Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | contagiousflow's commentslogin

Couldn't you just blame any business non-decision on fear of regulation?

"We were prevented from building a proper Windows phone because we already had such large market share on desktop, and already had an anti-trust against us so our hands were tied"

It's just an argument that creates a Kafka trap


You double check every university lecture you've been apart of?

Did you just sit there in class and then never do anything with what you learned afterwards? That certainly isn't how I approached university.

Doing something with the knowledge given in a lecture is very distinct from fact checking it

I'd say it's a subset of fact checking it. You can check facts without doing anything else, but doing something with the knowledge is inherently checking it. If the lecture presents some programming technique, and I implement it, I'll find out pretty quickly if it's wrong.

That's what is called "studying" or "reading a textbook", isn't it?

Uhm no? Reading a textbook is obviously not the same as fact checking a textbook.

Parent was writing about a university LECTURE which is different from a TEXTBOOK (which is different from primary sources), so yeah, consulting other sources is checking the facts.

Oh I see what you're saying. It was slightly ambiguous.

But in any case, I didn't read a single textbook at uni; it was all lecture notes provided by the lecturers (fill-in-the-gaps actually which worked waaaay better than you'd think). So the answer is still no - I didn't fact check them and I didn't need to because they didn't wildly hallucinate like AI does.


The real answer is:

You should have a mental model about how the world works and the fundamental rules of the context where you're operating. Even though you might not know something, you eventually develop an intuition of what makes sense and what doesn't. And yes, that applies even to "university lectures" since a lot of professors make mistakes/are wrong plenty of times.

Taking an LLM's output at face value would be dumb, yes. But it would be equally dumb to take only what's written on a book at face value, or a YouTube video, or anyone you listen to. You have to dig in, you have to do the homework.

LLMs make it much easier for you to do this homework. Sure, they still make mistakes, but they get you 90% of the way in minutes(!) and almost for free.


I don't think it's (necessarily) equally dumb. Maybe if comparing LLM output to a book chosen at random. But I would feel much safer taking a passage from Knuth at face value than a comparable LLM passage on algorithms.


Why have municipal laws? Everyone can just carry around an AK-47 and decide what's right and wrong for them


I'm guessing you're American? What regulations make it expensive in America but affordable in other parts of the world?


On the other hand, there are thousands of invisible interaction points in your day that are the result of regulation, and your life is better for it. You only get to see the bad in current regulation, not in the bad that could have been caused without it.


>On the other hand, there are thousands of invisible interaction points in your day that are the result of regulation, and your life is better for it. You only get to see the bad in current regulation, not in the bad that could have been caused without it.

Right but thats no reason to try and protect all regulation from criticism.

The problem is that most people assume it is all good, but if you ever get a bunch of people together from a specific industry you will get a sense on how bad regulation of that industry is. Often in places laughably bad. But no one generally cares enough outside of that group to change it. You need to expose people to bad regulation enough that they develop some empathy, to the extent that they can turn a critical eye to the rest of it. Thats the only way to develop an informed voting base these days.

To put it in context, I love to joke with people in wireless about how bad different regulatory frameworks are. I have never once in my entire life heard anyone complain about working at heights/ rope and rescue requirements in any jurisdiction. They are smart requirements and directly save lives. If a tower climber ever tells me "No I am not climbing that", that's basically gospel for me.


We don't disagree at all. I was disagreeing with the notion that regulation as an idea is bad. I completely agree that people and experts should have a democratic voice in the regulation that governs them


Would you please like to tell everyone how that's oversimplified?


> Would you please like to tell everyone how that's oversimplified?

People aren’t one dimensional. Simplifying businesses into perfectly-rational automatons is high-school economics.


Businesses aren't people and people's motivations aren't businesses motivations. Business are automatons, just running on carbon instead of silicon and if they are not perferct they are just bad.


I'm guessing you're American? It's much different when a foreign company wants to provide this service to you.


Why? If anything, a foreign company seems to present less risk.

If you're concerned about the government getting your data, your own country can subpoena a company within its borders and get your info.

It's a lot harder to get your private data from a company outside of a country's borders.


So you would be happy to have your digital identity be managed by Xiaomi, Yandex, or Eitaa?


I don't know what you mean by "managed by".

But I'd be perfectly happy to use a phone made by any of them that let me upload my driver's license to a wallet they managed.

I mean, why wouldn't I? What do I care whether China knows who I am...? I mean, I've already given them my passport when I visited anyways.


I'll manage it for you. Just send me an email with a photo copy of your identifying information and I'll add it to a digital wallet I'm working on for you. You've got nothing to worry about, right?


Why would I want you to manage it? Are you making a phone I want to buy?

Just because I'm happy with some corporations having a scan of my driver's license doesn't mean I'm happy with anybody having it.

Are you already storing the details of millions of others, and mine is nothing special? Are you a publicly traded corporation accountable to shareholders? Are you a nation-state with procedures around all these things? Or are you a criminal trying to sign up for credit cards in my name?

Your supposed equivalence isn't an equivalence at all.


What does this mean?


Pre-2022, Twitter was subject to heavy editorial oversight from D.C. and northern VA.

Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.

This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/


I like how you complain about "propaganda at breathtaking scale" and you fell for the Twitter Files, which was... precisely that.


Please show your work.


Musk's own lawyers did the work for us.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...

> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.

> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”

> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.

> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.

Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)


"Show you're work"

Does exactly that using Musk's own lawyers

"...Wait no you weren't suppose to actually do that..."


[flagged]


That's the spirit. Lean into that stereotype! Make it yours.


Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing negative stories about Biden and his son that was the proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent[0].

[0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...


Again:

> > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”

That was the case for the Biden laptop story, too. (And SCOTUS, thus far, seems to agree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri)

Again: Musk's own lawyers argued in court that the Twitter Files don't actually show what Matt Taibbi claimed they do.

(Taibbi also publicly claims Musk is now censoring him. https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1758230628355485979)

> though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent

While I tend to doubt that assertion, "Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years" perhaps points to a reason for a difference if it exists. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/28/left-wing-terrorism-far-rig...

The current administration seems just fine with similar jawboning. https://www.theverge.com/policy/799473/facebook-meta-ice-jaw...


Books exist


chatGPT exists

(I'm not saying not to read books, but seriously: there are shortcuts)


...and is unreliable, hence the origin of this thread.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: