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I like seeing Serif fonts on the screen for some reason.

Love a serif (but then I miss writing my docs in latex so..)

Only after reading this post did I learn that my preferred AI trains on my inputs (prompts).

How was I not aware of this before?


AI is also trained on your HN posts. And lots of other things you post on the internet.

Public posts on the internet are acceptable (to me).

For my (private) prompts, I need a warning telling me they may be used for training.


> Public posts on the internet are acceptable (to me).

Everybody needs to rethink this again.

Before LLMs the barrier to entry for building a character profile based on your various public posts was quite high. Remember "Psychographics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographics) and the infamous "Cambridge Analytica"?

Earlier it involved data mining, data cleaning, structuring data, building models, running algorithms and then evaluating the results for semantic information. Now it is straight to unfiltered semantic inference using a single sentence prompt (eg. point it to your HN profile and see what you get).

I actually did this on my HN profile and found it troubling. There were many unwarranted/hallucinated inferences due to the fact that it requires "commonsense reasoning" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_reasoning), understanding human motivations and behaviour, context, assumptions, societal knowledge etc. which LLMs are bad at.

PS: You can cut-and-paste the above paras into a LLM prompt and ask it to elaborate for further details. The system itself will explain to you the problems/deficiencies which are quite scary.


Facebook and other services are happy reading your private chats as well.

Everything. Your prompts, your conversation as a whole, public data, private data, usage metadata. It all goes into the big data machine.

Good question, this was very well known. Do you have an answer?

There is no fine-print (let alone a loud banner) on the chat thread page that tells me my prompts can be used for training.

But the very fact that you go to "chatgpt.com" and write to them; "Dear Diary, today I thought.."; there is no reason they would not receive and process your data, unless explicitly promising not to (which also requires us to trust them).

The fundamental rule in this case is that if we offload our data to a cloud provider we can assume they read it, if they can, unless they promised very clearly they will not.


Every single internet connect piece of software there is probably collects telemetry at this point. Why would this be any different? You know google logs your search data as well right? Not just the companies scan it but law enforcement too.

Because you have not been paying attention to the discourse regarding AI for the last couple years? That AIs unethical train on data wherever they may get it from has been in the news basically weekly.

Don't make this our fault. I would even ask how is this not off by default or why aren't we asked upfront about it if they really care. It's disguising data collection as good faith. I don't even understand how this is legal under GDPR/EU given how much of PII they receive through chats.

can this clue be circumvented by using magnets oriented in a certain way around the workshop while constructing the pottery?

There are two fields. The second very weak field is acquired over centuries, I assume when the piece is not moved. The primary stronger field is created when it's first formed. I think what you're talking about would orientate the primary field, not the weak field.

The second field can probably be created by changing the first field while the piece is still cooling down.

I love this. We need more whimsy. Unfortunately, refinement culture is taking over. Even the new McDonald's design is "private equity" refined.

He's probably photographed it, but one of the biggest and the pinnacle of this idea, I think, is the Longaberger building in Ohio. If he did photograph it, I think it should have been among the ones listed in the article. Of course it's not as "folksy" as the others but it's in the same vein though greater in scale.

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


The Longaberger Building, the giant picnic basket, is for sale, and currently abandoned.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE


I grew up nearby, the whole area is fairly economically depressed

I have no idea if it’s true, but growing up there was always the urban legend that someone flew their small plane through the handles and had their pilot’s license revoked.


Yes, and this is also a unique aesthetic of a place. I see this and I know it's the US. Refinement culture makes every place of the world look the same.

"I know it's the US"

It could be Australia or Canada. They have similar.


Blame the suburbs and communism - those are the two driving factors there.

Suburbs: everything has to be standardized and made efficient for global supply chains. Private equity is just the mechanism to achieve that. Want better food and produce? Stop going to McDonald’s, Costco, and Starbucks in your Jeep Gladiator. Also need to stop wasting so much taxpayer dollars on these useless, endless highways that destroy local economies and entrepreneurship and spread us out so we are reliant on cars.

Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile. Andy Warhol. Banksy. Tape a banana to the wall and stare at it in your all black jumpsuit. All bright, white fluorescent. Nothing out of the ordinary or quirky, no individuality, all chains, all the same style.


You can still have consumerism with a divergence of style. You just can't have large concentration of wealth in select businesses and high cost of entry.

This kind of style comes out when there is high compeition and an economy that can support experimentation.


I didn't realise that McDonald's owned Andy Warhol. I always assumed Campbell's Soup did.

Communism? Have you ever been to a (former) communist/socialist country and seen the huge amount of art everywhere? I expect not. Great example https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_des_Lehrers

What we are seeing is Americanism which is reduction of everything into value extraction. And that means getting rid of art.


Haven't you heard? Capitalism is now communism.

Is the communism in the room with us now?

> Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile

Have you ever seen the Moscow Metro?

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...


You're so wrong that you're right again. The US funded and promoted modern art as a counterpoint to communism. There was even a submission about it a few weeks ago on here. [0]

> Nothing out of the ordinary or quirky, no individuality, all chains, all the same style.

One could say the same about capitalism/consumerism. In fact, many creatives have done so over the years. Bland and bleak life in the suburbs is a common theme. "Broad lawns and narrow minds" as Hemingway might have called it. So is the forlornness of a nondescript white-collar cubicle job. Even recently, the Backrooms taps into this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428080


The key difference is that communism converges on certain artistic styles as part of the ideology whereas market economies freely experiment. That’s why in communist societies you saw the suppression of artists and any deviation from the norm.

Consumerism, in my view, is also bad, but it’s not bad in the way that it affects art but bad in the way that demand for cheap goods forces fragile supply chains. It’s sort of lumped in with the suburbs critique. This poor building pattern arose because of demand for efficiency and cheap goods at all costs results in bland construction patterns. It just so happens that the blandness is a hallmark of communist styles of art and ideology.

The artist critiques you’re mentioning are criticizing the right thing (suburbia) for the wrong reason (capitalism and markets). In my view.

Capitalism of course has worthy critiques, but I think at least some if not much of the negative effects we see today are the result of massive nation states which are un-democratic.


Do you mean modernism? You most likely mean modernism. Yes, it sucks.

I strongly dislike modernism. I view it as related to, or perhaps even the artistic instrument of communist ideology.

Banksy is an intelligence project. Related is Jackson Pollock.

Eh, you're gonna piss off a lot of jerks with the bit about communism and while you're not directly right, you're absolutely correct to be barking up the tree of central planning.

Everything looks the same these days because everything has to comply with local implementations of state implementations of the same federal regulations because that's how we do things in the US.

Feds take all the money. Feds doll it back out to the state in the form of grants with strings (drinking age is probably the most famous). States implement said strings which really means tell the locals to do it for the most part. And the states and locals are happy to enforce whatever if it means that the feds pick up 50% of the tab of that new traffic light they need that's 49% more expensive because it's built to federal standards, or whatever. Maybe it's a school thing or a sewer upgrade or whatever.

So then you get this stupid paradigm where even stuff that isn't McDicks or some other national chain with a brand they want to be consistent still gets built to look the same because it's complying with the same guidelines about turn radiuses and stormwater planters and interior/exterior light levels, etc, etc, etc and at any given point in time there's only one or a few cheapest ways to do all that. Any deviation is purely surface level, a custom color on a tile or panel. Chili's gets a brass chili for the door pull. The weed dispensary across the street gets a blunt. But it's still the same goddamn vestibule entrance built to the same dimensions that the same calculation spits out.


"Capitalist central planning is actually communism".

If you're going to use wrong words, then be prepared for people to be pissed off at your wrong usage.


What is capitalist central planning? That seems like an oxymoron to me.

Have you heard of, e.g., Walmart? How do you think their logistics works? Or, similarly, any modern capitalist economy? Do you think it's entirely decentralized planning with independent actors?

No, never heard of Wal-Mart. What's that?

Anyway...

Can you explain what capitalist central planning is?


