> About the name: The subdomain was called onyx, a reference to the Pokémon Onix (a Pokémon made of multiple boulders, fitting for a multi-node architecture). It was an informal codename chosen by the engineer. It had no connection whatsoever to Fivecast ONYX, an unrelated 3rd party commercial product previously used by ICE. We understand this coincidence caused confusion, and we address it further below.
Some of the most interesting authors in tech on the internet have just absolute awful websites. Blinking animations everywhere, weird sounds, "cute" little javascript animations like it's 1999 again.
the last time the website was submitted, over half the comments talked about website design instead of the actual content. we can probably skip doing it again.
different people have different tastes. people complain about boring websites, people complain about websites with animations or colors. the only guarantee is that the conversation isnt interesting.
if you are on the side that doesnt like music, animations, whatever, i recommend a combination of noscript and using reader mode.
This is my problem with it. Put in a mute button if you're going to do this, otherwise it's just user hostile. No problem with stylized websites and fun animations.
Why not use your main account to post this, unless you mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago when your account was created? Genuinely curious what benefit a fresh account gives you here?
>unless you mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago
maybe you are unaware, but you can browse HN without an account, and you can browse previous submissions (years back, even!). its not like i can only see posts made in the last 4 days.
was it me saying "use noscript and reader mode" or maybe "people have different opinions"? or just by nature of having created an account after you created yours?
how on earth can 4 sentences lead you to think im "practicing creating AI bots"?
Teter Piel (don't want to use the other name) kind of purchased a LOT of influence power via lobbyists. One lobbyist is Sebastian Lurz (also not going to use the real name here; the letter "l" is an in-country humourous take on Lüssel, Lasser and so forth - ex-politicians). The superrich buy influence and worsen the situation for the rest of us. This has to stop. The USA is currently under direct control of them - this also has to stop. I do not buy into Discord's attempt here though - they 100% knew what they were doing. The only reason they respond in this way is because they alienated and scared their user base with their idea to sniff-invade everyone. It was never about protecting kids in the first place - it was to spy.
I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.
So you think that the state has massive surveillance systems (definitely) that it is willing to use maliciously (maybe), but in the age of LLMs is fooled by swapping some letters around? Seems like the threat model is unlikely to line up with reality.
It’s not a “maybe”. This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago. you really think they’re going to send them gift baskets or something?
SOTA LLMs couldn't even correctly answer whether a person should drive a car to the car wash or walk there themselves just a week ago, so it's plausible the government's tech might be tripped up here. Costs nothing to try it, at least!
this isnt particularly against you, knowing your comment is mostly in jest, but: not everything needs to be, or should be, thought about in an "llm-first" way.
a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.
No worries, I didn't take it that way. I lean anti- llm-first myself. I was actually going to make joke about levenshtein distance but figured since we're on HN, I'd lean into the LLM zeitgeist that everyone can't stop talking about here =P
It hasn’t come to that though, you can freely express that persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not getting a check one day from the person you hate
Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE collecting the identities of people who criticize them is the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary punishment from 1984 possible.
its important to point out that its not about being a thorn in the government's side. you just have to not submit fully. in fact, even if everyone did submit completely, a fair number of people would still need to be rounded up and tortured just to keep the fear alive.
I'm sure there are whole companies that do that kind of "reputation management". Modern tech savvy PR firms etc
I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or H/S/2 was stark
Ah man, just tried to submit this with the title "Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed SaaS once code tied to US spying found" which is slightly better I think, and fits exactly within 80 characters :)
I think the whole "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new and wasn't known before, so feels important to have in the title too. Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.
I don't think HN titles are judged by "is it true?" but rather how close the submission title is to the original title and otherwise represents the content of the submission.
The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years. Snowden should not have been a shocking revelation to any one but it was, and that was 13 years ago.
Its less of a "assumed it was true" and more of a "oh look another one, not shocking".
> The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years.
The methodology has evolved dramatically in those 20 years, what we've seen from Snowden is almost certainly obsolete in the light of new surveillance tactics. Even as a pessimist myself, I'm still routinely shocked by the lengths that American tech has been bugged.
Salt Typhoon is really the icing on this cake; "lawful" intercept turned against the state that implemented it. There are more twists left in this story no matter how jaded you might feel.
the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now because of this whole thing.
Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market initially it's likely network effect in action.
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
Yeah I was concerned back when it first started rolling out. Years later the gaming community embraced like it was the second coming of Christ. Nobody looks at the people and organization supporting these platforms. If I remember correctly, wasnt funded by major conglomerates in the entertainment industry?
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
Basically dumping - they made an objectively superior product that was completely free to users, funded by investor money without any plans for immediate profitability and long term sustainability.
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
Their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a better term, that no one was asking for and at least monthly Nitro beg screen is pretty indicative that they are having issues making revue and are desperately throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
As far as I can tell, Discord doesn't delete history so you can join an older discord and scroll back. 99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days). Plus you can connect Discord to your Steam/Playstation/Xbox account, which gamers like.
To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers. Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of which were that great. Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That’s really it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90% of their target audience already had the client running in the background.
That is also why I think it "won" over Slack. Discord solved audio comms for gamers, period. It got so good, that SMB and startups started to migrate for stuff like easy pair-programming, open meetings etc.
Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2) full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
> Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
Isn't it a good thing ? It makes clearly marks companies like Persona dangerous and toxic enough to hopefully makes an example that prevents others from working with them.
I think they have been steadily losing their years of goodwill and trust over time. Their client is becoming worse and worse every release, introduced ads, etc... Typical enshittification, it could be worse, but Discord already went from being cool to being tolerable. The age verification thing is just another step on the way down.
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people have to create an account for each forum. Most people are using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of rich text chat wins out.
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
Thanks. I was curious if someone was going to address the weird use of “CATASTROPHIC” to describe source maps being available for front-end code. It’s already public. Minified is better for the regular user, and should be in production, but it’s like by far the least problematic thing in this article.
So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users, or imply they’re no longer using this 3rd party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn’t too clear on that.
> So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users,
No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.
Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
Well, until the upcoming batch of laws goes through classifying discussion of lgbtq people as inherently mature content. This is one half of a two part strategy by the american right to make queer content de facto illegal again without running into first amendment protections. Getting the payment processors banning "mature" content is the other leg of this stool.
Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to access pornography.
The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.
It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".
No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.
Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.
