Yep, that's horrifying. Imagine LLMs not just denying information about, to intentionally choose a hot button example, abortions but also invisibly logging a black mark against the asker for thoughtcrime/precrime because the current ruling party has baked their ideology into law. [EDIT] Imagine subtle injection of biases into responses that support the agenda of the current ruling party and failing to include any counterarguments. That wasn't possible with just the internet but it is very possible with centralized LLMs and a public dependent on them for looking up information and doing their reasoning for them. Authoritarians of every stripe must be salivating over the prospect.
> "For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)"
That example works against the argument since that policy was rendered moot when Commodore Perry arrived at Japan in 1853 with a squadron of American warships and demanded opening of trade and diplomatic relations at gunpoint.
> "If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."
It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.
The parent poster argument boils down to "[something] is theoretically possible, therefore 1) it is guaranteed to practically implementable 2) in the reasonably near future". Both are simply prima facie false; one can ask an LLM to explain why if there's any doubt.
Steam, at least in theory, has Gabe's long ago pledge that they'd un-DRM purchased games if Valve ever went out of business. Whether Gabe or his successor actually would honor that pledge today if it happened or even could contractually is a different question.
Hot printed circuit boards, of course. Probably a blow dryer on max temperature for 10 minutes against an old PCIe card would give you an idea of what that smells like. (Do this outside, obviously.)
More voter turnout wouldn't have changed anything. From
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turno... , "The survey suggests that 'if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different'"
This also matches what Democratic-leaning pollsters like David Shor have said in their own analyses.
Among other things, unions have been commonly anti-immigrant, seeing them as taking jobs that are "rightfully" theirs. Even on supposedly cosmopolitan Hacker News, you'll see users saying they support unions pushing for harsh restrictions on H1-B and other visas.
If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.
It is true that most software development jobs don't need much CS knowledge to perform. The majority of developers simply kludge together common libraries, frameworks, and software packages without needing to understand all that much about the internals.
It is also true that the software development jobs that don't need much CS knowledge to perform are the ones most vulnerable to being automated away by LLMs. If a kludge is sufficient, AI can kludge it cheaper than a human.
It's very noticeable among the progressive left who post on HN, highly paid software developers attempting to LARP as the oppressed poor. Don't they realize they're still wealthy enough that they'd still go the chopping block if a people's revolution came?
> "I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it."
While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.
Using "launch" may give readers the wrong impression. Show HN is not for product launches or advertising. It is for "something you've made that other people can play with" according to the specific rules for such submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html .
Submitters try to game the system to self-promote constantly but generally such improper submissions are ignored or shut down by the site moderators or users very quickly. Those who want to advertise or SEO on Hacker News are not welcome here.
As much as I like Steam and dislike Sony (quite a bit in both cases), I will point out that while you can still download every single thing you've bought on Steam, there's no guarantee that it will run on a modern PC. A handful of my past Steam purchases don't. Consoles still hold the advantage of being a tightly defined target platform and a game written targeting a console is compatible with it indefinitely.