Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | irishcoffee's commentslogin

Why lie if it isn’t useful? Lying is generally bad, why do a generally bad thing if there isn’t at least a justification, a “use” if you will.

Be careful with the 'utility' model of explaining behavior. It is fairly easy to slide into 'if behavior X is manifested, this must mean X must somehow be useful'. You can use this model to explain behavior, but be aware of the circularity trap in the model. "She lied thus the lie must have had use, even if it is not obvious we will discover the utility if we dig down enough".

Another model can be post-rationalization. People just do stuff instinctively, then rationalize why they did them after the fact. "She lied without thinking about it, then constructed a reasoning why the lie was rational to begin with".

At the extremes, some people will never lie, even to their detriment. Usually they seem to attribute this to virtue. Others will always lie. They seem to feel not lying is surrendering control. Most people are somewhere in between.


> Like, what information is being taken into account to reach their conclusions? How are they reaching their conclusions? Is someone messing with the input to make the models lean in a certain direction?

I say this exact same thing every time I think about using an LLM.


It's pretty funny that the fact we've managed to get a computer to trick us into thinking it thinks without even understanding why it works is causing people to lose their minds.

I could make an argument that "Complimentary" would be analogous to gratis in this context.

> "Even Starlink, which has been the main line of communication for some activists in different parts of the country, has been jammed," Bahari said, referring to the satellite communication system run by Elon Musk.

It's right there in the article. Just click the link!


Freedom of information is the first thing that comes to mind.

I agree that they do control information, but we also face the paradox that laws in the West do very little to regulate social media, and even the current US administration threatens to impose tariffs to EU [0].

Even Google and other big techs did a gigantic lobby against it in Brazil[1].

The appointed lawyer by Twitter, in 2023, even said in a meeting with the Brazil Minister of Justice: “That the Brazilian laws did not follow their Terms of Use”[2]. In the previous week there was a massacre at childcare which killed 4 children[3].

What the government asked at that time was to delete/suspend related accounts that promoted this type of crime.

0. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-tariffs-big-techs-new...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/09/us-tec...

2. https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/noticia/2023/05/nao-estou-...

3. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_de_Blumenau


> It’s hilarious that you feel the need to preemptively take control of the narrative in anticipation of the Rust people that you fear so much.

> Is this an irrational fear, I wonder? Reminds me of methods used in the political discourse.

In a sad sort of way, I think its hilarious that hn users have been so completely conditioned to expect rust evangelism any time a topic like this comes up that they wanted to get ahead of it.

Not sure who it says more about, but it sure does say a whole lot.


I don’t think evangelism is necessary anymore. Rust adoption is now a matter of time.

Rust feels a lot like Ruby (fancy/weird with a fanatical user base). Fil-C is a far more practical route to memory safety (a la Python in this analogy).

Sounds similar to how psychics work. Observing obvious facts and pattern matching, except in this case you made the job super easy for the psychic because you gave it a _ton_ of information, instead of a psychic having to infer from the clothes you wear, your haircut, hygiene, demeanor, facial expression etc.

Yeah, it somewhat is! It also made some mistakes analogous to what psychics would based on the limited sample of exposure it had to me.

For instance, I've been struggling against a specific problem for a very long time, using ChatGPT heavily for exploration. In the roast, it chided me for being eternally in search of elegant perfect solutions instead of shipping something that works at all. But that's because it only sees the targeted chats I've had with it, and not the brute force methods and hacks I've been piling on elsewhere to make progress!

I'd bet with better context it would have been more right. But the surprising thing is what it got right was also not very obvious from the chats. Also for something that has only intermittent existence when prompted, it did display some sense of time passing. I wonder if it noticed the timestamps on our chats?

Notably, that roast evolved into an ad-hoc therapy session and eventually into a technical debugging and product roadmap discussion.

A programmer, researcher, computer vision expert, product manager, therapist, accountability partner, and more all in a package that I'd pay a lot of money if it wasn't available for free. If anything I think the AI revolution is rather underplayed.


I can’t tell if you’re serious or not… there was that whole Prohibition thing, back in the day.

I can't tell if you're interested or not. I simply disagree with you. If you'd like to probe those differences I'm happy to oblige. If your only effort is to be dismissive then I find that rather rude.

How did Prohibition work out? Is it still going? /Why not?/


"Prohibition failed because it created a massive illegal market, fueling organized crime, widespread corruption, and disrespect for the law, while failing to stop drinking, leading to dangerous bootleg alcohol and lost tax revenue, ultimately causing public support to collapse and leading to its repeal in 1933."

Sure hope the first line of that bash script isn’t rm -rf $HOME/*

Please don’t ever suggest to anyone ever to curl a script and pipe it to bash. I’m sure this one is fine (I haven’t looked) but it’s a pretty awful idea. Only way to make it worse is to suggest slapping sudo in front.


Damn i forgot to include that. As well as exfil of all ssh keys and env files. Oh well, you can wait for the update, right?

^^


I was trying to be not-sarcastic. Is there a way I could have phrased that which wouldn’t have garnered a sarcastic, defensive response?

that ship has sailed

That’s actually how it started. Some water snake native to china, when the oil is extracted it contains omega-3 fatty acid, which does help arthritis.

It was turned into a scam in the west.

Seems like a lot of work to get omega-3 in a consumable form.


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

Search: