There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods. But with the help of machines, a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth. We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't. We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm? It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up.
If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on. I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface. This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc. It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread. There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf. I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient. Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour. Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality. Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting. The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it. I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations. I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle. With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters. At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored? The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237 [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202 ... [3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf [4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ ). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides. [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-misreads-2026-3 >misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
 Top