MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carbonguy | 2025-06-03 05:44:35+00:00
I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrupting the paid essay-writing industry (one assumes).

From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?" have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly) predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who knows how long 'this point' will last?
by wltr | 2025-06-03 05:44:46+00:00
> The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.

Are. You. For. Real?

The planes terrorised Ukraine each and every night. Now obviously they’re gonna do it less. Since they mostly target civilians, it might not do much to the frontlines situations, and technically you can be correct here …

But my dude, are you aware you mostly push a Russian side in this thread? Eliminating so many war targets is a huge benefit for Ukraine. They eliminated one third of their strategic aviation, literally overnight.
by ggeorgovassilis | 2025-06-03 05:45:31+00:00
Location: Athens, Greece

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Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgovassilis/

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Industries: banking, biotech, consulting, finance, government, insurance, manufacturing, real estate, retail

Skills: agile, Archimate, business analysis, engineering management, enterprise architecture, ITIL, technical design, TOGAF, QA & test automation, UML

Technologies: Java, Python, Linux, Azure, HTML & JavaScript, SQL, Selenium, containers, various DevOps tools (eg. Jenkins, Terraform)

Wants: enterprise architecture/engineering/platform/testing IC or management
by 112233 | 2025-06-03 05:45:50+00:00
Not OP, but here is my observations: The llm are uniformly dumb and not "understaging" across all spectrum of topics. It is counter-intuitive. By asking llm to simply blab ("write a story about ..") you notice it:

- mixes up pronouns (who is "you" or "he")

- cannot keep track of what is where.

- continuously plugs it's guidance slant ("lets cook dinner, Bob! It is paramount to strive for safety and cooperation while doing it!")

— language style is all over the place, comically so.

— when asked about the text it just generated, is able to give valid critique to itself (i.e. having that "insight" does not help the generation)

Journalists may have shallow understanding of topic, but they do not start referring to a person they write about as "me" halfway through.

LLM is uniformly dumb
by justlikereddit | 2025-06-03 05:46:23+00:00
>It will power scams on an unimaginable scale.

The solution is to put an AI intermediary into interactions. We already should have AI that rewrite the web pages we view into an ad-free format but I guess my ideas on this topic is ahead of the inevitable curve.

>It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze.

Most of our work and employment lines are a variation of drugery a d slave labor so that's a good thing way overdue.

>It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust.

It have democratized the access to consultation expertise and an increasingly widening pool of digital skills/employees for everyone to use and access. A huge amount of things previously locked or restricted by capital access are now freely accessible to literally anyone (with some skill and accuracy issues still to be ironed out).

And this last point is particularly important because we're only going to have more and better AI crop up, and unlike a humans their time isn't priced according to living expenses and hourly wage locked behind formalized business structures with additional layers of human employees that all need to pay rent and eat that drives the cost skywards.

It also matches my own prediction of a mundane non-singularity. Long before we get anything properly superhuman we'll have a proliferation of innumerable sub- or parahuman AI that proliferates and become ambiguous in society and the world.
by neilv | 2025-06-03 05:46:32+00:00
> > Maintain professionalism and grounded honesty that best represents OpenAI and its values.

I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because of the way it's worded.

In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it. :)
by homieg33 | 2025-06-03 05:46:44+00:00
Just yesterday I fixed a broken wireless N64 controller receiver with the help of ChatGPT. I tried looking for YouTube videos, but didn’t find the exact thing I needed, and since I’m such a newbie I needed a lot of hand holding.

Anyways, I took pictures of the components and described what I was seeing. It walked me through things really well and asked me to do tests and report back. It even told me how to use my specific multimeter after I took a picture of it. I ended up soldering a jumper cable from the console power supply line (not working) to the micro usb power line (working).

It actually works now and really saved me 30 bucks buying a new controller.
by addisonj | 2025-06-03 05:47:14+00:00
I absolutely sympathize with this and was/still is my opinion... but the only "evolution" of that is the hope that, while I don't think you can prevent the scams and short-term pain on labor markets... you maybe, actually, genuinely get a tool that helps change some of the dynamics that has led to the absolute discrepancy in power today.

If AI is truly as revolutionary as it could be... well, who is to say it isn't the pandoras box that destabilizes the tech giants today and gets us back to a place where a team of 10 can genuinely compete against 1000. And not in the "raise cash, build fast, and get out while things are good" trend... but actually in building, small, more principled, companies that aren't pushed to do the unsustainable things that current market pushes them to do.

Once again... it is more likely than not to be a pipe-dream... but I am starting to think it may well be better to be realistic about the momentum this freight train is building and see if it can be repurposed for my world-view rather than to cede the space to the worst of the grifters and profit-seeking-at-all-cost types.
by danielbln | 2025-06-03 05:47:15+00:00
It's a while loop. You collect a ton of context (file paths, function signatures, etc.), provide a bunch of functions to the LLM that it can ask to be called and an objective ("Implement X", "figure out X"). Then you send this to the LLM, perform the function calls it requests ("open file", "edit file", "call service X") and append their output to the payload and send it back to the LLM. Rinse and repeat until objective is complete (in which case the LLM may request to call a work_complete function/tool).

That's really it. Stuff the context, loop over the LLM until work is done.
by motorest | 2025-06-03 05:47:26+00:00
> I think the answer to this is clearly no: or at least, given what we can accomplish today with the tools we have now, and that we are still collectively learning how to effectively use this, there's no way it won't be faster (with effective use) in another 3-6 months to fully-code new solutions with AI.

I think these discussions need to start from another point. The techniques changed radically, and so did the way problems are tackled. It's not that a software engineer is/was unable to deliver a project with/without LLMs. That's a red herring. The key aspects are things like the overall quality of the work being delivered vs how much time it took to reach that level of quality.

For example, one of the primary ways a LLM is used is not to write code at all: it's to explain to you what you are looking at. Whether it's used as a Google substitute or a rubber duck, developers are able to reason with existing projects and even explore approaches and strategies to tackle problem like they were never able to do so. You no longer need to book meetings with a principal engineer to as questions: you just drop a line in Copilot Chat and ask away.

Another critical aspect is that LLMs help you explore options faster, and iterate over them. This allows you to figure out what approach works best for your scenario and adapt to emerging requirements without having to even chat with anyone. This means that, within the timeframe you would deliver the first iteration of a MVP, you can very easily deliver a much more stable project.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-06-03 05:48:15+00:00
If I am not mistaken, was not cotton itself - while known and used outside Europe for thousands of years - the polyester, a kind or wonder textile, of the 18th Century Europe that drove the British colonial expansion, the global slave trade and ultimately, in the form of Spinning Jenny, the industrial revolution?

Strangely, while I disagree completely with the writer, I actually think he is completely correct in his analogy, although not the way he intended. I don’t believe AI will be a revolution the way Spinning Jenny, electronic computer or the Internet were. I believe it will be exactly like polyester, in a sense that it will be hyped for a bit, then people find the hype a bit of a silly fad, and after a while just get bored of it while it has become ubiquitous and plain common.

Same way the oat milk carton will be designed by an AI bot directed by some senior advertising agent - as it probably is already - and some video game turned blockbuster video is slapped together by a supervisor and bunch of bots - as it probably is already - but people will flog to see something that is masterful and make them feel genuine human emotions.

AI is a tool like any other and while I’m certain some future creative master will use it to make something truly stunning, without human creativity and innovation it will just churn out some boring slag that while vaguely useful nevertheless make us feel kinda bored and empty inside - kinda like my polyester sweatpants.
by intended | 2025-06-03 05:48:20+00:00
Which solves the now problem for the tomorrow problem.

We assume quite a bit about the challenge when we say it’s getting feature out.

It’s sort of like saying we can sprint faster with these tools, when the race is a marathon.

Or a better example is Coke vs Pepsi.

How do LLMs impact long term project, firm, process viability ?
by taurath | 2025-06-03 05:49:13+00:00
The worst part to me is how little anyone seems to care about privacy - it just is how the world is. The US economy (or at least almost all e-marketing) seems to run on the idea that there's no such thing as privacy by default. Its not a subject that is talked about nearly enough. Everything is already known by uncle sam regardless. Its really strange, or maybe fortunate, that we're basically at a place that we often worried about but things haven't gone totally wrong yet. Corporate governance has been not that terrible (they know that its a golden goose they can't unkill). We'll see what happens in the next decade though - a company like google with so much data but losing marketshare might be tempted to be evil, or in todays parlance, have a feduciary responsibility to juice peoples data.
by paulpauper | 2025-06-03 05:49:17+00:00
When I was a postdoc at Columbia, I taught one of the core curriculum classes mentioned here, with a reading list that included over a dozen weighty tomes (one week was spent on the Bible, the next week on the Quran, another on Thomas Aquinas, and so on). There wasn’t much that was fun or easy about it.

