MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-07-06 11:50:56+00:00
> This one isn't for coding, they mention in the post that coding agents thrive in custom tool-use environments.

Well, that is why I am skeptical and said

>> I'm still waiting for AI/LLM's to be posing a danger to jobs other than those in software development and the arts.

The goal of this product is admirable but, I feel, lacks some grounding: doing screenshots, then converting those images to text, then processing, then converting that to actions, then converting the actions to input events ... results in 4 separate points of failure. So many points of failure each with a success rate (last I checked) of <90% gives you something stupid like an eventual success rate of 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.66.

The same iterative workflow for software development is pretty much 2 steps: process input, then produce output, with 100% success (or close to it for "output", as it's just rewriting the files according to the processing) and 90% for processing which is why it appears to work so well[1].

I dabbled briefly in this and explored a few different ways of making LLMs use the ERP/business system effectively, and with all the current popular business systems, this is simply not possible with a high enough success rate because those systems have few "structured text" output, and even fewer "structured text" input. In fact, some of them have exactly zero "structured text" input.

To make the most of LLMs in your business system, you're going to need a new one that is primarily text-IO based (structured text, if necessary) and only secondarily GUI-for-humans based.

[1] In truth, using tools is a poor way to extend the reach and grasp of the LLM into the operator's context.

It works well for one mainstream use-case: software development, because then you need less than a dozen tools to automate an entire development iteration (read file, list files, insert into file, run test command, etc).

Try doing that with a mini-ERP type of system; there's just no way to keep a small set of 12 tools that can do any workflow that the operator can do. You'll quickly run into a situation where every prompt request includes tool description for about 500 tool calls.

Agentic automation is working very well for coding, where all the input is structured text, all the output is structured text, and all the changes are structured text.

The only way for ERP, Accounting, etc to ever get to this level of agent-based automation is if the base product itself is completely 100% structured text IO based, with the human-operator interface built on top of that.
by meheleventyone | 2025-07-06 11:50:56+00:00
The reason for that is that the game is continuing to be distributed and the nature of digital distribution is ephemeral so contents like music are removed from the distribution when the license expires. If you own the game on physical media or remove the connection to the digital distribution service (never patch it) then as a consumer you’re fine as you note with the first sale doctrine. It’s just legally the developer can no longer offer the content as part of future distributions. The same would be true for another physical media release.
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-06 11:51:03+00:00
Yeah the moment you reach for pixel level processing tricks in GIS you need to pause and rtfm.

Grade calculations are right in qgis docs and part of their lessons, and are also top Google hits.

https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/training_manual/rasters/t...

Even better, you'll learn about DEMs vs topo maps.
by jawns | 2025-07-06 11:51:42+00:00
Subtract hedonistic and powerful.

I would say that adventurous, open and autonomous are three qualities that make a person interesting, as opposed to boring. They likely have entertaining stories and an approach to life that repels dullness.

And extroversion, though it doesn't have much bearing on being interesting, makes it a little more likely that I'd encounter them and get to know the three other qualities.
by einrealist | 2025-07-06 11:51:55+00:00
Isn't "Engineering" is based on predictability, on repeatability?

LLMs are not very predictable. And that's not just true for the output. Each change to the model impacts how it parses and computes the input. For someone claiming to be a "Prompt Engineer", this cannot work. There are so many variables that are simply unknown to the casual user: training methods, the training set, biases, ...

If I get the feeling I am creating good prompts for Gemini 2.5 Pro, the next version might render those prompts useless. And that might get even worse with dynamic, "self-improving" models.

So when we talk about "Vibe coding", aren't we just doing "Vibe prompting", too?
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 11:52:35+00:00
> The major AI gatekeepers, with their powerful models, are already experiencing capacity and scale issues. This won't change unless the underlying technology (LLMs) undergoes a fundamental shift. As more and more things become AI-enabled, how dependent will we be on these gatekeepers and their computing capacity? And how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources? And we haven't really gotten to the wearable devices stage yet.

The scale issue isn't the LLM provider, it's the power grid. Worldwide, 250 W/capita. Your body is 100 W and you have a duty cycle of 25% thanks to the 8 hour work day and having weekends, so in practice some hypothetical AI trying to replace everyone in their workplaces today would need to be more energy efficient than the human body.

Even with the extraordinarily rapid roll-out of PV, I don't expect this to be able to be one-for-one replacement for all human workers before 2032, even if the best SOTA model was good enough to do so (and they're not, they've still got too many weak spots for that).

This also applies to open-weights models, which are already good enough to be useful even when SOTA private models are better.

> You could argue that we already send a lot of data to public clouds. However, there was no economically viable way for cloud vendors to read, interpret, and reuse my data — my intellectual property and private information. With more and more companies forcing AI capabilities on us, it's often unclear who runs those models and who receives the data and what is really happening to the data.

I dispute that it was not already a problem, due to the GDPR consent popups often asking to share my browsing behaviour with more "trusted partners" than there were pupils in my secondary school.

But I agree that the aggregation of power and centralisation of data is a pertinent risk.
by bronlund | 2025-07-06 11:52:49+00:00
The unfair match between good and bad has most likely been a conundrum for thousands of years. Multiple solutions has been proposed as to how to deal with the bad ones, including; kill them, forgive them, educate and reform them - but nothing really seems to work.

One solution might be to gather them all up and send them to another planet were they can live as they please without bothering the good ones - and some might suggest that this is exactly what they did and here we are :)
by lelanthran | 2025-07-06 11:52:53+00:00
See my comprehensive reply downthread (it's very long, you cannot miss it).

While I am skeptical due to already having explored this for SMME Line of Business applications, I wish you all the best of luck.

My approach is to simply build a new system from the ground up that can take advantage of structured IO.

[EDIT: send me a message with a link to a post about your product (or this blog), I'll connect with you on linked-in and share your post with my network, meager though it may be]
by throwanem | 2025-07-06 11:53:06+00:00
I'm being inconsiderate because I'm dealing with people who mistake their opinions for facts and their aesthetics where present for morals, behaviors both well calculated to attract my interest without my respect.

I don't think you're an idiot. I think you're a smug, self-satisfied, deliberately ignorant ratiocinator who rarely understands why he succeeds and never why he fails because he does not really know how to think, although he is very sure that he does. This is the only conversation you and I can have on this website that is interesting to me, at least until you demonstrate some potential otherwise, which by now you seem as unlikely desirous as capable of doing.

If you want to boil all that down to something easier to swallow, then you're welcome. And, yes, I'm well aware that "no u" is as available a response here as previously. Do you think it will avail you more now than then?
by salawat | 2025-07-06 11:54:04+00:00
When the benefits accumulate to less than 1%, while the costs are borne by everyone else, who are simultaneously frozen out of benefitting through over-weaponization of high level network effect through acts of political and industrial collusion, then you'll have to excuse me if I give the doomers looking at their future a bit more credence than your starry eyed optimist. Especially when every "but no one would ever do that/that won't happen" that my more optimistic self believed in over the last half of the average human lifespan has inevitably turned out to have whipped around and slapped me in the face.

I'm a systems thinker, and a system is perfectly tuned to get the outcomes it does. If you want the outcome changed, you have to change the system. There's too much rent seeking, and too much power centered around woefully too few fools to keep one another from dicking around too extravagantly with it.
by fud101 | 2025-07-06 11:54:44+00:00
Tell me more. Lol. I just did a 10k run, I tracked it with my watch but tell me how any of that matters to anyone except me (and it doesn't even matter to me what my HR was over that run - though i did use a HRM but mainly to keep myself from over-exertion). I really don't understand what fitness apps are supposed to do, they're possibly the most useless thing ever invented. I wrote my own app in Clojure over a decade ago and used it to track my workouts for a year or two, I never ever go back and look at a workout more than a week ago, maybe 2 weeks at the most, it simply isn't good data, it is the least valuable data one can generate.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-07-06 11:54:51+00:00
And it made the web experience way worse. Would have been much better to just take back the cookie popups in the browsers, and require each site to publish ToS in a standard format to the browser. I want to approve each data sink once, and each type of clause in ToSes once. They took the technically easy way out. Not very well thought out, but great for adding web dev jobs, of course.
by kotaKat | 2025-07-06 11:55:38+00:00
The Extraction Wizard is a bit clunky opening a dialog box asking where you want to extract things...

