The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
John Adams wrote that as a reason why the United States is not a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. It's a consistent theme throughout the Federalist Papers.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.
Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.
But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.
Is it interesting that all these "democracies" around the world have persistent speech bans? When someone says something they don't like?
I seem to have a recollection of flipping through HN for a decade or so and people talking about all the meanie-pants who want people to be able to speak freely, even if it hurts people's feelings and might not be endorsed by the elected government.
> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people
No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.
Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?
I presume you're referring to the various systems of democracy introduced in different ancient Greek city-states, as opposed to the Roman Republic. Of course, they're different. But it doesn't run counter to what I said - being descendant from the ideas of democracy doesn't promise you that any aspect of the government will be in any way similar, only that the power will ultimately originate from the people in some way. You don't even have to go ancient for this - there are dozens of different takes on democracy in the modern world.
To emphasize - I'm not arguing against the distinctions or the new ideas that were made during the founding of the US, or that some of these ideas weren't novel. I'm arguing against the school of thought that seemingly arose long after that happened, which tried to categorize the US into a bespoke category of government that included it and excluded other nations, modern and historical - despite them all definitionally being ruled by the people and often even having similar ways of organizing their governments. Let's review the terms.
An autocracy is a state where power descends from a single person, the autocrat. An absolute monarchy is a subset of autocracy, where that person is a monarch, usually with religion tying into their perceived legitimacy. An aristocracy is a state where power descends from an upper elite class. In anarchy, the power descends from no one in particular. Democracy is the class that is opposed to these other forms, it's a system of rule by many where power descends from lots of people. It includes many flavors and forms that result in different types of government - direct, indirect/representative (you are here), as well as many sub-variants that define the exact way of how power moves from the ruled to the rulers or other characteristics.
Therefore, republics are a strict subset of the broad term of democracy. There are lots of republics in the modern world, all of which are democratic states, just as there are constitutional democracies. If you want to distance the US from these other states, you would need to prove why it was not envisioned as a power-from-the-people state and what exactly would place it in a different category that no one else occupies. The US may have been the first, but it's not that unique in the modern landscape of governments.
Great point about what Adams is actually arguing! Of course, I know the country was founded as/is a Constitutional Republic, but it's always interesting to see how much our modern (American) understanding of democracy differs from how the founders understood it – and also how they shaped the fact that most of us now equate Constitutional Republic with the best form of democracy.
If us means humans living in democracies, I would say that parliamentary democracy has more supporters and constitutional republics.
And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
> And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
That's a very dim view of your fellow Americans. I don't have such a dim view myself; there are certainly people who don't care and didn't pay attention in their high school civics classes, but I've found that most people do care and do pay attention. I wonder if your opinion is colored by recent events, and whether you'd have thought the same in 2008?
One day, AI will be able to provide midwit analyses like this.
Until that day, we can just say what we all know: 1) AI will absolutely decimate white-collar office jobs in the future, 2) composition of the workplace will change (more women will elect not to participate), and 3) we're in a capital boom where both successful and incompetent spending on AI occurred.
I suspect the reason people are hesitant to admit the obviousness of the future reality of white collar job loss (or replacement at the very least) is ego.
And I suspect that will be the last thing to finally implode, with interesting and positive social consequences.
"Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year."
Setting aside OP's right wing nonsense, I (as a lefty woman) can see it but from another perspective: as white collar work becomes harder to get, that will drive wages down and make work conditions worse. (supply and demand). So if/when they have children, the odds of them making enough to cover daycare will go down.
Additionally, as working becomes worse and worse, anyone who has an exit path will take it. We'll see an uptick in the lumpenproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term (I'm not a Marxist, but the term is useful) as well. Straight and bisexual women have more of an ability to opt out of capitalism directly than straight and bisexual men do in broad generalities.
Additionally, a lot of the resistance to a more traditional family setup on the women's part is because it places us in a precarious situation where, if the person you depend on financially is abusive, you're screwed. If work gets to a point where most employment involves abusive conditions, it's a better deal to chain yourself to a potentially abusive husband than a potentially abusive employer. The legal system is greatly biased towards an employer and the odds of help or redress are low. If you have to pick an abusive situation, pick the one where it's concentrated in one person and you can poison him if you need out. Your husband can have a 'heart attack'. Much harder to pull that off against a megacorp.
In short: the opt out/traditional path is likely to become a better deal, and selfishness will always win.
Are those statistics I provided invalid? Is it not the case there's an entire (ascendant in some spots) political party based upon this phenomenon of the highly-credentialed yet downwardly mobile?
If, as you call it, the "OP's right wing nonsense" is wrong, where are the competing statistics? Where is the competing claim?
It's very clear, whether or not people want to admit it, that a large percentage of jobs in modern society are provided for and sustained by the government or its proxies. People would not pay for these things voluntarily, and the degrees backing them are knowledge work replaceable by AI. No one needs another policy paper.
We can apply this logic liberally to much routine art or marketing production, HR, "news" (almost all of it unoriginal and syndicated), support services work, routine charting and BI functions.
