I personally think that when he mentioned her name during that interview, it was intended to be used as an archetypal proxy in place of someone else (another public figure) that he had personal dealings with. Yudkowsky checks those same boxes (mission focused on specific existential risk, gets a cult following) for example.
That being said, I don’t care much for Christian prophecies. Better to talk why than who.
There’s nothing Christian about what Thiel is talking about here, even if he does wrap it up in the bible.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, his views are deeply, deeply heretical. He’s so far out of pocket he’s in a completely different pair of trousers.
I don't even think Christianity itself is authentic anymore, so we can just leave it at that. It essentially amounts to outsourcing your spirituality to a man who died thousands of years ago (as great as he was at the time), through whatever institutional filters decide which words of his to cherry-pick.
Behind the Bastards did a good two-parter on Thiel's lectures. He sounds dangerously insane.
It'd be bad enough if he was just some random crank, but the fact he's got the level of power and influence needed to actually make his beliefs happen makes it exponentially worse.
> Genuine questions: what can be done in a democratic setting to stop him?
Thiel is only "relevant" because he's wealthy.
In a system that allows wealth to equal political power, systematically weakening the impact of wealth on civic and political systems is an effective method. Whether that can be done in America, with the current understanding of the constitution and the current philosophy that many take towards taxation/wealth is questionable; but the idea that we can do nothing is just not true. We don't need to slide back into an era of 19th century robber barons and pseudo-aristocracy. If we do, it's because we largely gave up or allowed it to happen.
The difference to robber Baron this time is that those companies have gone global, so a new Teddy Roosevelt being elected in USA wouldn't help, because these multinationals can just extend outside jurisdiction. Which is very similar to the actual dynamic of states/federal that Teddy tackled [1]
Unfortunately the political rhetoric have smeared "the globalists" and equated people that want global coordination to limit those multinationals with power, with the ones abusing it. Even the platform that was promising to drain the swamp turns out was just another swamp, so one would need to start from the scratch for that political movement.
Not sure your country but the internet isn't the USA. Secularism very much touched the hearts of Americans. Talarico's words are pretty good at embodying actual American Christian belief on it.
The dixiecrats mascarading as Christian Republicans who HN treats as all American Christians don't even believe in the larger USA/Constitution/Human rights so yeah they ignore/are anti a lot of basic American beliefs. They are from a long line of loser traitors to our beliefs.
> Voting, debate, democracy are for people that are on the same team.
Im sorry, but I dont agree with this one bit. Debate and the spread of ideas that you think are good is really the only thing that is lasting, regardless of which "team" you are on.
I also dont think America(ns) have been on the same team for its entire history. Its not a very recent phenomenon that neocons have pioneered.
If voting didn't work dixiecrats wouldn't be pushing the new voter ID law. Billionaires wouldn't be spending so much on elections. The entire premise/fantasy of 'elections don't work' is traitor/disenfranchisement/give up BS.
We voted our way out of the 1800s, our way to the New Deal. There have always been rich pushing un-American ideas. We didn't go 'welp, I guess the hyper rich plantation owners win, dissolve the country and continue slavery'. We beat the robber barons. We defeated the slavers. Time to feed the rich billionaires what we gave those that chose to be traitors before them. Fuck traitors. They win when we don't vote. Don't be the surrender meme:
I also like a two-pronged approach which includes taxing the billionaires out of existence. I haven't heard any significant downside to doing that. All the more so when weighed against the possible upsides.
I think what frustrates me above all else is that we, as a society, as a people, could have it so much better.
We could all be living in such a better world but for the allowances we make for the most sociopathic and greedy among us.
I sometimes think there should be a completion state to capitalism.
When you reach an arbitrary score, like $100 million, you get presented with a cup that says ‘congratulations, you won capitalism’ and are given the choice of either playing again from the start but this time on hard mode (no emerald mine or parents that are friends with the IBM chairman this time), or keeping your winnings on the condition that you and your family fuck off somewhere and are never seen or heard of again.
Seriously though, that billionaires can exist, that so much power and wealth can be concentrated in the hands of so few while so many have nothing is utterly repugnant.
Repugnant it may be, but you're leaving better sells on the table: it is extremely wasteful of human capital, both because the winners after having taken all, tend to spin out and add only negative value to societies. Also the many pre-determined losers, having to waste so much of their energy on survival, mostly cannot contribute positively either, sometimes also drifting into serious negative value generation.
So yes: as a system, "wealth" is demonstrably extremely wasteful of capital, in wouldn't take much on both edges to improve it significantly.
