>It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
That's like increasing your going out budget at the same time as moderating your excessive drinking.
The more money that's up for grabs, the higher the incentives for fraud and general abuse.
I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain. Instead it's always the promise that just [X] more billion from [billionaire] and we could solve homelessness
>I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain.
Are you simply calling the entire government a "welfare state" or do you believe that something like military spending is off the table for making more efficient? Because people very obviously would complain about shifting military spending to social programs and military spending is almost certainly the biggest differentiator in spending between us and those "'social democracies' such as Finland, France and Canada" that OP was talking about.
Of course you should make military spending more efficient. But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category. Don't cut waste in department A and allocate to department B. Maybe shift from buying fewer jets and more drones. It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem. Government takes more than enough money.
Again, percentage of government money that goes to social programs is less relative to military, but only as a percentage. Look at things like spending on public healthcare (Medicare / Medicaid) or public education, America spends as much as social democracies in absolute terms. Just relative terms its less because we're a wealthy country and produce a lot of wealth that we tax. It's not a money problem
> But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category... It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem.
We can't really have this conversation from the mindset that the status quo is inherently apolitical. The US spends more than those "social democracies" on the military in both absolute and relative terms. Since total spending is the same, that means we also spend less on social programs in relative terms. These are all political choices and refusing to revisit a previous political choice is an active political choice.
Military spending has been trending downwards the entire time I’ve been alive. All that’s happened is increased spending elsewhere and even more debt. With very little apparent improvement to those social services spending outcomes. Usually the the opposite.
I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.
I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.
TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.
Maybe we should approach this from the opposite angle. If it isn't military spending, what do you think the differentiator is between the US and those "social democracies" that OP mentioned? Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
> Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.
It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.
Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the average citizen for so long is up for debate.
“If you commit insider trading on Kalshi, that can and will at some point be a federal crime. It is a federal crime, I actually do expect the DOJ to prosecute some of these cases”. I'm guessing that “some point” is sometime after Jan 20th 2029.
No, I was commenting on the current administration's corruption. I don't think most previous Republican administrations would have tolerated the type of insider trading we have seen from people close to the administration. It goes beyond ideology, turning a blind eye to this behavior among your subordinates is a sign of weak leadership and poor management.
This is actually a good example of this not being a partisan issue. A congressional stock trading ban is one of the few issues that doesn't break down by party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats have put forward bills to ban it and the percentage of the population in support of such efforts is very similar between Republicans and Democrats.
I'm also not going to defend Congressional stock trading. I think it should be banned. But there are some differences about who is doing the trading/betting, what specifically they are trading/betting on, and what that information communicates to the public. There's a fundamental difference between a random staffer betting the US will attack Iran on a certain date which becomes public immediately compared to a Congressperson themselves buying stock in a weapon manufacturer in the leadup to an attack knowing the purchase won't be disclosed to the public for up to 45 days.
Like I said, I would be against both, but it's much easier to justify Congressional stock trading than the insider trading we see on these prediction markets. Afterall, it isn't like Congress is moving to remove all insider trading legislation, so there is some recognition of nuance here even if they give themselves more leeway than we would want.
I think it’s naive to pretend they haven’t been doing the same thing all along. The Trump admin simply has more options available to them with crypto and prediction markets. And their egos are too big to bother doing it quietly.
What proof do you have that there is a difference between the Team Red and Team Blue, other than your not on the team you’re railing against.
For example, given Nancy Pelosi’s effectiveness as an investor, she was effectively a highly successful day trader with a side hustle as a representative of her constituents.
Framing this as a Left v Right, is at best, naive.
Trump's second-term clemencies so far have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. That's over 2,000x the amount amount eliminated by Biden's pardons ($680,000).
These pardons go to convicted criminals who have ties to Trump and his administration, or who have donated significant sums to Trump.
It is very obvious the current administrating is the most corrupt administration in modern history by several orders of magnitude.
And what of Pelosi and the like? The problem is, you’re not able to measure what you cannot see.
For example, the obvious… Epstein Files. That went on for how long? Involved hundreds if not thousands of (mostly) men of power. Bill Clinton comes to mind.
Just because you couldn’t see the corruption doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Your bias is blinding you. The System is corrupted. Full stop.
How do we know? Look who is in the WH. How can a fair and just system lead to that? You’re failing for the “OMG! Look at him!!” narrative. A narrative brought to you by the people whose incompetence and negligence led to Trump. A narrative that distracts from their failures. You should be asking: How did we get here? Who is accountable? But you’re not.
