AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"

I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters slightly overflowing the borders and such like). Accessibility wasn't a thing back then.

If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get through all sorts of animations that hijack the scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_stea...

But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.

This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.

But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.

However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)

But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.

> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.

Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.

If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?

Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.

This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.

In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.

In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.

Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.

If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.

Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

If you're trying to determine Z, which is X - Y, and then you get some indication that Y might be 20 under a specific set of assumptions, you still don't know anything about Z because X could still be 0 or 20 or 40. Measuring Y by itself is useless. It's looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is even though you know that's not where you lost them.

> If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes.

That's assuming the removal of the DRM is well-publicized like the initial release. Otherwise people hear about the initial release, don't buy it because it has DRM and then most of them forget the game even exists. And negative reviews from when the game had bad DRM are still there even after it's removed.

It could still be net positive to remove the DRM after it's cracked but the benefit is naturally going to be a lot smaller than if it had no DRM when people were paying more attention to it.

Also, has anyone actually studied that? Most of the resources to do studies on these things are from DRM purveyors who want to make their product look better than it is. They don't have the incentive to find results that make them look bad.

> Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

You're still focused on measuring only Y.

If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

We're not measuring Y, we're measuring Z. And since Z is negative, we can conclude that the group of people who just want free games is larger than the group of people who buy after DRM is removed. We know that Y is larger than X.

Now you're assuming that all games immediately remove DRM after they're cracked, which is definitely false. In a statistical study it would need to be all of them or any that don't would be skewing the average.

And again, removing the DRM doesn't fully undo the hit from having it to begin with. Existing negative reviews or forum posts panning the game don't disappear the instant you address the thing they were complaining about. The network effect and word of mouth in subcultures that don't buy games with DRM is already reduced.

You've constructed an unfalsifiable claim here.

A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).

The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.

Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).

There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.

With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!

Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.

Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)

I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.

> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?

"I'd certainly wrestle less if I could afford it."

"I'd certainly eat less ice cream if I could afford it."

And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.

If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.

> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.

The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.

You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.

I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.

Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.

Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.

Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.

Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.

> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked

You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.

You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.

My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.

> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.

> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.

> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.

But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.

You've started with a retort to a point that some who would never pay for some copyrighted work are not a loss to copyright owner if they illegally use their work.

You've since expanded to everyone and SW development, and want to extend it to people who are willing to pay for the value a particular work provides them.

So let's go back to the beginning: can you please quantify how big is a loss to the copyright owner if one watches a movie they would skip if the only option was to pay for it?

I'll reiterate what I said above: entertainment and software are not life's essentials. Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.

Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.

On the other hand, I bet there have been some pretty serious repercussions due to the sweeping bans like in TFA.

The logic here is quite simple: if you don't have to pay, nobody else has to pay, either, because you're not special. If nobody pays, then people who make media and software won't get paid, and production will slow to a crawl. You'll have destroyed the very thing you seem to desire enough to steal.

How does this not make sense to you?

But nah, you're right. Nobody has to pay. Everybody should pirate.

Now, that's been true for decades, of course. So why hasn't the entire system fallen apart?

Believing oneself to be special and above the law such that one feels justified in trampling on others' rights is textbook arrogance.

To say nothing of what all that means when those laws are unjust and themselves serve to trample on individuals' rights.

2. If it's OK for one person not to pay, why should anyone pay?

2. Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds. Because it is available in their country legally. Because their streaming package already includes it. Because their cable package already includes it... Need I continue?

Again, you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

Nobody loses any money if you spill profanities at someone, but it's still not OK (even though it might not be illegal either).

Legallity and morality are not always in sync even if we try to keep one reflect the other. I am surprised this is even a discussion point.

Those are reasons that someone might choose to pay. These are also the same reasons why one might want to donate to charity or to non-profit/public media (PBS, NPR in the USA). In other words, they're a voluntary patron of the arts. And there's nothing wrong with that, when the organizations are non-profit/public or charitable. In fact, I think we'd all encourage it.

