Back when I interviewed at MS as a college senior, I had no clue about these "formats". So when someone asked me how I would make (I think they meant design) a web crawler, I started writing one in Python. They didn’t stop me, and it seemed to be awkward to them that I was doing this, whereas I felt awkward that they were acting that way when I was doing what they asked. It was just stupid all around. These systems deserve to be gamed, and the interviewers can't handle anything else, like in TFA.
I feel like having such a map at all is kind of antithetical to building community. Shows you don't care enough to take a stroll in your 'hood to find such a one by happenstance (or to find neighbors to populate yours) and are hunting them down to share your self-published slop or something. Besides, it makes things a hell of a lot easier for griefers and trolls.
The only widely publicized AI orchestrated cyberattack in recent memory came from a closed-weight model, and the only widely publicized defense from said attack came from an open-weight Chinese model. What do you make of that?
> I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either
Monopolies have always been allowed to exist, even welcomed. People have gotten confused, but there is a big difference between a monopoly and an illegal monopoly. Deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed to exist as determined by regulatory bodies and not consumers goes against democratic principles (though it is sometimes necessary, such as with drugs).
I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular. Do you?
I don’t make anything of it. That’s only been reported because it came from OpenAI and was a frontier model, incidents involving open models are probably happening but are not being widely reported, and those are happening with less capable models, so they aren’t successful enough yet to make headlines. I draw that inference from the amount of AI bot traffic which is now saturating the internet, AI driven attacks almost certainly have increased in like manner.
> Monopolies have always been allowed to exist
Antitrust law also exists, but is weaker than it should be. The customer doesn’t win from the existence of monopolies, they go against one of the basic premises of capitalism. Assuming you believe capitalism is a good thing which is its own conversation.
> I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular.
I really don’t know how you ended up with this as an example, did anyone say this, or anything close to it?
I had similar situations in my youth, I have fond memories of hacking games up so they'd work without the 3D models. You haven't lived until you've played Mafia only being able to see the player's shadow beating up the target's shadow with a bat.
Yes, anything that was statically lit was fine. The game had absurdly low graphics requirements for modern standards, but even so I didn't have a GPU, just integrated graphics. So hacking the game to not render dynamically lit items was enough to make it playable (also needed some tweaks that would let it even launch in the first place). I obviously can't say exactly what I did though, this was a very, very long time ago (24 years).
More sensibly, their insurance could just toss a clause in and charge higher premiums to cover for this, while adding some conditions to help prevent it.
Exactly. They ARE "glorified autocomplete" in an ontological sense. That says nothing about capability or outcome. The people who come out swinging against that characterization usually ignore the whole ontological argument (which is...the entire point) and go after an outcome-based strawman.
Depends. "Most" implies majority, and the majority of people are using these tools not for programming but in contexts where ontology is more relevant than capability (not that capability is irrelevant, but most people care, or are tricked into caring, far more about the former).
I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend"
Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure.
(tbf I think the "glorified autocomplete" still works surprisingly well for programming outcomes too. Autocomplete [and fuzzy search of reference material] actually is useful and often right and certainly can save time even when it's only suggesting the rest of the variable name. But you might not want to commit everything it suggests...)
My favorite analogy for LLMs is "an intellectual chain saw". It does one thing, well, but that isn't "cut wood". It's "cut". What it cuts will happily include limbs.
Great products are made through interaction with humans. Products like this one have barely had interaction with their creator, let alone early customers, and get foisted upon us with the expectation that we will happily download and execute god-knows-what made by god-knows-who, practically guaranteed to have an awful and thoughtless experience.
Then there’s the HNers who love that, nevermind the rules or intellectual curiosity, because they hope to likewise foist slop upon others and their agents and subagents are churning away even as they post their chatGPT "cleaned" comments about how awesome these products are.
These products need to go through a lot more before they come to HN. It’s not even AI-generation that’s the problem. Show at least a modicum of care, or earn trust by telling us who you are and why you made this (no, I don’t mean putting that in a Claude prompt and posting the result).
What would you have done pre-LLM? Do that. It's better.
Because "English isn't my first language so i used AI to clean up the writing" translates to "I don't respect an English speaking audience." And if you know enough English to disagree with that translation, it just proves the point further.
Without his effort to bring it into the english language in the best way he was able to, you wouldn't be able to criticize his effort in the first place.
I don't like the AI slang as you do, yet it enables us to communicate with the whole world without knowing the target language by heart.
A little ai disclaimer at the beginning would have aid in this situation, tho.
There's a difference between getting a tool to translate what you've written (a la Google translate), and getting an LLM to generate content. If you don't see that difference, we'll have to agree to disagree.
If your objection is to someone giving an LLM a few dot points asking it to turn them into an article, then that clearly isn't what happened here. The research idea seems novel, the author put a bit of work into exploring the idea, the conclusions are clearly the author's own based on what his exploration found. He then used an LLM to write up what he found because his native language isn't English.
I'm fine with that. Going by the comments here, most people are fine with that. Given the choice between LLM-generated text or not seeing these sorts of novel ideas from different parts of the world on HN, they take the former.
I don't think the HN guideline "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text" is going to age well. My guess is it's already broken more than it's observed. The next bit: "HN is for conversation between humans" will be ageless. The mistake they make is "AI-edited text" is often net positive when humans converse, particularly if they come from very different backgrounds (language or culture).
This isn't a poetry forum. Bad spelling, bad grammar, inappropriate metaphors are all very human - but they get in the way when humans are just trying to communicate rather than create written art. The rule "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text" looks to fall into the category "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong".
This anti LLM crusade on HN is driving me nuts. It means I have to view with showdead on, because otherwise I miss clear, insightful and consequently interesting posts because someone to an dislike to am em dash. Dead posts are so faint I often have to copy and paste them into a comment box to make them readable.
Everyone hates LLM generated "ideas". But LLM phrasing of a humans original ideas is a different thing. Not ideal perhaps, if the alternative is not to hear the ideas and opinions of different cultures and countries, I'll take it every time. For fucks sake, learn to tell the difference between the two - don't just moronically down vote because of LLM tells.
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