MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robotbikes | 2025-05-30 13:03:45+00:00
I really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world. Here's an excerpt

"The Addiction to Acceleration The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward.

This addiction manifests as: • Inability to accept plateau phases • Anxiety when not optimizing optimization • Devaluing of steady-state excellence • Compulsion to add meta-levels • Fear of falling behind yourself Recursive improvement can become its own trap."

I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.
by throwanem | 2025-05-30 13:04:20+00:00
They have a whole lot of violence going for them too, when they decide they need to use it, and invariably also a considerable predominance in numbers. You're thinking about this like you imagine you'd be able to stay on your feet, I can tell. Maybe you're the kickboxer you'd need to be for that. If not, you are dreaming, and as with losing any fight, once they get you down it is "everything to play for."

There's not a wasp on Earth I need to be afraid of, just friends I've met already and those not yet. I've hosted them in my kitchen, on my porch, been in the midst of a hundred drunk baldfaced yellowjackets and not only had nothing to fear but I knew it, not because they could not hurt me - I'm not so foolish as to imagine myself immune to their weapons! - but because I know how easy it is not to make them decide that they need to use those weapons on me.

I am very careful to walk small around geese and swans at all times, lest I inadvertently give cause to treat me as a threat. You'll do what you like, of course. No business of mine what you think of your chances. I hope the birds keep not taking you too seriously, and that you never frighten a gosling or God forbid a cygnet.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-30 13:04:21+00:00
Let's say you want to release a deepfake image. Your AI image, as generated, is not watermarked or hashed. Difficulty: Story-mode. You can release your image in two minutes flat.

Let's now let's say your AI deepfake image is watermarked/hashed upon generation. Difficulty: Intermediate to hard. You might be able to get it done, but not without real effort, and removing all traces of the watermark without leaving artefacts might be so difficult as to be nearly impossible.

...So it doesn't eliminate the possibility of fakes, but it hugely raises the cost and effort bar. Only the most motivated would bother.
by u5wbxrc3 | 2025-05-30 13:04:32+00:00
> I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?

You don't see any issue with machine learning models trained on huge amounts of copyrighted and patented materials basically scraped from the internet. Yes you can make your animated film and audio but at the cost of hugely controversial and non-transparent generative models.

> Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.

This argument kind of conflicts with itself, no? Aesthetics are inferred from ideas either inspired or original.
by skydhash | 2025-05-30 13:04:48+00:00
As long as you create the grammar, the language exists. Same if you edit a previous grammar. You're the one creating the language, not the model. It's just generating specific instance.

If you tell someone that multiplying a number by 2 is adding the number to itself, then if this person knows addition, you can't be surprised if it tells you that 9*2 is 18. A small leap in discovery is when the person can extract the pattern and gives you 5*3 is 5+5+5. A much bigger leap is when the person discovers exponent.

But if you take the time to explain each concept....
by scrumper | 2025-05-30 13:05:10+00:00
I've seen worse at an airport bookshop. This was funny:

"The irony is delicious and deeply instructive. Every flaw we've identified in artificial intelligence exists, magnified and unchecked, in human intelligence. But here's the critical difference: when it appears in AI, we can see it, measure it, and try to fix it. When it appears in humans, we call it "just being human" and move on."

Poor Claude thinks it's all a bit unfair.

I didn't read much of it though, it made me feel a bit like I was a naughty avout being punished by reading pages from The Book.
by almostdeadguy | 2025-05-30 13:05:26+00:00
The "just a tool like any other" perspective can't account for how much talentless slop is in practice created by AI.

Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).

Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
by neepi | 2025-05-30 13:05:46+00:00
You have to convert to an archival format from whatever your raw format is. The issue with raw files is that they are compressed so any bitrot in those leads to more than just losing a pixel or two here or there but sometimes the entire file. TIFF is not compressed at all. FEC allows single pixel corrections to be done accurately. We had a metric shit ton of LTO tapes, changers and online disk cache that handled all that.

I don't do that at home. I have 600GB of Nikon raws. I keep one copy on my Mac. I have a time machine backup in the house (in another room) on an Samsung T7 shield and I have an off site backup which is a quarterly rsync job to another Samsung T7 shield.
by podgietaru | 2025-05-30 13:05:54+00:00
I have that issue too. But for literature it’s something more primal.

Fiction feels like the ultimate distillation of the human experience. A way to share perspective and experience. And having some algorithm flatten that feels utterly macabre.

Not to be too dramatic. I know that not all fiction is transcendent. But still. There’s something so utterly gross about using a machine for it.
by spookie | 2025-05-30 13:06:32+00:00
From that post, so context is easily discoverable here (I hate Discourse navigation, Discourse is the forum platform):

"It’s not a generative AI. It won’t invent anything. It won’t add details, any stylistic flourish besides basic line weight, cross-hatching or anything else. It won’t fix any mistakes. It will closely follow the provided sketch. I believe it won’t even be possible for a network of this size and architecture to “borrow” any parts of the images from the training dataset.

We will not be training the model on any of the existing datasets, or stolen pictures. All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for. And our particular model will work better with special training data anyway, I believe. Maybe you’d want to help out with gathering the artworks - I will be making another post about that soon.

The calculations will be 100% local and offline. It won’t send the sketch image to any server to process and return the line art. I’m not planning to implement any networking functionality, and there are no servers planned either. It will only use your own computer CPU and GPU for calculations, the same way all of the other features of Krita do. It also won’t train on your images that you make in Krita. It won’t save it anywhere either, until you save it with Krita to your own device as usual, in a Krita file."

This being said, I don't think this is the correct approach. I don't think you need a convolution network or training. You would need some very carefully designed filters with parameters exposed to the user. Granted, this won't do as much of a "good job" at it, but the artist will touch it up anyways.
by taylodl | 2025-05-30 13:06:42+00:00
Okay, but now you're moving the goalposts. First it was "we don’t manufacture," now it’s "we only assemble." Let’s not forget - it was the United States that invented the assembly line, revolutionizing global manufacturing.

In today’s world, assembly is a critical part of manufacturing, especially in high-tech and complex industries. Modern global supply chains are designed for efficiency and specialization, not 19th-century-style autarky. Trying to reverse that entirely isn’t just impractical - it’s economically and strategically self-defeating.

The real challenge isn’t whether we assemble or forge every bolt - it’s whether we maintain the capacity to innovate, produce, and adapt when it matters. That’s the future we should be building toward.

It’s also worth noting that the U.S. doesn’t just lead in value-added manufacturing - it dominates global finance, which is arguably even more critical in shaping the modern world. The U.S. dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, U.S. capital markets are the deepest and most liquid, and American financial institutions are central to global investment and trade.

This financial dominance gives the U.S. enormous strategic flexibility, from funding innovation to influencing global policy. Manufacturing matters, but economic power today is multidimensional - and the U.S. still leads on many of those fronts.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-30 13:06:47+00:00
I don't think it will be much different than how we already conduct ourselves online.

Consider the thousands of replies to a Reddit submission that probably never happened, or the thousands of replies to a screenshot of a headline/tweet/text post with no source and nobody even asking for one.

Thousands of people voraciously pretending it's the most serious thing in the world so they have an excuse to share their two cents and some emotion over it.

I don't think we very much cared about the veracity of most things we encounter day to day. It's mostly an excuse to engage and socialize.

LLMs seem to perfectly fit into this. Now everyone can find their personal hobby horse to engage with, and there will always be some straw men reply guys to keep you entertained.
by bityard | 2025-05-30 13:06:52+00:00
In the house I grew up in, we had an old upright player piano with at least 250 rolls sitting in a rack on top. The piano itself was severely out of tune and a bunch of the key tops were missing. The piano had a motor and vacuum, but neither worked, so you had to pump the pedals to make it play.

I spent many rainy afternoons sitting at that thing. I always wanted to fix it up and make it work (and look) like it was supposed to, but my parents sold it before I was old enough to acquire the skill to do so.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-30 13:07:10+00:00
> another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2;

Much of the credit for the victory goes to Stalin's USSR. Perhaps "not Nazi nor Japanese" would be more accurate.

> It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.

Always the path of progress, especially in science it seems. Darwinism takes over when the remaining Creationist biology teachers finally die, etc. It's possible that the 20th Century moved beyond this - Relativity and DNA caught on within a single generation.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-30 13:07:50+00:00
There has been an effort to deny all variance in human output or abilities in the last 8 years.

It works, because most humans are mediocre (including their managers). So they gang up on the productive part of the population, harness its output, launder its output and so forth.

Then they say: "See, there are no differences! We are all equal!"
by incomingpain | 2025-05-30 13:07:50+00:00
The california vc industry is literally a geopolitical tool.

>It is sometimes forgotten that Silicon Valley was itself the offspring of the US national security state during the cold war. Geopolitics has now returned with a vengeance and — like everyone else — the VC world must adapt fast to that new reality.