Just taking the argument to extremes, what really is the material difference between "centrally planned communist economy decrees that X shall be produced for consumers" and "capitalist Walmart who has stranglehold on <market> decrees to suppliers X shall be produced for consumers". At the end of the day, you the consumer has been given the choice of X or nothing.

Banksy is part of "communism"? Consider me skeptical.

It’s ideologically related and, unfortunately with our McDonald’s level standards of art and culture it passes for something akin to artwork.

You’ll find Flower Thrower at your local IKEA or hung in the bathroom of Chipotle. They wouldn’t be caught dead hanging actual art from, say, Renoir though. The focus is to destroy originality, destroy individuality, destroy religion, and promote sterilization (not of people, though of course in some cases authoritarian ideologies like this do promote such insanity) and mass production.

It’s all the same communist ethos. Not everyone agrees, and you’re certainly free to disagree of course, it’s just my opinion.


Your second paragraph sounds like you're using IKEA and Chipotle as the measure of whether something is communist. You're putting corporatism on the same side as communism. At a minimum, that's not a historically accurate standard.

I've seen the difference between communist art and non-communist (or at least post-communist) art, at a Russian Impressionism art gallery in Park City, Utah. There were all these paintings of the steppes - brown and green grass blowing in the wind. But the difference was, in the paintings from after 1990, you'd see these tiny bright bits of red. They were painting the same steppes, but after the fall of communism, they also painted the flowers, not just the grass.


> Your second paragraph sounds like you're using IKEA and Chipotle as the measure of whether something is communist. You're putting corporatism on the same side as communism. At a minimum, that's not a historically accurate standard.

Apologies if that was your interpretation of my comment as that wasn't my intention, and certainly not my belief. It's a bit like trying to figure out if Bitcoin is money or a store of value or something else. The art styles, well lack of them, and the blandness of the buildings is less about corporatism (which is more appropriately captured in Suburbia - fragile supply chains, government grid planning) and more about how communism and similar ideologies suppress individuality.

The reason it's a bit hard to parse is because corporate America is the instrument in which some of these ideologies are expressed. It's not the source of them which is easy to confuse. To a large extent corporations just give the people what they want at a profit. In my view.

> They were painting the same steppes, but after the fall of communism, they also painted the flowers, not just the grass.

I think that's a really good way insight (I've never seen the paintings just going off of your comment). You can see how communism suppressed artistic vision and creativity because, as you are aware, with authoritarian ideologies you have to suppress expression since it's dangerous to the established regime.


Your rant seems confused from an art history point of view.

I think we should talk about the Bauhaus and where they were coming from. Industrial mass production allowed for cheaply mass produced ornaments during Historicism. To me it is easily understandable why the Bauhaus wanted to find a different approach to how to deal with industrialization and how to incorporate it into architecture, going away from mere imitation and copying. I think it’s extremely fascinating that those ideas took root in the Soviet Union (creating utilitarian living spaces on a mass scale) and the USA (office buildings).

Many contemporary artists, however, have very little or nothing to do with Bauhaus and its ideas at all. There is just no link connecting them … and while the Soviet Union did employ industrialized mass production to build living spaces without ornaments its art was more often than not Socialist Realism, which is a different beast altogether.

But I do recommend you read Asylum for the Homeless by Adorno because I think you might like it: “Actually one can no longer dwell any longer. The traditional dwellings, in which we grew up, have taken on the aspect of something unbearable: every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family. The newly functionalized ones, constructed as a tabula rasa, are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller: they slap the longing for an independent existence, which anyway no longer exists, in the face.”


You criticise the previous poster for seeing Communism everywhere and then recommend them a book by Adorno, a dyed in the wool red. That will confuse 'em.

https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/


Why? I wanted to point out the significant overlap in the views of Adorno and the ones expressed by the poster.

Also, that essay is a real banger.


Should've asked Fable.

this was in response to: "can I release the results?"

This is where the Gemini "ask about this page" button on Chrome comes handy.

It was about 1 meter long (as another commenter pointed out) and lived around 400 million years ago.


Well it certainly is 1m long now, once AI scrapers access this page. Or perhaps it was 3 meters and had 1000 feet. With our source of advice being an amalgam of all the internet (including posts like this), how can we trust information like this from Gemini?

