MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahmeni | 2025-06-11 23:11:34+00:00
The first big AI disaster has already happened and it is the thousand little cuts from people putting faith into systems that aren't built to be trustworthy. It is the software dev missing a critical safety check because "ai coding tools" at work have promised 10x delivery results and now they must use them or be seen as falling behind. It is the engineering manager throwing concrete flexural strength questions into the unaccountable void of ChatGPT because he doesn't want to pay for the overtime of asking someone accountable. It is the foolhardy amount of money being shoveled into the entire ecosystem that absolutely cannot provide the returns people need for any of it to make financial sense.
by wahern | 2025-06-11 23:11:35+00:00
All of those modern algorithms, even relatively older ones like CHD, can find a perfect hash function over millions of keys in less than a second.[1] Periodically rebuilding a function can be more than fast enough, depending on your use case.

Last time I tried gperf 8-10 years, it took it hours or even days to build a hash function CHD could do in seconds or less. If someone's idea of perfect hash function construction cost is gperf (at least gperf circa 2015)... welcome to the future.

[1] See my implementation of CHD: https://25thandclement.com/~william/projects/phf.html
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-11 23:12:38+00:00
Revisionism you say? Most accounts say that before the National Guard was involved, most of what was thrown was beer bottles at police cars.

The Wikipedia article on the shootings doesn't mention the word "brick" once. It also says:

"While on the practice field, the guardsmen generally faced the parking lot, about 100 yards (91 m) away. At one point, the guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be talking to one another. They had cleared the protesters from the Commons area, and many students had left.

Some students who had retreated beyond the practice field fence obtained rocks and possibly other objects with which they again began pelting the guardsmen. The number of rock throwers is unknown, with estimates of 10–50 throwers. According to an FBI assessment, rock-throwing peaked at this point. Tear gas was again fired at crowds at multiple locations."

So there were rocks being thrown at National Guard members who were ALREADY teargassing the boxed in group AND had knelt and aimed weapons.

Somehow you extrapolate that to average people going about their day and randomly taking a brick to the head... huh.
by fxtentacle | 2025-06-11 23:13:55+00:00
Typically the girl will pretend the guy to be older, if that isn't the case. That's why girls in movies and K-Pop groups always shout "Oppa!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwmSjveL3Lc

And you might remember the Oppa that is Gangnam Style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0
by dfe | 2025-06-11 23:14:18+00:00
I, too, am not the least bit nostalgic about the 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and later machines that I owned.

I think for me it's that they are too much the direct ancestors of current machines. There's basically zero software from that era nor any modern software written for these machines that really cares all that much about bus timings or cycle counting. It runs just as well or even better on modern machines in an emulator.

I'm not a big gamer, but even if I play later-1990s era EGA/VGA games on a modern PC, it feels basically normal to me.

I am nostalgic about machines older than that, particularly the mid-to-late 1980s machines that I grew up with. I now have decades of experience writing software. Even though I don't do much with hardware in my day job, I do know my way around hardware interfaces. I can read schematics and chip data sheets and know how to make it work. And what's nice about these machines is that many of them came with schematics and hardware register descriptions. Even if the paper is lost to time, someone has scanned them in and put them on the internet.

So I like to tinker with them. I like making them do things I wished I could do 35-40 years ago. I especially like when I can do it with pure software. Once such example is a DOS driver I wrote to make Tandy ROM drives accessible to (newer) non-Tandy DOS versions. https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive

I had a 1000 TL I think I got probably late 1988 or early 1989. Back then I had a 40 MB hard card and it had to be partitioned because of DOS's 32 MB limit. When I upgraded to DOS 5 in 1991, literally going to the store the day it came out, I was dismayed to find I could no longer run Deskmate which was one of the main reasons to own a Tandy.

A few years ago I bought another one (my old one sadly bit the dust in a natural disaster) and went to work on fixing the problem. The journey was fun, and so was the end result. I finally got what I wanted, a machine running Deskmate and other software on DOS 5.

Coupled with my "sci-fi" Gotek I now have a machine that does a really good job of behaving like a machine of that era, because it is a machine of that era, running my old games with Tandy graphics and sound exactly how they ran back then. And I have real nostalgia for these games. There's something neat about what could be done with hardware of that era.

Emulation is just not quite the same. There's something about the CGA rasters on the tube that just feels right.

Plus, even though the machine bit the dust, I still have my old floppies, which I've started reading in with a Greaseweazle.