Ok calling this out. Both parties are involved in crimes. An example is both party's are involved in supporting Israel's fascist objectives.
Just because there is less reports of corruption in the past by dems doesn't change anything. Corruption extends beyond parties, its not a political problem. Its a human problem.
I don't expect to see much change when the dems come back into power, albeit, it be less apparent and of a different nature, I.E more indiscriminate surveillance and less racial profiling ..
There is some kind of cultural thing going on that transcends the party's IMHO that's keeping this problem going.
I can’t help wondering about the categorization. For example, we spend more on “agricultural subsidies” than “NASA & space” or “EPA & environment”, but for some reason the former gets hidden under the “all other” category while the latter two get their own distinct categories. The author might not have a political motivation for those choices, but it’s the kind of choice that will likely influence the political conclusions the reader will make from the data.
I have been thinking about this painting a lot more in recent years because it always comes to mind when someone mentions AI art. It's arguably the most important piece by arguably the most important artist of the 20th Century (the "arguablies" are intentional, I'm not going to have that argument because that isn't the point of my comment, but including "arguably" makes them both statements of fact) and it's bleak, upsetting, and just flat out ugly, but that is all intentional and what makes it fascinating to look at. The goal of art isn't merely beauty. It's primarily communication. And this piece very clearly communicates the horrors of war. Sure, AI can make pretty pictures, but it can't make art because it has nothing to communicate.
Well, is Pixar’s Toy Story a work of art? Or what about Julia set renderings, where people make choices about the colors? ;)
Tongue-in-cheek aside, I do think I agree with you in that (1) art, as perceived by us human meatbags, is art because of the human element of it (if not in creation, then in perception), and that (2) AI absent explicit steering trends towards a rather bland medium.
But there’s art in everything from the blurry, out of focus, disposable film cameras, to a 5-year-old’s crayon scribble scrabbles, to the neon glitter themes we used to copy-paste over our geocities and xanga pages, and as frustrating as it is to our own sensibilities, an AI prompt “draw a pink elephant” isn’t all that different.
The element of creation is central to art. A painting or a photo of a sunset can be art, but the sunset itself is not art.
In addition, the communication doesn't need to be explicit or intentional. It can be communicating something antithetical to the artist's original intent like a blurry and out of focus photo. Or it can even be antithetical to the piece itself like a lot of modern art (Fountain[1] comes to mind). I'm also sure that the 5-year-old will happily tell you a story about why they scribbled what they did. I'm not diminishing any of those. But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art.
> a photo of a sunset can be art
...
> But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art.
The natural question to pose is, does that mean that when the person who pressed the shutter button in that camera, that button press was the extent of their art? Of course not; intent, sensibility, timing, understanding there's something special about what's in front of you, preparing a composition, orchestrating poses, framing to create a special composition, manipulating the medium via speed or exposure or etc to create an appropriate texture... all those and more can play a part, and the button press is just the delivery method.
Millions of photos per day are not art even if they show a pretty thing, and nobody has a problem with that. Even when we actively try to capture something special, most people will later look at their photo and say "it shows the place, but it doesn't communicate anything like what being there made me feel".
So in the same way, I think the interesting discussion will be not that AI images are not art. Millions of prompts per day will not be art, and nobody (except grifters) has a problem with that. But how can AI become another vehicle for people to produce interesting art? Perhaps there's nothing special there. But I hope people with the drive to explore and the need to communicate continue giving it a shot and prove or disprove the notion that "it's just a prompt".
But it completely is different. To you point its why a 5 year old's crayon scribble is more powerful to certain people than Guernica for instance. History is littered with gazillions of scribbles, stray notes, meaningless stuff that just goes straight in the bin. AI will do that. But for something communicates the feeeell of something you need warmth and emotional relatability.
I'm not a fan of AI "art" at all, but this particular attack does leave something to be desired.
Beyond aesthetic judgements of good/bad or intentional stance re: communication with others, there is such a thing as "process art" which could also be described as communication with oneself, or as kind of being locked into conversation with the medium, or with the universe. People will get distracted here and want to fight about whether Pollack is good, but I think that's missing the point. It just happens to be a very direct way of engaging with the dialectic tension of order / chaos that's incompressible, irreducible, and completely without substitute.. and that's just one of many dialectics you could explore.
Another self-communicative aspect of art is about exploring the limits and mastery of technique, where the details and result per se don't matter much. You can see this with a bunch of dorks building useless programming languages and doing amazing stuff with them, or see it with a smith at a forge. Someone will say this is about being a technician or a craftsman, but I'd say no, those activities typically have a practical purpose. Especially if you're doing this for the joy of it without even caring whether you're actively learning something you can apply elsewhere, then it's probably art.
I’m not sure what specifically you think you’re disagreeing with me about because I don’t see what you’re saying as incompatible with what I said. Communication with oneself or the rest of the art world is still communication.
What makes Pollock’s art “art” is the context in which it was created. It’s not like One: Number 31, 1950 would have the same reputation today if you sent it back a couple centuries in a time machine. It’s appreciated because it’s part of an ongoing conversation.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I don't think an artist would "one-shot" an art piece, let's say an image. At what point of the iterative process does the output become "Art"? What if the artist makes it a point to one-shot images and the ugliness of the output becomes their commentary of the current aesthetics...
I'd say it's much more about intent than the process, there are plenty of "Artists" on instagram (in quotes because I would not consider them artists), who paint by hand, surely talented people, but their images convey nothing. They are clearly marketing/branding themselves, the instagram post becomes the actual final output...I don't know.
Hole. In. One. I have so little fear of AI replacing true art because its fundamental purpose is to transfer emotions (and its the best way humanity's been able to do this) that can be indescribable in any other way than feelings. AI does not have that and so can never be a true substitute for it. it can be a tool to help someone convey that but it needs humans.
It is interesting that sites like HN have existed for decades and still don't have any real solution for this sort of problem. Is providing a way for us to all bypass paying for this content that cost money to produce actually the most desirable outcome?
Like imagine if there was some 90 minute tech documentary on Netflix that was worth discussing here. Could I just rip it and link to a copy on my Google Drive? How long would that link stay up? I can't imagine long. I guess the conclusion based off how these sites operate is that piracy doesn't count when it's just words.
> It is interesting that sites like HN have existed for decades and still don't have any real solution for this sort of problem.
Heck, I find it odd that we don't even try to model the problem, let alone solve.
For example, there's no submitter-tickbox for "this requires additional access", no icon to distinguish between the kinds of items, and and we don't even an informal convention like putting [paywall] in the title.
Without even tracking that information, it's very difficult to address the pain-points, such as allowing the submitter to preemptively provide alternate links, or allowing readers to select against certain sites they've already decided they won't subscribe to.
That first link is not relevant to the point of my comment. I was not complaining about paywalls. The comment also doesn't address whether paywall bypasses would be acceptable for non-text links.
Regarding the second link, I'll happily engage with something specific dang said on this topic if you want to link to it, but a link to every time he said the word "paywalls" is not a productive contribution to this conversation.
I can't recall a piece of technology in which the age distribution of the people embracing it was similar to what we're seeing with AI. In the past, this stuff has almost always been picked up by the young first and foremost, but the embrace of AI seems mostly to be coming from elder millennials through boomers (I'll admit this is anecdotal, so it's possible this is an observation of my own bubble).
Understandably, the people currently above water want to be able to sleep at night and believe things are just going to continue being acceptable from their perspective, so they may go to unknown lengths to convince themselves of this no matter how unrealistic it is. Then one day reality hits them with a layoff followed by a seemingly endless and fruitless job search.
It's interesting that this is explicitly for non-sports markets because I see no reason why this would be less applicable there. Sports betters have long talked about that the winning strategy is usually to bet the under (i.e. the no) on most bets. The over (i.e. the yes) is generally a more exciting and fun outcome which causes it to attract more betters which in turns makes that side overpriced.
Like with this bot, I have no idea if that will still lead to actual positive returns. This might just be a remnant from a time when these betting lines were set less intelligently. But all things being equal, it seems logical that "boring" bets would have a better return in the long run than "exciting" bets as long as some betters are at least partially motivated by entertainment.
There's probably a lot of knowledge like this that sports betters have built up over decades that could apply to these new forms of non-sports gambling.
Strategies like this can easily be positive EV until enough people discover it and that actually is the driving force behind efficient pricing.