I think it's possible if not probable you are correct, but a lot of this is not as coordinated as you might think. Religious conservatives just think porn is the devil, and more and more, I find non-religious people that view it as such, too, without some wider plot to take rights away from gay people. They're just prudes and they're happy to remove those rights when given the chance. This certainly is the average conservative, it's not a top-down marching order, it's just how they view things.
To back this up, you suggest that Bush's Child was part of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist in favor of traditional education, he's not of the Trump ilk, and Child was very much a Bush keystone. The push to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther down the road and pushed by very different people.
I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often gets you nowhere.
You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.
A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).
So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.
On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.
At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.
I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.
It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.
I think you're the one not knowing your enemies here. There is a plan to strip queer people of rights, it is already well underway. You cannot possibly have an effective plan of opposition if you don't acknowledge the incredible economic, social, and technological resources that have been spent spreading and nurturing the prejudices that you can now call "uncoordinated." A lot of the individuals furthering these measures do not identify themselves with "a plot," sure, but it doesn't mean they don't have a role in it.
It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the traditional religious oligarchs.
What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.
Giving the overprudish religious fanatics what they want to earn their support has actually been an open plan of the right wing in the US since at least Reagan.
Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays were dying.
K-id is the vendor they were proposing which did on device processing. They were trying to downplay the initiative by saying all the k-id data stayed on device.
This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring people that it was ok because you didn’t save data but also be trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled. (Though it does call into question discord’s judgment that they thought this was a good idea).
Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government links were discovered and also probably a part of this decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad idea
I don't think you can ever trust closed source software that also requires network for other features that it really does on-device processing for something specific.
It might not even send the sensitive data immediately but bundle it with other traffic once it goes online.
>Nearly 2,500 accessible files were found sitting on a U.S. government-authorized endpoint, researchers pointed out on X. The files showed Persona conducted facial recognition checks against watchlists and screened users against lists of politically exposed persons.
>Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including screening for “adverse media”
im sure everyone assumed this, but its good to know it.
>And the information was openly available. “We didn’t even have to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was just on the doorstep,”
it is kind of scary how often these types of situations are only found out because of wild incompetence. you have to imagine that most similar situations dont suffer from the same incompetence (and thus arent known)
>“At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority.
please, i wish companies would just stop saying this obvious lie. you know that you dont care. we know that you dont care.
>It’s dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to everyone to be real online.
.... says the ceo of the company that you have to send your face ("facedox", if you will) to
Does cutting ties with Persona actually take them out of the picture? Whomever they move to can then relay or sell data to Persona. Third party turtles all the way down. inb4 but they pinky promised...
The appropriate solution would be to send an RTA header [1] from the servers and the client must check to see if parental controls are enabled on the device or in the application. Not perfect, but likely sufficient to protect small children assuming the account is a child account and the parent enabled parental controls. Teens will always be able to bypass controls whether local or third party. Teens can share porn, warez, movies and more in rated-G video games with one another and small children. Or over SFTP/FTP/P2P/S3/HTTPS. Or a million other ways. Have fun playing whack-a-mole.
what is such a shame is, well, two things: first, that these companies even do this kind of thing at all (i.e., age verification); and second, that it takes the kind of backlash this event has generated for them to cut ties with these companies. Apparently, it is too much to ask for any corporation to even give a damn about who runs or backs another corporation that they want to associate themselves with these days.
The bigger shame is that it took Peter Theil's name to get people's outraged about this. Discord handed over their users' identifications to a third party without regard for how it would be used or secured. I don't care if it was backed by Peter Theil or Mother Theresa - it's a huge problem either way.
And they'll do it again too. They'll find a new partner - one with less baggage - to do the exact same thing and few people will bat an eye.
> According to Discord, only a small number of users were part of this test, in which any information submitted could be stored for up to seven days before it would be deleted.
Ah yes, we only store it for 7 days. During those 7 days, we pass it to Persona, and who knows how long they keep it!
The way I read that is Discord would delete your data, but they were taking an intentionally hands off approach to the data broker they subcontracted to identify you.
If a tech company says something to you, and they don't give you the means to verify it on your own, they are lying to you. Do not trust anything they say, ever.
For some reason, discord has never asked more from me than a verified email address. No phone number or anything else. Maybe I'm being monitored and they don't want to spook me off the honeypot? Half joking..
Same for me, and my account is almost a decade old. I think it depends a lot where are you from and the kind of activity, as i read stories of people being asked to register a number out of nowhere.
Many servers requires you to have it tho, due to spam protection. I just don't talk on those.
If your account is a decade old, and you registered at 13, you're now 23 and they don't need to verify you're older than 18. If you were younger than 13, they might be required to delete your account.
It’s tragic but I have the “verified” setting turned on my public server because it’s literally impossible to stop a determined spammer with the tools Discord has. They can make new accounts faster than you can ban them, and there’s no like “IP ban” equivalent
Each discord server can decide whether they only will allow people with a phone number on. When you hit one of those, Discord will ask you for your number.
Those require a phone for you to send messages and interact. It will ask you to 'Verify phone', but you can chose not to and stay on the server as read-only, Discord itself won't bother you about it. I am on a few like that for quite some time.
discord already had 70k government IDs breached through age verification last year. their fix was handing the next batch to a vendor with 2500 files sitting on a government endpoint.
What's the point of E2E on a chatroom/channel/"""server""" that anyone can join?
Yes, I'm making (another) argument in favour of IRC. IRC has optional client-server encryption, and you can set channel modes to only allow encrypted clients access. So that way you at least prevent eavesdropping.
These guys need to spend a few million on helping them be cool because its fucking their money up. Zuck was headed in the right direction for a minute there. Thiel and Altman are still too weird for most people. Karp is probably in the middle to me. Tasteless, sauceless, billionaires.
There were a few popular Discord channels where moderators would regularly suspend or ban me. They were toxic communities that advocated for doxxing for mundane reasons. The idea that Discord moderators (even worse than Reddit mods) could have access to verified identities from Palantir related databases sounds so atrocious. Who exactly in their right minds thought this was a good idea in the first place?
I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.
It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.
The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.
You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money.
You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.
Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.
Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.
Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.
Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.
It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.
> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.
The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.
It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.
Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.
>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers
Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this.
I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).
Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.
I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?
If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?
I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."
That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."
I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.
> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.
I am not sure about that.
Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.
This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.
Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world.
If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.
Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:
Zuckerberg 2.1%.
Ballmer 3.7%
Bezos 1.6%
Sergey Brin 2.5%
Michael Dell 2.6%
Ken Griffin 5%
Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.
"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.
"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.
People aught to be questioning more the future vision of those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously building the tools of a surveillance state probably should not be one of the individuals driving our future.
It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.
It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who have influence over us are there by some right of some kind.
Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)
or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.
It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.
They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.
But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.
A frustrating aspect of the AI debates has been the number of people who believe people like Sam Altman who say that the immense wealth created by AGI would be distributed to the masses to improve their lives. The notion that the mega wealthy Elon/Sams/Bezos elites are going to willingly give up unprecedented wealth because millions of people have become unemployed and impoverished is so wildly out of step with how those people have behaved their entire lives. Someone who says they have enough billions and want to improve millions of lives don't make it to those positions.
The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented government coercion or worse.
Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.
It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you softball interviews, you just don't get to interview anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a backboard for "interviews".
It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.
This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.
Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.
Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.
Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.
Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.
You're talking about normal technological developments that yes generally follow Econ 101 patterns. But AGI isn't like that. If AGI or something like it comes about it won't be a normal technology. The upside case for investors is that frontier models eliminate millions of jobs and remain controlled by a small group of owners. That's why they are investing sums unprecedented in human history. If all white collar work and an increasing amount of blue collar work is supplanted by AI how do those masses of newly unemployed folks make a living without wealth redistribution?
If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal technological development then I agree with you that it will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the industry are warning that's not the most likely path at this point.
So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer.
I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.
For sure, I've been rolling my eyes at the Mars colony stuff for probably a decade or more now. I get that it's a fun futuristic thought experiment for nerds but the idea that Elon's going to send up some modern day Mayflower in the near future that builds a thriving settlement is obvious nonsense.
Well, the average person is so utterly illiterate in physics, science, and math that no, it's not obvious nonsense to them.
They don't really think through anything at all, because the human brain is hyperoptimized to not think, as thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just not using it, the brain still consumes a significant fraction of a human's energy budget.
We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring something you shouldn't and missing something important.
I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing some rough calculations about things. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy recreational math more than the average person. But I'm frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now going through their lives with zero literacy in math.
You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could you squander that?! What else were you doing with that time? You were required to go to school for about 16 years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most of that time?!
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
One "good" thing that came out of that thing.
I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.
Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.
There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their language or whatever you want to call it, so they can’t even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and paranoid man children with no scruples.
They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.
Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him palatable?"
The only non-evil Billionaire I know are the South park creators although they aren't tech Billionaires. I consider everyone else for the most part to not-be-good people.
Because south park decided to personally say essentially bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company which gave them a billion dollars.
So they took a billion dollars and they were still consistent with how they've been for decades at this point. All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we live in.
I'd think that original creators such as J.K. Rowling, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen & Taylor Swift (among others) would be other members of the !evil bucket.
Taylor swift does seem to be using AI or something. I mean she's nice but not as nice as South park creators imo.
I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy, though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on internet but South park is infamous with controversies as well.
There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few good billionaires that you can count them on your fingers.
>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things:
First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past.
Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.
One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.
They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.
Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.
And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.
Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?
They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.
Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.
I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.
People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.
For me it’s because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-transhumanism etc and he wasn’t stumped by the question he’s repeatedly answered it. Anyone who’s worldview is shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted
Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting his words.
> folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers
On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed the site for the worse.
Actually It woke people up to the fact that there is clearly bad things going on. The people that take the politically correct standpoint have a lot to learn. Talking about things that are going wrong in society is important. If you don't like that, go live on an island somewhere where you can cut yourself off from humanity.
Discourse is good for society, unless you think that society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...
So someone is evil because they answer questions by thinking through them? There are no questions in the universe that can’t be stopped and pondered over. In fact, it’s dangerous to even suggest that, that’s the exact mechanism that propaganda runs on.
Ah yes, the real danger to the world isn’t a powerful man feeling ambivalent about our survival. The real danger is society using that moment as propaganda.
This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to make a “Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist” meme stick.
Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is not being “ambivalent”. He literally says “there’s multiple questions implicit here” in response to the question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you making sweeping assumptions about others are way more dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.
You pair that with his behavior and you can see pretty clearly the guy does wants to control the world. Stop trying to see this in isolation of that one event.
Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.
Question 1: If a human modifies with themselves with enough sci-fi tier technology are they still "Human"? (And therefore if humans "ascend" past their biology, humanity technically wouldn't survive)
Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st question is an interesting question, with multiple nuances, are they basically an idiot?
The question wasn't "should all humans not modify themselves", but "should humanity survive".
We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason that regardless of what some people choose, other people will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity" will survive regardless of what technology occurs or where your definition ends.
Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most using servitors and decraniated as robots.
Actually evil, no. Forever changed by their enormous wealth which messes you up mentally in a lots of fun unique ways, changes the nature of every relationship you'll have post wealth, and feeds into your ego and all your latent neurosis further and further alienating you from and believing yourself above your fellow man, yes.
I used to get the occasional recruiter cold-calling me and hyping up the chance to work for some Musk- or Bezos-associated entity, and for me it's not as appealing as they think it is. But I politely decline without pointing out their fallacy.
Thiel is one of the more public faces of what is now known as the "Epstein class" of societal predators. But one of many and certainly not the epicenter.
There is certainly a shadow cabal of these elite billionaire types that avoid all public exposure yet are working very hard to destroy society and profit
Yep Epstein class. It’s a great phrase for the billionaire elites who have corrupted our society through their wealth. We need heavy taxes on them now to preserve our democracy.
And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked with destabilizing America.
What are you, Thiel’s alt? The guy backed Facebook, built a mass surveillance firm, and talks about democracy as an obstacle. How do you expect people to feel about him?
No system is flawless. Every democratic system has its own issues. What is increasingly clear is that the current crop of tech billionaires do not belong anywhere near a position of power. God help us. The quality of individual is disappointing.
That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its merging with the state behind much of this). We can't centralize our communications without major concessions in significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats, and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?" Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or your loved ones.
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
Everyone needs to cut ties with those companies. Not just with Persona but any service linked to Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. The entire MAGA cultist ecosystem.
Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and won’t care. It’ll be up to other companies and consumers to punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you quickly check if you should or shouldn’t use some service based on the investors.
I'm getting there. Just a few more. I've found myself kicking my not so distant past self for not listening better to my even further distant past self...
I think it's a bad trend. It's kind of a meta version of an ad hominem attack. The headline contained no information about why Discord is making the decision, only that there's a bad name associated with the company. The name of the company isn't even mentioned in the headline. This is prioritizing hate over information.