We are not in a democratic setting in America any more, the people in power are willing to start wars to protect pedophiles, they are willing to hire Nazi thugs to shoot your wives in the face. They are willing to bribe supreme court justices and dismantle democracy, and they will if not stopped by force.
Thiel has been obviously and evil sack of shit for decades but more than half of HN viewers revere him. I fear we have no hope, and the good people asking how we can democratically solve this problem makes me feel even more hopeless. Yall don't get it.
It wasn't voting that "defeated" southern slave owners, it was a war. A war that leveled cities and killed more Americans than any before or since. Also, I'm pretty sure this man and everyone in his class control a larger percentage of the economy than any plantation owners. Saying we should just vote out way out of oligarchy ignores the history of every oligarchy in the world, and makes you at best and unwitting pawn of the pedophile ruling class.
LOL. I'm no pawn. I'm at best a democracy supporting, western Liberal society loving American.
Spreading fear in this way since 9/11 has dramatically changed America into something worse. I'm sad you've lost faith in Liberal thought and are preaching replacing it with reactionary nothingness.
We literally defeated the people who owned the system AND owned the workers, because we elected the right people and we fought. If we had instead burnt the system down how the heck would we win the war? This system was build for people like us. The first of it's kind. We aren't going to get a better playing field. The oligarchy WANT it burnt down. Stop doing their work and put your effort/energy into useful change, don't be a tool for them.
It's sucks we have to fight, but it's idiotic to seed the best battlefield we are going to get to fight them on to some nebulous, reactionary unknown one like you seem to want. Don't give up! And fuck the anti-American traitors!
The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of capitalism is to enrich the capital owning class, people like Peter Thiel, who will do anything to gain power over the working class. The civil war is a great example of how voting in a leader who is perceived as being a danger to the owning class lead to an attempt to destroy the democracic process that threatened their power. It didn't work that time, but looks at Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Chile, Iran, etc to see what happens when a democracy tries to oppose capital. This belief that people who gained their position by exploiting the deaths of millions of people will peacefully give up that power is naive, and American propaganda from both parties pushes it to silence any real chance at change.
Is there some more concise and ideally written summary of Thiel's lectures? One that doesn't require sitting through 3h of video?
I've only got some superficial acquaintance with Thiel's ideas, but he's been objectively correct on enough contrarian stuff (Thiel fellowships) that I'd like to at least have some rough, non-distorted understanding of what the anti-christ stuff is about even if it sounds a bit crazy.
I built something similar to this. It's a SSG and CMS that runs in the browser and publishes the raw Markdown and JSON metadata alongside the rendered HTML. Unlike this it doesn't use encryption as it only publishes public data.
As the source is available, other clients can easily parse the data so that content can be made available beyond the browser, such as text-only clients, indexing and discovery networks and custom readers. I've built a prototype terminal client to test this out.
Now that the editor is working, my plans are to add public follow/block/like lists to sites to add a lightweight social layer and to build an open indexer framework for content discovery.
It's not trying to be another social network protocol. It's first and foremost a publishing platform, designed to be as easy to use as something like Medium while still being simple, open and portable.
Sonnet told me I was lying when I said that gpt-5 was a model that actually existed. It kept changing the code back to 4o and flatly refused to accept its existence.
Cancelled my Anthropic subscription this week after about 18 months of membership. Usage limits have dropped drastically (or token usage have increased) to the point where it's unusable.
Codex + Z.ai combined is the same price, has far higher usage limits and just as good.
I was confused when I first heard about 'Design Thinking' as a thing because as a designer it sounded just like the standard design process that I already knew inside-out and backwards.
After a while I realised a few things about it:
1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.
2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers
3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.
I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.
Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
The last time I heard this from a designer, the designs we got constantly violated the UI framework in ways that required deep customization.
I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
Yeah it’s easy to do. Is why I prefer to design in the browser than using Figma. Drawing boxes on an artboard does not translate well to components or systems.
First things I stress to devs I’m working with are, here are the rules for breakpoints, type sizes, colours, spacing etc. If the designs don’t match the rules, go with the rules, not the designs. If things don’t look right let’s talk about it.
Graphic, formerly iDraw, is one of my favourite vector design tools, but it's been abandoned since being dropped by Autodesk in 2018.
At one point it had genuine potential to be a viable lightweight Illustrator alternative, similar to Pixelmator vs Photoshop. Autodesk's purchase and sale killed all that momentum and it's not been updated since.
The iOS and iPad apps are still the excellent vector tools even in their current half-broken state.
I'd love to discover who currently owns it and what their plans are - it's a great app and I hate to see it rot.
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