This is a big deal reality. As Obama, Trump, and Biden have worked toward this new geopolitical situation. Everyone knows what's up now.

China implemented strict capital flight controls; and even stricter if california is involved.

This all began around 2016 when Obama started blocking China.

This geopolitical tool has shifted heavily over to the middle east, japan, and india. It's going to be a "reboot" perhaps but it's the same game, it's the same purpose. It's simply culture and language which needs to shift. Drop the mandarin classes and switch to arabic.
by yeyeyeyeyeyeyee | 2025-05-30 13:08:11+00:00
To survive the future, one must start by understanding the problem. The world we see today is the result of choices that started to be made in the 1970s. The positive momentum China currently has started with choices made during the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. Things change gradually, and then suddenly, and the self-inflicted wounds by the US administration only accelerate what was already happening. There are few parts of the world not subject to the same forces. I strongly recommend reading The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot as a brief, first line explanation of many of the symptoms we currently see in the Western world.

The second thing to realize is that the current political and economic system is not a force of nature, it can be changed. Not easily and not quickly, but changed nonetheless. However, the beneficiaries of this possible change will be our children, and possibly their offspring.

As being stressed and concerned on a daily basis is hardly a useful emotion, we must take care of ourselves. It has become a radical act of resistance. To help ourselves, we can read world history, to understand how great powers and industries disappear and what can reasonably be expected in its aftermath. We can read philosophy, to help us think right and keep in touch with the things that are truly important in life. And we can create or appreciate art, to feed our soul. Importantly, we must make appropriate technology and media choices, so we limit our exposure to toxic things we have no direct control over to a level that is sustainable long-term for each individual. If you have access to a positive local community, cherish it and be welcoming to those who do not have that privilege.

I am not as bullish on the effects of AI as most people in technology, especially not LLMs, though I fully agree it is something to keep tabs on. It is however wise to see through the hype and beyond very powerful companies trying to justify an enormous investment with little to show for until now. Only Nvidia is selling shovels. That said, most CS has now become blue-collar work, and it is something people in the industry have not yet come to terms with.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-30 13:08:28+00:00
Ai is the future. Face the truth.

Human creativity is cheapened by AI because AI can produce work faster, equal and at many times superior to human output.

This isn’t something that can be changed. It’s reality and it’s not necessarily a good reality but it’s something you have to accept.

The procreate title, the whole marketing idea, even the article itself could have been generated by AI and we would be none the wiser.

I can use ai generated art and bullshit and say I used procreate and no one would know.

This ad reads like an ad for typewriters at the dawn of ms word. It’s just everything is happening 10x faster and it’s all much more tragic as humanity is losing much more here.
by luke-stanley | 2025-05-30 13:08:58+00:00
High value comments / posts are good to look for, though high value political discussion is almost an oxymoron. The post about it here was the first I heard of it, which is valuable to me. Zombot's comment (44133962) quotes TFA: "He outlined plans for creating government-run journals instead." this is important context to highlight, especially given the already demonstrated flaws that makes me want to read the article. The quote is instantly insightful and the commentary "There once was a time when we fought an entire Cold War to stop ideas like that." is a fair point. I come for the gems among the rough, and I'm really glad HN exists, even though it could use Slashdot style comment categories or a personal spam and ranking system! Maybe I should make a UserScript for spam and ranking.

I don't agree that it's pointless.
by soneca | 2025-05-30 13:09:26+00:00
> "The product is about manual drawing. It’s difficult to imagine where would you insert the AI in that process."

I can imagine. In fact, I wrote a scifi novel that imagines it! :)

In the story, the idle elite has painting classes with an AI teacher. They have levels of engagement they can choose from: see something and paint it, see an AI-made painting of that something and copy it, copy it over projected lines into your canvas, paint only the filling colors over AI-created lines delineating it, let the AI-teacher-robot fix the painting for you after you are done. Every student goes home happily with the same painting in the same high AI-made quality. :)
by ninkendo | 2025-05-30 13:09:39+00:00
RAII, like a lot of C++ concepts, finds the most use in library-like code (stdlib especially), where it needs to be super generic. Application developers get the benefits of these concepts by simply using these libraries, even if they don't have to care about them themselves. As an application developer, you mostly focus on classes as plain-old-data and functions to work on them, so you don't need to mess about with custom destructors or move-constructors or other RAII stuff.
by cheema33 | 2025-05-30 13:10:13+00:00
> It really does take the beauty out of the whole experience.

Beauty is subjective.

