N_Lens
18 hours ago
The amount of damage inflicted by this admin will take over a generation to assess, if circumstances are stable enough to do so.
e2le
18 hours ago
Unfortunately Americans remain too comfortable to bother with any serious push back. The destruction of democratic traditions in America will continue and the president will keep using the office to legitimise his scams.
dgellow
18 hours ago
Even worse, way too many people are still actively supporting this. That can even been seen in the HN commenting crowd
classified
17 hours ago
> the HN commenting crowd
That set also contains elements who will swear that LLMs are conscious, so it does not mean as much as we might want it to.
Mielin
11 hours ago
I dont support Trump, but the conscious part is closer to me.
Why would you think LLMs are not conscious? Maybe a link to an article that is aligned with your views? That would help me understand your viewpoint.
Are dogs conscious? Maybe not, or a bit so. LLMs are more conscious than dogs.
LLM are deficient in certain memory aspect - particularly a gap between the generation cycle and the context window. So they seem forgetful. But people with memory loss or damaged hypocampus are still conscious. LLMs are dumb in certain aspects, do weird errors, but we still agree that dumb people with weird errors are conscious.
Theory wise thinking is likely substrate independent. Unless you think that biological tissue holds some life force that allows to transend comoutation limitations somehow.
Thats probably not what you wanted to read, Im aorry. Just really curious in how do you reconcile all of this.
dgellow
15 hours ago
Fair. Though that’s likely a reflection of the general population
jfengel
15 hours ago
Or at least, the tech-bro subset of the general population. It's possible that they're disproportionately vocal on HN, but I think overall it's a reasonably accurate presentation of that (narrow but powerful) demographic.
JKCalhoun
16 hours ago
"Unfortunately Americans remain too comfortable…"
I suspect this too will change.
We may get to a point where we'll refer to the Great Depression as Great Depression I.
We'll see change then. It happened last time.
lopsotronic
16 hours ago
If the rest of the world stayed still, that's a hard "maybe". Since the rest of the world isn't, what we're actually watching is the "Western Flavor" of the Soviet collapse. The fact that these destructive policies are being repeatedly selected - over and over and over again - means that the collapse is systemic; indeed, this could even be seen as a part of a larger "End of the West" which kicked off with World War 1 and then the utter self-immolation of the secular colonial period in WW2.
Future historians, with the benefit of hindsight, will probably date the beginnings of the collapse[1] to 9/11, with the actual ceasing of the functional economic system somewhere around the 2008 econopalypse. COVID was something like our Chernobyl. I think Trump is, quite honestly, our version of Yeltsin: the buffoon who ends everyone's faith in "the system".
Americans should mentally prepare for an equivalent collapse in, well, everything, from public health to aviation safety. Of course, by the numbers, "you're already soaking in it".
[1] The American side of it, anyway. The larger end of the West, World War 1 is a logical place to draw the line, but honestly it started when Europe ran out of profitable/exploitive space on the map.
nutjob2
18 hours ago
I think you'll eventually find that the United States has lost much of its credibility and goodwill forever.
amiga386
18 hours ago
Post WW2, the US set up some fantastic levers of power that let it establish and maintain its hegemony at arms length: the United Nations and the UNSC. NATO. The petrodollar. Pax Americana could've gone on forever.
However, those levers of power are subtle enough that once the US voted ignorant jackasses into power, they wrongly thought that's just how the world is, they can do what they like, including -- critically! -- dismantling the levers of power.
It's like that image of the idiot sawing off the branch he's sitting on. How else can you explain the US trying to fuck up the UN and NATO?
jermaustin1
18 hours ago
> Pax Americana could've gone on forever.
Hubris is the undoing of all empires. And hubris is basically entropy for humanity.
skinfaxi
18 hours ago
> How else can you explain the US trying to fuck up the UN and NATO?
