I'm two weeks into a vibecoded Illustrator, actually (https://orochi235.github.io/weasel/swillustrator). It's built on top of a more generic WebGL presentation layer for canvas-based apps in general and Illustrator seemed like a fun test case. That said, I would think anybody who actually tried to use it for real work was an idiot. There are decades of convention and tweaks and learned lessons built into an app like Illustrator. It's kind of shocking how well Claude knows its intricacies, but even then, replicating them all would take a very long time. Also it's incredibly busted and full of bugs and I'm out of GitHub CI minutes for the month. :(
That said, it's been a whole lot of fun to build, and the real wins are in the tangents it lets me go off on. I spent a whole day building a "badge lab" and just adding random features and sliders. I had a sunset motif in the background of a garden planner I was sketching out, and it led to this, which took a day or two: https://orochi235.github.io/experiments/interstellar-horizon....
I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.
I'm not saying diplomatic realism is useless, or that countries shouldn't act strategically to further their own interests. I'm saying that you have to balance those needs against the very basic moral standards that are hardwired into (almost) all of us. I'm not talking about hypocrisy, but about the basal revulsion all decent people should feel in seeing hospitals bombed and innocents massacred.
Yanukovich was caught rigging an election in 2004. He got caught and lost the subsequent clean version. He then had the gall to run again years later (with loads of support from Putin), somehow managed to win, immediately threw a bunch of the old leadership in prison, and then set about breaking the promises that got him elected. That's why he got run out of office, and the fact that he fled to Russia when things got hot is very telling. The US had nothing to do with any of this. _Of course_ we were cheering for the people of Ukraine. Of course we were excited to see a people we viewed as long-suffering fighting so hard for their freedom. But Putin drove them away on his own, and Americans have no particular interest in Ukraine (or Russia, for that matter) that goes beyond wanting to see the world be a peaceful place that's conducive to free trade. And fwiw, the length of a Wikipedia page likely has a lot more to do with the community's level of interest in a given topic than it does the level of State Department complicity in that topic. :)
I was imprecise with my wording. The population of the USSR, as I understand it, was pretty deliberately shifted around in the 20th century to prevent uprisings, and I'm sure the former Soviet ethnicities themselves aren't segregated. But I have friends of color—people who obviously are not from the area—who _have_ been to Moscow and say it was uncomfortable in ways that nowhere else in Europe had been. Anyway, my point was more that you don't see Russia accepting refugees from the Middle East or anywhere similar: the country exists entirely on the supply side of the migrant crisis.
The situation in the South China Sea is complicated. I'm not going to pretend it's my area of expertise. That said, the Western agenda there is to ensure freedom of navigation for everybody, and prevent China from seizing one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. I'd also point out that no one has invaded anyone else (with the arguable exception of the Chinese dredging operations that sparked this whole controversy to begin with).
I agree completely that when you can't question the truth, it's time to get suspicious. That's exactly the point I was trying to make about the recent Russian media blackout. People outside of Russia have access to all kinds of information about the war, including official Kremlin statements. The Western media report on what Putin's spokespeople are saying. It's just that it usually turns out to be demonstrably false. The Biden administration, on the other hand, announced the invasion days before it happened. I don't trust them because they're my government; I trust them because they accurately predicted the invasion and because the reporting on the ground continues to corroborate what they're claiming.
I think I do a pretty good job of listening to other perspectives. I even watched a few autotranslated segments of Russia-1 before YouTube blocked it. (Olga Skabeyeva is freaking terrifying!) But how many times do you have to be lied to by somebody before you stop trusting them?
> I am not sure there is such a thing as "respect" at the very high level. The public opinion is easily swayed and important actions are dictated by pragmatism
This seems like a convenient way of just hand-waving away the entire concept of morality. Maybe this is how Russians view the world, but it's not how anyone else does. They say this is part of the problem with Putin: he just can't conceive of a world where every entity isn't a CIA or FSB puppet. It also illustrates why the civilized world feels like it can't in good conscience keep trading with a nation that acts like this.
It's not like this whole thing materialized out of thin air. Ukraine has been trying to free itself from Russia's grasp for decades. Everything that's happened there has Putin's fingerprints all over it: puppet leaders who promise one thing and then betray their people to Russia; the jailing of former leaders on garbage corruption charges; the red-handed vote rigging; the not-very-well-concealed assassinations. This isn't the norm anywhere else in the developed world.