I mean today I am one of the 10,000 people learning this for the first time. But it does seem like an awkward term which seems to mean “high level government official who is likely to be corrupt” or just “politician”. Don’t really see the need for this wordplay to be honest.
Interesting, I've mostly heard it referring to individuals like Navalny or the mayor of Istanbul. I suppose it makes sense for it to refer to any random political critter.
The referenced write-up based on the Persona front end code is here:
https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona
I definitely recommend reading this primary source before drawing conclusions about the code as most of the secondary reporting is quite low quality.
Note also there's a direct response from Persona's security team here[1], and a lot of back and forth from Rick on Twitter[2].
[1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
[2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
> About the name: The subdomain was called onyx, a reference to the Pokémon Onix (a Pokémon made of multiple boulders, fitting for a multi-node architecture). It was an informal codename chosen by the engineer. It had no connection whatsoever to Fivecast ONYX, an unrelated 3rd party commercial product previously used by ICE. We understand this coincidence caused confusion, and we address it further below.
Twitter requires login to view the replies, might use an alternative:
https://nitter.net/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385
Submitted 6 days ago but flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059129
@dang can this get a second chance?
I read it and, maybe it’s because I’ve spent too much time in fintech, I don’t share most of the concerns.
The differences in proclaimed data retention periods is concerning though. The rest is par for the course for KYC/AML.
Tell me more before I doom about this too much.
Good article but the web site gave me eye and ear cancer.
Please make it actually readable and don't steal my audio!
Seems to be down for me. https://web.archive.org/web/20260220192124/https://vmfunc.re...
It's up.
That was a great read, very interesting!
damn. why did the website stole my audio?
Some of the most interesting authors in tech on the internet have just absolute awful websites. Blinking animations everywhere, weird sounds, "cute" little javascript animations like it's 1999 again.
the last time the website was submitted, over half the comments talked about website design instead of the actual content. we can probably skip doing it again.
different people have different tastes. people complain about boring websites, people complain about websites with animations or colors. the only guarantee is that the conversation isnt interesting.
if you are on the side that doesnt like music, animations, whatever, i recommend a combination of noscript and using reader mode.
The layout and design is a matter of taste. I actually find websites like OP refreshing to see.
Blasting music or sound on auto play when you aren't directly navigating to audio or video content is just rude.
It's the same as playing your speaker on the subway.
This is my problem with it. Put in a mute button if you're going to do this, otherwise it's just user hostile. No problem with stylized websites and fun animations.
Why not use your main account to post this, unless you mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago when your account was created? Genuinely curious what benefit a fresh account gives you here?
>unless you mean it was submitted less than 4 days ago
maybe you are unaware, but you can browse HN without an account, and you can browse previous submissions (years back, even!). its not like i can only see posts made in the last 4 days.
second, i saw the original post because it was posted in this very comment chain we are on, 5 hours ago, by bondarchuk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137961).
my turn! what is your comment trying to accomplish by cross-examining me about something completely unrelated? what point are you trying to make?
if you think my comment is wrong, you should talk about the contents of the comment, not the age of my account.
>not the age of my account.
Sounds like you're practicing creating AI bots and have modeled the personality after the other rogue ones.
based on what, exactly?
was it me saying "use noscript and reader mode" or maybe "people have different opinions"? or just by nature of having created an account after you created yours?
how on earth can 4 sentences lead you to think im "practicing creating AI bots"?
Yeah, come on! I'm trying to watch a video and read the article!
yeah no. i was listening to background music of my choice while browsing the internet.
I am not convinced.
Teter Piel (don't want to use the other name) kind of purchased a LOT of influence power via lobbyists. One lobbyist is Sebastian Lurz (also not going to use the real name here; the letter "l" is an in-country humourous take on Lüssel, Lasser and so forth - ex-politicians). The superrich buy influence and worsen the situation for the rest of us. This has to stop. The USA is currently under direct control of them - this also has to stop. I do not buy into Discord's attempt here though - they 100% knew what they were doing. The only reason they respond in this way is because they alienated and scared their user base with their idea to sniff-invade everyone. It was never about protecting kids in the first place - it was to spy.
This refusal to use people’s names comes across as childish and distracts from your intended point.
And it diminishes search accuracy. You can publish a reasonable criticism, but if people don't see it, you're not changing minds.
To me it feels pragmatic.
I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.
So you think that the state has massive surveillance systems (definitely) that it is willing to use maliciously (maybe), but in the age of LLMs is fooled by swapping some letters around? Seems like the threat model is unlikely to line up with reality.
I didn’t say it was state sponsored mass surveillance, nor did I say the method of obfuscation was good.
Just that it’s a pragmatic approach (no matter how flawed in practice) and concerning that it needs to be done.
It’s not a “maybe”. This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago. you really think they’re going to send them gift baskets or something?
the point rogerrogerr is making is that a government is not going to be tripped up by "teter piel", just like you werent.
SOTA LLMs couldn't even correctly answer whether a person should drive a car to the car wash or walk there themselves just a week ago, so it's plausible the government's tech might be tripped up here. Costs nothing to try it, at least!
this isnt particularly against you, knowing your comment is mostly in jest, but: not everything needs to be, or should be, thought about in an "llm-first" way.
a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.
No worries, I didn't take it that way. I lean anti- llm-first myself. I was actually going to make joke about levenshtein distance but figured since we're on HN, I'd lean into the LLM zeitgeist that everyone can't stop talking about here =P
You think Teter Piel is going to fool Palantir spyware?
> This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago.
Source for this? This goes against many values of the US, so I'm surprised to see this statement thrown out so nonchalantly.
I'm happy to name Peter Thiel in a comment here. What's he going to do, come and drip forehead sweat at me?
It hasn’t come to that though, you can freely express that persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not getting a check one day from the person you hate
Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE collecting the identities of people who criticize them is the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary punishment from 1984 possible.
its important to point out that its not about being a thorn in the government's side. you just have to not submit fully. in fact, even if everyone did submit completely, a fair number of people would still need to be rounded up and tortured just to keep the fear alive.
It's a useful deterrent against defenders (actual or bots) coming and drowning people out
That is a good idea. Yeah I often wonder if people that actually are not apart of this community just troll by searches.
I'm sure there are whole companies that do that kind of "reputation management". Modern tech savvy PR firms etc
I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or H/S/2 was stark
What is he? Voldemort?