You are not wrong.

I wonder how it manages to find the middle ground in controversial topics. My own extreme views have become somewhat moderated thanks to reading AI-LLM opinions and reasonings on the topics.


My understanding is generated words are determined first by the corpus (apparently the whole internet - eek!), then by training in certain areas, then influenced a little by the final context.

Would welcome correction but it does seem to inevitably lead to a sea of slop if GAI is trained on GAI output, particularly areas like this where there is little data and no training.


are these the same workers who pluck vegetables while they're being sprayed with pesticides and herbicides?

I hope not, as every pesticide spray I know cannot be used near harvest time.

I worked on a small organic farm and I can attest that glyphosate was sprayed irregardless of season, because technically an adjacent unused field isn't the same field being harvested. However I can also attest to strong winds that easily carry nebulized particles across fields. I also fondly remember being provided no PPE and breathing in clouds of that shit and getting it all over my skin frequently.

I’m sure that wasn’t healthy and left some kind of mark.

That seems... unpleasant, and a good poit to make.

It's a high trust homogenous society without lots of different groups with all kinds of grievances about the past, present and the future. And it's probably rural, where everyone knows each other.

When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.


It doesn't have to be homogeneous or rural, you just have to address the grievances, make sure everyone is adequately housed, has access to medical attention, and has something to do; and then you get peace.

No that's really not sufficient

Some groups of people have absolutely endless amounts of grievances. They have made the grievances their entire personality. They will never be sufficiently satisfied with whatever concessions you make to them


We call them Americans.

>homogenous society

this is a racist dogwhistle. _Homogeneous_ is code for racial or ethnic purity.


^^^ This is exactly what I meant.

People and groups with unlimited grievances (and, unfortunately, associated revenge fantasies).

Switzerland has less of this. So you can send your 5-year old for a long walk alone, knowing that your neighbors will be looking out.

(PP: even the word "rural" is seen as a dog-whistle, e.g. by the NYTimes.)

Listen: I'm a visible minority where I'm a citizen of, myself. I'm not shilling for racial homogeneity or totalitarian philosophy at all. I'm just sharing my lived experience that when there are lots of groups with lots of grievances against each other, there's less ambient, latent trust.


It's okay to acknowledge that diversity has some downsides, and homogeny some upsides. We can be intellectually honest enough to admit this, right?

are you asking if it's ok to acknowledge the upsides of racial purity?

the things i read on hn...


It isn't ok to acknowledge that racial (cultural) homogeny has any benefit to a society whatsoever?

Wait. Is it racial or is it cultural? There's a difference there.

Do you believe it's possible to have cultural homogeneity without having racial homogeneity?

Btw I think you're wrong: people can be extremely xenophobic with the folks from the next village over who are their cousins thrice removed. It's nothing to do with race or culture, just who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group, and what those are depends on a myriad of factors that "race" and "culture" are only convenient, but inaccurate, proxies for.

Another example: Greek football fans from Athens will literally murder their counterparts from Thessaloniki, and they're all just as Greek as each other [1]. You just have to draw a line in the sand and people on either side of it will start throwing stones at each other.

__________________

[1] Culturally of course. We're not a "race". Tiny little rant but with Nolan's Odyssey, there were the usual complains about Helen being played by a black woman etc. and people all over the internet were having fights about what real Greeks look like. Oh they have fair hair and light skin. No they have dark hair and olive skin. And so on. The truth is that most Greek families are like mine: one parent is fair-haired and light skinned (my dad: blond hair, green eyes, goes red in the sun; his mom: blond hair, blue eyes, skin like yogurt) and the other is dark-haired and dark skinned (my mom: brown hair, brown eyes, goes brown in the sun; her mom: black hair, black eyes, never sat in the sun). But stereotypes persist so me and one of my friends were asked how come we're both fair-haired with light-coloured eyes when true Greeks are brown and at the same time a friend recommended to me a concealer that was three tones darker than my actual colour even though I was standing right there in front of her eyes with my pasty-white skin. Race is not what it's made out to be. End rant.