Another hallmark of Putinist rhetoric is whataboutism. I mean, when everything you do is so cynical and violent, I guess it's the only real defense you have. Debating what actually happened in Libya is an enormous distraction—which may be the entire point—but the US had nothing to do with that uprising until Gaddafi sent a column of tanks after a bunch of poorly-armed rebels and the world reacted in horror. Was it a mistake to intervene? Maybe. But that's nowhere comparable to straight-up invading a peaceful country (twice!).
It's funny to hear anyone in Russia hand-wringing about the well-being of "economic migrants." Russia is one of the most ethnically segregated countries in the world and has done absolutely nothing for refugees anywhere except create more of them. It's widely believed that Putin's intervention in Syria was designed to displace as many civilians into Europe as possible, with the goal of causing a populist backlash. It may be downright evil, but he's gotten away with it for years.
In terms of which sources to trust, the Russian government has done nothing but lie to everybody for the last 20 years. US intelligence accurately predicted the invasion even when it seemed to take most Russian soldiers by surprise. There's all kinds of primary-source war footage, if you can stomach it. And Putin's objectives keep drastically changing, which sure makes any claims that he's succeeding seem suspect. As does the really harsh media crackdown and the threats to jail people for years just for saying the word "war." You don't have to aggressively "sway" public opinion like that when the truth is on your side.
> Even the thought that another great purge has begun fills my heart with warmth and childlike joy
I really hope you're kidding. Those things never stop where they're intended to, and it's certainly not your interests they're being carried out in.
Noam Chomsky has had a remarkable career, but he's really old and was never anywhere within shouting distance of the political center. Neither is Current Affairs, for what it's worth. His argument seems to be that Putin's belligerence is effectively an act of God, and that our only choice from now until eternity is to submit to it. Dr. Chomsky's childhood was apparently so long ago, he's forgotten that appeasing a bully only ever makes him worse.
For the record, no country is capable of making another country's citizens resist an invasion to the last man. Look what happened to the army in Afghanistan. Despite what Russian state TV is telling you, Ukrainians want to fight far more desperately than the rest of the world wants them to. They all grew up learning about the Holodomor, for one thing. And that was true even before Putin razed a bunch of their major cities and killed tens of thousands of people. The US is just providing weapons—many of them old and Soviet-made, no less—to a people desperate to protect themselves from what they clearly see as a fate at least as bad as, if not worse than, death.
Nothing about this is inevitable. The world works however the people in it want it to work. We can build a better one, or we can all decide that we're OK repeating the endless brutality of the past. The West has (imperfectly, sporadically) chosen the former since the fall of Nazi Germany, and the result, despite all the missteps, has been an unprecedented era of global peace and prosperity. Russia was welcome to join this fraternity in the 90's, but instead was consumed by corruption and mob rule and retreated inward to misguided nationalism and xenophobia.
It seems to have been forgotten in Russia that the Soviet Union was a disaster, and its primary victims were its own citizens. Stalin murdered tens of millions of his own people. It promulgated a culture that installed bloodthirsty dictators who were almost as bad in dozens of countries, and whose ideology was so ineffective that it led to devastating famine in many communist countries. It gave us Chernobyl. For all the talk about hating Nazis, the USSR (and, increasingly, Putin's regime) much more closely resembled Nazi Germany than any country you'd recognize nowadays, except maybe China or North Korea. Soviet vassal states all voted to leave the USSR by >80% margins the second the regime collapsed.
Russia is hell-bent on being recognized as a great power, but there's little to substantiate that claim. The country has been hollowed out economically by seemingly endless and endemic corruption. It turns out the military is only really good at committing war crimes. Russia's two greatest military victories—a point of great national pride—are both seen by historians as much more akin to enemy self-owns than great acts of brilliance or might. Its intelligence agencies have likely been the single most destabilizing force in world politics over the last hundred-plus years, dating back to the Tsars. Many of the most persistent and idiotic conspiracy theories—e.g. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the CIA creating AIDS as a weapon to use against Black people—are literally fabrications of Russian intelligence programs. Your dictator deliberately creates refugee crises around "enemy" countries with the aim of exploiting their compassion and generosity to cause political unrest. And you're either one of the only countries brazen enough to regularly carry out state-sponsored assassinations, or the only ones sloppy enough to keep getting caught. You even cheat at the f--king Olympics.
Case in point, here's a list of Russian oligarchs who have conveniently decided to commit suicide after killing their families in the last two months: https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-oligarch-who-has-died.... It's amazing how many of them have fallen from tall buildings over the years, too.
You're right, as long as Russia has a bunch of nukes, they'll be treated with a certain amount of deference. But don't conflate fear—which Putin wields very effectively—with respect, which will never, ever be earned on the world stage through this kind of behavior. You can't butcher and threaten your way to esteem. It's a lesson Xi could stand to learn as well.
What's the alternative, though? The leader of your country is terrorizing Europe in ways not seen in almost 80 years. We all know all-out war between nuclear states is not an option, so what should Western nations do? Just sit back and ignore the indiscriminate war crimes?
It's ironic to me, given how clearly Putin's worldview presumes that power is all matters, how quick Russia has been to cry foul over sanctions. If you want to live in a world where the one with the biggest stick gets to do whatever he wants to everybody else, you should probably at least make sure you have a big stick first.
I'm sorry that your local McDonald's closed, and I do have some sympathy for the Russian people, most of whom probably wanted nothing to do with this war. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for those brave enough to speak up in the face of frankly terrifying state oppression. But honestly, after enabling that maniac for 22 years, I do think Russian citizens bear a little bit of responsibility for this senseless war (not to mention all the other ones!). And if you think that's unfair, well, how about what's happening to the citizens of Ukraine? Is that fair?
It's in everyone's interest that we all learn to get along. Nobody wants the Russian people to suffer for no reason. I hope you guys eventually figure out how to stand up an honest and functioning democracy, for your sake as well as everyone else's. But we can't condone this senseless brutality, and if that makes you see us as your enemy, that's unfortunate, but hopefully temporary.
You can be as sarcastic as you want, but these stories are absolutely indicative of a much larger problem. It might be beyond the capacity of one company to fix, but in the aggregate they represent a serious political and economic threat and need to be dealt with one way or another. Preferably by literally anyone other than Donald Trump.
Am I the only one who finds this editorial morally repugnant, especially considering it was written by a VC who runs a fund that specifically invests in startups facing "regulatory challenges?"
These claims are pretty flimsy. For one thing, Yahoo's search engine is Bing, so it's fallacious to say that two of three search engines yielded the same result, and that result is thus more valid or accurate than that of the dissenting engine. Further, if Google did scrub results, they didn't do a very complete job, as they're more than happy to suggest "hillary clinton email" and plenty of other negative terms. I also suspect that Google's search suggestions algorithm is a bit more involved than "tally the frequency of entire search queries and return the most common ones."
In a wider sense, it's a bit of a leap to think that Eric Schmidt has direct control over Google searches. There would have to be a chain of contacts leading from him to someone in the engineering department, or at least a few developers who built the "scrub sensitive terms from the suggestion list" feature. Surely they're not _all_ working for Clinton. Or surely this power would have been abused other times in the past. It's just so much more plausible that this is a complete coincidence than that there's some kind of Google-based conspiracy to install Hillary Clinton as a dictator by forcing people to type the entire phrase "hillary clinton indictment" into a search engine before they can have their crazy beliefs validated.
You make some good points, but her contributions to the US's surveillance program are barely more than a footnote on the campaign page. Most are about past economic or geopolitical misdeeds. I think reading the page in toto makes it pretty clear that the authors object to her hiring mainly on the basis of her perceived character flaws.
I was still fairly outraged over the Eich lynching when I wrote all these posts. I still don't think it's a great precedent to set, boycotting a company over appointing someone to a mostly ceremonial position. (Something that I still think is terribly gutless to do anonymously, no matter who you're targeting.) But I do actually buy the privacy argument. And I have to admit, it's really disconcerting to be put in the position of defending the actions of Condoleezza Rice (or any other prominent Bush 43 official).
> I don't understand your overall position. I understand that one aspect of it well enough to call it idiotic.
This assertion ('I admittedly don't understand the context, but I'll gladly render judgment on a single tenet of it!') may seriously have just given me an aneurysm.
Can you cite one boycott or strike that history looks fondly upon that centered around calling for a specific person's head? These tools have traditionally been used to advance policy changes and improve living conditions for whole groups of people, not exact revenge on someone you don't like.
There's nothing wrong with voicing dissatisfaction in, well, basically anything. There's also nothing wrong with terminating a business relationship with an entity who has done something you don't like. Or even tweeting form letters at a company's CEO. That's all beside the point.
I think sometimes, the appropriate recourse is to realize that you're overreacting to something, calm the hell down, and go on with your life.