Here's how the mechanism works: I find that something is statistically worth $0.70 but I am able to buy it for $0.60 and statistically sell it for $0.70 (in the average). I make $0.10 each trade on average. Until you come along, copy my strategy and change $0.60 to $0.61 to frontrun my trades. Then someone else does it for $0.62. Until the market finally reprices to $0.70 where it should be. The guy who tries $0.71 loses money and stops, and then it goes back to $0.70. It's a stable feedback loop.
There are lots of positive EV strategies lying around in these inefficient markets that Citadel hasn't (yet) descended upon. The best advice I can give is if you find one, trade the hell out of it and don't open source it or tell anyone about it, because as soon as more people run it, it will cease to be positive EV and then after that it becomes an infrastructure game.
If it's popular on Github it probably doesn't work.
If you found something that works and is paying your rent, don't put it on Github. My 2 cents.
This all really depends on the efficiency of the market. I think these prediction markets would claim that is their goal, but even Wall Street isn't perfectly efficient. I would also guess that sports betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient and less likely to be swayed by a popular GitHub repo. Once again, it goes back to the share of the market that is participating for entertainment purposes. That's a lot more common for sports betting than it is for will the US bomb a certain country.
Yes, you can find positive EV trades on Wall Street as well. I've been diving into this a lot lately, all I can say is it's 10X harder to find strategies that work on Wall Street than prediction markets.
With one exception.
The one easy long-lasting anomaly to exploit on Wall Street which actually does NOT exist on prediction markets: "American stocks go up most of the time". This is actually a massively exploitable structural anomaly (you just buy and hold forever and effectively reap the rewards of a biased coin) and the source of the anomaly is mostly US monetary policy, US foreign policy, and US tech expertise put together. However, it still is an anomaly. The thesis that SPY will continue going up forever is also predicated on these things continuing to work the way they have in the past.
How is it an anomaly? Global stocks go up (or at least have positive total return) over time on average because companies produce value. Ultimately it's true that that money has to come from somewhere, so you can say printing it is monetary policy, but the reason it can be done without runaway inflation is the tangible value produced by the firms.
> I would also guess that sports betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient
Your strategy doesn't work on sportbooks to begin with, because bookmakers don't move the odds with the action.
That is, there is no such phenomenon as "the over is exciting therefore overpriced". Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
> Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
A bookmaker is a market maker, and they ideally want to end up with no net interest in a position. They then take guaranteed profit in the bid-ask spread, which in sportsbooks is the 'vig'. Bookmakers who adjust their odds in real-time don't have to be particularly clever about the fundamentals, just responsive to the competing demands on either side.
A bookmaker who intentionally takes a position on a game is the equivalent of a proprietary trader or hedge fund. It's potentially more profitable, but it's also adversarial against 'sharp' traders.
Bookmakers who set odds at the beginning and don't move with the action must set larger bid-ask spreads to compensate.
>Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
If this were true, lines would never move unless there was breaking news, but we see lines move all the time without there being any material change to those "facts and statistics".
I think the distinction is that sports betting companies are basically casinos, need to guard their edge, and although they will tolerate some moving of lines, they will kick out players who consistently eat their edge, and will rig the lines at a place where they can still profit.
Different from a prediction market like Polymarket or Kalshi whose income probably comes mostly from transaction fees rather than house edge. Otherwise these platforms wouldn't welcome bots so much. Bots => efficient pricing + transaction volume => profit for them
The sustainability of prediction markets depends heavily on continuous liquidity provision - without bots and market makers, spreads would widen and user experience would degrade quickly
These are all reasons supporting my point as they would make sports betting platforms less efficient meaning it would be easier to find arbitrage in their prices (at least temporarily, until you're booted for being too successful).
Without there being any material change you can see. If you had access to all the tips and data and insider information that sportbooks operate with, you could be a bookmaker too.
>If you had access to all the tips and data and insider information that sportbooks operate with
Can you give an example of what you're talking about here? Because it sounds like you're accusing these large publicly trade companies of participating in organized crime. There is regulation when it comes to sports betting that doesn't exist with general prediction markets. An athlete can't just feed a sportsbook "insider information" in the way you're suggesting. The only private info that they are supposed to have is better behavior details that you claim doesn't factor into their decisions.
Books like DraftKings and FanDuel get their lines from market makers like Circa. Market makers use a variety of information for setting initial lines (you'll have to go ask them), but one of the main ways they move lines afterwards is professional action. That is, if some person or entity who Circa knows to be a profitable professional better puts down a large bet in a certain direction, Circa will move their line in that direction.