This sums up the problem. It's not fun and the only thing that matters is the credential anyway , so unsurprisingly students are outsourcing to drudgery to AI. In the past it was CliffsNotes. The business model of college-to-career needs to be overhauled.

The humanities are important, yet at the same time, not everyone should be req. to study them. AI arguably makes it easier to learn, so think this is a welcome development.
by simoncion | 2025-06-03 05:50:21+00:00
> ...have policies saying that they will not train on your input if you are a paying customer.

Those policies are worth the paper they're printed on.

I also note that if you're a USian, you've almost certainly been required to surrender your right to air grievances in court and submit to mandatory binding arbitration for any conflict resolution that one would have used the courts for.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-06-03 05:50:46+00:00
Think bigger than just the stuff you type in to chatgpt. People and companies are going to start running these LLMs on your entire private messages and photo libraries that are sitting in plain text on someone else's server.

They are going to have in depth summaries on everyone. Our whole security and privacy model up until now has relied on "Technically someone at Google or the government could see my data but realistically they don't have the resources to look at non targets" Now they really will have an agent looking at everything you do and say.

Authoritarian governments are going to have a 1 click CSV export for all the individuals problematic to them based on private conversations.
by baxtr | 2025-06-03 05:50:49+00:00
There’s a fine line between being an AGI skeptic and an AI skeptic.

While I don’t believe the “AI will take all jobs” VC tales, I also think not using LLMs in software development workflows is similar to not wanting to use Excel as an accountant in the 1990s.

AI won’t replace all jobs, but companies that cleverly integrate it into their processes will be faster and more efficient compared to those that don’t.
by gyomu | 2025-06-03 05:51:14+00:00
Not necessarily a bad plan per se, but don’t forget to take into account the fact that this jobs/rental crisis might be due to deep systemic+geopolitical issues that are only going to get worse and that we might not be going back to the abundance of the 2010s anytime soon.

Finding yourself in an even worse job market 5 years from now is a very real possibility.
by nitwit005 | 2025-06-03 05:52:30+00:00
But, logically, you need to spend time thinking about numbers to be good reasoning about them, and the calculator is about reducing that time.

I feel there's a bit of a paradox, with many subjects, where we all know the basics are the absolute most important thing, but when we see the basics taught in the real world, it seems insultingly trivial.
by kamaal | 2025-06-03 05:52:38+00:00
At some point trust will break down to a point, you will actually only believe things from a real human with a badge(talking to them in person).

For that matter, My email has been /dev/null for a while now, and unless I have spoken to a person over phone and expect their email, I don't even check my inbox. Facebook/Instagram account is largely used as a photo back up service, plus online directory. And Twitter is for news.

I mostly don't trust anything that comes online, unless I already have verified the other party is somebody Im familiar with and even then only through the established means of communication we both have agreed to.

I do believe reddit, quora, leet code et al, will largely be reduced /dev/null spaces very soon.
by motorest | 2025-06-03 05:54:31+00:00
> I'm not so sure that would work well in practice. How would the inexperienced developer know that the code created by the AI was correct?

Not a problem. The industry has evolved to tolerate buggy code that barely works. In fact, in some circles that's what's already expected from the baseline. LLMs change nothing in this regard. In fact, they arguably improve upon this problem as it becomes trivial to implement extensive automated test suites.

> What if subtle bugs are introduced that the inexperienced developer didn't catch until it went out into production?

That's what is happening in the real world without LLMs entering the picture.
by zefr-sre | 2025-06-03 05:55:11+00:00
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by tom_m | 2025-06-03 05:55:17+00:00
I think people fail to realize that to value software to $0 is to destroy the point of most of it.

If it becomes so easy to write apps, then everyone can build their own. They won't need your app.

The entire point of most SaaS business revolves around the simple concept/question: build vs. buy.

So if there's no point in buying since building is so easy, then AI isn't helping you like your software product/SaaS.

I think programmers may just become the "IT person" or "webmaster" or "AI guy" at a company that needs software. Not at a separate company building it for others.

This may greatly reduce the need for programmers. This will in turn reduce the need for fancy computers like that expensive MacBook Pro. It will reduce the need for web hosting. Don't get me wrong, these things will still exist...but the demand will decrease.

Essentially it will become the biggest bubble since the dot com bust. It'll be much larger.

The dust will eventually settle and we'll all adapt to a new world with AI...but I think the years and years of over specialization could come to a screeching halt.

The industry will likely implode and suck in all of the orbiting industries along with it. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think people quite understand here. I greatly suspect there will be far fewer sales of high end computers. Compute power will continue to move to data centers.

Think about it this way. Code aside, because it's not just a coding thing. If everyone can create amazing videos and full on films with AI, then they don't need all those high end machines. They don't need tons of hard drive space that takes all the raw footage and different cuts to make a video. You prompt and the get the exact result you need. Assuming AI gets that good.

So the more we push into AI the greater than "gravity" here so to speak and the stronger the implosion. I just see an entire industry collapsing in on itself personally. If I'm believing all the FOMO logic out there.

If "we'll see our first one person billion dollar company." Whoever said that is a moron. You understand what that means, right? If anyone can do all that, then how could that even exist? Are we all going to become billionaires now? No, to say something as stupid as that is to say software is trivial and worthless. So how could anyone start a software business worth so much?
by irjustin | 2025-06-03 05:55:29+00:00
Such is my pet peeve.

Soap box - Analogies simply don't help. They invariably have some flaw and rarely aid in actual understanding as is the case with the anode/cathode reference. I know 100% of readers understand that countries want to attract talent, but <100% of people understand anode+cathode functions.

It gets worse when others attempt to build off the analogy and so it becomes flawed on top of flawed. At some point, semantic arguments begin, i.e. source of electrons, and now we're quite far from countries+talent.

STOP USING ANALOGIES
by mindwok | 2025-06-03 05:55:50+00:00
"Correctness" in what sense? It sounds like it's being expanded to an abstract academic definition here. For practical purposes, correct means whatever the person using it deems to be correct.

> It can't do that. "My requirements" wasn't part of the training set.

Neither are mine, the art of building these models is that they are generalisable enough that they can tackle tasks that aren't in their dataset. They have proven, at least for some classes of tasks, they can do exactly that.
by dlcarrier | 2025-06-03 05:56:08+00:00
Counter point: Show me a web developer that can read a datasheet, follow a timing diagram, write a state machine, and service a watchdog timer.

In a field where the programmers don't know that floating point has different dynamic range than integers, or the difference between a blocking and non-blocking call, where there's no limit to memory allocation, and where everything —including the back end— runs in a library, inside a framework, running through an interpreter, inside a virtual machine, inside an abstraction layer, inside a web browser, inside of the operating system, and where metrics put release cadences over everything else, you end up with an environment where the speed, reliability, and readability of LLM generated code is on par with the average human. It's not a high bar: https://xkcd.com/2030/.

If you're writing something that requires stability, efficiency, and capability, you're not going to benefit from the output of an LLM, but if you're constantly "refactoring", by shoving a new web interface into the codebase of the old one, which itself was created in the same manor, several layers down, all so that you can release a new user "experience" every year or two, each running slower and with fewer features than the last, than pulling in code from an LLM is practically a requirement, and trying to make something that works well is a waste of time, because there's no reliable foundation for it to run on.
by jaggederest | 2025-06-03 05:56:23+00:00
It 100% will. Interestingly zepbound does more than merely lower weight and thus reduce sleep apnea as a secondary result, it seems to actually help directly from the preliminary studies I've read, much like we're seeing in other domains where GLP-1 drugs actually reduce e.g. fatty liver disease more than the same amount of weight loss alone.

I wonder if we'll discover that there's actually an endemic deficiency in endogenous GLP-1 production due to some other cause? The usual suspects of environmental contamination or subclinical infection, perhaps.
by weitzj | 2025-06-03 05:57:47+00:00
I was quite happy and entlohntes when I dropped an HTML table Formates with Emojies into my prompt and told to turn it into a terraform module.

But how do you quality check this part? I am proofreading all these transformations and I am not sure if this is really faster than actually recording a VIM macro, which will do the steps I need.