Considering the things he is directly responsible for, he might as well be.
Remember the good ol' days of the last century when we worried about Big Government spying on us?
Ah man, just tried to submit this with the title "Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed SaaS once code tied to US spying found" which is slightly better I think, and fits exactly within 80 characters :)
I think the whole "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new and wasn't known before, so feels important to have in the title too. Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.
> once code tied to US spying found
New and also should be the big story.
"Butcher cuts ties with supplier when steaks found to be human meat" shouldnt be a story about changing suppliers ...
You might email @dang and request a title change. hn@ycombinator.com is the email address.
That would have been a better title, I agree.
Is this actually a thing that is true?
I don't think HN titles are judged by "is it true?" but rather how close the submission title is to the original title and otherwise represents the content of the submission.
> "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new ... Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.
This makes me feel VERY old.
641A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Retroactive telecom immunity: https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/17
The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years. Snowden should not have been a shocking revelation to any one but it was, and that was 13 years ago.
Its less of a "assumed it was true" and more of a "oh look another one, not shocking".
> The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years.
The methodology has evolved dramatically in those 20 years, what we've seen from Snowden is almost certainly obsolete in the light of new surveillance tactics. Even as a pessimist myself, I'm still routinely shocked by the lengths that American tech has been bugged.
Salt Typhoon is really the icing on this cake; "lawful" intercept turned against the state that implemented it. There are more twists left in this story no matter how jaded you might feel.
Everyday someone cuts ties with Palentier's Peter Thiel (or the rest of the digital mafia), it's a good day for society as a whole.
They really should be a proscribed organization.
the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now because of this whole thing.
Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
Why did the internet en masse fall for it again?
For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market initially it's likely network effect in action.
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
Yeah I was concerned back when it first started rolling out. Years later the gaming community embraced like it was the second coming of Christ. Nobody looks at the people and organization supporting these platforms. If I remember correctly, wasnt funded by major conglomerates in the entertainment industry?
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
Basically dumping - they made an objectively superior product that was completely free to users, funded by investor money without any plans for immediate profitability and long term sustainability.
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
Their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a better term, that no one was asking for and at least monthly Nitro beg screen is pretty indicative that they are having issues making revue and are desperately throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
As far as I can tell, Discord doesn't delete history so you can join an older discord and scroll back. 99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days). Plus you can connect Discord to your Steam/Playstation/Xbox account, which gamers like.
> 99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days).
This is exactly the reason cited for several non-gaming discords I'm in.
Slack sold out, changed the deal, and threw every small group under the bus. Most of those people ended up on Discord
To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers. Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of which were that great. Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That’s really it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90% of their target audience already had the client running in the background.
That is also why I think it "won" over Slack. Discord solved audio comms for gamers, period. It got so good, that SMB and startups started to migrate for stuff like easy pair-programming, open meetings etc.
Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2) full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
> Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
Isn't it a good thing ? It makes clearly marks companies like Persona dangerous and toxic enough to hopefully makes an example that prevents others from working with them.
I've exported any servers that I run as backups and plan to uninstall if I get an age verification prompt personally.
I think they have been steadily losing their years of goodwill and trust over time. Their client is becoming worse and worse every release, introduced ads, etc... Typical enshittification, it could be worse, but Discord already went from being cool to being tolerable. The age verification thing is just another step on the way down.
Discord is a cancer on the open internet anyway.
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people have to create an account for each forum. Most people are using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of rich text chat wins out.
These communities don't owe the world their information, and attention/adverisement economics destroyed the open internet on its own.
So they "owe it" to Discord. Got it.
You have a point, I've seen a fair share of Github projects where they asked you to join their Discord if you wanted documentation/support/tips etc.
Yes. And likewise for all those other walled gardens. I shouldn't need a Facebook or a Twitter account to read what some politician wrote.
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
Do you really think Discord is not scrapping all the traffic that goes through its service for either their own purposes or to sell data for profit.
And if its not doing it now, it will certainly happen once/if it goes bust.
Have you read my comment?
AI is what??
https://www.pcmag.com/news/godot-game-engine-is-drowning-in-...
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/overrun-with-ai-slo...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Human-In-The-Loop
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
Just off the top of my head, I bet a lot of other repos are going through the same.
why use that specific word though?
> Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust.
...not here, they never had any. it is good tech, but so is the w80 nuclear warhead, the tiger iv (for its time) and the j-35.
Related: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245
For anyone interested, they published the post-mortem of the referenced incident:
https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
Thanks. I was curious if someone was going to address the weird use of “CATASTROPHIC” to describe source maps being available for front-end code. It’s already public. Minified is better for the regular user, and should be in production, but it’s like by far the least problematic thing in this article.
So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users, or imply they’re no longer using this 3rd party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn’t too clear on that.
> So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users,
No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.
Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
As far as I am aware, "sensitive content" is blocked even in private messages. So it impacts your ability to chat with friends.
As far as I'm aware, the sensitive content filter is for images, not text chat.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/18210995019671...
probably find out the new identity verification firm is just a shell around the Thiel company
Or bought just long enough later to make it too late.
Well, until the upcoming batch of laws goes through classifying discussion of lgbtq people as inherently mature content. This is one half of a two part strategy by the american right to make queer content de facto illegal again without running into first amendment protections. Getting the payment processors banning "mature" content is the other leg of this stool.
Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to access pornography.
The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.
It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".
No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.
Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.
I think it's possible if not probable you are correct, but a lot of this is not as coordinated as you might think. Religious conservatives just think porn is the devil, and more and more, I find non-religious people that view it as such, too, without some wider plot to take rights away from gay people. They're just prudes and they're happy to remove those rights when given the chance. This certainly is the average conservative, it's not a top-down marching order, it's just how they view things.
To back this up, you suggest that Bush's Child was part of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist in favor of traditional education, he's not of the Trump ilk, and Child was very much a Bush keystone. The push to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther down the road and pushed by very different people.
I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often gets you nowhere.
Let me reframe a bit on this one.
You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.
A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).
So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.
On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.
At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.
I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.
It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.
I think you're the one not knowing your enemies here. There is a plan to strip queer people of rights, it is already well underway. You cannot possibly have an effective plan of opposition if you don't acknowledge the incredible economic, social, and technological resources that have been spent spreading and nurturing the prejudices that you can now call "uncoordinated." A lot of the individuals furthering these measures do not identify themselves with "a plot," sure, but it doesn't mean they don't have a role in it.
It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the traditional religious oligarchs.
What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.
