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Less Popular Than Coal

https://www.argmin.net/p/less-popular-than-coal
31•_delirium•1h ago

Comments

silverFork•49m ago
It is obvious that is about fight for resources and supremacy between humans and the machine where the machine is also the capital that seeks the discount for human labor. How can the competition between capital and labor be resolved when capital has found a replacement for labor and competing for resources to serve its own needs? Will capitalists and technocrats give up? zero chance of that. Will labor and humans accept the machine and capital supremacy? zero chance of that.

So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.

sneilan1•31m ago
I think people would like AI technologies a lot more if they were the ones making money off of it.
Chris2048•25m ago
https://isaiprofitable.com/
outside1234•23m ago
You are forgetting about the grifting part where they dump all of this crap on our 401ks
dzink•29m ago
A lot of capital was looking for a place to get parked. AI and hardware seems like it has the best prospects going forward - especially with baby-boomers retiring and the new generation getting less opportunity to climb the economic ladder (aka catering to them is not attractive to investors).

AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.

The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.

ion_trapper•25m ago
The hysteria around datacenters will be to the US/Western world what the burning of its fleet was to China, or (more recently) what the banning of nuclear power was to Germany. Bravo to whoever coordinated this generational psyop.
outside1234•23m ago
The increase in the cost of power per kWh is a real problem for a lot of people.
noosphr•18m ago
It's a real problem because we were sold a post industrial dream which could only happen if the hardest computation anyone would ever have to do is sending an http packet.

Electricity is destiny, if you can't produce it you will be a puppet of those who can. See Germany.

muhfuhkuh•15m ago
Not only that, but this is basically the sales pitch of AI:

Voter: So, tell me about this AI stuff. You wanna build one in my backyard right?

AI CEO: That's right! It'll increase the cost of your water, electricity, and likely lower your property values due to people leaving because of the 24/7 daytime lighting and noise pollution!

Voter: Well I kinda don't like that at all!

AI CEO: Great! Because that's not all! Once we really improve on our AI, it will eat your job for now and forever! And, wait till we embody them in robots. Whoo-boy! You won't even be able to drive a truck or plumb pipes for a living! Ain't that great?

Voter: What? No! That sounds terrible!

AI CEO (thinking): Why can't I get to these schmucks?

It's the economy stupid. If you don't offer material improvement with UBI instead of selfishly flexing your utopian visions of Star Trek robes and replicators and you and only you living for a thousand years, don't be surprised if voters don't give you what you want politically.

Grombobulous•22m ago
I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.

For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.

Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.

Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.

The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.

Gonxa6282•16m ago
I mean, it should surprise no one that the sheer dislike of the billionaires making AI is ruining the perception of the technology they are building. If we should go and blame someone, it's certainly them. I agree 100% with OPs article.
aaron_m04•8m ago
That's one thing ruining the perception. I wouldn't even say it's the most important one.
pnathan•5m ago
1. "ai will take your jobs" 2. "We need data centers for AI" 3. "How could you vote against data centers"

Idk maybe step 1 wasn't popular.

Nifty3929•8m ago
Right - so instead of getting mad at datacenters, how about getting out of the way of building more powerplants?

Electricity is the ultimate fungible resource. You can convert electricity into food, housing, medicine, video games, football games (either sort), transportation, etc.

The more electricity we produce, the more broadly prosperous we will be.

It's not a question of needing more electricity - we don't need any electricity at all. We got by without it for 100k years until just the last few. But still, the more we have, the better all our lives will be.

srejk•6m ago
You know, except for that whole climate change thing. The fastest power to spool back online is older coal, oil, and gas plants.
layer8•17m ago
The protests are a good counterweight to the big tech AI propaganda. The former is a consequence of the latter. It’d be better if everyone was moderate and reasonable, measured and considerate, but that’s not the world we live in.
Analemma_•13m ago
Yes, keep saying "hysteria" and calling opinions other than yours "a psyop". That will definitely win over hearts and minds instead of catalyzing even more ferocious opposition.
ion_trapper•5m ago
People’s opinions are valid, and I wish tech CEOs were better at addressing them, but ultimately it is hysteria and it is a psyop, and the US will regret it.
harimau777•9m ago
People's hatred of AI is no psyop. People just hate AI.
jltsiren•8m ago
Calling it a psyop is a non-explanation. Water is wet and your opponents will oppose you. That much is given. The interesting question is why the side supporting data centers failed to get their message through.

