It’s not really a “loophole,” it’s a standard way to give away absurd sums of money.
Have you ever tried to donate billions of dollars? It’s actually extremely difficult.
You have to find causes you’re passionate about/things that society needs, find the correct charities to give the money to, make sure your money actually goes towards the thing they say it will (this is difficult), and then figure out how much you can actually donate (you can’t just give N dollars to company Y. They’ve got zero experience managing that much money, and no way to scale into doing it efficiently.)
What happens then is you have $100b to donate, and mostly only do it $10m at a time or less.
Warren’s kids are old now. They’ve all been donating money for YEARS (it’s a mandatory part of their trust).
So yeah, you receive tax benefits by transferring shares to a foundation you also control, but that money is now earmarked for charity. It doesn’t flow both ways, and the laws on this are very tight (bad actors will find a way, but what’s new?).
Sure that is the typical way to donate your wealth but there are many other ways than giving it with control to your children. I have no judgement but doing it this way is a nice way to move money within your family.
Everyone does it different and I have no judgement but you could just as easily pick a quorum of folks to do the job with a very explicit timeline. Charitable donations are quite broad in the US. So sure lots of wealthy folk don’t this way but not everyone!
Can you just as easily pick a quorum of folks? It seems to me that no matter what, you're going to have to choose people you know and be accused of nepotism because those are the people you can actually assess, and in the case of children, hopefully raise/influence to be on the same page as you.
You could always donate it to the US government, but then it'll be used to go start some wars, so that won't work. You could put it in some weird trust where random people can democratically decide what to do with it, but all you have to do is look at the government to see how good of decisions that leads to. So truly what's the alternative?
Easy is relative but someone in his position with decades of experience working with talented individuals, yes. Nothing is perfect but I have seen other foundations structured where it’s a mixture of descendants and leaders that worked with the individuals. We are going to be picking at hairs though since this is all anecdotal and we don’t know how it will play out. Some of kids foundation work has been a bit self-serving but it’s there money to spend. It could also just as easily be that the 3 kids are different enough that requiring all three to agree prevents most of the opportunity.
If it's so difficult, maybe they could take the easy option and, you know, properly fund the government to build the shared infrastructure on which we all rely by paying tax proportional to their wealth.
You mean fund ICE and build some more concentration camps?
Approximately 1% of the federal budget is infrastructure. There are huge advantages to donating to a charity that actually does something productive instead of the federal waste machine.
Or maybe, just maybe, a system that doesn't create massive concentration of wealth won't try to divert people's focus by pitting people against each other and building concentration camps. Governments aren't fundamentally wasteful. In fact, an effective government is an absolute requirement for functioning healthcare, fair wages, consumer protection, and actual public safety that protects all people equally.
This isn't to diminish all the good things charities have done, but charities are fundamentally band-aid solutions to a dysfunctional society. Leaving welfare at the mercy of wealthy individuals as the wealth gap keeps getting bigger and bigger is a losing strategy. It shouldn't be the state of things people should be aiming for.
Fixing government and taxing the rich is the only solution that addresses the core of the issue. Charities can't close wealth gaps, because they lack the power to enforce laws that ensure fair labor and trade practices. Charities can't stop the healthcare industry from bankrupting sick or injured people, because that too requires enforcing the law. Charities can't stop concentration camps.
Charities do have a place in society and they can do enormous good, but can't compensate for a poor government.
Frankly, the notion that government is fundamentally ineffective and only the private sector can fix things is billionaire propaganda. Billionaires undermine government so they can exploit working-class people with fewer constraints. Then they'd use charity to launder their reputation while pushing their own agenda.
Deriding calls for fair taxes and claiming charities will fix things is wishful thinking at best.
This literally just happened to me for a storage unit we got to store a bunch of baby stuff while deciding if we’re going to have another kid.
Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed.
We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months.
It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months.
We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.
I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated.
Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
Where do you consider the line here to be? What if the design and the core code is mine but I use AI to apply it to additional elements, pages, etc (something I do a fair amount)? What if I designed, or had a very good human designer design, an entire well-crafted design system and design language in Figma but feed it to AI to help turn it into static assets?
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
It's not like the before times were a paradise but putting together anything like this took time. If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research. In LLM land you can just tell Claude to fart out an investigation in a few minutes and never invest time in it.
>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
You don’t get it do you?
The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this.
As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast.
Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic
> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.
Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people.
There is space for nuance:
If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this.
If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this.
In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.
One of these things was wholesale systemized actual state-run murder. The other is a range that encompasses big companies run by awful people and also a binary blob I can run on a GPU in my basement.
It's also a foolish thing to do. Any time anyone types anything into anywhere on any webpage, that data is as good as gone, it's out there. Back in the 90's I experimented with per-character logging on all form input boxes, just because I could. That's still possible today.
I think it’s great that we’re discussing this more often as time goes on. This is not the first post I’ve read this month about this topic, and that’s a good sign.
I also think it takes a certain level of intelligence to be able to _notice_ these shifts in mental load.
A lot of people are going through this same thing, but their response isn’t “i need to unplug, slow down, and let my mind reset,” it’s quite literally the opposite - they scroll more, binge more, swipe more. Mostly because they aren’t aware of why they feel the way they do.
The more we discuss this issue, openly, the more likely it is we’ll bring attention to it to those people who are currently unaware of why they feel so empty all the time, despite never being more occupied.
And it is a massive problem. The complete overflow of impressions you get from mindless scrolling is really not talked about enough. Before you realize it, you begin forgetting important tasks, rationalizing wasting your time and showing up late to things. Please take back your life
GitHub is on Azure. Azure is notorious for being terrible. There was a post here recently from an ex-Azure engineer explaining all of this in a multi-part series.
Maybe they didn’t take the severance part that makes the NDA valid? IIRC for an NDA to be enforceable there has to be a monetary consideration to it. Or maybe it’s for no competes?
Have you ever tried to donate billions of dollars? It’s actually extremely difficult.
You have to find causes you’re passionate about/things that society needs, find the correct charities to give the money to, make sure your money actually goes towards the thing they say it will (this is difficult), and then figure out how much you can actually donate (you can’t just give N dollars to company Y. They’ve got zero experience managing that much money, and no way to scale into doing it efficiently.)
What happens then is you have $100b to donate, and mostly only do it $10m at a time or less.
Warren’s kids are old now. They’ve all been donating money for YEARS (it’s a mandatory part of their trust).
So yeah, you receive tax benefits by transferring shares to a foundation you also control, but that money is now earmarked for charity. It doesn’t flow both ways, and the laws on this are very tight (bad actors will find a way, but what’s new?).
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