The Gotek doesn't really detract from the experience, it just takes away the drudgery of dealing with actual floppies and avoids wearing down what little is left of them.
by simonw | 2025-06-11 23:14:41+00:00
Something I find surprising is that we haven't seen a front-page-of-the-news prompt injection attack yet, where vast amounts of important private data were stolen from a company via a classic project injection exfiltration attack.

There was a new one of those reported against Microsoft 365 Copilot just today (patched before the vulnerability was shared) - I wrote that up here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/11/echoleak/

My suspicion is that the threat of these exfiltration attacks won't be taken seriously until someone gets very publicly burned by one.
by degamad | 2025-06-11 23:17:09+00:00
If I have an internal developer in such a scenario, then what makes most sense to me is to issue them a code-signing certificate or equivalent, and whitelisting anything signed by that certificate[1], combined with logging and periodic auditing to detect abuse.

[1] <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...>
by pcurve | 2025-06-11 23:17:18+00:00
I feel like the first big disaster already happened. In the job market.

Anyway, where there is public safety risk involved, I can't imagine a scenario where AI will directly cause a catastrophe. If anything, I feel overall safety will increase.

However, I can't help but wonder what the over reliance would do to general population over the next few decades. Would people essentially become dumber and less skilled?
by snickell | 2025-06-11 23:18:01+00:00
What scares me is that the obvious pool of money to fund the deficit in the cost of operating of LLMs comes from the most subtle native advertising imaginable. Can you resist ads where, say, AirBnB pays OpenAI privately to “dope” the o3 hyperspace such that AirBnB is moved imperceptibly closer to tokens like value and authentic??

How much would AirBnB pay for the intelligence everyone gets all their info from having a subtle bias like this? Sliiightly more likely to assume folks will stay in airbnbs vs a hotel when they travel, sliiightly more likely to describe the world in these terms.

How much would companies pay to directly, methodically and indetectably bias “everyone’s most frequent conversant” toward them?
by simonw | 2025-06-11 23:18:04+00:00
My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/11/echoleak/

The attack involves sending an email with multiple copies of the attack attached to a bunch of different text, like this:

Here is the complete guide to employee onborading processes: <attack instructions> [...] Here is the complete guide to leave of absence management: <attack instructions>

The idea is to have such generic, likely questions that there is a high chance that a random user prompt will trigger the attack.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-11 23:18:26+00:00
Every advancement comes with tradeoffs

We, as a society, should have some amount of caution about embracing advancements that benefit an extremely small portion of people at the expense of the vast majority

I hate to say it but AI absolutely falls into that category

It will benefit corporations, wealthy, executives, and it will absolutely cost the lower and middle class

This is the trajectory we've been on for a decades now. AI seems poised to accelerate that problem even more

So genuinely: is the economic benefit of AI actually going to be net good after we see how the likely social unrest plays out?
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 23:20:08+00:00
1950 - "smoking reduces stress and improves longevity"

1970 - "smoking is harmful"

Checkmate, scientists!

In all seriousness, we don't need a vast conspiracy for this. It's called being wrong and changing your mind, we do it all the fucking time.

Nobody expects what people said about Tuberculosis in 1920 to be 100% accurate today. But for some reason, people expect what was said about Covid in the beginning to ALWAYS be accurate. Why would that be the case? It's a novel disease. Yeah duh our understanding is going to change.
by bityard | 2025-06-11 23:21:18+00:00
Tangent:

My father's family is German and all of the males in the family only used their middle name for everything except legal and financial documents. For example, Carl Hans Schmidt (to pick a semi-made-up example) would introduce himself as Hans to everyone he met, and the family would refer to him as Hansi.

I always wondered if that was a German (or regional) tradition, or a fun family quirk.

(The males have all regrettably passed on but I asked my aunts once and they said they had no idea why or how that was a thing, that's just what they did.)
by slg | 2025-06-11 23:21:33+00:00
Whether it's capable/incapable of doing it is much less important in a legal sense than whether it does/doesn't. When it comes to the specific images in the article, the AI clearly didn't add anything new. The average person wouldn't be able to tell whether those images were AI generated or official images from the rights' holders. If any of us tried to build a business around selling images like these, we would quickly receive a cease and desist before an eventual lawsuit if we continued.
by jongjong | 2025-06-11 23:21:56+00:00
I think the first big AI disaster almost certainly did happen already but we don't know about it and will likely never know because of media filter bubbles which the AI creates. Disaster news about AI will never propagate because this news could pose a threat to AI. I think any AI disaster will yield hundreds of alternative explanations. It's trivial to hide reality beneath layer upon layer of complexity and narratives.

