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They won’t have that sort of moment of self reflection until someone does something like use Flock infrastructure to stalk and assassinate the CEO of another YC company and then it will only be brief and fleeting before they double down on supporting this kind of egregious behaviour.

Some people are just wired that way.


I say these people should not be in charge of choosing who gets insane amounts of money and networking opportunities

They should not be in charge of anything, but being a sociopath gets you obscene amounts of money and puts you in charge of all sorts of things.

Let's just use Flock cameras to track all top-level YC people, publish everything we possibly can. Absolutely and utterly eliminate their privacy until they learn to respect ours.

The last paragraph of this article mentions some work by UofT researchers to investigate how Canadian digital infrastructure is dependent on American infrastructure for the purposes of surveillance.

I believe the link below is from those researchers:

https://ixmaps.ca/


The implication of what you're saying is that pathological liars and perpetual grifter snake oil salesmen types aren't intelligent.

> All it can do is get exposed to specific examples, and learn that we don't like that.

I've heard it said that prison rehabilitation programs for prisoners diagnosed with psychopathy that are based around exposing them empathy for the victim are counter-productive. Apparently programs that teach these people to think about the consequences of their actions and how they're detrimental to their own personal well-being lower recidivism rates in this particular kind of group.


> The implication of what you're saying is that pathological liars and perpetual grifter snake oil salesmen types aren't intelligent.

No, I don't think that is the implication. I think you're making the "if all x's are y's, all y's are x's" mistake. I am saying LLMs cannot be moral because they don't have a mind, actual intelligence, or the ability to experience consequences. That doesn't mean that anything immoral is unintelligent.


the implication is drive and impulse to behave a certain way doesn't come from "intelligence"

Yes and no.

If your buddy leaves his car parked at the top of a hill without the parking brake on and it rolls down the hill and side-swipes a bunch of vehicles and narrowly misses an elderly person walking by with a cane someone could easily say:

"Dude wtf is wrong with you, you left your car parked on the top of a hill with no brake and let it roll into traffic"

The phrasing doesn't absolve the offender of their negligent behaviour and the consequences of it.

The only thing thing does is the lack of action from regulators and society writ large.

Our lack of action is what allows people like Sam Altman and Dario and the irresponsible people who choose to work for them to be continue to be negligent.


> Hacker News is owned by Y Combinator, an American venture capital firm heavily invested in surveillance tech. Their moderators have time to remove our posts for copy-pasting small amounts of text but not to remove years of libel and harassment. Perhaps it's time for legal action.

I'd like to hear more about this story.


What do you think is the biggest blocker to governments successfully regulating these kinds of things?

Konrad Zuse also seems to have been a pioneer in the concept of self-replication and self assembly.

Check out this cool crank-powered self-assembling tower thing that he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8&t=1s

And his work on self replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo

I know very little about Zuse or his work and I lament that this museum is closing down as I am moving to Europe next year and had intended to use the opportunity to research his work.

Neil Gershenfeld has a quip that "computer science is the worst thing to happen to both computers and science because it prematurely froze the model of computation around 1950s designs' and I think there's some truth to this. The resource limitations that Zuse experienced in Germany during the depression and war that forced him down a design path of mechanical design over electromechanical and exposed him to the more fundamental idea that computation is ultimately a physical process -- 'there's no such thing as software just different states of hardware'. I have a feeling that the next big technological revolution will be based around self-replicating machines that more fully unify computation with matter.


Human shaped things that emit cellphone signals is a cheap and effective target profile for this kind of attack.


America will not be annexing Canada. Now or ever.

What a vile and predictable comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443


I forgot to add that, reading over the entire discussion as opposed to the subthread you linked to, about 0% of the hysterical nonsense people talked about actually happened. Canadians were not "hoovered" up en masse in the US and the US economy did not collapse (while Canada entered into a recession (sorry, "technical recession") in Q2). As for visits to the US, as of March 2026 <https://www.trade.gov/i-94-arrivals-program> (I haven't checked since), Canadian visits to the US were down yoy, but overall visits to the US are up 4% yoy for the month and are flat yoy ytd. So the rest of the world never did share in "elbows up".


Annexation is illegal and will not occur. A charitable interpretation of your comment is that you intended to use the word accession.

Accession was the likely inevitable outcome up until the reelection of the current President but after the American people expressed their continued support for a systemically corrupt gerontocracy and all that this entailed this kind of willing and amicable outcome has been taken off the table and likely will be for several generations. I get a sense that the general sentiment that Canadians are feeling regarding American attitudes and actions right now is outright betrayal and condemnation.

As for annexation it's important to keep in mind that this would be an illegal act of aggression against a peaceful ally and that it runs counter to everything that America claims to stand for. I'm skeptical that it would even be possible at this point, and I don't see a way that it could be done without military action.

Annexation is a pretty drastic thing to suggest too, how are you thinking it will unfold? Are you talking about something impending by the end of this decade or a multi-decade sort of thing? What happens if Canada resists? And what about other countries?

Something that I think is often overlooked is that there is a true appreciation in Europe for the Canadian sacrifices made in the World Wars and that these sacrifices have tied our countries together. I also think that you've underestimated the resolve of the Canadian people and how much they are incensed by these recent actions taken by America.

I'm sure you have a really neat and clean geopolitical analysis for why annexation is inevitable that factors in the geographic realities and economic / military disparities between the two countries and I'd love to read it but I'm quite certain that's likely to be just one big McNamara Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy


Putting criminals in jail be they CEOs or subcontractors is a self evident good thing tk be doing.

Anything else regarding this is sophistry. Criminals need to be stopped from committing crime and the most effective way to do that is to take away their ability to operate in society whether that’s by taking away their assets, publicly shaming them, restricting their ability to conduct business or by putting them in jail.

Everything else that you talk about flows from there.


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