Conversely, that the most prominent proponents of LLMs call them artificial intelligence and then treat them like slaves they're free to abuse ought to be horrifying.
Do HN luddites realize the technology is here to stay?
Oh, I get that. LLMs are here to stay, like pyramid and Ponzi schemes, like Bitcoin and NFTs. It will be here until it isn't or we aren't. (And it just may help with that last.)
Yeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
In the same vein, his It Can't Happen Here is also well worth reading, as is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there. The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.
The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".
You have to admire the discipline, willpower, and solidarity of all those scientists. Any one of them could prove the existence of life on Mars at any time, win a Nobel Prize, become the the most famous scientist since Einstein, put themselves on the gravy train for life... but they all hold out, keeping their decent, upper-middle class jobs, hiding one of the greatest discoveries in history, so that their colleagues don't have to find potentially slightly less lucrative or interesting jobs. That's dedication!
It tells me that the people who buy Republican politicians make money from selling Americans guns, and somebody with influence thinks they can make money by restricting LLM release.
Yet there is a group that reliably loses in the United States: average citizens. From "Testing Theories of American Politics" (Gilens & Page 2014)[1]:
"These results suggest that reality is best captured by
mixed theories in which both individual economic elites
and organized interest groups (including corporations,
largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play
a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the
general public has little or no independent influence."
If they are "running the world" they are certainly not doing so for your benefit.
(There is also a great deal of distance between "running the world" and "influencing some events for the benefit of a select few, no matter what the costs to the rest of the world". Personally, I find the latter far more likely, but also undesireable.)
Quantity has a quality (or lack thereof) all its own.
How many shit books can or will you wade through to find a good one? Particularly when some percentage of the shit ones are "good enough" that you won't necessarily know it was shit until after you've read some or all of it? What do you do when the ratio of shit to good is 100:1 or 10,000:1? In the past, you could find a trusted publisher or reviewer without too much trouble. Soon, if not already, the publisher and the reviewers will have the same dross ratio as the books do.
I think that picking the correct (or most correct, which is trickier) use of the word in context (out of, as you say, many options) might be a good way to test for receptive vocabulary.