However, not every media organization is a non-profit/public operation or a charity. Those who are made a choice to be that. Those who didn't--well, they chose to remain for profit.

The point is that we, as individuals, do not get to override the choice of whether a publisher is for profit or non-profit by taking the law into our own hands--just like I don't get to turn your back yard into a public park when you're not using it. After all, you're not using it, right?

You and others keep saying, "no loss in revenue, no harm done." (Just like, "no loss of use of your back yard, no harm done.") But that's not the point. It's about infringing on others' rights.

> you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

This is just silly: Where does the profit come from if nobody pays? Again: if you don't have to pay, it must follow that nobody should have to pay. If you disagree with that, then who gets to choose who pays and who doesn't? You? No; that's for the law to decide. That's how democracy works.

Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.

And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)

For me at least, it is a service problem.

There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?

The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.

If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:

Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled

The illegal workflow looks like this:

Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it

Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.

As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.

Now that you can just pay 10-20 euros for each of 124293507239841524352 services, one of which _might_ show what you want...

Fixed it for you.

YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.

A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.

Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.

sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages

I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.

Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty

Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.

What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.

And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.

Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.

I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.

But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.

Early on Apple sold individual songs and leaned hard into selling individual TV episodes for a $2 (if I remember correctly). It was unpopular and people flocked to the lines of Netflix and Spotify instead.

What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.

I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.

Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.

In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.

Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.

Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.

My vision may be biased. In fact it is ;-)

Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.

America's been in that mode for a long time.

If the empire doesn't have any cities and counties, it must have already collapsed.

US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.

So why do so many people want to keep coming here?

People aren't coming for the scenic canyons, they're coming to get some of that USA money, so they can be on the benefitting side of the skewed exchange rate, instead of the losing side. Many of them exchange part of their salary for their home currency and send it home, in quantities that would be impossible to accrue if you did the same work in that country.

They don't, in fact, at least not anymore:

"We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...

Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).

There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be:

To Canada: Statements about Canada last year.

To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year

To the Middle East: Current events.

Things have definitely accelerated in the second term, but it's not like there weren't signs that political leaders definitely noticed were disruptive, even if the wider public weren't as aware at the time.

Ie real actual legal liability. Line up anyone who did insider trading, the doge guys, the big mouths in the big house, and put them through a zero tolerance military tribunal.

No bullshit kangaroo court where they're let off with a slap on the wrist because they're rich.

I mean strip every last one of these motherfuckers of everything they're worth. 180 the kangaroo court. Make a public mockery of them. Posters everywhere.

Think of it as a peace offering for the rest of the world. We could even include the war on terror guys in there, all the liars who claimed WMDs could go to the same federal prison. No cushions.

The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.

Besides, even getting to that point would need to mean that this situation would not arise again.

Agreed, as I have said before (1) even if the next administration is very different, that has happened before in 2020-2024. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. Expecting it to happen a third time is reasonable. Wait and watch would be an appropriate response.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217131

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837147

Forfieted any remaining goodwill.

(Post 9/11, It would have been so easy to choose the other path.)

Trump just made it undeniable.

The republic may be collapsing. The empire comes after. The rich benefit if we transition to an autocratic empire based on American military might.

I think the roman republic to empire transition doesnt have much to do with the trajectory of rome at all. Their institutions were still strong. With america, her institutional knowledge is being stripped apart. Thats hard to pull up from

Based on which contemporaneous source? Personally, this feels like Cicero. Not Caligula.

Trump urges US allies to send warships to Strait of Hormuz as Iran vows to retaliate https://apnews.com/article/iran-iraq-us-trump-march-15-2026-...

It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.

> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued

I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANRGSP

Translation: Native Americans were nice to the European settlers, until the European settlers were in a position to murder and expel in the Native Americans. The genocide against the Native Americans happened both before and after the founding of the United States, which casts serious doubt on a claim that the US has a "moral" mission.

> Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A,

Not sure where this math came from. Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies at the time of the revolutionary war. It wasn't until later, and in some cases much later, that the so-called "free states" actually freed slaves.

I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.

Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.

I guess you are referring to the principle of "no taxation without representation." Fair enough, but I don't find that consistent with twoodfin's comment, to which I am indirectly replying, that "America was a radical moral project when it was founded."

> Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.

That is certainly how they wrote about it, but the point that suzzer99 and I are making is that they did not walk the walk. It's one thing to write fancy documents about all men being created equal, and it's quite another to actually emancipate the slaves or stop genociding the natives.

> The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate

I have a lot of lefty friends, and I don't know anyone who thinks anything remotely similar to that. Criticizing the ethical failings of a country in the hopes of improving it does not amount to a statement if illegitimacy. And I'm pretty sure that elected leftist politicians don't consider the government that they form to be illegitimate.

The USD cannot exist as a reserve currency and support domestic manufacturing. That is to say, the US political engine and its benefactors sold out domestic manufacturing for international leverage.

Did it have to be this way? No, we could have implemented the Bancor, but the appeal of dominating international politics was irresistible. We cannot reindustrialize without giving up international financial power and with that in mind, who would still decide to switch?

Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.

Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.

A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.

You can list these connected problems all day.

Exactly. Which is why

> ... street crime will just dissolve the society overnight

is false. Street crime is also generally limited to poor areas and people who can't move out will be the first victims. Street crime does not dissolve trust at the societal level, it just dissolve trust of everyone into a few segments of the population (whose members are also now the first victims of that loss of trust)

Whereas corruption is a cancer that takes hold of all institutions as anyone and you might need to leave your country altogether when it becomes a third world hellhole.

The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters.

The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.

Both parties are being funded by the same people, so both parties play ball with the same set of funders.

But...

They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners.

Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.

Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.

This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.

Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.

We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.

That was your existence.

This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.

A few hundred bucks a year ain't gonna move the needle at this point.

Most people I know, everywhere in the world have mixed views on most topics.

Let alone the fact that ideologies tend to change, modern rights are way more populist and economically-socialist than they were 2 decades ago. See Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc, where governments make money fall on the poorest, on the elderly, etc ignoring their historical electorate (middle class).

If I could filter "conservatives are X and liberals are Y and it makes no sense" type thought, I would, because it's a driver of this impression.

Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).

Also, you're resigning the biggest part of the conversation (immigration and residency policy and enforcement, especially with regards to employment) to an implication in a parenthetical?

You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.)

Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.)

It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.

I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.

What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?

How do you propose to compete with foreign workers when the government prevents you from matching their employment conditions within your own company?

- The massive regulatory burdens on American businesses are dissolved in order to permit genuine competition with the globe

- Economic protectionism is applied so that the heavily regulated American business can compete on price with less-regulated foreign businesses

In both cases, the prices of goods would increase--in the first case, less than the second. But both would be better than the current status quo, in my opinion.

I don't want to live in a country where I have to pay American prices for goods and services, but the owner class only has to pay foreign prices for labor and supply. I have no desire to be outcompeted by foreigners while my hands are tied by local laws.

Why is protectionism working for China?

Protectionism is "working" for China because it's still a poor country, it was much poorer only a generation ago, and when you have no industry, it's easier to deliberately keep people poor for a little longer in exchange for more jobs. Once the pipeline is built, it's just societal inertia.

But I have to wonder how much it working out for China is just "China is still poor, so people have little choice." Among millions of Americans decrying outsourcing of American jobs, how many are willing to work under an average labor condition of China if they were given the opportunity?

Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.

So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.

And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.

I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.

This plus capital controls would reduce a lot of economic inequality between countries. It would be super, super rough in the short-term but probably globally beneficial in the long term. I believe Bernie Sanders was proposing this back in 2016.

> People don't buy American cars

53% of cars sold in the US are assembled in the US versus 18% assembled in Mexico.

> things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more.

The total cost of manufacturing wages only account for 5-15% of the MSRP of a vehicle. So moving manufacturing from an expensive country to a cheap country only changes the price by maybe 10% due to the impact of wages.

When a system takes the money from the economy and delivers it to the capital class and foreign workers, what happens to that economy? We don't know. We're gambling it will somehow be ok. We are also losing the 50% of taxes that comes from individual workers, so add in losing that velocity of money vector going through the government as well.

It doesn't seem like a sustainable system, nor a cheaper system. Only a very risky short term gamble.

In other words, the only reason foreign industry threatens domestic jobs is because it's cheaper to produce the same thing in these countries and the cost savings are being passed on to domestic consumers.

Sometimes I wonder if we're simply living in different realities. You may claim it's not worth it, but you can't claim it's not happening. Just go to grocery and see the prices of Mexican avocados and everything.

With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.

I am not for unrestrained immigration either. But I would not look for whose child is sick so I can kick them out and leave the sick child alone.

An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.

Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."

Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.

[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/factchecking-claims-about-...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1158

eventually they got their shit together.

China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.

For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.

That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.

"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

I thought the point was to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge. I suppose this is why people criticize colleges as having lost their core principles and simply responded to market forces to produce the types of graduates that corporate America currently wants.

> "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar.

Usually people get fired for their actions and not their knowledge or lack thereof. It may be that David Graebers core thesis was correct. Most jobs are actually "bullshit jobs," and in the era of the Internet, they don't actually require any formal education to perform.

You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.

> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.

What happens if LLM’s suddenly change their cost to be 1000 USD per user per month? What if it is 1000 USD per request? Will new students and new professionals still be able to complete their jobs?

Calculators have never been more accessible/available. (And yet I personally still do most basic calculations in my head)

So I agree students should learn to do this stuff without LLMs, but not because the LLMs are going to get less accessible. There's another better reason I'm just not sure how to articulate it yet. Something to do with integrated information and how thinking works.

LLM’s are not consistent. For example, having a new company make a functional duplicate of ChatGPT is nearly impossible.

Furthermore, the cost of LLM’s can change at any time for any reason. Access can be changed by new government regulations, and private organizations can chose to suspend or revoke access to their LLM due to changes in local laws.

All of this makes dependence on an LLM a risk for any professionals. The only way these would be mitigated is by an open source, freely available LLM that creates consistent results that students can learn how to use.

LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.

Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.

I could be wrong, time will tell. I just wouldn't base my argument for why students should learn to think for themselves on accessibility of LLMs. I think there's something far more fundamental and important, I just don't know how to say it yet.

To the horror of anyone struggling with anxiety, ADHD, or any other source of memory-recall issues under examination pressure. This further optimizes everything for students who can memorize and recall information on the spot under artificial pressure, and who don't suffer any from any of the problems I mentioned.

In grade school you could put me on the spot and I would blank on questions about subjects that I understood rather well and that I could answer 5 minutes before the exam and 5 minutes after the exam, but not during the exam. The best way for me to display my understanding and knowledge is through project assignments where that knowledge is put to practical use, or worked "homework" examples that you want to remove.

Do you have any ideas for accommodating people who process information differently and find it easier to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in different ways?

Why aught there be an exception for academics? Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.

I didn't ask for an "exception" in terms of knowledge, I pointed out a bias in favor of one specific type of assessment. I didn't do great on verbal exams but I could run circles around other people when it came to more hands-on assessments that required a deeper understanding of the material and applying it in practice.

A surgeon is a perfect example. Before you trust your life to someone, would you rather find out their grades on verbal assessments in med school or do you prefer to see their patient outcome statistics?

When hiring a software developer would you rather verbally quiz them on theoretical knowledge of SOLID and TDD or would you rather see their code and work history?

> Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.

As a client you can do whatever you want, but that's not the goal of educational institutions. It's antithetical to their goals unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that schools only exist to produce easily replaceable, obedient, compliant workers.

[And reading your other comment, this indeed seems to be your view.]

The culture has moved from competence to performance. Where universities used to be a gateway to a middle class life, now they're a source of debt. And social performances of all kind are far more valuable than the ability to work competently.

Competence used to be central, now it's more and more peripheral. AI mirrors and amplifies that.

The best way to move from the working class to the middle class these days is the military with a federal government job after retirement (even with what the current admin is doing). That said, a person doing this needs to realize that they will need to unlearn and learn a lot of social habits and learn some new ones.

The bonus is that higher ed will be free, and ambitious folks can ladder up into officer roles, which can be even more of a social climb.

> I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold

I think you are very wrong on this point.

A highly-socialized person with the minimum viable amount of competency will go much farther in life than a highly-competent person with limited social skills.

If your kids are in a good school system, there will be a culture of competence in the students and their families.

> but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit

You just need to find the right pocket of people.

I personally recommend good Montessori schools over home schooling for K-8. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works well when it’s a good fit. The community around the school is usually fairly healthy as well.

For 9-12, a high-quality private school, a magnet school, a combo high school / JC, or an independent study high school (often with home school “classes”) are all good options for curious and ambitious students, imho.

Western education passing as many fee paying students as possible seems to be very much a UK/US phenomenon but doesn't seem to be the case of European countries where the best schools are public and fees are very low (In France, private engineering schools rank lower)

At the other extreme are universities offering low quality courses that are definitely degree factories. They tend to have a strong vocational focus but nonetheless they are not effective in improving employability. In the last few decades we have expanded the university system and there are far more of these.

There is no clear cutoff and a lot of variation in between so its not a bifurcation but the quality vs factory difference is there.

Mostly done to get more degree holders which are seen as "more productive". Or at least higher paid...

This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.

To your broader question

> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.

As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.

Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.

Gosh that sounds horrifying. I am not an expert on that piece of system, no I do not want to take responsibility for whatever the LLMs have produced for that piece of system, I am not an expert and cannot verify it.

Students had very good reason to question the education system when they were asked to memorize things that were safe to forget once they graduated from school. And when most functional adults admitted they forgot what they had learned in school. It was an issue before LLM, and triply so now.

By the way, I now am 100% agree with "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity." However, if you asked me to try to convince the 16-year-old me I would throw my hands up.

But the response to that will be further beatings until morale improves.

What about technology professionals? From my biased reading of this site alone: both further beatings and pain relievers in the form of even more dulling and pacifying technology. Follow by misanhtropic, thought-terminating cliches: well people are inherently dumb/unmotivated/unworthy so topic is not really worth our genuine attention; furthermore, now with LMMs, we are seeing just how easy it is to mimic these lumps of meat—in fact they can act both better and more pathetic than human meat bags, just have to adjust the prompts...

As more jobs started requiring degrees, the motivation has to change. If people can get food and housing without a degree again to a comfortable extent than the type of person getting a degree will change again too.

If you let them, they'll alienate you until you have no free time and no space for rest or hobbies or learning. Labour movements had to work hard to prevent the 60 hour workweek, but we're creeping back away from 40, right?

Here, though, is my answer: an excellent long-term goal for any band of humans is to create, inhabit, and enjoy the greatest civilization possible, and the more each individual human knows about their reality, the easier it is to do that.

I would not survive without homework. I needed that extra push in school. Otherwise, I would have been doing something else.

F homework.

The obvious answer is "Because it's interesting."

But suppose you think strictly in utilitarian terms: what effort should I invest for what $$$ return. I have two things to say to you:

First: what a meaningless life you're living.

Second: you realize that if you don't learn anything because you have LLMs, and I learn everything because it's interesting, when you and I are competing, I'll have LLMs as well...? We'll be using the same tools, but I'll be able to reason and you won't.

I think the people who struggle with the question "Why should I know anything?" aren't going to learn anything anyway. You need curiosity to learn, or at least to learn a lot and well, and if you have curiosity you're not asking why you should learn anything.

Why would I need to be able to lift 100kg? I'm never going to need to lift 100kg, and if I do need to, I'd just find a tool that will do it. My life isn't any less rich because I can't lift 100kg, and I can maintain basic body health without being able to lift weight from the ground.

    - dell p2 300 win95
    - early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)

and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised

I can't leave Excel for that. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end, and maintain it myself. The amount of work and knowledge it takes to get the same thing spun up in a proper language with a proper server is 1-3 orders of magnitude more.