Indeed, it can be applied entirely to the wide swath of "bullshit jobs" [1] in the economy. When that term originated, people laughed because everyone knew it was true. Now people are frightened because AI will always be better and cost effective at bullshit. A fitting repose.
When I say 'right wing nonsense', I mean nonsense that is right wing, not that right wing inherently = nonsense. I thought that was worth clarifying. I'm left, sort of, in the sense that I'm more left than right, but a lot of my views are so far outside the Overton Window that categorizing them in either way is a futile endeavor. (And there are many instances where I 'cross the aisle' in my opinions: guns and administrative legal theory are two.)
It isn't the statistics that people object to when you present your case: it's the framing and the ideological assumptions behind them.
In writing your post(s) as you did, you embedded the following assumptions along with your statistics:
1.) That the government is 'acting in the place of a father', indicating that there is a specific natural place for a man in the world as it relates to his spouse and children, specifically that he should wield authority and care along the line of traditional roles (versus using the phrasing 'acting in the place of a parent' or 'acting in loco parentis', which would indicate a different critique centering around the amount of external authority in people's lives without prescribing how people should live otherwise).
2.) That we should organize society around/value what people willingly pay for. I disagree. Particularly in modern America, where we've all been raised from birth to be selfish babies and assholes with no ability to look beyond three months down the road (to be generous). Half of this country would throw a tantrum if you asked them to contribute to the roads they drive on. They're definitely not going to pay for cancer research, or to create any strategic resource reserves, if it means they have $5 less now.
3.) That 'bullshit jobs' are more likely to be taken by women and that as a class they're more likely to be impacted by AI than men. I don't agree with that. I think that white collar bullshit jobs are held pretty equally by both sexes: the devastation of the IT/tech job market + all the conversation around what AI means for tech suggests that white collar men are far from immune. In my opinion, pretending that women are going to be more impacted is a cope. They're going to be equally impacted, but women have more of an exit strategy. I also think they've got better non-white collar options, honestly. Pink-collar is going to be more resistant to robotics and AI than blue-collar. I'm betting that construction labor can be automated before hair dressers, and the fastest growing job sector is healthcare services. Or consider in home childcare and jobs like elementary teachers. We'll let robots drive our trucks, but letting them take care of our 4 year olds is going to be a much bigger hurdle.
Overall, I think your case would be stronger and better received if you dropped the gendered element. Discussions happen in a particular context (the Internet's attempts at collapsing that aside), and adding the gender aspect aligns you in the audience's mind with certain positions (just as I did deliberately when I described myself as a leftist woman - I did that specifically so I could present that I agree that women are likely to exit white collar work without aligning myself with other gender positions which in turn makes it easier to discuss the idea on its own merits, or when I started this message by walking back some of my flippancy wrt your message because I appreciate that you took the time to respond and are open to a conversation and therefore am also stepping forward to try to find common ground and reciprocate that I'd like a productive conversation).
The tl;dr is it's not the statistics that are putting people off and earning you downvotes, it's the rhetoric and presentation. Knowing your audience and the context in which an argument is being made is crucial. Like... if I posted this comment in any kind of sapphic group, I'd be run out with pitchforks.
I am indifferent to whether or not my message is well-received. It is true.
And also because the people making the arguments for why they should force people to pay for their jobs are indifferent as well. I take joy in knowing that reality is reality, men are men, women are women, and reality is objective and indifferent to subjective voting patterns.
You can simply overlay that Nate Silver chart in the other post with DSA voting and "bullshit jobs." It's the same exact people.
I would like to also point out it was the "Occupy Wall Street" left who most championed criticism of said bullshit jobs. A true irony.
> It is not possible one of their extraordinarily high paid engineers did not know how to deploy an airgapped environment for the models to run in.
It is, in fact, possible.
Do you not remember 2022-2023 when the air was singing with the sounds of young engineers in San Francisco elated they were creating an AI god?
And now a couple years later we're supposed to pretend they're competent?
Sorry. I've been in the tech industry a long time. There's a lot of incompetence. The margins provided by software allow a level of endemic incompetence that would simply not be possible in other industries.
Agreed. Specs are more important than ever. Constraints: types, contracts, protocols, schemas, APIs and such are what ground the boundaries of systems.
Without them, code drift is a guarantee.
Does anyone trust that a set of human sentences typed into a box is more reliable and precise than objectively exact descriptions of data?
This is not to diminish the utility of these code factories. But surely, if anything provides resistance to drift, it's codebase consistency, standards, and things which must objectively be true for the software to function.
I suspect bailouts will be off the table. Simply because the people who support OpenAI and the tech industry are on the same side of the political aisle as the people protesting data centers.
"Big Tech" as a pejorative started on the Right. That never changed.
Remember the hubbub about companies having "free speech" while they deplatformed and censored critics? That never sat well with a certain group of people. And they're the kind of people with long memories, that might have guests entertained as a visible sign of submission, and not as friends.
The more interesting revelation will be if certain persons can psychologically come to admit the people they are against are politically aligned with them, and their opponents are more intelligent than they are willing to let on.
