> The primary reason for the strong border is allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor which can't complain about mistreatment.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want "cheap labor [that] can't complain about mistreatment," you want a weak border, not a strong one, because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A strong border, at a minimum, reduces the supply of illegal immigrants, and may even push the employer into hiring people with legal immigration status who can complain and sue over mistreatment.
> It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
I'd put it another way: a large part of the population has been put under a lot of stress and pressure, while simultaneously being intensely conditioned to not blame the people actually responsible. That stress has to go somewhere. Don't blame the little guys, even if you find them contemptible because they're not from your culture. Blaming the little guy (for "hat[ing]...anyone different from themselves") is another aspect of the conditioning that protects those actually responsible.
Strong border policies with moderate (weaker) and selective enforcement will give the combination that GP describes: enough supply backed by the threat of strong individual penalties if someone here illegally “gets out of line”.
> because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A larger pool with more rights and less fear of being deported. That means it's easier for them to pick and choose the jobs they do or even to start their own businesses.
They could, for example, form a union without the fear of deportation.
Look, if this were all about stopping illegal immigration, there are very fast paths to doing that. A prime one would be punishing not the immigrant, but the employer of the immigrant. Fine every farm in the US that employs an illegal immigrant and you'd quickly see the number of those jobs being worked drop.
But that's not what ICE is about which is why they and legislators haven't done that really basic enforcement.
Heck, at the start of this admin, Trump had to pull back ICE from raiding farms because the business interests of the farmers collided with the xenophobia of Steven Miller.
> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
I also hate it because:
1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.
2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
2.5) It's not even about automating the engaging and creative work well. Code generated with LLMs are "Day 1 Legacy Code" with all sorts of tech debt liabilities from the very first generation. Art made with it is often "good enough" but rarely escapes the uncanny valley and succeeds at its creative goals. Technical writing made with it is "mansplaining as a service", often pompous and confident but low in nutritional value (and factual value). Creative writing made with it is repetitive, rambling, and frequently nonsensical, is terrible at metaphors and similes, is all exposition and almost no narrative arc, is bad at nuance and equally bad at overt messaging.
3) As a human, I don't just hate that C-Suites think they can replace my and my colleagues' creative output with LLMs, I dread the world where LLM-first creative content is ubiquitous because it will be a world of increasingly less substance/nutrition/taste/texture/other human metaphors.
Communication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class.
Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.
If you're a programmer or (physical) engineer you've been automating other people's labor all this time, it's ironically hypocritical that now that engineers are the ones being automated that they cry foul.
I left one employer in part because I thought some of their automation of almost-but-not-quite minimum wage jobs was unethical to me. In Software, we don't have an industry-wide ethics board that people trust, so the complaints about individual automations remain quieter and personal. It is entirely possible for people in these conversations to not be "hypocritical" in their relationship to this topic versus their personal ethics.
It's definitely hypocritical at the "industry ethics" level, but again we don't have an ethics board and all we have are personal and public opinions. (Arguably this is one of the current problems with AI is that there is no ethics board for software so instead we must debate this in the court of public opinion, such as HN comments.)
> But how would that make the "I won't read this because it feels like AI" comments more interesting to read?
> No one is forcing you to read this stuff, no one is forcing others to read this stuff as well. When I come across text that isn't great, for whatever reason, then I close the tab and move on with my life. Do I have to make it clear to the world what I think of the text in that specific article? Not really, it'll continue spinning like before, and people who want to read it will read it, others like me will just close it.
I think the point of those comments is to save others that time.
Do you really think it's reasonable to expect every single person to read some piece of slop, and independently make an effort to evaluate it to determine if it's worth reading?
> If you have specific complaints about the text and content, bring those up instead, and we could discuss those or even correct the linked page itself, as it seems to be a wiki. But general complaints that could be copy-pasted for any submission, just so you can feel heard about that you think this was AI written, gets so tiring to read for every submission.
No. And the reason is pretty simple: if you couldn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?
And that's the problem with AI: it creates floods of that stuff and makes it hard to differentiate the good-faith use from the bad-faith use. The default can't be "reader, waste your time, even on garbage." A reader-respectful norm needs to be set, and those comments you complain about are part of that. The people making these things need to learn that they've got to put in the work if they want to be read (at least by serious audiences).
Yeah, I'd be fine with it if every AI-generated posted was required to have “AI gen:” at the beginning of the title so that readers could make an informed decision about whether they should spend their time to read something that was not worth even 1 person’s time to write.
Yeah, would totally resolve the problem of half the comments in each submission discussing if the author used AI or not, and if they did, exactly how much. People would just see the "AI gen:" and if they disagree, refrain from leaving comments about it, since everyone here on HN is so agreeable with each other.
> xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
> Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽
The web used to be like that, but then it was enshittified. The same thing will happen to consumer AI, and it will be done by the same people.
> Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing. A significant reason for the large settlement totaling about $25 million made by Jackson in 1994 to the Chandler family and their lawyer was the drawing of specific markings Jackson had on his penis caused by the skin condition vitiligo.
> Jordie Chandler drew the markings and the drawing was put into a sealed envelope. During the criminal investigation, Jackson was so resistant to having his genitals photographed that he slapped one of his doctors. It didn’t matter for the civil suit. My reporting showed that when Jordie’s drawing was unsealed, it matched the photos.
No. Have you every worked at a business? Sometimes they are, often they aren't especially if decisions are being made by people who don't know you.
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