Once every couple of years I dive into it, I still cannot complete it without cheat codes, but I love the mouse animation, the "mirror" prince, and many other amazing details!
The amount of AI slop that makes it to HN is concerning. I don't know whether readers here don't care or don't notice it anymore. Or maybe they are only reading the title and then commenting?
My #1 tell is an article that's suspiciously long without any real "story", that is, pictures of someone hacking at a laptop. It's always 20,000 words AI hate, ironically.
I've found a common giveaway of AI writing to be having many unnatural pauses in sentences. For example,
A good architect’s most important skill isn’t designing systems. It’s knowing which systems not to build. It’s pushing back on complexity. It’s asking “why?” five times until the actual requirement emerges from the aspirational nonsense. It’s telling the CTO that their conference-inspired idea is a terrible fit for the team they actually have.
A normal person would've used ~2 sentences for this, even if it became a run-on sentence. You can feel the AI being very confident in what the prompter wants to get across, which is ironic, given that this is 2 paragraphs above:
AI agents are pathologically agreeable. Ask Claude if your idea is good and it’ll tell you it’s good. Ask it if a microservices architecture makes sense for your three-person team and it’ll explain why microservices are an excellent choice. Ask it if you should build a custom ML pipeline instead of using a managed service and it’ll enthusiastically lay out the design.
> It hasn’t thought about the problem at all. It’s pattern-matching against its training data and producing the most plausible-sounding response.
The article kind of lost me here. Agents are way more than that, today. And the author knows it, as later it says stuff like
> Claude will never do this. It’s trained to be helpful.
But the first phrase just tell me author just have a deep dislike for agents and it's looking for rationalizations for that feeling.
Part of the criticism is on point, sure. But if it "being trained to be helpful" is a problem, it's fixable. It can "be trained to be more critical".
Later:
> But it wasn’t designed for your team. (..)
It was designed for the median of everything Claude has seen. A generic best practice for a generic problem at a generic company. Which is to say, it was designed for nobody.
That's non-sense. Anybody who understand algorithms know that, sure, on a first instance you have a "good algorithm" that has a good performance on average, or in worst-case. But then, you can design algorithms that are adaptive to the input. Same applies here.
Isn't that how many people
program too? I remember some idea or pattern from previous projects, or something I read about on the internet. Then I code it in the most straighforward way, whatever comes to mind first. Then I sit back and analyze: does it look good architecturally? Do I like it? Does it even compile? Then I rewrite some parts to make it more sound. Rinse and repeat, until I'm satisfied. I usually don't come up with entirely novel ideas on the first attempt. I usually just rehash known concepts over the course of many iterations.
Just browse their Facebook profile. It's enough of an evidence. If that's not enough, just like couple of their posts and you're gonna witness the b.s. in their ads.
"As temperature approaches zero from the negative side, the model output will again be deterministic — but this time, the least likely tokens will be output."
I understand this as, a negative number far from zero is also quite random (just with a distribution that will produce unlikely tokens).
Yep! Very large negative temperatures and very large positive temperatures have essentially the same distribution. This is clearer if you consider thermodynamic beta, where T = ±∞ corresponds to β = 0.
> Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.
So, no compilers for you neither ?
(To be fair: I'm not loving the whole vibe coding thing. But I'm trying to approach this wave with open mind, and looking for the good arguments in both side. This is not one of them)
Accidental non-deterministic compilers are fairly easy if you use sort algorithms and containers that aren't "stable". You then can get situations where OS page allocation and things like different filenames give different output. This is why "deterministic build" wasn't just the default.
Actual randomness is used in FPGA and ASIC compilers which use simulated annealing for layout. Sometimes the tools let you set the seed.
I think you're misunderstanding.
AI is not a black-box, and neither is a compiler. We(as a species) know how they work, and what they do.
The 'black-boxes' are the theoretical systems non-technical users are building via 'vibe-coding'. When your LLM says we need to spin up an EC2 instance, users will spin one up. Is it configured? Why is it configured that way? Do you really need a VPS instead of a Pi? These are questions the users, who are building these systems, won't have answers to.
If there are cryptographically secure program obfuscation (in the sense of indistinguishability obfuscation) methods, and someone writes some program, applies the obfuscation method to it, publishes the result, deletes the original version of the program, and then dies, would you say that humanity "knows how the (obfuscated) program works, and what it does"? Assume that the obfuscation method is well understood.
When people do interpretabililty work on some NN, they often learn something. What is it that they learn, if not something about how the works?
Of course, we(meaning, humanity) understand the architecture of the NNs we make, and we understand the training methods.
Similarly, if we have the output of an indistinguishability obfuscation method applied to a program, we understand what the individual logic gates do, and we understand that the obfuscated program was a result of applying an indistinguishability obfuscation method to some other program (analogous to understanding the training methods).
So, like, yeah, there are definitely senses in which we understand some of "how it works", and some of "what it does", but I wouldn't say of the obfuscated program "We understand how it works and what it does.".
(It is apparently unknown whether there are any secure indistinguishability obfuscation methods, so maybe you believe that there are none, and in that case maybe you could argue that the hypothetical is impossible, and therefore the argument is unconvincing? I don't think that would make sense though, because I think the argument still makes sense as a counterfactual even if there are no cryprographically secure indistinguishability obfuscation methods. [EDIT: Apparently it has in the last ~5 years been shown, under relatively standard cryptographic assumptions, that there are indistinguishability obfuscation methods after all.])
There are plenty of smart devices (including lighbulbs, sensor movements, and what not)t hat use bluetooh, or protocols like Zigbee that enable all kind of functionality without wifi password.