The entirety of "agents" and tool calls is a process of combining LLMs to get better results. Is it the same LLM in many cases? Yes. But it doesn't have to be.
It's the natural move that happened after people realized you couldn't throw away half a century of AI research.
Most of these focus on costs. But it is simply the case that the one-shot output did not scale for harder problems on workflows.
"But what about criminals?! What about terrorists?! Won't someone please think of the children?!!!"
Every argument against open source AI is moot. Outside of totalitarianism, you cannot control people building algorithms with math and software.
And even that won't work in the long run. People are not going to stop their AI printing presses because the Church of Venture Capital needs regulatory scarcity to command valuations.
Would it be the ones that tried to backdoor SSL and encryption in the 90s?
Would it be the ones who argued for censoring speech on social platforms?
Do those individuals in both cases share the same political ideology as the Bay Area?
I'll provide a counter thought experiment. What if, a certain politician whose campaign was derailed by people who censored him and kicked him off every tech platform simultaneously... thought it would be very funny to "commoditize his complement"?
" - The highest tier Chinese models are not more economical than US frontier models. Try GLM 5.2 and see how much it costs to do real work. I did, and it was more expensive than GPT 5.6."
This is a flatly false statement for most things powering backend applications. The AI consumer "doing real work" model, either for analysis, chat, or coding could well be more cost effective with closed frontier models.
But most of these internal glue business SaaS applications where engineers are integrating are not those tasks. It is those tasks which 1) drive immense amount of domain-specific data into the platform over time, and 2) are most encouraging of driving open model independence with no vendor lock-in.
Anyone on this site who has actually used ML models (more accurate in many cases) knows there's a lot of kludge that simply does not need a 5 minute agentic feedback loop to solve the problem. And they were solvable a year ago with lower class models. The token economics are exceptional and the anecdotes of a16z saying 80% of startups are productionizing open models is only surprising to people who think running your company on OracleDB in 2026 is a sound engineering decision.
You're correct, but that's a different market segment and not the market GLM 5.2 and its peers compete in.
The labs are not interested in the small, fast, single purpose end of the market. Google increased their pricing on Flash so much that it stopped becoming a cheap model; instead, they released Gemma 4 open source, which is actually easier to use from a third-party inference provider than from Google.
From a total token volume perspective, these "utility" models (classifiers, simple summarizers, small OCR models) will absolutely drive enormous volumes of tokens, at low prices and margin and modest overall market size. Because the models are small and the performance requirements are modest, and because their use cases are specialized rather than general, there are poor economies of scale: they can run cost effectively on rented small GPUs, and a big player doesn't get a structural cost advantage. These models are usually 1b - 30b in size, and can run on a rented 5090. I've productized these myself: I run millions of pages through a fine tuned 1b OCR language model that runs on 5090s at a cost far lower than commercial providers.
But that's not the segment of the market where GLM 5.2, Kimi 3, etc., play. They compete with frontier capabilities, and they are not particularly cheaper than OpenAI models at a cost per task. (I do actually think they compete well with Anthropic, because Anthropic's model efficiencies are poor compared to OpenAI.) And although this part of the market may not be the bulk of the token volume, it is the bulk of the market value.
That's because a lot of human knowledge work is too generalized and fuzzy for dedicated, fine-tuned models, so they are almost entirely different markets that don't particularly compete with each other. (Though if SaaS companies successfully build around verticals that can use small models applied against well-defined jobs, there may be opportunity to push the small/big capability boundary to subsume marginally more valuable tasks that today would require mid-grade reasoning.)
> "The highest tier Chinese models are not more economical than US frontier models. Try GLM 5.2 and see how much it costs to do real work. I did, and it was more expensive than GPT 5.6." This is a flatly false statement.
It may not be false but may be a "category error" [0]. Reserved GPU pricing & bulk inference pricing is 3x to 6x cheaper than "API rates", but renting your own GPU cluster (in this crunch) to run a 600b+ open weights is going to be "more expensive than GPT 5.6".
Even then, it remains to be seen if Huawei will pull their weight (and match up to Nvidia) as spectacularly as their fellow Chinese AI Labs have. If so, the WAICO alliance is ready to go all-in.
[0] Ben, and probably other "influencers" in this space, may be prone (knowingly or unknowingly) to favour points that make their conclusion for them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning).
But much like Ben's point that commoditization is a relatively novel concept to many in tech, it's not the consumer AI applications at risk of commoditization. They have distribution there.
It's the literally millions of engineers who are updating codebases with tools replacing workers partially or wholly. It's the supply-side where there's compression, and no need for distribution.
I would argue, given the enormity of the existing SaaS stack and how it integrates with the human machinery of personnel, that's where volume is. And that is clearly cheaper and a home run.
Commoditizing a ~$100B AI consumer market is no small feat. Commoditizing 20% of the $500B SaaS market, to say nothing of the underlying systems in the who-knows-how-many trillions "Big Tech" market (you're obligated to say that like the Kool Aid man), is shocking.
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.