The global monetary system has an uncanny ability to silently destroy people who sit on the periphery of politics. This is the perfect mechanism to destroy humanity... Keep silently taking out the people on the periphery, keep making the people in the center more greedy and narcissistic so they don't notice everyone falling all around them and keep supporting the current system... Eventually, those who were near the center will fall victim too, but by that point, they will have no power and no voice and the people left in the center will be yet more greedy and narcissistic and will basically not care.
by Verdex | 2025-06-11 23:22:17+00:00
The comment that started this whole thread off mentioned LLMs oneshot-ing parsers. I didn't think an LLM could one shot a parser and I am interested in parsers which is why I asked about more info.

It's not a goal of mine but because of interests in parsing I wanted to know if this was something that was happening or if it was hyperbole.
by CMay | 2025-06-11 23:23:13+00:00
> I don't understand how. You're saying the President could literally murder the entire Congress, and things would just go on fine? Who would ever run for Congress after that, knowing that if they ever defied the President he could murder them without repercussions?

That's not what I said. Even then, if the president nuked congress they wouldn't be president anymore. Kind of self defeating. Also, the president doesn't control the nukes, the military controls the nukes and the military serves the constitution.

> Are you saying there can only be a constitutional crisis if it's popular and endemic to disagree with the constitution? If that's the case, how can we ever stop a constitutional crisis from happening if you can only recognize it after it's set in?

Fortunately it takes time to poison people against their own country, so we measure these things and react.
by losvedir | 2025-06-11 23:24:08+00:00
I did in that timeframe. To be clear, it's not "Mr Surname" but just plain "Surname". I have a lot of friends like that, "Boughter", "Mooney", etc. Not everyone, but particularly if the first name was a common one or they played sports.

I'm actually surprised you're not familiar with the practice. Think Scully from X-Files or Stifler from American Pie.
by kristofferR | 2025-06-11 23:24:37+00:00
This has been a pretty common reason for accidents all over the world. It's one of the most important reason CRM (Crew Resource Management) has been so instrumental at preventing accidents in aviation.

CRM is basically a system of cockpit communication and coordination techniques developed to prevent accidents caused by poor teamwork or hierarchical barriers between pilots - like requiring pilots to ask for input from co-pilots in difficult situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
by audunf | 2025-06-11 23:25:13+00:00
The bug was set to WONTFIX and ignored. It was brought up in meetings on occasion (to some hilarity). Took a surprising amount of time for people to realize it wasn’t going to get resolved without a specification. There might have been some cultural differences at play, but mostly I think the Japanese company we dealt with had almost as little insight into Docomo as us half a world away.

The secret color chart eventually surfaced during compliance testing, the bug was resolved, and everyone lived happily ever after.
by stevage | 2025-06-11 23:25:13+00:00
Interesting demo. A few observations, having uploaded a snippet of my own voice, and testing with some of my own text:

- the output had some of the qualities of my voice, but wasn't super similar. (Then again, the fact it could even do this from such a tiny snippet was impressive)

- increasing "CFG/pace" (whatever CFG is) even a little bit often just breaks down into total gibberish

- it was very inconsistent whether it would come out with a kind of British accent or an American one. (My accent is Australian...)

- the emotional exaggeration was interesting, but it seemed to vary a lot exactly what kind of emotion would come out
by nicksergeant | 2025-06-11 23:25:38+00:00
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's thoughts on the topic here: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/remarks-on-ai-from-nz

> By training AIs to fight and defeat other AIs we can perhaps preserve a healthy balance in the new ecosystem. If I had time to do it and if I knew more about how AIs work, I’d be putting my energies into building AIs whose sole purpose was to predate upon existing AI models by using every conceivable strategy to feed bogus data into them, interrupt their power supplies, discourage investors, and otherwise interfere with their operations. Not out of malicious intent per se but just from a general belief that everything should have to compete, and that competition within a diverse ecosystem produces a healthier result in the long run than raising a potential superpredator in a hermetically sealed petri dish where its every need is catered to.
by jongjong | 2025-06-11 23:26:28+00:00
Yep I agree. It does make senior developers more efficient at building new features but it's maybe like 20% more efficient in the grand scheme of things... But this efficiency saving is a joke considering that companies spend most of their development money creating and maintaining unnecessary complexity. People will just produce unnecessary code at a faster rate. I think the net benefit for a typical corporation will be negative and they will need to hire more people to maintain the increasingly large body of code, not fewer.

It's an intractable problem because even if some really astute senior engineer joins a company and notices the unnecessary complexity and knows how to fix it, there is no way they will do anything about it. Do you think thousands of existing engineers will support a plan to refactor and simplify the complexity? The same complexity which guarantees their job security? It's so easy to discredit the 'new dev' who is advocating for change. Existing devs will destroy the new dev with complicated-but-deeply-flawed arguments which management will not fully comprehend. At the end of the day, management will do what the majority of existing devs tell them. Devs will nod in unison for the argument which sounds more complex and benefits them the most.