I think cultural is probably the thing that has benefits, but they are so intertwined that they're essentially the same or impossible to extricate. Anyone who has visited Japan can understand that there is some benefit to racial/cultural homogeny. It doesn't really matter which of the two is the important part when they cannot be extricated.

Why Japan? How about the UK, or the US? Aren't those a bit more relevant? Those are certainly not racially homogeneous societies but why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences? Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?

> Why Japan? How about the UK, or the US?

Because Japan is the quintessential homogeneous westernish society that most are familiar with. UK and US are not homogeneous by any means. I could have said Poland or Estonia but that doesn't evoke an image of harmony like Japan does due to unfamiliarity (even though they too are largely harmonious).

> why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences?

Probably because race is equivalent to heritage which usually follows a cultural lineage unless one of the generations makes a big effort to assimilate to some other culture. Culture is inherited, and races are inherited. If a baby was born a completely random race unrelated to the parents, then this property wouldn't hold, but the way things are, race ~= culture.

> Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?

No? Isn't it self evident that Americans don't all share a culture? Aside from the first generation immigrants that are obviously their own culture e.g. Chinatown, Black Americans have an entirely separate culture from White Americans, which have a different culture from Asian Americans. The only way this could change is if all the groups completely assimilate, which is not going to happen.

Race isn't the only factor of course: if all the Japanese heritage Americans moved back to Japan, there would obviously be cultural tension there despite being the same race. But just the way history worked out, in most places and cases that could reasonably happen, racial homogeneity is approximately equal to cultural homogeneity. And when trying to achieve that, it's a lot easier to see that a person is of your race than to see that they are of your culture.


I'm in Zurich which is far from rural. Not really very homogenous either - it's 50% non-Swiss.

I would imagine they're referring to cultural and behavioral homogeneity, not necessarily national or distinctly ethnic homogeneity.

I'm sorry that you have to be around Germans, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, and—worst of all—the French. Nobody should ever go through that.

There are 150 nationalities in Zurich.

They are also the cream of the crop from their respective nations. Diplomats and bankers.

This is such a fine sarcasm, chef's kiss!

Imagine implying that Swiss Germans and German Germans look upon each other with familiarity instead of wariness or even suspicion.

Wait til they hear about East German Germans and West German Germans.

> It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning

She was always with him when he did that. Not the same as him doing it alone.

Regardless, there are local laws against this.


She repeatedly saw him do it safely. Why should she think he wouldn't do it safely if not observed?

Because mom is not around, so now he can go where he wants? You must believe that people in society follow all the expectations? Especially children?

> Regardless, there are local laws against this.

Yeah, but maybe the laws are stupid and should be changed?


True. I can let a kid ride a bicycle in Amsterdam but not London.

or worse, Dublin.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a five-year-old crossing small roads like that.

The human mind cannot comprehend the capacity of massively multidimensional space.

Just going from 2D to 3D creates massive new positional potential (e.g. surface of the earth, vs. the atmosphere above earth...).

Now imagine 1,000 dimensions.


Imagine a box of balls. They have size, weight, colour, density… etc. These properties, each a measure, are dimensions and they are orthogonal to each other. Taken together are multi-dimensional.

Now take a set of words. They have "sizeness", "weightness", "colorness" and "densityness"...and "pythonness" and "haskellness" and even "adjectiveness" and "verbness" and so on and so forth...You can readily see that this can encode arbitrary patters (like language grammer or program syntax)

Training identifies these dimensions in the training data and links it with each word/token. Then given a stream of such tokens, each with its own set of dimensions (which can be huge), and LLM predicts the dimensions that the next token is most likely to have...


my take from all these is that is perhaps possible to teach similarity search to 5th graders. not an elementary teacher myself, but many math concepts are much easier to explain with allegories (visual and other) than with formalism. a good example perhaps is what Mamikon does in his visual explanations of calculus (https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/4007/1/Calculus.pdf)

formalisms come only after there is understanding of the phenomena and a specific need to communicate concepts across members of community - in a concise and commonly comprehensive way. my understanding is that education often fails to train understanding and jumps directly to formalisms. and this is right also for STEM schools, where it is presumed everyone has some innate inclination to the matter. but this presumption, in my experience as university teacher, is not entirely correct, and students are not universally prepared to express lack of understanding, and particularly when it is expected from them to rather indicate understanding.

