Imagine claiming undue credit for the works of Euler, Einstein, Michaelangelo, and hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe, while disclaiming the constant bailouts from the taxpayer so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money, and being blinkered to the fact that 'money' doesn't solve hard problems or do hard things, workers do.
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money
If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail.
> hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe
In this case the church was the capitalist. They risked the capital that paid for the cathedral. Although it was fairly low risk, as building a cathedral is pretty well understood.
> Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
Capitalism is not "when someone pays for something". By that logic when the USSR launched the Mir space station in 1986, because the state paid for it that made them capitalists.
> Capitalism would let them fail.
and yet ... Here we are. The state paying for things is Capitalism, and the state paying for this isn't Capitalism, in the same comment.
> "we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies"
For someone nitpicking on details surely you noticed that nobody said that. This is a strawman you created to drag the parent poster's point off-topic.
> "The equivalence is obviously false"
And Opium is obviously not an "algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain", so clearly the poster who "sees no difference" does actually see differences, just not in the point they are making.
> "My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text."
I saw a comment on HN that that was roughly "re: ChatGPT, when I write one sentence and I get back three screens of lecture, I don't consider that a 'chat'".
I consider that comment often when prompting Claude and hoping for a two line response and getting an "it's important to note that <blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah>".
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Ultra-concise: Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone.
> Punchy: The best don't always win—chance rules us all.
> Modernized: Skill, speed, and wisdom don't decide the outcome; everyone is at the mercy of time and circumstance.
I feel like it did pretty well, and made the point more clearly than either the original or Orwell's rework (Gemini 3.8 Flash).
Or, as the version I've used for 30 years goes: "It's better to be lucky than good." I do like Reagan's addition, though: "But I find the harder I work, the luckier I get."
Concise helps clarity, but notice what still is lost. The original version used multiple perspectives to illustrate the point. It invites consideration, putting yourself in the shoes of each person before the "twist" is applied to each. It makes the point more visceral and memorable because it is (slightly) lived instead of told.
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
I find the original poorly written, and it did not, for me, invite any consideration, because it didn't make much sense. "Bread to the wise"? "Riches to men of understanding?" Why would someone wise get bread, or someone with understanding be rich? What's the difference between "wise" and "men of understanding", anyway?
LLMs didn't write "It's better to be lucky than good.", but I find it both easier to understand and easier to remember than the biblical version.
Here on HN, I've noticed that I pro-actively defend myself against things I think will be said in counter to my comments. I concluded it's being trained into me.
Alternatively, I've been banging on against the same things that I see as insane so long that I know all the objections.
My guess is that if you were betting on a race, you would put your money on the swift to win, and "sometimes fast runners trip over" wouldn't seem as smart.
The rewrite stinks of a consultant's report where humor is frowned upon, business is serious, and there's no way we could write in plain words that the CEO got there by chance. Objective consideration distances the author compared to the subjective original I have returned and [I saw]. The original gives examples, the rewrite's contemporary phenomena is vague enough to avoid calling out the board of directors. A compelled conclusion is one the author is - reluctantly, you understand - forced into. Innate capacity leaves an escape hatch for a education from a good school and life experience to excuse the board again. It's not an honest rewrite of the same sentiment - a subjective take that life isn't fair and it's not just here, and us.
A plenitude of observations undertaken in a multitude of geographically and culturally diverse locations has convinced this author of the incompleteness of the following claims: races are won by the swift, battles are won by the strong, bread is earned by wisdom, riches are earned through applied understanding, and favours return to skilled persons. Absent are the effects of time and chance on all situations, of which experience has made abundantly clear. Other phenomena may too have their inputs, e.g. underhanded manipulation.
(Swiftness is still the best available predictor of who will win a race, though, and training cardio, muscles, diet, electrolytes, mental endurance, is the best available way to increase your chances of winning and not dropping out, tripping over from tiredness, or getting cramp, even though you can't change your innate ability or age, and time and chance happeneth to ye regardless).
Why not Goliath when he lost to David's new-fangled technology?
Wikipedia[1] says Deep Blue had 30x 120Mhz CPUs and 480 custom VLSI chess chips, and could do 11 GFLOPS. HN[2] says that's roughly an iPhone 5s.
Wikipedia[2] says 11 GFLOPS of compute power cost about half a billion inflation-adjusted dollars in the mid 1980s when the Deep Blue project was started; cost about half a million in 1996 when it was playing Kasparov; costs about 12 cents today. (Of course it's daft to compare custom chess chips and CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers and mobile SoCs, but it'll do).
"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged."
I guess even without the physical buttons you had to just learn that "play" means "engage the appropriate technical machinery".
> "[play] The meaning "to cause (a recording) to reproduce what is on it" is by 1903, probably from the "make music" sense." - https://www.etymonline.com/word/play
We know what it means for a GUI to be keyboard driven now:
Edit with Copilot[1]
Press the Copilot key on your keyboard[2] and type the thing you want to happen on your keyboard in English without leaving the home row. Forget the keyboard shortcuts, the path through the menus, the button location in the toolbar, the command name in the omnibar, the marketing name of the feature. Forget queueing up keyboard keys in an input buffer based on memorising which dialog will popup next, or the tab ordering on this or that screen. DWIM is back, and this time it still isn't determinstic, but it's the way we are going to manage ever-growing software features and task complexity and finally turn computing declarative instead of imperative.
"Move rows with dates from 2020 to the bottom of the table"
"Change the date format in the table from mm/dd/yyyy to yyyy-MM like 2026-Aug"
"Style the table with alternating dark/pale contrasting colour backgrounds and a different header row colour"
LLMs do solve the discoverability problem which underpins every power user feature ever. It is fantastic to be able to describe what you want without the domain knowledge that was previously a prerequisite to achieving that goal. Hopefully as more systems create declarative ways to interact with them (MCP, clis), power users will be able to profit from this as a side effect as well.
They sidestep it (partially), but I don't think they solve it. Sure, you'll get your task done if the agent does it for you, but the agent won't show you how to do it without their help. So the next time you have to do the task, you have to ask them again.
I also think this is misunderstanding "discoverability" a bit. For me "discoverability" also means you get an understanding of what options are available at all in the system, which can be helpful to get a better idea of what you want to do in the first place.
Seach and chat-based UIs always assume you already have a perfectly thought-out plan what to do (conveniently in terms if the software you're working with) and just have to type it in.
Look how many programs and features exist on Earth.
Project this forward to the worlds of 2050, 2076, 2126.
Your "understanding of what options are available at all" becomes moot when every program has so many options that you couldn't read them all in a lifetime even if that was all you did. Or when the answer is effectively "everything". Future programs will vibe single-use features like you make a disposable regex for every search. You don't cement xyz\d{3} into a feature, and you don't ask "show me all patterns I could search for".
At what point is "how to do it without their help" a strange thing to say? Select text and press Ctrl+B for bold, you reply "no I want to do it without the software's help". What? Typing [b][/b] markers, coding a function call, pointing to a bolded font - there's no world where you "do the bolding" and the computer "doesn't help". There is a submerged iceberg of bolding with a bit poking above the surface where you press Ctrl+B and feel you are doing meaningful work. Like the story of instant cake mix, it was a market flop until they removed powdered egg from it and turned it into "just add an egg" cake mix, which lets us feel like we are still cooking.
Why does Future Word need an "insert picture" feature? It can press enter a few times and display that picture of your dog in the gap, easy. If you had a personal assistant they would not have a please-call-my-partner-and-say-I-will-be-late-home "feature" and you wouldn't want to micromanage which cellular network and which audio codec was used, and you wouldn't say "I want to call my wife without the telephone's help". "Insert picture" doesn't need to be "a feature" any more than the regex "xyz\d{3}" needs to be "a feature". Future turbo-LLM has seen you write every document you've ever written, future Microsoft Word has been trained on every document ever uploaded to Office 365/SharePoint/OneDrive. Future computer tracks your typing when you pause for emphasis, or hears when you speak with emphasis, or the cameras observe as you scowl for emphasis. When you indicate the bit that you want emphasised, it puts bold markers on that bit, and you won't give a damn how - whether it put [b][/b] markers or whether it printed the document through a virtual fax machine, simulated a hand drawing more ink on the simulated print, virtually faxed that back to itself, ran OCR on the incoming fax, identified the added ink as the bolded font, and put <p class=></p> and a CSS stylesheet indicating the bold font.
> "Seach and chat-based UIs always assume you already have a perfectly thought-out plan what to do"
What? CLIs assume you have a perfectly thought-out plan, and understand the internals of the tool, all its options, and how they combine. You either type `fffmpeg --foo-transform --start-frame=234 --bounding-box=0,0-100,100 --option=reticulate-splines --reticulation-formula-bellard-optimal` or you get an error.
A GUI assumes you have a plan and you can find your way through the menus to find the foo-transform, then the popup dialog box will prompt you with textboxes, comboboxes, radio buttons, for the options, which you can set using your plan. You still need a plan but you don't need as much software internals.
Chat based UIs are even more of that; you type "I want it to look like an old photo" and it says "here I setup the foo transform for you with options that will make it sepia toned, here's preview, accept?".
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
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