The harm may be greater when it's not leaked. In other words, it can be used to blackmail people in power. They may not even be doing anything particularly illegal - just making a controversial statement or having an unusual sexual preference - and there you go. Or of course illegal stuff, you know. Or ultimately if nothing illegal, enough to assemble a parallel construction case.
At the end of the day, the only guaranteed way to retain access to LLMs is to run an open model on your own hw. Which at this time, it's often inferior but may change in the future.
Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.
At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.
I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.
It's just HN's Two Minutes Hate (extended). It's wise to filter out stuff that's too hot for too long on this site to focus on interesting stuff, as at this point nuanced views aren't to be found.
Are you asking whether software that's been actively developed has changed since the last time you used it 15-20 years ago? I'd be wary of holding a grudge against something for so long.
Funnily enough, the country where I'm from is so touristic that if you're a local (with a typical local salary i.e. miserable) you get much more value for your money by going abroad.
I don't think that's a fair comparison since LLMs can't e.g. prescribe medical tests or medication. That's not something I'd be looking for anyway, but we should at least compare apples to apples.
Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.
The whole thread is about permanently storing every single conversation forever vs conversations that get deleted shortly after. If the latter is chosen, the blast radius is significantly smaller.
Logs are stored on local devices and many people back them up in whatever cloud (majority not encrypted).
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit, I love doing this but I should also warn everyone to make sure they're in a place where it's safe to do so. While most tourist destinations are mostly fine, you don't want to end up in a random shady neighborhood in certain cities - even touristy ones (Barcelona, Paris, etc). It doesn't matter that 20 years ago you did it and it was fine, things have changed.