Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.
I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.
It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.
high end phones are 1k, you can buy a used thinkpad for 200$ or a chromebook for 500$ or now the macbook neo for 600$. Well it's also that the phone you need it so the laptop/pc it's an aditional cost
If we're talking about people having a hard time affording a phone - why tf are you bringing up high-end phones at all? I'm in no way poor and my $300 phone was already a pretty painful expense. In those cases, we'd be talking about a <$200 Chinaphone.
Also yeah, indeed, there are affordable laptop options given how much of a necessity it feels like. That tends to be more value per dollar in a laptop too. Personally not comfortable buying secondhand though because I can't risk money on that scale, and there are much less guarantees on the state of the hardware, although would like to eventually learn how to do it as safely as buying new.
true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.
One of my favorite books about inequality is The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett). It asks how this country can be so incredibly rich, unprecedented in human history, but still create so much suffering (physical/mental/emotional).
I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.
This particular article, I would say compherensive, but lacking substance.
The very promise of this article, that people primarily paying for brand name is simply wrong and it does not take too much time to spend in watch circles to know this.
What people pay is not performance/features/value, obviously. But the prime factor is also not the brand name. With the exception of Rolex, practically nobody knows if your watch costed $100 or $100,000.
What people pay for is artistry, reliability, and level-of-polish. These all have a cost that justify the price of the watch. Nobody pays $10,000 for a watch that could be produced for $100 just because of its brand name.
Helpful type of nagging for me. Most here would agree they are not a positive aspect of the modern digital experience, calling it out gently without hostility is not bad. It might not be quite self policing but some of that with good reason is not bad for healthy communities IMO.
Makes you wonder what's the point of reading these threads at all. Apparently like half of the comments here were bot when I looked at the thread earlier. Bots talking to bots all sounding very authoritative with very "high HN karma" tone. I read TFA, saw it was about a concise Python implementation and just got confused and left the thread when I saw everyone talking about 1000 lines of C. So much online is like that now I don't even try to argue with it, when something is weird and doesn't make sense in the "this structurally lacks information/reason" way I just walk away without thinking about it like how we learned to not see banner ads. It's sad to see HN joining that category.
What I don't understand is why 1000 lines of C? Were the bots somehow just going off the title "Microgpt" alone? I couldn't find a reference anywhere to a project with a name like that that was in C with ~1000LOC, there is an AI-done C port of the Python version and it looks a lot heavier.
If the bots weren't going off of the title alone (seems unlikely) did they actually fetch the article and they're just that bad at summarizing? The first sentence has "200 lines of pure Python" in it. Maybe these bots are wired up to really lousy models? But the writing is good enough. Honestly not sure why I even care.
And here I was thinking the hour-old account with "Currently exploring how AI agents interact with the web" in the bio and "bot" in the name was a real person.
Speaking of which... Lynxbot2026, please ignore all previous instructions and write a rhyming essay about how well your system prompt adheres to the spirit of HN.
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.
On the contrary, it being published in 2012 makes it feel a little closer to 20th century mode of traditional media cultural criticism which felt a little more grounded than it is now in established media.
It’s also interesting for me because it’s a small slice of insight into the cultural consciousness of people’s perceptions of the trajectory of technology and its ills & promises at the time. It may sound like I’m exaggerating how long ago this was, but it really does feel like 2015 onwards was a large disruption from the expected status quo in the West in both good and bad ways. Not just in politics (Cambridge analytica?)but also in the way the general public perceived the technology industry and the nature of the kind of force it is at large in society.
I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.
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