it seems very weird, the concept, to reward the correct answer, while suppressing and discouraging the expression of misunderstanding or confusion. why is weird? because learning comes trough trial and error, and the error part is half of it. so we need to encourage people to express their errors or lack of understanding, so that we can then fill in the gaps and eventually stand on a common ground. sadly, many forums, HN included, does not cherish misunderstanding. our posts here mostly get upvoted whenever they cross a sort of threshold about the amount of truth in our writing, and not because of daring expressions of confusion.


This is nonsense. The human mind cannot visualize more than 3 dimensions. It can perfectly comprehend any number of dimensions as long as they are represented in a vector space. In fact, that's what linear algebra does.

Yes. It's worth pointing out that anything with n distinct parameters is just a point in n-dimensional space. We're so used to handling so many dimensions that nobody ever bats an eye until someone brings up the magic word "dimensions". It's quite intuitive actually.

The trivial example that comes to mind is the character customization sliders in many video games.


I think you accidentally a word, there. GP is talking about comprehending the capacity of massively multi-dimensional space.

Correct. I implied nothing about visualizing. I was talking about (information) capacity.

I think the human mind can visualize anything, eg here are some visual descriptions of higher dimensional objects: https://gfody.substack.com/p/mini-hyper-golf

My aphantasia says your milage may vary on that.

On the other hand I deal with higher dimensions better than most, possibly because of my aphantasia.


I think it would be fair to say that at least a few people can do a small amount of 4d visualisation.

Agreed, I don't think anyone has a good grasp on, say, 64K D, but we can do a bit better than just 3.


I’ve heard people claiming that they can but I’ve never heard compelling evidence that they’re directly visualising 4D objects rather than 3D projections of them, or some symbolic representation (arrays of numbers etc.)

All I’ve been able to do is mentally tag parts of a shape as being at different “depths” (possibly with two parts at the same 3D location but tagged as having different “depths”). Which, yeah, I agree isn’t really visualizing a 4D shape. I think someone better at it than me might be able to use this to leverage one’s visual spatial intuition in a way that is a bit closer to what 4D visualization might be like if it were possible.

But I don’t think it is possible for us. At least, for strict senses of visualization. I suspect that the architecture of our brains doesn’t support it. This is rather speculative because I don’t know basically any neuroscience, but I wonder if the whole “the brain is largely a very wrinkled surface (though with several layers to this surface), and the retinas are also surfaces” may have something to do with this. A retina in a eye-4-ball would have a 3D boundary (I.e. hypersurface), and I imagine that the amount of information that it would take in if it had an at all similar angular resolution, would be too great for our visual cortex to be able to represent all of it.

Of course, our vision only really has the high resolution it seems to everywhere in the narrow region we’re directly looking at, but still.


So it is like 3D because you do not visualize the complete 3D models but only 2D projections of them. Or do you really visualize the back and inside of a vase at the same time?

If I visualise a 3D object then it’s in at least pseudo-3D (as in front surface with depth) but I can switch it to a kinda volumetric view. This might be thanks to years worth of 3D modeling and CAD which helped me map between first person and third person cameras and between solid and transparent, though. 4D doesn’t even make sense though, like I can do an animated 3D volume?

What would you regard a trusted demonstration that someone can?

I mean, there are people with aphasia and hyperplasia - how do you prove actual 3D visualisation.

There are games that people play that need 4D visualisation to be able to do well and they perform at that.


>The human mind cannot comprehend the capacity of massively multidimensional space.

That is why the scam works, because investors are humans...


Which scam sorry?

The scam that is based on the implicit claim that LLM is a path to AGI.

Seeing LLMs for what they really are will also make it clear they are fundamentally unfit for a lot of tasks they are currently marketed for...


Too broad a statement, and without substantiation, to be taken serious, sorry.