Did they not know how to argue for their case convincingly? Were they unwilling to do what was needed to get people on their side? Were their ideas against the interests of most people? Or was the issue mostly about the people in charge?

Republics have historically fared well against more authoritarian societies. In no small part because they are not stuck with the leaders they happen to have. If a leader becomes a liability, a republic can easily replace them. Companies can also do that, except when the leader also happens to be a major shareholder.

thrance•8m ago
You're part of the problem. This insufferable contempt and disdain you're displaying toward the views and concerns of the population is what riled them up against tech and AI.
dumberquestions•7m ago
Big tech has been actively burning bridges for a decade and you find it easier to believe China brainwashed 7 out of 10 Americans overnight.
JuniperMesos•5m ago
American anti-datacenter sentiment is not a Chinese psyop; that doesn't mean that sentiment is well-founded or a good thing for US interests.

Residential proxies detected on White House network

https://layer3intel.com/blog/residential-proxies-white-house-network
512•Rasbora•3h ago•150 comments

Ripple-65B Preview: U.S. Open-Weight SOTA on Agentic Coding

https://www.ricursive.com/ripple
201•Philpax•5h ago•68 comments

AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-cybersecurity-php2shell-vulnerability
1019•pseudolus•12h ago•614 comments

Insects don't swarm at LED lights

https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2026/11/03/insects-dont-swarm-at-led-lights/
147•speckx•4h ago•87 comments

Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 3: Bad Update Improvements

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40•muricula•2h ago•2 comments

A new Go API for JSON

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206•olexsmir•6h ago•88 comments

Kimi K3.1 Pro model weights are out

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336•abrarthought•8h ago•88 comments

Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra – 150W AI Accelerator Card with 128GB at 548GB/s

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82•peter_d_sherman•4h ago•39 comments

Less Popular Than Coal

https://www.argmin.net/p/less-popular-than-coal
34•_delirium•1h ago•26 comments

Conductor is joining Meta

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85•kenrose•5h ago•129 comments

Launch HN: Kino AI (YC S23) – AI media manager and video editor

66•lukeigel•6h ago•26 comments

Introducing Images 2.6

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14•davidbarker•32m ago•3 comments

Progress on provable inference for large language models

https://www.anthropic.com/research/provable-inference
166•ltononro•6h ago•83 comments

Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux

https://openai.com/index/a-thousand-fewer-paths-to-root/
13•dangelosaurus•34m ago•6 comments

Nvidia RTX Spark encrypted firmware slows inference speed to 35% on Linux

https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/linux-nvidia-rtx-spark-laptop
584•novaRom•15h ago•267 comments

Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander

https://fireflyk64.github.io/wcmulti/
93•daniel_rh•5h ago•11 comments

Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)

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244•zenincognito•9h ago•175 comments

Is Curiosity Good for Us?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n20/adam-phillips/is-curiosity-good-for-us
11•NaOH•1d ago•4 comments

Successful People (2013)

https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people
13•epestr•1h ago•9 comments

OpenAI to acquire Pierre Computer Company

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-pierre/
163•itunpredictable•8h ago•54 comments

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8•0x63_Problems•3h ago•2 comments

Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/doordash-says-outside-ai-agents-have-only-led-to-hundreds-of-o...
46•PaulHoule•2d ago•73 comments

A wave of plastic-free coffee pods and machines

https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/02/food/coffee-machine-plastic-free
34•thunderbong•8h ago•59 comments

Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?

84•eggbrain•9h ago•84 comments

Tencent Hy4

https://hy.tencent.ai/research/hy4
169•Philpax•9h ago•55 comments

Death Comes for XSLT

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29•colejohnson66•3h ago•5 comments

AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history

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441•rbanffy•8h ago•155 comments

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89•adlep•8h ago•61 comments

Have I befriended a murderer?

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100•gmays•5h ago•56 comments

Show HN: The DNA of DOOM – How code structure survives across 44 ports

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10•joe-esquibel•2d ago•10 comments