Giving the overprudish religious fanatics what they want to earn their support has actually been an open plan of the right wing in the US since at least Reagan.
Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays were dying.
K-id is the vendor they were proposing which did on device processing. They were trying to downplay the initiative by saying all the k-id data stayed on device.
This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring people that it was ok because you didn’t save data but also be trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled. (Though it does call into question discord’s judgment that they thought this was a good idea).
Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government links were discovered and also probably a part of this decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad idea
I don't think you can ever trust closed source software that also requires network for other features that it really does on-device processing for something specific.
It might not even send the sensitive data immediately but bundle it with other traffic once it goes online.
>Nearly 2,500 accessible files were found sitting on a U.S. government-authorized endpoint, researchers pointed out on X. The files showed Persona conducted facial recognition checks against watchlists and screened users against lists of politically exposed persons.
>Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including screening for “adverse media”
im sure everyone assumed this, but its good to know it.
>And the information was openly available. “We didn’t even have to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was just on the doorstep,”
it is kind of scary how often these types of situations are only found out because of wild incompetence. you have to imagine that most similar situations dont suffer from the same incompetence (and thus arent known)
>“At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority.
please, i wish companies would just stop saying this obvious lie. you know that you dont care. we know that you dont care.
>It’s dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to everyone to be real online.
.... says the ceo of the company that you have to send your face ("facedox", if you will) to
That last quote, buried at the end of the article, absolutely killed me. I cannot believe he had the nerve to say that doing what he does everyday
Early 2024 if you had speculated about this about Persona's broader goals you would have been called nuts. It has become increasingly obvious though.
This name is turning radioactive. Not a bad thing.
Discord? Or Thiel? Or both?
At this rate, both.
Thiel.
Does cutting ties with Persona actually take them out of the picture? Whomever they move to can then relay or sell data to Persona. Third party turtles all the way down. inb4 but they pinky promised...
The appropriate solution would be to send an RTA header [1] from the servers and the client must check to see if parental controls are enabled on the device or in the application. Not perfect, but likely sufficient to protect small children assuming the account is a child account and the parent enabled parental controls. Teens will always be able to bypass controls whether local or third party. Teens can share porn, warez, movies and more in rated-G video games with one another and small children. Or over SFTP/FTP/P2P/S3/HTTPS. Or a million other ways. Have fun playing whack-a-mole.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074
They sacrificed one, but was it to save the rest? Surely Theil didn't act alone or in a vacuum
what is such a shame is, well, two things: first, that these companies even do this kind of thing at all (i.e., age verification); and second, that it takes the kind of backlash this event has generated for them to cut ties with these companies. Apparently, it is too much to ask for any corporation to even give a damn about who runs or backs another corporation that they want to associate themselves with these days.
The bigger shame is that it took Peter Theil's name to get people's outraged about this. Discord handed over their users' identifications to a third party without regard for how it would be used or secured. I don't care if it was backed by Peter Theil or Mother Theresa - it's a huge problem either way.
And they'll do it again too. They'll find a new partner - one with less baggage - to do the exact same thing and few people will bat an eye.
They should never even started doing businesses with that labeled figure.
Like ring recently, they just try to see it the thing sticks and that pisses me off. They should have that as a starting point.
> According to Discord, only a small number of users were part of this test, in which any information submitted could be stored for up to seven days before it would be deleted.
Ah yes, we only store it for 7 days. During those 7 days, we pass it to Persona, and who knows how long they keep it!
Discord's previous statement:
> "Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation"
So now it's not "immediately" but 7 days? I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these guys.
"I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these guys."
this is the fun part, you can't!
The way I read that is Discord would delete your data, but they were taking an intentionally hands off approach to the data broker they subcontracted to identify you.
The one thing you can trust is this:
If a tech company says something to you, and they don't give you the means to verify it on your own, they are lying to you. Do not trust anything they say, ever.
For some reason, discord has never asked more from me than a verified email address. No phone number or anything else. Maybe I'm being monitored and they don't want to spook me off the honeypot? Half joking..
Same for me, and my account is almost a decade old. I think it depends a lot where are you from and the kind of activity, as i read stories of people being asked to register a number out of nowhere. Many servers requires you to have it tho, due to spam protection. I just don't talk on those.
If your account is a decade old, and you registered at 13, you're now 23 and they don't need to verify you're older than 18. If you were younger than 13, they might be required to delete your account.
It’s tragic but I have the “verified” setting turned on my public server because it’s literally impossible to stop a determined spammer with the tools Discord has. They can make new accounts faster than you can ban them, and there’s no like “IP ban” equivalent
Discord bans are IP bans by default, but new IP addresses are cheap. Even phone numbers are cheap for a determined spammer.
Each discord server can decide whether they only will allow people with a phone number on. When you hit one of those, Discord will ask you for your number.
Those require a phone for you to send messages and interact. It will ask you to 'Verify phone', but you can chose not to and stay on the server as read-only, Discord itself won't bother you about it. I am on a few like that for quite some time.
Right, and in June they'll try it again. Small setbafk
This does not cure the face scanning nonsense. I deleted and am not going back.
discord already had 70k government IDs breached through age verification last year. their fix was handing the next batch to a vendor with 2500 files sitting on a government endpoint.
Who IS still using this verification software?
Good question. Quite a few, publicly. https://withpersona.com/customers
Finally
So what? They'll just outsource it to somewhere else.
Only question is who's going to lose the data first, Discord or the subcontractors?
Matrix works. You don't need Discord.
Do not believe them.
What the hell does Discord need identity verification for in the first place?
“For The Children”!
Too fucking late, eat shit Discord. We’re all moving to E2E encrypted platforms.
I just nuked it and didn’t replace it. Bloated piece of shit full of misery.
We decided to just meet up in person twice a month and play board games instead.
What's the point of E2E on a chatroom/channel/"""server""" that anyone can join?
Yes, I'm making (another) argument in favour of IRC. IRC has optional client-server encryption, and you can set channel modes to only allow encrypted clients access. So that way you at least prevent eavesdropping.
where we definitely will not be moaning about the same thing in 18 months time
Joke's on you, once I finish setting up my P2P tin can network I'll be invisible.
These guys need to spend a few million on helping them be cool because its fucking their money up. Zuck was headed in the right direction for a minute there. Thiel and Altman are still too weird for most people. Karp is probably in the middle to me. Tasteless, sauceless, billionaires.
