We just need a distinct definition first. Moderated forums were kind of great in general. Early social media with chronological feeds of your friends were useful too. The nebulous algorithms pulling people into reinforcing rabbit holes of trash or simply optimizing for "engagement" (outrage) is the primary issue IMHO.

If we can only ban the bad stuff, great, but it's rarely that easy.

Exactly - ban addictive dark patterns in ALL software for ALL ages.

Fair enough.

Typically what I call Social Media is akin to things such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Anything that has a personalized "feed" generated by an algorithm.

Old moderates forums had no personalized anything.

Incidentally, as much as I despise Reddit, this would exclude Reddit from being banned. Last time I used it, it didn't really have a personalized feed (unless things changed ever since).

I could subscribe to subreddits and see the activity on what I subscribed, but anyone with the same subscription list (fully controlled by the user) would see the same activity, so it was not a personalized feed per se.

I'll add Italy, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, Greece.

I'm not following your logic.

What you responded to was a quote of a request that claimed that was what they were looking for. Whether it was a good-faith request or they used the data for only that, etc is the real question.

And if they did find something, it would obviously have been in court a long time ago.

Open and peaceful isn't the same as accepting an objectively incorrect viewpoint as equally valid. But I agree that what you describe as how some people read it is likely what is happening.

No one has to be accepting to have an environment where people feel safe to participate in a dialog. Civil disagreement is a good thing and can improve a discussion just as civil agreements.

If however a large portion of comments get flagged or downvoted to the point of being killed, or met with hate rather than polite and constructive discussion, the result becomes a hostile environment. Repeat that experience a few times and many people will stop engaging in the discussion and just use tools like downvote and flag without making a single comment. It becomes a battle ground where moderation tools are a weapon, rather than a forum where moderation is there to improve the quality of those wishing to participate.

There has been a few times where dang has removed the flags of an article but also done some more heavy handed moderation with a seemingly focus on civility and tone. Personally I would also like to see them remove downvoting for those articles, leaving only upvotes as a way for people to appreciate other comments. It is a nice way to give people room to have a serious and open discussion around political topics here on HN, but with some supervision.

If Republicans are as easy to manipulate as you state, the original statements is correct regardless, just through separate causation.

Its current state is worse than a year ago and even worse than 10 years ago, etc. As a fellow European, it's a fact that the US for many decades have attracted global top talent for both universities and industry. That definitely hit a hard reversal during the current term with the war on universities/education as well as immigration policies though.

I'm not sure you're disagreeing with GP.

While they will always have premiere models that only run on data center hardware at first, the good news about the tooling is that tool calls are computationally very minimal and no problem to sandbox/run locally, at least in theory, we would still need to do the plumbing for it.

So I agree that open source solutions will likely lag behind, but that's fine. Gemini 2.5 wasn't unusable when Gemini 3 didn't exist, etc.

NATO is/was a major contributor to the success of the dollar and US economic activity. It was never a cost center, it's a core enabler. Whoever thinks otherwise is setting the US up for an epic owngoal.

The most statistically likely output given your diligently described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor. If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can then shoot down or further explore could likely save time rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive binary tree exploring.

This from a huge LLM skeptic in general. It doesn't have to be right all the time if it in aggregate saves time doctors can spend diagnosing you.

Sure, but what confidence do you have that what the "dumb" LLM says is worth any salt ? It's no different than aggregating the results of a Reddit search, or perhaps even worse because LLMs lack the intent or common sense filter of a human. It could be combining two contradicting sources in a way that only makes sense statistically, or regurgitate joke answers without understanding context (the infamous "you should eat at least one small rock per day").

Realistically the more likely use will be medical transcription - making an official record of doctors' patient notes. The inevitable errors will reduce the quality of patient care, but they will let doctors see more patients in a day, which is what the healthcare companies care about.

Such "AI" has already existed for decades. Look up expert systems.

While I don't subscribe to universal "moral absolutes" either, I think this doesn't counter the argument. I don't think even the people you describe would claim their own acts as moral.

But if only one person feels that way, wouldn't it no longer be universal? I genuinely believe there has to be one person out there who would think it is moral.

(I'm just BSing on the internet... I took a few philosophy classes so if I'm off base or you don't want to engage in a pointless philosophical debate on HN I apologize in advance.)

There will always be individual differences, whether they be obstinate or altered brain chemistry, so I'd probably argue that as long as it's universal across cultures, any individual within one culture believing/claiming to believe different wouldn't change that. (But I'm just a hobby philosopher as well)

You just moved the goalpost.