Where did that entity get that information, and how are they right so often? Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not accusing anyone of anything.
>That is, if some person or entity who Circa knows to be a profitable professional better puts down a large bet in a certain direction, Circa will move their line in that direction.
Well that's the source of our confusion then. I agree with this, but it conflicts with what you said a few comments up:
>because bookmakers don't move the odds with the action.
it avoids sports bets because "Who will win game 6 of XYZ" is formatted on the polymarket backend as a Yes/No bet. There's a lot of markets with Yes/No plumbing even though you wouldn't interpret them as such
Fair enough, I assumed the exclusion of sports with a deliberate decision rather than one forced on the project due to the technical details of the platform.
It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".
Not in this instance. People don't stop being people when they join an organization. If we can recognize that getting ignored, suppressed, or met with hostility "discourages people from posting", why can't we recognize that it can also discourage organizations from posting?
You don’t think people have different goals than organizations?
Do you think the goal of EFF posting on HN is the same as some random user posting on HN?
Of course not. So it’s not surprising they have different actions under similar circumstances. Nor is having different actions indicative of differing morals.
You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.
Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.
Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.
I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.
I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
If people are interpreting this is an analogy, that is probably the issue...
> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy
It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.
> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.
Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.
It's hard not to see this as you just restating your argument.
If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?
> What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?
I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).
Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).
I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.
EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.
There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.
Just noting that I saw this, but I don't really see a point in replying outside of this comment at this time because I don't feel the need to prove myself to you, and I don't know how I could change what I'm writing to satisfy you personally anyways.
> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.
I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!
But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.
I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.
You've expressed a sense that the organization has become “too political” in a specific way (e.g., emphasizing equity, anti‑discrimination, or skepticism of state/corporate power as a matter of justice), and that this is a kind of ideological overreach.
You've implied that digital privacy, encryption, open‑source software, and anti‑patent‑trolling should be treated as pure technical and legal questions, not as expressions of a progressive political ideology.
I'm surmising a desire to roll back the organization’s explicit engagement with social‑justice‑adjacent politics and return it to a more “classical” techno‑libertarian or “just fix the code and laws” stance.
Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy. Any attempt to normalize him—or paint his products and services as neutral—is, in effect, reactionary opposition to a broader societal reckoning with fascist tendencies in tech and politics.
The reactionary position is the one that wants to preserve or normalize Musk’s power, image, and platforms as “just business” or “apolitical tech.”
In one sense: yes. But in a different sense, if their post was about how they were leaving a more left-leaning platform and they dropped in a bunch of examples about how it was important to support gun-rights and pro-life groups and was alienating people on the left as a result, I'd like to think I'd be objecting in a similar way. (I certainly wouldn't be saying that you can't be pro-encryption without converting to libertarianism or whatever.)
>should be treated as pure technical and legal question
I would like that, yes. I remember being super annoyed watching net neutrality become a partisan issue in real time. I believe that ideologues are always going to exist, but for a lot of us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we are going to play that game or if we're going to do the work to persuade the persuadable and build coalitions to get wins where we can get them.
That's why I chose to be vague in some of my language, because I think it's important to be able to modulate how you speak to different people in service of other types of goods. I don't see a benefit of trying to litigate abortion or authoritarianism in a Hacker News thread about the EFF. I do see a benefit in trying to convince people that advocacy groups staying in their lanes, and that it's good to have voices that try to operate outside the left/right divide in the US in 2026.
>roll back
I get that you're saying that because it fits certain definitions of "reactionary". I don't believe in turning back any clocks, even if I might be in favor of bringing back, in some form, policies that have been dropped. If you see that as a distinction without a difference, so be it.
But "reactionary" often has a particular set of right-wing connotations that I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself with.
From there you pivot hard into your criticisms of a particular person as well as your perceptions about how he impacts the broader political landscape. As I started to reply to some of those ideas I realized that this is all a pretty different line of discussion than the idea that you originally engaged with me on, or even what the EFF said in its own post.
I wonder why this post is worthy of staying on the HN front page but all the articles about Trump's threats that "A whole civilization will die tonight" got flag killed. I guess the president making genocidal threats isn't "interesting" enough to meet HN's moderation standards.
We all know he’d say something like that and that there’s a chance he’d actually do it. It isn’t really newsworthy. This isn’t the set of minds that needs to change to affect change in the short term anyway.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
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