For a long time we were an agrarian society. Getting up early, getting on a horse and tending to your land every day, was probably considered beautiful by some. But we don't do that anymore.

We are probably going to see a similar shift in society. At a much more accelerated pace.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-30 13:10:42+00:00
You don't need to go to the bouldering gym to make small talk hoping it becomes more than that. You can make small talk everywhere like libraries, cafes, bars, meet-ups, concerts, stand-ups, etc. places where the main activity is talking, not exercising.

And if sports is your jam, team sports are better for socializing than solitary sports like bouldering, because you are forced to work together and build connections even without talking too much.

From my experience here, bouldering gym are the worst if socializing is your main goal because local people go there to exercise not hang around to talk to strangers and build connections, even if you're the one initiation the conversations. Socializing with strangers at the bouldering gym seems to be a mostly anglosphere thing or a big international city young urbanite thing as people mostly go there to hang out and meet new people instead of exercise. But again, bouldering is not a very easy sport for everyone to pick-up and master.
by ecocentrik | 2025-05-30 13:10:45+00:00
You also can't really stop the protests. People will be displaced from highly specialized skills that some spent a lifetime developing. Jobs that gave their lives meaning, financial security and a sense of community and accomplishment. You can't fault them for being angry or even hostile if they aren't presented with a dignified alternative. When you're building any disruptive technology, you should be prepared for hostility.
by myfonj | 2025-05-30 13:11:08+00:00
Good idea. I remember I have done some research about this in the past when I tried to trace historical arguments for the infamous "should there be a space before slash in void tags for the best compatibility"

<br/> vs <br /> (vs <br>)

discussion, but didn't get much far then (https://stackoverflow.com/a/30880386/540955).
by acdha | 2025-05-30 13:12:14+00:00
I think there are two key differences: a spell checker doesn’t write the document for you or change your style (grammar checkers are closer to that) so your work is still your style and something you can claim copyright on. If you sell your work, that last part can be important. If you’re an artist, customers are paying you for your skills and the more you say a tool can do, the less they’re going to think your time is worth.

They also have a bit of a different market: their customers are people whose work has been used commercially without compensation to endanger their future livelihoods. It may be futile in the long run but I’d imagine there is a substantial market of people who don’t want to contribute to the problem or worry whether Adobe’s terms of service give them rights to screw you.
by mynameajeff | 2025-05-30 13:12:18+00:00
I agree that's definitely the main culprit for many adult men but given this is the first mention I've seen of this idea after scrolling past dozens of comments above this one either attempting to re-invent the country club or immediately ascribe the problem to laundry list of imagined cultural enemies, I have to conclude we're either describing a different issue entirely or people generally have no idea why they're actually lonely
by diggan | 2025-05-30 13:12:43+00:00
> Adobe seems to be getting a lot of backlash from creatives at least on social media.

That mainly seems to be about Adobe doing opt-out training on people's art and data (and sneakily re-enable that option for people who've already disabled it in the past), not just because Adobe now has AI features you could use. But maybe we're stuck in different bubbles/echo chambers.
by shubhamjain | 2025-05-30 13:12:56+00:00
Disappointing to see all the snarky remarks here. Let me tell you, it's not easy to ignore the AI wave. The fear of being left behind is very, very real. AI-based tools are quadrupling their revenues in a matter of months, even on a very high base (Cursor famously going from $100M to $300M in 3 months). Reading "it's all over", "graphic design is dead" all over social media doesn't help either.

I am an author of a Desktop App [1] myself. More often than I like to admit, I find myself wondering how I can integrate AI, because that's all the rage these days and gets views, clicks, and potentially revenue.

Taking a firm stance like this and standing up for creativity is not an easy stance. Kudos to Procreate team for taking it!

[1]: https://textquery.app/
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-30 13:13:00+00:00
You start by attacking the ad hominem of "morons", but then in the next sentence refer to those morons as "lying and murderous".

I agree that they are more likely liars than imbeciles, but stupidity is now praised openly by the US right wing. "I'm a maverick!" - a maverick is a useless horse that cannot be put to work. "Those ivy-league elitists" - a phrase actually used by ivy-league graduates to pretend they aren't well-educated.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-30 13:13:14+00:00
I find I'm willing to explore a minecraft world or puzzle through a nethack dungeon that nobody bothered to create. You could argue that humans made the biomes or defined the layout constraints, but humans also supplied the training data for an LLM. I guess it comes down to whether the art is any good, with procedural generation being mostly irrelevant? But perhaps a book is different