At least cynically, there is nothing ignorant about it, it is intentional undermining probably for personal gain.
john_strinlai
18 hours ago
for awhile, sure. but we can look at japan, germany, etc. and recognize that it wont be "forever".
edit: woops, i guess everyone apparently still hates japan and germany and will hate them forever, too. does everyone still hate spain?
ceejayoz
18 hours ago
I'd really prefer not to learn the "don't put evil assholes in power" lesson the way Japan and Germany did.
They're basically brand-new countries.
john_strinlai
18 hours ago
i hope that it is obvious i am not saying that...
my point was that a couple generations is usually enough to heal most animosity, assuming the offending events cease
certainly in a thousand years, ~no one will remember.
ceejayoz
18 hours ago
A couple generations plus a flattening of most major cities, and the deaths/imprisonment of the leadership responsible.
bcrosby95
18 hours ago
The second half never happened to Japans leaders despite being responsible for many atrocities in the region at the time.
john_strinlai
18 hours ago
punishment of those responsible, sure.
i dont think flattening of most major cities is a requirement...
ceejayoz
18 hours ago
> i dont think flattening of most major cities is a requirement...
Both of your chosen examples went through exactly that as part of their reputational change.
john_strinlai
18 hours ago
i can go dig up other examples of countries that did bad things which are forgiven now, if you'd like.
ceejayoz
18 hours ago
Like the Confederacy?
Wait, bad example.
john_strinlai
18 hours ago
just wondering, do you want the US to be hated "forever"? or what is it that you are arguing for?
i thought it was a fairly obvious statement that over the thousands of years of history, many bad things have been done, but after several generations, we are able to heal.
if you think that in the year 2200, the world will still hate the US because of today, i disagree.
the year 2500? i doubt the people of that time, excepting a few ancient historians, will even know it happened.
"forever" is a long time.
ceejayoz
18 hours ago
> do you want the US to be hated "forever"?
No.
What I want and what I get don't always match up.
The US will suffer from this era on the international stage for generations, in a completely self-inflicted blow. Its continued existence as the present-day USA is by no means guaranteed, either.
Present-day Germany isn't Nazi Germany; I certainly hope people will hate Nazi Germany forever.
john_strinlai
15 hours ago
>The US will suffer from this era on the international stage for generations,
this is what i said earlier... generations? sure. forever? no.
so i guess we agree.
yifanl
16 hours ago
You don't get to decide how you're hated is the point.
krapp
17 hours ago
Japan and Germany made it illegal to put the evil assholes in power. The US will do no such thing, we're going to keep voting for the evil assholes and every attempt we make at progress will simply be undermined and undone.
I don't see a way out of this without a fundamental transformation of the US. At the very least that looks like a Constitutional convention, repeal of FPTP and the electoral college, maybe even changing to a parliamentary system without a powerful executive. At worst it looks like civil war. Nothing on a lesser scale than than that is going to suffice. Expecting to simply return to normal with a vote for blue and pretend this never happened isn't going to work.
clark_dent
18 hours ago
A good proportion of the older generations still disdain or mock Germany as nazis-in-waiting. There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down the line.
SideburnsOfDoom
18 hours ago
> There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down
Let's not forget that in the early part of the 20th century, Germany was the powerhouse of mathematics and sciences such as physics and chemistry, to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German (1) and/or study in Germany (2).
How long did it take Germany to recover that preeminent position?
Its a trick question: they did not recover it.
1) https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/162/how-did-german-b...
2) e.g.
> In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born; Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Early_ca...
ModernMech
18 hours ago
> to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German
That reverberates even toady -- I had a physics professor who who learned German precisely because he wanted to read some original texts written by Boltzmann. Apparently he thought he was missing some nuance in the translations.
fabian2k
18 hours ago
I certainly hope that the US finds a less destructive way of changing their reputation than Germany did.
LoganDark
18 hours ago
the hit to practically all its spy programs will set it back years
dgellow
18 hours ago
Easily a decade
jasonvorhe
16 hours ago
As if Trump was the first to print trillions and start a new war. Americans are so enchanted by their 2 party duopoly, it's not even funny. Bizarre how people view reality.