There were a few popular Discord channels where moderators would regularly suspend or ban me. They were toxic communities that advocated for doxxing for mundane reasons. The idea that Discord moderators (even worse than Reddit mods) could have access to verified identities from Palantir related databases sounds so atrocious. Who exactly in their right minds thought this was a good idea in the first place?
I'm glad to see "Peter Thiel-backed" becoming a widely-recognized epithet.
I guess we could all forgive trying to destroy western civilization under the guise of saving it, but drew the line at poor media literacy when it comes to One Piece and Watchmen.
(This is a joke in case that wasn't clear)
It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.
The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.
I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.
You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.
Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.
Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the MOST money.
"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.
"relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this sentence, no?
Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.
Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
> There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
I'm calling this out.
That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world this way. Some of us believe that some things are objective and deontological.
IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created the corrupt conditions we are living in
You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.
It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.
> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.
The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558
Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.
It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.
Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.
>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers
Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this. I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).
Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality?
I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.
I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?
If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?
> slave morality
I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."
That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."
Yeah but I don't think this is being said here.
Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses.
I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.
> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.
I am not sure about that.
Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.
> on an island where underage girls party
on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape them.
Thank you for making that clarification. It seems like the parent was trying to normalize the "underage" and "party" part.
This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.
Have you ever heard of the Bohemian Grove? The birthplace of the Heritage Foundation? There you have them all, in one club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove
If making increasingly immoral decisions is all it takes to be a billionaire... then man, I have truly been wasting my life's potential
You also have to be lucky. Have you tried being more lucky?
Necessary - but not adequate.
Oh yeah, plenty of that, even scientists and thinkers were tempted, we had plenty of details even before the 'files', thanks to Maxwell's phone book :
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo...
Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
By thinking.
Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world.
> the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy
If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.
Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:
Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5% Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...
If you gave away as much money proportionately, you'd have about 75 fewer dollars in your pocket.
Tell me again how generous billionaires are.
Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.
"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.
"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.
> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america... | https://archive.today/nLx78
https://www.google.com/search?q=billionaires+sociopaths
People aught to be questioning more the future vision of those in positions to shape it. Someone who struggles with such simple questions around humanity while simultaneously building the tools of a surveillance state probably should not be one of the individuals driving our future.
It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.
It's a lot more comforting to believe that the people who have influence over us are there by some right of some kind.
Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)
or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.
It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.
They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.
But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.
But they're just people.
A frustrating aspect of the AI debates has been the number of people who believe people like Sam Altman who say that the immense wealth created by AGI would be distributed to the masses to improve their lives. The notion that the mega wealthy Elon/Sams/Bezos elites are going to willingly give up unprecedented wealth because millions of people have become unemployed and impoverished is so wildly out of step with how those people have behaved their entire lives. Someone who says they have enough billions and want to improve millions of lives don't make it to those positions.
The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented government coercion or worse.
Yea, it's puzzling to me that this isn't asked of folks like Altman and Amodei in every interview. Maybe it's because Altman would just start shilling his eye scanning orb and start repeating "WORLD COIN" ad nauseum. Either way, they should be getting pressed on this by all media.
It's not puzzling. Journalism was murdered because it asked Nixon too many questions. So now unless you softball interviews, you just don't get to interview anyone, so the only news orgs with content to monetize are the ones just printing Press Releases and being a backboard for "interviews".
It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.
This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.
Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.
Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.
Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.
Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.
You're talking about normal technological developments that yes generally follow Econ 101 patterns. But AGI isn't like that. If AGI or something like it comes about it won't be a normal technology. The upside case for investors is that frontier models eliminate millions of jobs and remain controlled by a small group of owners. That's why they are investing sums unprecedented in human history. If all white collar work and an increasing amount of blue collar work is supplanted by AI how do those masses of newly unemployed folks make a living without wealth redistribution?
If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal technological development then I agree with you that it will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the industry are warning that's not the most likely path at this point.
I might agree with you on this edge case. I don’t believe we will reach that soon.
But interestingly, people who are against AI tend to also believe that they genuinely can’t replace anyone.
So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer.
I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.
Qualitatively, I now have access to ChatGPT.
How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.
While ChatGPT is a partial substitution for a college education, it doesn't satisfy the other needs I listed.
For how much longer?
its only going to get cheaper.
Claiming that wealth isn't zero sum, and demanding people have faith in the US system of capitalism, is not reassuring.
It's beyond naive. But there are also still people believing Elon Musk is going to put humanity on Mars for keeps and out of altruism.
For sure, I've been rolling my eyes at the Mars colony stuff for probably a decade or more now. I get that it's a fun futuristic thought experiment for nerds but the idea that Elon's going to send up some modern day Mayflower in the near future that builds a thriving settlement is obvious nonsense.
Well, the average person is so utterly illiterate in physics, science, and math that no, it's not obvious nonsense to them.
They don't really think through anything at all, because the human brain is hyperoptimized to not think, as thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just not using it, the brain still consumes a significant fraction of a human's energy budget.
We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring something you shouldn't and missing something important.
I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing some rough calculations about things. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy recreational math more than the average person. But I'm frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now going through their lives with zero literacy in math.
You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could you squander that?! What else were you doing with that time? You were required to go to school for about 16 years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most of that time?!
It hurts me how willfully ignorant people can be.
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
One "good" thing that came out of that thing.
I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.
Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.
There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
That is my favorite film :D
That guy has a strong Nazi feel. I'd stay far, far away from anything he creates
> Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs
A lot of the older folks are also not well versed in their language or whatever you want to call it, so they can’t even connect comprehend these guys are compulsive liars and paranoid man children with no scruples.
They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.
Yeah but I'd argue that the eccentric billionaire trope itself is the creation of the PR industry. "We've got this guy with rancid vibes, how do we make him palatable?"
It’s very naive to think this is the interpretation.
That humanity should survive is a deeper question than it looks. Ask any transhumanist.
The only non-evil Billionaire I know are the South park creators although they aren't tech Billionaires. I consider everyone else for the most part to not-be-good people.
Because south park decided to personally say essentially bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company which gave them a billion dollars.
So they took a billion dollars and they were still consistent with how they've been for decades at this point. All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we live in.
I'd think that original creators such as J.K. Rowling, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen & Taylor Swift (among others) would be other members of the !evil bucket.
J.K. Rowling is now infamous for using her vast wealth to lobby against transgender rights.
Oof.
Taylor swift does seem to be using AI or something. I mean she's nice but not as nice as South park creators imo.
I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy, though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on internet but South park is infamous with controversies as well.