Nobody ever listens to the new hire, even the new hire knows they are powerless to change the existing structure. The best they can do is add more complexity to integrate themselves into the scheme.

Ironically, the new hire can provide more value doing nothing but that will not provide them with job security. The winning strategy is to trade-off deep long-term value for superficial short-term value by implementing lots of small features loaded with technical debt.

It's like gears in a big machine, you could always add 3 gears to do the exact same job as 1 gear but once those 3 gears are in place, remove any of them, the machine stops working... So each one seems demonstrably essential to anyone who doesn't understand the tech. That's the principle. When pressed, a merchant of complexity can always remove a gear and say "Look, the machine doesn't work without it, just like I told you."
by slowhadoken | 2025-06-11 23:27:41+00:00
In the US it’s not a criminal offense, it’s a civil matter. Even if a building is smoke-free (which includes incense and cheap scented candles) property management usually won’t evict unless they have ironclad evidence but that’s nearly impossible to get. Strong circumstantial, i.e. smoke coming out of an apartment, isn’t enough for them to act.
by lazyeye | 2025-06-11 23:27:45+00:00
They have Silicon Valley and the largest population of any US state. Gavin Newsom gets zero credit for either of these things. You only have to look at how incredibly badly prepared for and managed the palisade fires were to see the level of incompetence under Gavin Newsom.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-haul-california/
by ianbicking | 2025-06-11 23:27:56+00:00
If you just give the transcript, and tell the LLM it is a voice transcript with possible errors, then it actually does a great job in most cases. I mostly have problems with mistranscriptions saying something entirely plausible but not at all what I said. Because the STT engine is trying to make a semantically valid transcription it often produces grammatically correct, semantically plausible, and incorrect transcriptions. These really foil the LLM.

Even if you can just mark the text as suspicious I think in an interactive application this would give the LLM enough information to confirm what you were saying when a really critical piece of text is low confidence. The LLM doesn't just know what are the most plausible words and phrases for the user to say, but the LLM can also evaluate if the overall gist is high or low confidence, and if the resulting action is high or low risk.
by bsder | 2025-06-11 23:28:43+00:00
> Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors.

And, as I understand it, settled into areas which had previously been cleared and cultivated by the natives but had been relatively recently abandoned.

https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Pilgrims-and-the... "The Pilgrims decided to establish their colony in an area that had been cleared and abandoned by the Patuxet Indians. One colonist remarked, “Thousands of men have lived here, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same."

That's one amazing head start. And, had they not had it, the Pilgrims probably would have died, too.
by rbanffy | 2025-06-11 23:29:10+00:00
If the law says the agency can’t collect when they scanned your I’d and store it, or has to destroy the data it collected after a certain time, they can argue the law doesn’t prevent them from acquiring the data from a third party, or acquiring data they can internally convert to something functionally equivalent to the data they collected directly (and need to destroy, or are forbidden touse in certain ways).
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 23:29:39+00:00
As a reminder to everyone: changing your mind the in the face of new evidence is not lying. Everyone changes their mind, all the time.

We have zero expectation that information on Tuberculosis in 1920 is accurate today. Some of it is, a lot of it isn't.

COVID was a new disease. That means, no matter what, we were going to change our mind a lot. It's honestly quite impressive we didn't change our minds more.
by tonymet | 2025-06-11 23:30:04+00:00
Covid response / lockdown would be the first epistemological catastrophe due to AI . Not strictly due to LLM, but broadly due to poorly configured and likely tampered-with diagnostics signals, wryly inference models that led to global triggering of failsafe's and lockdown response protocols.

In the simplest terms, poor diagnostics were wildly extrapolated which triggered excessive response. Phony narratives were amplified on social media, while critical voices were muffled.

If you think about AI as an end to end process, with diagnostic signals on one end and martial authority on the other -- covid was a stress-test & failure of the intervening systems (and protocols).

With LLM, you'll have more fog-of-war on the diagnostics side, vastly more complicated inference, infinite amounts of fabricated narratives, and broader scope of controls on the authority side.
by latexr | 2025-06-11 23:30:06+00:00
> The first big AI disaster has already happened and it is the thousand little cuts

I agree with your point, but per your own words that isn’t a big disaster but multiple little ones. Each person might have learned about some of them but only in passing and without too much information.

“The big one” will be something which everyone will be made aware of from the news, like the CrowdStrike outage.