Comment by tombert

2 days ago

I never really understood people's need to post these cynical doomer posts. "Things can't be perfect so don't bother doing anything ever I am so smart".

Will a few dozen people canceling their accounts change anything? Probably not, but at least we know that we're not actively giving our money to Sam Altman.

There's not a lot in the world that any of us have control over. Most of us aren't billionaires who can buy a government. Really the only variable we have any amount of freedom with is how we spend our money.

As a former soldier and as someone who married into a family from the now russian occupied parts of Ukraine i feel that this is a great mindset, but also somewhat of a luxury believe. I agree that ideally we'd stand up to aggression and weapon production and that all other citizens around the world would do the same, and we'd live in peaceful equilibrium. But they don't- and so our best bet is to be so strong that no one wants to attack us. For that, we can't leave the cutting edge of military technology to others. This mindset used to be anathema to the tech community, but then briefly changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as people briefly understood that there are in fact aggressive actors in the world and war might come to us. But it seems we went back on that.

Do you understand that this news is not universally disliked and some people are happy to keep their subscriptions?

And this thread like most of reddit just becomes a hive-mind of me-too comments. Downvoting anything that goes against the common theme into [flagged].

  • I didn't downvote anyone here and I really only ever downvote outright spam or shitposting.

    > And this thread like most of reddit just becomes a hive-mind of me-too comments.

    Yeah it's a "hive mind", a bunch of very technical people who actually kind of understand computers and the implications of OpenAI's actions don't like it. It's so "hive mind" for people who actually understand why something is bad to think it's bad. You're right to call that out because people should instead just have different opinions so they can be different.