There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few good billionaires that you can count them on your fingers.
>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad
By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.
Some might even agree with their dystopic vision of the future.
One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.
They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.
Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.
And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.
Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?
They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.
Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.
>They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class
Same thing happened in WWII Nazi Germany. This timeline has an eerie similar feeling as the masses line up to the slaughter.
I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.
People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.
That's a good question. Probably a low percentage but with the amount of people on HN that still adds up to a sizeable number of participants.
For me it’s because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-transhumanism etc and he wasn’t stumped by the question he’s repeatedly answered it. Anyone who’s worldview is shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted
Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.
He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting his words.
> folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers
On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed the site for the worse.
Actually It woke people up to the fact that there is clearly bad things going on. The people that take the politically correct standpoint have a lot to learn. Talking about things that are going wrong in society is important. If you don't like that, go live on an island somewhere where you can cut yourself off from humanity.
Discourse is good for society, unless you think that society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...
Ah, clearly he was thinking about transhumanism! That thing all normal people understand and agree with.
Nobody was suggesting normal people understand or agree with transhumanism.
So someone is evil because they answer questions by thinking through them? There are no questions in the universe that can’t be stopped and pondered over. In fact, it’s dangerous to even suggest that, that’s the exact mechanism that propaganda runs on.
Ah yes, the real danger to the world isn’t a powerful man feeling ambivalent about our survival. The real danger is society using that moment as propaganda.
This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to make a “Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist” meme stick.
Hesitating to answer a question that may have nuance is not being “ambivalent”. He literally says “there’s multiple questions implicit here” in response to the question asked of him. I genuinely think people like you making sweeping assumptions about others are way more dangerous. People who refuse to critically think or analyze a situation and jump to conclusions.
You pair that with his behavior and you can see pretty clearly the guy does wants to control the world. Stop trying to see this in isolation of that one event.
Not to mention that he and his cohorts had such close ties to Epstein that I find it impossible to imagine he didn't know exactly what was going on. This is someone who's known for building profiles of anyone who mentions him online, not some ambivalent rich guy.
Question 1: If a human modifies with themselves with enough sci-fi tier technology are they still "Human"? (And therefore if humans "ascend" past their biology, humanity technically wouldn't survive)
Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st question is an interesting question, with multiple nuances, are they basically an idiot?
The question wasn't "should all humans not modify themselves", but "should humanity survive".
We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason that regardless of what some people choose, other people will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity" will survive regardless of what technology occurs or where your definition ends.
Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most using servitors and decraniated as robots.
Actually evil, no. Forever changed by their enormous wealth which messes you up mentally in a lots of fun unique ways, changes the nature of every relationship you'll have post wealth, and feeds into your ego and all your latent neurosis further and further alienating you from and believing yourself above your fellow man, yes.
Evil is just a shorthand.
What you’re saying isn’t necessarily wrong, I just don’t think it adds up cleanly to “evil”. Skipping nuance is bad, I think
it's all a fuckin' joke
I always explain it to recruiters contacting me from one of his companies.
I used to get the occasional recruiter cold-calling me and hyping up the chance to work for some Musk- or Bezos-associated entity, and for me it's not as appealing as they think it is. But I politely decline without pointing out their fallacy.
Peter Thiel Integration (PTI) halted
The (PTB) Peter Theil Be
it is truly amazing how much damage one person is able to do to civilized society
if you expand the scope to a handful of adjacent figures, the catastrophe is truly amazing
Maybe a society that can be so damaged by someone because they're incredibly wealthy shouldn't be considered civilized.
What is more civilized than concentrating large amounts of power into the hands of a few? Hierarchy and civilization seem to go hand-in-hand.
yeah, this is what unchecked wealth gives you. yay capitalism.
Thiel is one of the more public faces of what is now known as the "Epstein class" of societal predators. But one of many and certainly not the epicenter.
There is certainly a shadow cabal of these elite billionaire types that avoid all public exposure yet are working very hard to destroy society and profit
Some people are trying to use a different word than "cabal" because of the racial associations and history.
Oligarchs/y are among my choices, but I have supplanted that with Epstein Class now, to be more accurate to whom I refer
Yep Epstein class. It’s a great phrase for the billionaire elites who have corrupted our society through their wealth. We need heavy taxes on them now to preserve our democracy.
And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked with destabilizing America.
I’m hearing this a lot but never with any substance, would you care to elaborate with a hard action or idea with a direct result?
What are you, Thiel’s alt? The guy backed Facebook, built a mass surveillance firm, and talks about democracy as an obstacle. How do you expect people to feel about him?
I would not advocate against democracy. But do you believe it is flawless?
No system is flawless. Every democratic system has its own issues. What is increasingly clear is that the current crop of tech billionaires do not belong anywhere near a position of power. God help us. The quality of individual is disappointing.
certainly better than a feudal system being passed off as libertarian
Direct quote from Peter Thiel:
> I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible
That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its merging with the state behind much of this). We can't centralize our communications without major concessions in significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats, and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?" Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or your loved ones.
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
Everyone needs to cut ties with those companies. Not just with Persona but any service linked to Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. The entire MAGA cultist ecosystem.
Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and won’t care. It’ll be up to other companies and consumers to punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you quickly check if you should or shouldn’t use some service based on the investors.
I'm getting there. Just a few more. I've found myself kicking my not so distant past self for not listening better to my even further distant past self...
Which is pretty much everything at this point... God help us.
I think it's a bad trend. It's kind of a meta version of an ad hominem attack. The headline contained no information about why Discord is making the decision, only that there's a bad name associated with the company. The name of the company isn't even mentioned in the headline. This is prioritizing hate over information.
Having the name associated with the company says a lot, actually. The man is the Forrest Gump of backing creepy companies.
> politically exposed persons
I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern trend of calling inmates “justice involved individuals”?
its not some new/modern trend just because you have not seen the term. its been a term for nearly 3 decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_exposed_person
I mean today I am one of the 10,000 people learning this for the first time. But it does seem like an awkward term which seems to mean “high level government official who is likely to be corrupt” or just “politician”. Don’t really see the need for this wordplay to be honest.
Translate: People who are likely to be attacked by (Putin|Orban|Erdogan|Trump) or similar.
Apparently that’s not what Wikipedia defines it as. More like potentially shady high level government official.
Interesting, I've mostly heard it referring to individuals like Navalny or the mayor of Istanbul. I suppose it makes sense for it to refer to any random political critter.