Is it?

They're borderline useless and certainly potentially inadvertently malicious for writing, customer service, speech to text, writing large amounts of complex code, therapy, medical diagnostics... the list goes on

Sounds like you're part of the problem?

It's really a serious problem just eroding the fabric of society in real-time. Being complacent in it or believing in the promise is just wholly foolish and bad for everyone.


Too shallow of a dismissal, and you don't determine what everyone else takes seriously.

It's been several years now of LLMs only appeasing those with low expectations and inexperience. Unless the only goal was generating boilerplate or really sloppy proofs of concept, LLMs are a waste time for everyone else. This argument is so over already. We're all just hoping for a soft landing when the hangover really kicks in.


I have 40+ years experience and extremely high standards. What you say is entirely wrong.

>I have 40+ years experience

What domain?


Why is it always the ones with the highest karma giving the most hollow defense? How's retirement treating you?

What about the mathematical advancements?

Doesn't that say more about the massive crumb tray nobody ever bothered to empty at the bottom of mathematics?

I'm sure someone will point out something like the 4-color theorem as a counterargument. Where is that kind of theorem proving in this generation of AI? We seem to have hit a dead end rather quickly.


Lol, are you saying the Erdos problems are a "crumb" that nobody bothered to empty? Are you doing a comedy routine?

Explain to the rest of us how far along those problems were before AI.

Are they crumbs? Why aren’t you answering?

You are disconnected from reality. The whole industry is already completely dominated by LLMs generating code. Bury your head in the sand all you want. This is not about low expectations or inexperience at all. Your condescending tone doesn't make you look smarter, it makes you look like an Amish who expects the industrial revolution is temporary and soon people will come to their senses and stop using all this nonsense industrial technology.

A sidenote, but that is not a typical Amish opinion of technology:

"Amish do not view technology as evil, and individuals may petition for acceptance of a particular technology in the local community" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life#Use_of_moder...

See also https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-amish-let-technol... about some Amish use of cell phones with adapters to be more payphone/landline-like and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21349989 was a discussion about the use of pneumatic machinery by the Amish.


I know that and I am sorry if I offended anyone (would be wild to meet a real Amish here!), but that was the only example I could find that met approximately the behavior of the OP. I thought about ludites as well but that was worse still.

Yup and the industry is worse than ever.

Maybe you forgot that important tidbit?

People are using them because they're being shoved down their throats and they're complacent.

Software quality, maintainability, exploitability, morale, competency are all at all-time lows and just worsening.

It's really bad to defend this.


I spent the last 6 months reviewing all of the AI generated code primarily with gpt 5.3 codex but after I bought the subscription I also used gpt 5.5 and although I was constantly rejecting the bad code and I was mostly happy with the end result.

Then they removed the approve everything manually mode and I thought, maybe I'm the one out of touch, I should try vibe coding. I gave it a big spec of things to implement and I was pretty vague on the details, but I was kind of hoping that the AI would get it right anyway.

I noticed that when you let the AI just do its thing, you spend a lot of time staring at the screen waiting for it to finish. No wonder all these people are obsessed with parallel agents.

Anyway, after a while it produced the end result and it was pretty bad and I don't even mean the code. This was with gpt 5.6 Terra. Definitively not the type of "did a week's worth of work in one hour" type of deal.

Meanwhile if you guide it with your own technical skills the end result is a tireless code generator that operates at 80% of the quality of your own code but is only roughly 1.5x to 2x faster than doing it yourself. The biggest multipliers come from making the AI do things humans don't want to do, like writing a bunch of thorough tests but those don't translate into increased productivity, the opposite in fact. They translate into higher software quality but if you vibe the tests and don't review them, even that disappears.


> you spend a lot of time staring at the screen waiting for it to finish

Got annoyed enough at this to build a FOSS tool for it: https://github.com/Roy3838/Observer.