My problems with this specific situation:
- Trying to organize a popular campaign targeting a specific person's reputation and/or livelihood while refusing to divulge your own identity is incredibly gutless. If you're sure enough of your convictions to take that kind of action, why are you not sure enough to sign your name to it?
- Social tools like boycotts and protests become less effective the more frequently they're used. In isolation, this doesn't really apply. In light of the Brendan Eich mess, it seems like the start of a dangerous (and frankly annoying) trend. Are we going to see boycotts every time an organization makes a decision that someone with basic HTML skills disagrees with?
- When waging any kind of social crusade, there's a line of conduct that you can't cross without abandoning any claim to the moral high ground. You seem to agree with me that violence is on the wrong side of that line. I'd argue that trying to get specific people fired from private industry for essentially unrelated conduct (during their time as a public official, no less) is, as well. Especially when the whole thing really seems to be more about punishment than effecting future change.
- You're still trying to equate declining to vote someone into public office with trying to organize a movement to get someone fired. Those things aren't even close to equivalent.
- You're missing something about the nature of boycotts. They're not designed to demonstrate your disagreement. They're designed to coerce their target to accede to your demands, lest they suffer financial harm. I'm not saying they're innately bad, but they are much more coercive in nature than protests, whose nature I also think you're mischaracterizing. By your definition, there would be no point in protesting any action carried out by any politician in the last term of a term-limited office, right?
- Editing to add one more. The reason we have qualified immunity is that, in theory, you want the best possible people occupying important public positions. (Obviously, things don't often work out this way, but I think it's still important for the incentives to align properly.) When it becomes clear that anyone who holds one of these offices may have to fend off angry mobs for the remainder of his or her professional life, you're making public office less attractive for anyone else who might ever be considering accepting an appointment to it. Which will probably, in the aggregate, make these positions less attractive to the people most qualified for them.
It's pretty smooth of you to call me an idiot, double down on that, and _then_ say you don't understand my position.
This sort of intimidation (of Dr. Rice and anyone who associates with her) may not be violent, but it _is_ coercive. That sort of climate is anathema to "civil society," no matter how narrowly you attempt to define the term. (You didn't need to provide a working definition, by the way; it's obvious you don't think it has anything to do with decorum.)
And yes, there is absolutely a distinction between Congressional, journalistic, judicial or even private oversight of a sitting public official, and public hounding of that person once he or she returns to private life. There's also a difference between airing one's grievances (i.e. protest) and making threats if your demands aren't met. Maybe if you disagree with something I've said, you should try to get me fired, too.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say this sort of action should be illegal. Just that I think it's tasteless, shortsighted, and somewhat hypocritical to do anonymously, given that it specifically targets an individual. Which is the other element of this that I find so abhorrent: it's one thing to target an idea, or campaign against someone running for public office. It's another to follow a private citizen around for the rest of his or her life, making demands of anyone who attempts to hire that person. It seems, well, vindictive.
I think I mentioned above that I disagree with basically every decision Dr. Rice ever made while acting as a public official. The Iraq war was a huge disaster, and that was obvious before it even started. But there's a reason we have legal doctrines like qualified immunity: it's detrimental to a public official's ability to perform his or her duties if he or she has to view every decision as a question of personal liability.
Upon further reflection, this isn't nearly as bad as last week's Mozilla witch hunt. You could probably make a legitimate argument in the context of privacy and government surveillance. But given the "success" of that purge, I'm worried that we'll be seeing three more of these campaigns every week. The fact that I've taken a karma beating for (completely earnest) posts I've made in this thread just reinforces my fear that we're becoming a community that finds it harder and harder to brook dissent. And I really thought the kind of person that reads HN was smart enough to see the inherent dangers in that.
Thanks for not calling me an idiot this time. Really made my day.
I can't help but notice that whoever is behind this campaign found it necessary to give attribution to the people who produced the images on the page, and provided helpful links to Dropbox's CEO's social media accounts, but didn't bother to sign his own name to the cause. That's the very definition of gutless.
I hated the Eich thing and I hate this too. Even if she has been wrong about basically everything she was ever put in charge of, this is not how we settle political disputes in a civil society. If you want to stop using Dropbox, fine. If you're a stakeholder in Dropbox, then you have a legitimate interest here. But no one else does.
That said, it's been a whole lot of fun to build, and the real wins are in the tangents it lets me go off on. I spent a whole day building a "badge lab" and just adding random features and sliders. I had a sunset motif in the background of a garden planner I was sketching out, and it led to this, which took a day or two: https://orochi235.github.io/experiments/interstellar-horizon....
I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.