many years, Lisbon and Porto have been rendered totally unaffordable for average local residents by rampant Airbnb fuelled property speculation and general overtourism.
And all of this under a supposedly left-wing government.
"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims"
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
Big law (at least outside of the US, in the UK/EU) is very much pyramid shaped. Typically the model is based on getting the maximum number of chargeable hours from the minimum number of associates, for a dim prospect of eventually making partner. The overwhelming majority of profits flow to partners at the top of the equity structure.