You don't have to worry about projecting truth. The truth gets through. This is about projecting lies.
What if the truth is that something is a lie?
Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.
Readit Newsjwarden commented on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere reuters.com/world/us-plan... · Posted by u/c420
jwarden commented on OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission theconversation.com/opena... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting
You can see the official mission statements in the IRS 990 filings for each year on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
I turned them into a Gist with fake author dates so you can see the diffs here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc...
Wrote this up on my blog too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/13/openai-mission-stateme...
This writeup is very useful simonw.
But the title of this HN post is extremely misleading. What happened is that OpenAI rewrote the mission statement, reducing it from 63 words to 13. One of the 50 words they deleted happens to be "safely".
jwarden commented on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com/writing... · Posted by u/sidk24
For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something.
The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks.
You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this constant vigilance of waiting for background jobs to finish.
I dont feel more productive, I feel like a lazy babysitter that’s just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves
It’s like being a manager.
We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism. Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the resources and means of production, they take the reward.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of
production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
I don’t understand this argument. Just because functional extensionality is undecidable for arbitrary functions doesn’t mean that it is undecidable for every class of functions.
In the specific situation, let’s say that by an array we mean a finite, ordered list whose entries are indexed by the numbers 0, 1, …, n - 1 for some natural number n. Let’s also say that two arrays are equal if they have the same length and the same value at each position (in other words, they have “the same elements in the same order”).
If we now want to represent a function f as an array arr such that f(i) = arr[i] for every possible input i of f, then this will only be possible for some very specific functions: those whose domain are the set {0, 1, …, n - 1} for some natural number n. But for any two such functions f, g : {0, 1, …, n - 1} → t, their extensional equality is logically equivalent to the equality of the corresponding arrays: you really can check that f and g are extensionally equal by checking that they are represented by equal arrays.
Right, so for a subset of functions, a language could implement an extensional equality test operator `==` for two functions by calling the functions for every possible input. It would be prohibitively slow for some functions, but correct.
But for other functions, even that won't be possible.
The point is that functions and arrays may be practically different. You can always do an `==` test on the contents of two arrays, but you can't do the same for two arbitrary functions.
jwarden commented on I stopped following the news mertbulan.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/mertbio
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
Yes that’s a good point.
jwarden commented on I stopped following the news mertbulan.com/2026/01/28/... · Posted by u/mertbio
I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.
Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
I remember I got a little confused when I was first learning TLA+, because what you normally call "functions" are "operators" [1], and what you'd normally call "maps" or "lists" are called "functions".
It was odd to me, because it hadn't really occurred to me before that, given infinite memory (and within a mathematical framework), there's fundamentally not necessarily a difference between a "list" and a "function". With pure functions, you could in "theoretical-land", replace any "function" with an array, where the "argument" is replaced with an index.
And it makes sense to me now; TLA+ functions can be defined like maps or lists, but they can also be defined in terms of operations to create the values in the function. For example, you could define the first N factorials like
Fact == <<1, 2, 6, 24, 120>>
Fact[n \in Nat] ==
IF n = 0 THEN 1
ELSE n * Fact[n - 1]
[1] At least sort of; they superficially look like functions but they're closer to hygienic macros.
One case where a function is often not substitutable for an array is equality testing. In a language where any two arrays with the same elements in the same order are equal ([1,2] == [1,2]), the same cannot always be true of two equivalent functions. That is because extensionally equality is undecidable for arbitrary functions.
Arrays and functions may be mathematically equivalent but on a programming language level they are practically different.
If everywhere you go stinks, look under your own shoe.
If you move somewhere, and find the same circles why are you surprised that you’re still not happy?
> also, no women
Social groups aren’t just a place for unhappy people to meet a partner. I’d look inwards first.
Ouch! I don’t think that’s fair.
It sounds like his professional life or personal interests naturally being him in contact with a social circle that isn’t fulfilling socially. Doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with him.
I say, look outward! Intentionally get involved with other social circles.
Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.
This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.
But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.
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(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.
(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).
Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.