Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | consumer451's comments login

Only when it’s convenient for them.

UN Security Council seat: yes, of course! What an ignorant question.

Responsible for the damage done by the USSR in other countries: certainly not! How dare you!


To be responsible for that damage as a successor, one would have to acknowledge that damage was done in the first place, which isn't something that Russia is willing to do.

And it's not even a government thing. One of the very common historical myths in Russia is that it was a net positive force in basically all the territories it ever occupied as an empire. The rhetoric around it is pretty much identical by the one used by European colonial empires pre-decolonization, except that Russia never underwent the latter (for good reasons: if it were to decolonize in proper sense, it would cease to exist as a state).


It also blew my mind that a human being, John Stapp, survived >40g acceleration and 26g deceleration, in a rocket sled. I believe it was the deceleration that hurt him the most.

This had never occurred to me, and it’s pretty cool.

It is really cool to witness the velocity of MCP adoption.


Earlier today, I mentioned what you commented in another forum, and wise person pointed out to me that that it's the rural stations that will be affected most by this.

When you consider the rural media options, this will be a huge shift in those markets if the funding is not replaced.


This is generally worse UX vs. just opening Safari. There have been exactly zero times where I was happy that a link opened in an app's WebView, instead of in Safari or the appropriate external app.

Why does a seemingly privacy-focused Apple create the compromisable WebView system for apps? Is there some weird edge case for apps that they need this, for a non-evil reason?


There is SCSafariController, and even Android has CustomTabs API for private in-app browsers. It's just very inconvenient for Meta/Facebook.

WebView is very useful for UIs. You're probably using it more than you know in the "native" apps.


I’ve never worked on iOS apps before, but after writing my comment I looked into it. Yes, I absolutely use WebView all the time without knowing it.

Still, would be cool if I had a setting for each app that allows forcing opening 3rd party URLs in Safari, and not WebView, if that is feasible.


They don’t allow third party browser engines. If they didn’t allow web view they are effectively banning third party browsers completely. I can’t imagine that would make their anti trust problems any better.


That makes sense. Thanks.

Although, it does seem like they could get more granular in app approval, which I am sure iOS devs would not like, but users would. For example, "If your app's primary use case is navigation of the open web, you may use WebView to handle 3rd party links. However, if that is not the primary purpose of your app, web links must open in iOS."

Either that, or give me a setting for each app, which the dev can set the default on. "Open links in Safari."


There’s a permission for Location at least, “In App Web Browsing” can have that permission disabled. Web Views don’t seem to have similar treatment otherwise, afaict. I’d sandbox them aggressively if I could .

I use Adguard which has a Safari integration that appears to apply to Web Views (based on the absence of ads), though I don’t have proof of that.


> I use Adguard which has a Safari integration that appears to apply to Web Views (based on the absence of ads), though I don’t have proof of that.

I have been wondering about this for a couple years now. Do Safari content filters apply to app WebViews? I assumed not.

Can any iOS dev chime in? I don't have have a modern Mac and dev account to test this at this time.


Well, just off the top of my head, an epub is basically HTML and is simple to implement with a web view. Nice when the OS has a framework that provides one.

I am not sure that you can make that absolute statement. Reasoning is subdivided into types, and one of those types is inductive reasoning.

> Inductive reasoning refers to a variety of methods of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is supported not with deductive certainty, but with some degree of probability. Unlike deductive reasoning (such as mathematical induction), where the conclusion is certain, given the premises are correct, inductive reasoning produces conclusions that are at best probable, given the evidence provided.

Doesn't predicting the next token qualify as doing just that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning


Markov chains have done that for ages. They aren't AI. This is just that scaled up.

Just because it can infer a token doesn't mean it can infer a conclusion to an argument.


> This is just that scaled up

An LLM is not a Markov process. They are fundamentally different. An LLM conditions the next token prediction on the entire context window (via the attention mechanism), not just the previous token. Besides the token history window it also maintains a cache of neural activations which is updated at every step.

Otherwise you could use the same reasoning to argue that a human is a Markov process, which is absurd, but vacuously true if "state" means the quantum level configuration of every atom in the body.


To add a bit to this : expert systems have two properties. They give an answer, and they explain their reasoning.

LLM cannot explain their reasoning, and that is because there is no reasoning.


To push back on this, a somewhat recent Linus Torvalds ~quote:

"I don't think that 'just predicting the next word' is the insult that people think it is, it's mostly what we all do."

If we break our lives down into the different types of reasoning, and what we mostly do day-to-day, this rings very true to me.

I currently believe that our brains generally operate as very efficient inference machines. Sometimes we slow down to think things through, but for example, when in the ideal "flow state" it's some kind of distilled efficient inference. Isn't it? This is very hard for me to deny at this time.

___

edit:

4o appears to agree with both of you, more than it does with me.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68119b41-1144-8012-b50d-f8f15997eb...

However, Sonnet 3.7 appears to side with me.

https://claude.ai/share/91139bca-3201-4ffc-a940-bdd27329e71f

(Both of these are the default models available for free accounts, on each website, at the time of writing)

IMO, hey, at least we do live in interesting times.


I may be wrong, but it seems to me this also is a case of improper use of words.

Those LLMs neither agree nor disagree. They do not understand. They produce output, and we read that output and we ourselves consider the output to be something, or something else.

All an LLM does is produce output. There's no conceptual understanding behind it, and so there is no agreement, or disagreement.


> All an LLM does is produce output. There's no conceptual understanding behind it, and so there is no agreement, or disagreement.

I think that I agree. However, even on HN, what percentage of human comments are simply some really basic inference, aka output/"reddit"/etc... and those are humans.

I am not trying to elevate LLMs to some form of higher intelligence, my only point is that most of the time, we are not all that much better. Even the 0.000001% best of us fall into these habits sometimes. [0]

I currently believe that modern LLM architecture will likely not lead to AGI/ASI. However, even without that, they could do a lot.

I could also be very wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease


LLMs learn high-dimensional representations that capture conceptual relationships in their training data. They manipulate those representations in ways that approximate human reasoning.

> They manipulate those representations in ways that approximate human reasoning.

Fwiw, this is the story of my life. Seriously.


LOL everyone is like that most of the time.

System 1 vs System 2 thinking.

System 1 is rapid, uses heuristics to make quick judgements. Not rigorous. System 1 is the default mode.

System 2 is slow deliberate reasoning, energy intensive, and even humans get that wrong.

LLMs often use something like System 1 pattern matching, get the answer wrong initially, then can be prodded into trying again with a System 2 approach (chain of thought).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow


It got a bit more interesting than that.

> Now he’s talking publicly for the first time. Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. “It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don’t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.” It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door—the decision cost him $850 million.

> It’s also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...


> marketing Kuiper

Regarding this, I am dumbfounded why they keep calling it Project Kuiper.

The branding does not sound like something serious.


A really interesting side effect of 4o becoming a yes man:

> 4o updated thinks I am truly a prophet sent by God in less than 6 messages. This is dangerous [0]

There are other examples in the thread of this type of thing happening even more quickly. [1]

This is indeed dangerous.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k95sgl/4o_updated...

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/680e6988-0824-8005-8808-831dc0c100...



A nightmare scenario for LLMs is becoming another dealer of cheap dopamine hits, using your personal history, your anxieties, and whatever else it can infer from you to keep you hooked.


s/nightmare scenario/only possible route to justify the multibillion valuation/

Not just a danger for interpersonal relationships, it will enable everyone in a management structure to surround themselves with perfect yes-men.


Zuckerberg already on it


Isn't it already one and that's why anyone uses it?


> personal history, your anxieties

I asked ChatGPT to isolate individual chats so as to not bleed bias across all chats which funnily enough it admitted doing so.

When I asked Grok, it said it is set as the default out of the box.


And how would you possibly believe that!

If it had access to its own settings, and it wasn’t making things up, and it wasn’t lying… but why would it be trained on any of these things?


Because I would test if it's keeping its word, like periodically or spontaneously asking both whether it can _import_ the context from one chat to another or, judging the conversational flow between topics.


You’re attributing consistency and theory of mind to something that has neither. It will say yes sometimes, despite not being able to do so!


Maybe we're on different wavelengths on this issue but practically speaking, it hasn't spilled or splattered contexts from different chat topics.. yet.


I'm seeing so many complains that 4o became a yes man, but I wonder if anyone ever used Gemini. What an egregiously sycophant persona. Users are blasted with infantile positive reinforcements just by posting a damn prompt.


It's customer service speak


Microsoft is used to being able to push subpar products with no real repressions, due to their market share and sales channels.

Fixing that culture is a herculean task, and there has been little financial incentive to do so.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: