In unregulated free market capitalism, there would be no free supply of unlimited land for roads for Uber & car companies to arbitrage into profit - they would have to have bought land & built infra all of which would make using vehicles for one person completely uneconomical. This would be much better than the status quo - freight & transit would be relatively unaffected by having to pay for land since they they both very efficient.
Similarly, in unregulated free market capitalism, there would be no copyright to bypass.
I am not trying to argue that either of these area panaceas but I feel like we are often in denial about how much collectivism is involved in the things we don't like about capitalism.
Sure but that's a one time vector. If the attacker didn't infiltrate the LLM before it generated the code, then the code is not going to suddenly go hostile like an npm package can.
I don’t think that will happen. There are still problems with React and folks are going to address those problems, sometimes by rolling a completely new UI layer.
I guess if I wanted to read a book written by Claude, I would ask Claude to write the book. I wouldn’t need you to do it, or to post them to hacker news, I would just ask Claude to do it.
Like with programming, I’m sure there are ways AI can help authors and subject matter experts be more productive, and hopefully help readers learn from the works created.
However at the current moment, I have few good tools to discern signal from noise.
Is the human co-author an experienced Lisp programmer who used an AI authoring tool to ease the process of writing a book?
Or is he/she an AI grifter, looking for quick cash by asking an AI to churn out thousands of words he/she has no understanding of and no care as to whether they are helpful or correct.
I'm sharing a work product, just one that used a power tool. You didn't use that power tool to make my work product, I did. That's why people are curious - they want to see what was made. I'm an experienced Elisp programmer, among many other things. I'm curious what Claude Code Opus 4.1 has to say on the topic, aren't you? Why the hell anyone would try to get rich off a book on Perl or Lisp shared under CC0 in an open community is beyond me, but maybe -- just maybe -- somebody wants to read it? It's free. And open source. If that matters.
I dispute that you have the right to put blatantly generated stuff under a license of your choice.
It was produced by ripping off countless copyrighted texts scraped from the Internet and used without permission.
If you actually wrote the book yourself and got Claude to correct some grammar errors and such, that would then be different. The result would still be influenced the aforementioned texts, but in such a way that it is overwhelmingly a derivative of your own text.
> I'm curious what Claude Code Opus 4.1 has to say on the topic, aren't you?
No. Claude isn’t a person and has nothing to say on any topic without a human providing the prompt.
Again, if I wanted Claude to write me a book about lisp or anything else, I’d ask it too. I ask AI tools to do stuff everyday, not clear value you are adding by inserting yourself between the tool and the readers who have the same access to the same tool.
If you think the stuff has value and you’re sharing it for free, that’s great, but I don’t know you from Adam, so your recent flood of HN posting doesn’t inspire confidence, it just looks like self promotion of AI slop being churned out at a rapid pace.
I'm a senior developer on medical leave who wanted to contribute to the community. I used Claude to help create the programming guides I wished existed - carefully prompting for content about languages I've worked with extensively. People were engaging positively with the Perl book before it was flagged. If there are specific technical issues with the content, I welcome that feedback via issues or PRs. But dismissing all AI-assisted content as 'slop' regardless of quality or utility seems shortsighted, especially as these tools become part of how we create and share knowledge.
Or: diet is eaiser to commit to than going to the gym and going to the gym is easier than convincing your neighbours & city council to allow any sort of change to American style land use patterns that prevent destinations being within walkabout distances and destroy the profitability of transit.
Anything worthy of the concept of art isn't likely to be found in these places.
If you like making shit that looks cool and you want to sell it, have at it. Just please drop the intellectual pretence that anything other than "it looks cool" is going on.
What an absurd argument. His main point is not about abundance or about any specific technological aspect of trains, but rather their aesthetics in his feeling that they belong in a previous century.
There are things that trains do exceptionally well, far better than planes or cars. And there are things that planes and cars do exceptionally well, far better than trains. And all three have trade-offs and externalities that a true abundance society would at least attempt to balance.
An abundant society is one that does not put up arbitrary roadblocks in front of people who want to deploy useful technology. Asking that your technology not break other people‘s windows or wake them up in the middle of the night is not an arbitrary roadblock. It’s a reflection of inherent trade-off of a specific type of technology and societies attempt to balance it with the need to sleep and avoid externalities.
This argument ignores an even more fundamental aspect of abundance. That a great deal of transportation demand is not driven by transportation, but by arbitrary limits on construction. No not everyone wants to live in the city and that’s fine. But if they were allowed, millions of millions up on millions of people would live closer to their destinations, then they currently do, requiring less logical innovation in transportation that is required if they are forced to live hundreds of miles away.
Similarly, in unregulated free market capitalism, there would be no copyright to bypass.
I am not trying to argue that either of these area panaceas but I feel like we are often in denial about how much collectivism is involved in the things we don't like about capitalism.
reply