chronotis (u/chronotis)

chronotis commented on Silicon Valley is pouring millions into pro-AI PACs to sway midterms techcrunch.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/sailfast

xyst · 12 days ago

That is awful. Corporate money, billionaires need to stay out of politics.

Yet another reason why Citizens United v FEC was an absolute mistake.

chronotis · 12 days ago

I wouldn't object, though I also don't see how to put the genie back in the Citizens United bottle.

chronotis commented on Silicon Valley is pouring millions into pro-AI PACs to sway midterms techcrunch.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/sailfast

arduanika · 12 days ago

I guess that means that now, AI is helping these politicians save time and increase their productivity!

chronotis · 12 days ago

There are some efforts to do exactly that, though overall I'd observe that the general level of technological sophistication / early adopter-ism is pretty low in the politician cohort. There are tools for developing campaign plans, direct mail messaging, text campaign content, etc.; we used AI social media ad generation tools to help fill our content pipeline. We developed some internal tools to assist with direct mail fundraising letters to PACs / labor unions / etc.

chronotis commented on Silicon Valley is pouring millions into pro-AI PACs to sway midterms techcrunch.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/sailfast

chronotis · 12 days ago

Former (failed) candidate here, state legislative race in a smaller state that's not generally described as competitive. Money = time. When large donors can deploy large amounts of cash, it relieves you of the need to spend tons of time raising money and you can instead spend that time on other things of greater ROI or that can scale your outreach to a larger audience.

chronotis commented on Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks goblin.tools/... · Posted by u/ValentineC

chronotis · 5 months ago

As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.

Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.

Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.

"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.

chronotis commented on Datadog acquires Quickwit quickwit.io/blog/quickwit... · Posted by u/lrx

orf · 8 months ago

What does any of that have to do with the actual product?

chronotis · 8 months ago

For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.

Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.

Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.

NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.

tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product

chronotis commented on X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Nazi content mediamatters.org/twitter/... · Posted by u/doener

aeternum · 2 years ago

Interesting that Media Matter is trying to double-down on this. Seems non-profits might be even more corrupt than for-profit companies.

It's clearly a weak argument, and why are they focusing on X only when they could expand their criticism to the many other social media news feeds. The pants are sagging and the bias is showing.

chronotis · 2 years ago

Not doubling down, this is just the original article that started the controversy.

chronotis commented on OpenAI Sued for Fraud Allegations webapps.sftc.org/captcha/... · Posted by u/iamnotarobotman

generationP · 2 years ago

TL;DR anyone? The filing takes an ungodly amount of time to load and the server might croak under HN pressure.

chronotis · 2 years ago

Without irony, here's ChatGPT's summary:

This legal complaint alleges that defendants operating a non-profit entity for the benefit of humanity have committed massive fraud on donors, beneficiaries, and the public. The complaint raises concerns about OpenAI's operation, including its dual structure as a non-profit and a for-profit entity, potential insider dealings, and the exclusion of the general public from its benefits. It claims that OpenAI has used deceptive advertising, unfair competition, and fraud to develop its valuable resource for personal gain.

The complaint highlights OpenAI's mission of benefiting humanity and points out that a narrow group of stakeholders have received commercially invaluable early access to its technology. It also argues that OpenAI's for-profit operations might infringe on copyright and fair use laws, as the technology is built on large datasets, much of which is copyrighted. It accuses OpenAI of breaching trust and fiduciary duties, disrupting legal frameworks, and potentially engaging in willful and wanton negligence by increasing existential risks related to AI.

Finally, the complaint alleges that OpenAI might have engaged in banned political activities, specifically suggesting that the technology may have been used to influence the 2020 US presidential election in favor of the Democratic party.

chronotis commented on 43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief 0x58ed.com/blog/amtrak-so... · Posted by u/lennartkoopmann

ryukafalz · 3 years ago

My understanding is this is sadly not as rare as you would hope around level crossings. Likewise with trains hitting cars on the tracks.

Some crossings have gates which make this much less likely, others do not and rely on flashing lights and the train horn to warn people of an approaching train.

chronotis · 3 years ago

A friend of mine works at a law firm that exclusively handles train injury cases. It happens a LOT more than you'd expect, primarily at crossings. Hearing-handicapped or people blasting their speakers who don't hear the horn; faulty crossing gates; distracted drivers; and so on.

The cases almost always include a fatality.

chronotis commented on Bye, Twitter tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/lolsoftware

chronotis · 3 years ago

I don't personally know the OP, but his profile isn't that of a passing crypto fanboy hustling to attract a followers list. I'd wager that he probably doesn't care much if some pro-Elon HN folks don't agree with his views on capitalism or proper vs. improper ways to migrate a follower base between platforms.

He's contributed to the software industry longer than most people here. That's not to say that anyone is owed anything in deference or respect, but "he's seen some shit." It's hypocritical to applaud what you believe to be pro-free-speech changes at Twitter while criticizing somebody for the manner in which somebody communicates their decision to deprioritize that platform.

If somebody has 50k followers, I imagine they would have reasons to communicate to that audience why they're not going to be as visible on their current platform and how to go about finding their content in the future.

chronotis commented on An AWS account just for getting into other AWS accounts src-bin.com/an-aws-accoun... · Posted by u/templaedhel

benatkin · 3 years ago

It's a bit different of a situation from the usual product recommendations because the domain of the article and link in the comment is the same.

chronotis · 3 years ago

Seems relevant to me. The article is from your organization, and that information is something I wouldn't have known if not for the prior commenter's comment.