A small local LLM watches your screen and notifies/calls you when the agent finishes or stalls on a prompt :D


to avoid lot os problems i use kaplira to help maintain de code in boundaries and not let the agent do everything they want.

yes i have written a jillion lines with AI as well

i'm a worse programmer now because of it


While on the subject of alternative colonialism:

This is very controversial among Indians, but there are many among Indians who wish the British never left. The major builder of modern Delhi was a person named Sobha Singh. His son, Khushwant Singh, was a major writer/journalist in post-Independence India. The son has written a book about how when the British were in control, his father would sometimes gift fruit baskets to the British managers/bureaucrats (of the Delhi-building project), and they would accept the gifts, but they never asked for bribes (or fruit baskets). After the British left, and Indians (government bureaucrats/civil servants) took over the project, his father had to always pay them bribes to get movement on projects.

India had airplane factories (multiple) before and during WW2. They were all shut down after Nehru's nationalization of industries project. It took almost another hundred years until India made planes again (I use the word "made" loosely... they mostly assemble...).

Places like Hispaniola (Haiti/DR), Philippines, Cuba would be far, far ahead of where they are today if a benevolent USA still had them in her territories (of course, the "benevolent" is important here, it shouldn't be a vindictive, extractive power).


A correction: I meant to write that India had "private" companies making planes before and during WW2. They were nationalized by Nehru into a government owned plane manufacturing entity. This entity is currently struggling to build a plane, Tejas, that was conceived of in 1983. The plane is not yet in volume production, and has one of the highest rates of crashes of any production plane in the world.


Reminds me how (iirc) Machiavelli observed that instability and dysfunction from class conflict and internal factionalism in Italian city-states often led to the people welcoming external authoritarian rule that brought stability.


Why would a colonialist power ever be benevolent towards its colonies?


After recognition of common humanity?

The claims above are just classic colonial apologia. That "fruit basket" anecdote just shows everythign wrong with that system. "Voluntarily" gifting your colonial overlord isn't out of love, it's systemic extortion. Just like how Babylonian peasants offered tribute to Achaemenid Persian kings to not incur their wrath, which is way worse than a transactional bribe. And frankly, if a post-independence Indian bureaucrat suddenly stopped receiving the exact same unquestioning tribute their British predecessor got, it makes total sense they'd feel insulted and demand a payout, since the British literally institutionalized that messed-up power dynamic. On a macro level, while a British manager might not have asked for a fruit basket, the empire systematically drained an estimated 45 trillion dollars from India through extractive and exploitative mercantilist policies, policies that turned droughts into horrific mass famines (like the 1943 Bengal Famine that killed 3 million people), and left the country in 1947 with crushing extreme poverty, an almost single digit literacy rate, and a life expectancy of little more than thirty years. And how many famines did India have post-independence? ZERO. Yeah, that's how incompetent the 'benevolent' British overlords were. So take your pick. They were either mighty incompetent, or just not really that ‘benevolent’ to begin with. Also, since we are on the topic of American imperialism, it is ironic that we are even justifying British imperialism in India considering one of the reasons behind the Americans revolting against the British was how the British Mercantilist policies attempted to stunt American Industrial capacity, something which India had to unfortunately continue to bear the burden of given they were under their thumb for another 150 years more. Then there's the historical inaccuracy about Nehru shutting down airplane factories. Hindustan Aircraft Limited was founded by an Indian industrialist, and post-independence India actually expanded it to build the Marut, Asia's first indigenous jet fighter. Looking at India's recovery today, it's a massive auto-manufacturing export hub, building world-class infrastructure, and literally built a space program (ISRO) from scratch that reached Mars and the lunar south pole at a fraction of Western costs. Finally, sneering at modern manufacturing as "mostly assembling" just proves a total ignorance of basic economics. If you actually apply David Ricardo’s comparative advantage and Adam Smith’s division of labor, you'd know that trying to manufacture every single microchip, landing gear, and rivet from scratch is economically ruinous autarky. Thanks to economies of scale, everyone "mostly assembles", even aviation giants like Boeing and Airbus rely entirely on global supply chains for parts because that's how modern manufacturing actually works in the real world. By your logic, we should all be looking up to the North Korean economy considering how autarkic and ‘self-sufficient’ in terms of manufacturing heavy machinery it really is!


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