Gift link: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/?gift=v5U_UzUTothfWXsPxtvNVAh7esWToMRD6XnbXmc5WgA" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety...
For a very long time publishing something in a newspaper has been considered a way of putting something on the public record - up to and including legal obligations like announcements of deaths. The fact that newspapers cost money has never been considered a barrier to that.
One of the reasons why it was noti considered a barrier was the ability to purchase a single issue for a very reasonable price (or even read somebody else’s copy or the copy made available by the bar) vs being asked to subscribe
I'm not OP, but the complaint is that one can't pay 10USD to read the issue that contains the article in question... one must pay -at minimum- nine times that amount. [0]
Ten bucks is pretty close to "I don't even need to think about it" money. Ninety is -for most folks- nowhere near that.
Publishing in a newspaper gets you distribution and a permanent record. After one day access was also virtually free.
Going behind a paywall is a reduced distribution over what an individual can easily access, and the content is no longer permanent but subject to whatever the publisher chooses to keep providing.
It’s in The Atlantic. There’ll be a copy in the Library of Congress. You’ll be able to read it for free in any dentist’s waiting room for the next six months.
I'm sure it would to a great many of them. The money would be insignificant, but there's a congnitive overhead that you had to have a subscription so that paying for it becomes thinking about that becomes friction even while the cost is insignificant. Like, hm, am I willig to just forget about it and let it charge forever so I can read this one article, do I care enough to remember I have a subscription to the site in the future, can I read the one thing and cancel on the spot, will that work? blahblah. To be sure, I'm sure some quite wealthy people could be completely unbothered by it, but I think it's far from a foregone conclusion simply by the price being insignificant for them--the subscription is a mental non-monetary transaction, you have to take at least a small mental journey of being an 'x' subscriber in a sense, and that's friction
TBF, you can access the full (text) content of The Atlantic by merely disabling javascript. It's a quality publication, with quality writing. I'm inclined to think that its tech team are also quality people ... and I'd love to think that they are happy to allow free and open access to them that have the nous to enable or disable scripts.
The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys! :-)
jameshart · · focus · HN ↗
Lerc · · focus · HN ↗
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agos · · focus · HN ↗
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simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
Ten bucks is pretty close to "I don't even need to think about it" money. Ninety is -for most folks- nowhere near that.
[0] <<a href="https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products" rel="nofollow">https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products>
rolosa · · focus · HN ↗
Lerc · · focus · HN ↗
Going behind a paywall is a reduced distribution over what an individual can easily access, and the content is no longer permanent but subject to whatever the publisher chooses to keep providing.
jameshart · · focus · HN ↗
frm88 · · focus · HN ↗
simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
Methinks that this says quite a lot about your socioeconomic situation. I've not seen The Atlantic in a dentist's waiting room.
code_duck · · focus · HN ↗
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samizdis · · focus · HN ↗
The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys! :-)