Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
> it’ll get most of the job done in most of the cases
This is not a very high standard for art.
Particularly not in this case, when the current art is a reference to, and for fans of, art that was all about authenticity. It's also art on a product that is very much not aiming for the 'just get it done' market.
If all I care about is the destination, then sure: use the most resource-efficient method. In this and in every other situation where there are other considerations, reducing everything to efficiency is absurdly reductionist.
How many people have a print of “Starry Night” or “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in their house vs how many have a hand-painted on canvas edition (original or copy)?
At some point, a significant increase in resource efficiency improves certain aspects of many things, even art.
People watch The Simpsons despite it being farmed out to animators in Korea and using digital tools for the composition of the frames. Nobody is complaining that Matt Groening isn’t hand animating every frame.
I used ChatGPT to make myself a picture based on a concept of a story I’ve been kicking around in my head for awhile. That picture made me so happy. It just wouldn’t exist twenty years ago.
The efficiency we’re seeing now is in moving from idea to execution. I think that’s a good thing. The thing we’ll see now is curation of taste. People with good taste are going to be the ones to succeed in a market where there are no barriers to entry. I can understand why that would upset people who spent years cultivating a skill.
> At some point, a significant increase in resource efficiency improves certain aspects of many things, even art.
I'll agree with that incredibly-hedged claim, sure. I'm not against efficiency at all.
As before though, it's not the only consideration. It would have been even more efficient to give all the people with a copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring a blank canvas, or even nothing at all, but that would be missing the point.
I think you've misunderstood me. The Lord of the Rings has authenticity as one of its main themes. This is part of the work itself, not to do with its provenance.
What does it mean for a thing to be “authentic”? Tolkien hasn’t created anything since he passed away. I hear they used computers to some extent when making the lord of the rings movies, something Tolkien certainly would not have done. Should we thus criticize the movies on the basis of their authenticity?
Again, I think you've misread the parent comment here. The Lord of the Rings--the actual books, the content of the work--is partially about authenticity, in the same way that Spiderman is about power and responsibility.
I'm not talking about the provenance of the work, but the content of it.
I'm honestly not sure how much more I can break this down for you. I'm not trying to be difficult here, but you keep on misreading and objecting to things I have not said.
The Lord of the Rings is about lots of things. Some of those things are orcs. When I say that The Lord of the Rings is about orcs, I'm not saying it's made by orcs, or that orcs were used to distribute it, but that orcs are something discussed within the text.
Similarly, when I say that The Lord of the Rings is partially about authenticity, I'm not talking about the way in which it was written, but the contents of the work. Authenticity is a theme in the books, discussed within the text.
There's substantial observable change pointing towards a universal software development speedup in the neighborhood of 2x. Much of it is internal company metrics, simply because it's meaningless in most enterprise contexts to count how much software is released. Things you can count, like the number of phone apps published, show the same pattern: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-a...
I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry.
If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an increase in apps being released, but an increase in product output from the big players too.
We should be, but I just don't know how you'd measure that in the short term. It's very hard to put a number to "how much software did Google release this month". You'd expect to see a substantial increase in revenue, but most kinds of software generate revenue only months down the line after adoption picks up, and few companies have even released Q1 results yet.
We've had LLMs for far longer than a quarter now; even if you think that only the recent ones have led to any improvement, you'd still expect to see something.
I’m skeptical that LLMs were capable of producing good software at all until Opus 4.5 in November, and they weren’t good enough to be in my personal workflow until 4.6 in February. I really do think the effects would have started only this quarter.
None of that is concrete though; it's all alleged speed-ups with no discernable (though a lot of claimed) impact.
> This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.
People will stop asking for the proof when the dust-eating commences.
I'm not justifying the war on White House press releases. The additional justifications though just strengthen the need.
Separately it's a poor argument to say well Iran's nuclear capabilities were obliterated (they were certainly damaged if nothing else) therefore further attacks are unjustified when Iran could build up missile defense, missile attack, and drone capabilities and make a future incursion to stop their nuclear program impossible without extreme destruction to the Middle East and the rest of global trade.
Which, you know, was what they were actually doing. Hence the missile attacks. We just caught them before we couldn't actually do much about it without significant loss of life and equipment.
Because soft power is a real phenomenon and by going along with the illegal name change, we are giving legitimacy to an illegitimate act. Its anticipatory obedience.
Do not obey in advance. It signals to the regime how much power they actually have.
I'd agree in principle, but they're already killing people. The worst-case scenario has been happening for a while; treating this as a procedural stance rather than a description of reality is blinkered.
If we adopt their language because things are already bad we are saying that their power is now the only reality that matters, we are giving up any form of resistance. We killed people under the name of Department of Defense too.
Giving them the name is giving them the legitimacy to continue to justify the violence, and signals to the rest of the population that no one is coming to help and the new order is absolute. Mind you, this is mostly the fault of complicit media going a long with the name change rather than individuals here on HN, but whether its a true description of reality or not isn't important, whats important is any form of resistance to stop giving legitimacy to the regime.
As a non-American, I think that Americans treating concrete problems as less important than linguistic games does an awful lot more to legitimise the violence.
I don't think parent claimed that simply using certain words is more important than dealing with the real problems.
You sound frustrated with the American situation. I am too but that doesn't mean someone saying "resist" is somehow condoning or ignoring the important issues.
I think the message of "don't submit in advance" is a great one and it actually makes sense to me to include that ethos in all things, including your speech. I think we all agree that speech alone is not enough.
Controlling language changes the way people think, and therefore act. Both of the things you mentioned are bad, glossing over real problems and the attempt to control language, they are not mutually exclusive.
Just (re)read 1984 and focus on Newspeak, controlling language controls the way people think and act.
The body of water that borders Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and other states along with Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico. The US cabinet-level department responsible for the military is the Department of Defense.
As a third party to your discussion, I observe that you are both engaged in exactly the same "linguistic game" with each other, if you prefer to use that dismissive terminology, and I'll add that writing is not mutually exclusive with action.
it's far more than that. By giving into the television like hyper-reality they create you're giving up base reality. That power and legitimate institutions are derived from the people and due process.
To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities. War department, thugs with badges pretending to be police etc. The provocations are intentional and the offensiveness is the point, if you're just opposed to the concrete violence you're missing the forest for the trees. You have to reject their entire grammar they're trying to impose on you.
It's as if I put on a robe, went to Rome and claimed I'm the Pope (taking bets on this happening in the US too). You shouldn't then try to argue with me if I'm a good or bad pope or if I'm committing bad acts, but you should reject the entire non-reality circus I'm trying to pull you in.
> To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities.
No, this is what I am complaining about. The obscenities are the point, the rhetoric is cover. Ignoring the rhetoric does not stop the obscenities, and treating the problem as 'they are using the wrong name' rather than 'they are doing the wrong thing' dismisses the real harm being done.
If you claim to be the pope, rejecting your constructed reality is the way to help you out of your delusion. If you do so while leading a crusade to sack Jerusalem, it's not the priority.
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