Scale matters. Using Photoshop took vastly more time and skill to pull off realistic images, limiting how many could be made. With image generation there's no practical limit. Some of it will be used for relatively innocuous purposes like making joke images for friends or menus for restaurants. But the floodgates are open for more socially negative uses.
If you're the only one in the world with an internal combustion engine, the environmental impact doesn't matter at all. When they're as common as they are now, we should start thinking about large-scale effects.
I worked at a university bookstore and we sold lots of disks. while CDs were killing them for long-term storage zips were required for some courses because RW disks suck.
those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.
the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.
interesting read, pretty depressing take if you're pro IPV6. I think their guess that IPV6 has low value-add when considered as part of a hybrid environment is probably one of the better explanations I've heard for poor uptake.
I keep seeing basically this comment over and over, which on reddit would be expected but I'm surprised how much it pops up here. I would expect the HN crowd to be a bit more cognizant of the fact that the consumer is at the end of a potentially long chain and that direct-to-consumer refunds through that chain are at best impractical and at worst literally impossible.
In this case the importer was losing money post tariff so was the exporter. the consumer was actually paying more than the tariff (due to margin).
making each actor "whole" in even this short, cut-and-dry chain would be extremely difficult not even counting the overhead of each entity issuing refunds. A product with multiple importer inputs and more hands in the pot would be nearly impossible to even trace and you'd have to be able to definitively construe that each change in price at each step was directly related to tariffs, maybe someone in the chain was already going to raise prices some and then didn't raise any more on top of the tariff thus the tariff increase was absorbed by a pre-planned price hike.
Did people get charged more? yes. Are you getting your money back, no. does it suck? yes. Is it some conspiracy to make importers more wealthy? no. Were more than just end consumers harmed? yes! Is this fair? fuck no, but truly fair is impossible so might as well do something rather than let the corrupt government keep their ill gotten gains.
The government acted illegally, and those illegal actions caused harm to consumers. It is reasonable for consumers to expect to be made whole in some manner. It would also be nice for the government administrators and agents that flagrantly broke the law to end up facing repercussions as well. But of course both of these are essentially pipe dreams in our broken down society.
It’s not really impossible to do refunds to consumers. Businesses wouldn’t have to be compelled to cooperate either. If they are suitably enticed, they will go through their own records, find rationale for higher prices because of tarries and submit individual records to the government.
Businesses are already basically forced to do KYC on direct to consumer imports so they have the information on file.
It’s only for the wider market, where items aren’t imported to be sold direct, that it’s harder to tell because as you said there is a chain of actors.
Like if you have a product, and the government says the product is ok, and it's labeled per regulation and later that product turns out to be deleterious to people's health should the company be liable?
Guess we should already have precedent but my google-fu is failing here. I can't seem to find the resolution of Felix-Lozano v. Nalge Nunc , Felix sued Nalgene over their use of BPA which at the time was not illegal to use in the bottles.
PFAS will probably be the next battleground here. They've been used in lots of products. And have some lawsuits https://www.cbsnews.com/news/firefighters-pfas-lawsuit/ . In your opinion should every manufacturer of a product that uses PFAS be legally liable?
I'm not a lawyer, nor a judge, so I can't say. All I can tell you is that it feels wrong that [Monsanto/OpenAI] can lobby a state's legislature to prevent you, the average joe and potential lucrative victim, from filing a lawsuit against them when it seems clear to any reasonable person that people are developing [cancer/mental health issues] due to the use of [pesticides/AI].
Perhaps something like anti-SLAPP rules for the ignominious corporations would be a happy middle ground? I don't know if that would "fix" anything – or if there's anything to fix – so don't take that as a super serious suggestion.
I'm generally open to lobbying, but I'm not generally open to "you can never file a lawsuit against the comically evil pesticide corporation standing behind us twirling their mustaches." There needs to be a middle ground.
I don't think itd be ok, personally. My impression is regulations and regulatory institutions can be very slow to evolve after technological advances, unless the government is financially liable. A scheme I would be more comfortable with is mandatory insurance and insurance companies with a financial incentive absorbing the liability. On top of that probably add some bare minimum regulatory requirements/certifications.
"Like if you have a product, and the government says the product is ok, and it's labeled per regulation and later that product turns out to be deleterious to people's health should the company be liable?"
Mesothelioma is the precedent.
100% yes. If you've never seen the hell that people go through with these cancers, you are blessed, but it is hell, especially in the US medical system.
> Like if you have a product, and the government says the product is ok, and it's labeled per regulation and later that product turns out to be deleterious to people's health should the company be liable?
But like, what if you like, totally bribed the shit out government people and like totally fabricated scientific evidence to make it seem like it was safe but then you sold it anyway?
I categorize this kind of stuff as "Crisis of accessibility" . AI is not alone in this territory, happens all over the place. Basically it's a problem that's existed for ages but the barrier to entry was high enough we didn't care.
Think 3D printing, it's not all that hard to make a zip gun or similar home-made firearm, but it's still harder than selecting an STL and hitting print.
You could always find info about how to make a bomb or whatnot but you had to like, find and open a book or read a pdf, now an LLM will spoon-feed it to you step by step lowering the barrier.
"Crisis of accessibility" is simultaneously legitimate concern but also in my mind an example of "security by obscurity". that relying on situational friction to protect you from malfeasance is a failure to properly address the core issue.
> Think 3D printing, it's not all that hard to make a zip gun or similar home-made firearm, but it's still harder than selecting an STL and hitting print
There were hundreds of mass shootings in America in 2025 alone [1]. None of them involved a 3D-printed weapon.
To my knowledge, there has been one confirmed shooting with a 3D-printed gun, and it didn't uniquely enable the crime.
That's mostly because they suck (for now, who knows when we'll get home metal printing), also it's easy to get real guns. also crises of accessibility could be predicate on merely the perception that the barrier is now too low rather than actual harm.
I don't really think photoshop, flat bed scanners and half decent inkjets really facilitated a lot of counterfeit currency but there was the same panic back then and "protections" put in place.
this source is a bit better and answers a couple questions.
first the verification wasn't just "click this link to prove you own this email"
>That account verification process meant that developers were required to upload their government-issued ID before they were allowed to publish potentially highly sensitive code to the broader Windows user base.
Also according to at least one affected user they didn't actually get notified of the process.
> “Microsoft never sent me any notification at all about this. I’ve looked in every inbox in every spam folder in every mail log, and zero, nothing, zilch,” Donenfeld said.
Some devs did get the email and follow the process and still got kicked out
> Don’t let anyone tell you it’s because we didn’t read our emails or submit the right verification paperwork. Cuz we did all that back in October.
> And this month, we were suddenly and without any warning locked out.
>According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at the administration.
>What enraged them most was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
They don’t disagree that they conduct diplomacy based on force. They disagree that they should instead promote dialogue and seek consensus among all parties.
I desperately wanted to like Valerian since I love Fifth Element, while visually striking the story line was pretty meh and OMG the casting was horrible. I think I could casually enjoy it even with the bad story if they had done better job casting.
> There’s a certain type of person who reacts with rage when anyone points out flaws with <thing>. Why is that?
FIFY, it's not endemic to here or LLMs. point out Mac issues to an Apple fan, problems with a vehicle to <insert car/brand/model> fan, that their favorite band sucks, that their voted representative is a PoS.
Most people aren't completely objective about everything and thus have some non-objective emotional attachment to things they like. A subset of those people perceive criticism as a personal attack, are compelled to defend their position, or are otherwise unable to accept/internalize that criticism so they respond with anger or rage.
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