...then a brief flash as the decompress happens because it's no longer 1998 and we're not extracting 2 MB of ZIP files on a Pentium 166,

... then you get a silly "complete!" screen with a pre-filled checkbox that spawns another Windows Explorer window by default.

Eh, three clunky "wizard" screens is a bit much for a "extract here..." command.
by lyu07282 | 2025-07-06 11:56:10+00:00
> I can't afford a car or a house instead of an apartment (also as my wife is still looking for work). Meanwhile terrible criminals like the Nytorgsmannen got only ~5 years in prison for over 25 rapes, and was living in a rent-controlled apartment in central Stockholm! I wouldn't be able to afford that at market rates!

This almost reads like a satire of right-wing populist propaganda, people's real economic grievances are getting redirected towards the most inconsequential and powerless scapegoats in society, immigrants.

This is especially tragic for people who themselves are immigrants who will also become the target by these populists. The more people suffer economically, the more they are looking for real alternatives. Then an "outsider" right populist comes in and offers just that, except of course with the backing by the wealthiest class of society, the ones actually responsible for your economic grievances in the first place.

This pattern repeats itself all across the western liberal democracies. Its not the people rising up, it's the richest people in the world holding on to power while the neoliberal house of cards that made them rich comes crumbling down.
by rr808 | 2025-07-06 11:56:56+00:00
> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
by sofixa | 2025-07-06 11:56:59+00:00
As worrying as this story is, I find it interesting and consoling that the BBC, which is a state owned media, didn't hesitate and even strongly pushed to investigate and publish a story of abuse at another government agency. They weren't pressured to drop it, but kept going.

Goes strongly against the common narrative about "the mainstream media" and state media in particular (about them being complicit and useless).
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-06 11:57:36+00:00
> tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package

A thousand times, yes.

And even if you find ethical jobs (e.g., paid-for and ethically committed open source work), they are much-much more difficult to do well. Distrust and secrecy are absolutely rampant between you and your (inevitably proprietary) partners; reverse engineering plays a central role. It's a warzone -- and the constant fighting, battling, against measures put in place by other humans, just takes the will to live out of me.

It should be possible for well-paying, ethical, interesting, and co-operative jobs to exist. They only exist as exceptions.
by csomar | 2025-07-06 11:57:46+00:00
Does this assume they all have the AGI at the same time? In that case, it depends on the local ruling gang; whether they want to adopt its advice or not.

But oversimplifying: Assuming all countries have access to AGI and just start implementations of whatever it is suggesting.

The countries that will do well are resource rich and population rich. Since brain power is unlimited, the limit is physical labor. Countries like Indonesia will be super rich while countries like Switzerland will become relatively poor to where they ranked before.

In reality, your odds are as good as mine. There are lots of variables at play, and the first mover advantage will be big (as first country/company/guys to reach AGI).
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-06 11:57:47+00:00
Most people coming into the workforce today have grown up on iOS and Android. To them, the phone is the default, the computer used to be what grownups use to do work. Watching them start using computers is very similar to those videos from the 80s and 90s of office workers using a computer for the first time.

The appification of UI is a necessary evil if you want people in their mid twenties or lower to use your OS. The world is moving to mobile-first, and UI is following suit, even in places it doesn't make sense.

Give a kid a UI from the 90s, styled after industrial control panels, and they'll be as confused as you are with touch screen designs. Back in the day, stereos used to provide radio buttons and sliders for tuning, but those devices aren't used anymore. I don't remember the last device I've used that had a physical toggle button, for instance.

UI is moving away from replicating the stereos from the 80s to replicating the electronics young people are actually using. That includes adding mobile paradigms in places that don't necessarily make sense, just like weird stereo controls were all over computers for no good reason.

If you prefer the traditional UX, you can set things up the way you want. Classic Shell will get you your NT-Vista task bar. Gnome Shell has a whole bunch of task bar options. The old approach may no longer be the default one, but it's still an option for those that want it.
by tomhow | 2025-07-06 11:57:56+00:00
It's an imperfect system and some human judgment about fairness applies.

In this case, the original URL submitted had the YouTube video prominently embedded, along with some commentary. It's no big deal to do that, as sometimes the commentary adds something. In this case nobody seems to think it does so I updated the URL to the primary source, but there's no need to penalize the submitter.

If the primary/best source for a topic has been submitted by multiple people, all being equal we'll promote the first-submitted one to the front page and mark later ones as dupes.

But things aren't always equal, and if the first submission was from a user who submits a lot and gets many big front page hits, we don't feel the need to just hand them more karma and will happily give the points to a less karma-rich user who submitted it later, especially if theirs is already on the front page.
by 20k | 2025-07-06 11:57:56+00:00
The issue is that you have to put in more effort to solve a problem using AI, than to just solve it yourself

If I have to do extensive subtle prompt engineering and use a lot of mental effort to solve my problem... I'll just solve the problem instead. Programming is a mental discipline - I don't need help typing, and if using an AI means putting in more brainpower, its fundamentally failed at improving my ability to engineer software
by 0xTJ | 2025-07-06 11:58:16+00:00
I do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers.

They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)

There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
by xg15 | 2025-07-06 11:58:59+00:00
I guess the (media) battle is on now.

In some ways I think even this statement by the trade association is already a win - the initiative forced them to explicitly address topics such as private servers, which they'd rather not talk about at all. Their statement also made it easy to ask counter questions regarding offline single-player or actual player compensation on shutdown. (I love the "we understand it can be disappointing, but we give players fair notice" statement, as if players didn't pay money for this)

I don't expect a lot of support from EU politicians for the initiative, as the current Parliament is even more conservative and corporate-friendly than usual. But well, hope dies last, and at least the will of the public seems to be there. (And also the appearance of being a tech regulator has become more popular in Brussels)

So we'll see.
by javitury | 2025-07-06 11:59:37+00:00
I agree with you, uber is a good 1st option. In my previous comment I wanted to remark that it's not flawless, but I think we are on the same page about this as well. It pays off to keep alternatives in mind when things seem to go sideways (request another driver, use a taxi, be more vocal ...). Also travelling makes me tired and then I just let issues slide
by aredox | 2025-07-06 12:00:16+00:00
The majority of people did nothing to stop him and still, day after day, does nothing to stop him. The whole Republican party feels unthreatened enough by being voted out by "the majority of Americans" that they enable Trump.

Where are your second amendment guys? Still in full support of tyranny? The only guys trying to get a shot at your politicians are psychos and dumb idiots who want to become famous. Not a single hint of politics - except as a show - in their empty head.
by _mitterpach | 2025-07-06 12:00:26+00:00
This might be completely wrong, since my understanding is based very much off of Truck Simulator games, but isn’t one of the reasons aerodynamics as well? The US is huge, and trips can take several days at high speeds, so aerodynamic improvements can save quite a bit of money, whereas EU is smaller, the trucks do not go at large speeds for as long and have to navigate tiny city streets, thus being more compact is an advantage there.
by luqtas | 2025-07-06 12:00:49+00:00
hopefully a DRM-free, peer-to-peer network way of distributing games without the abusive 1/4 tax out of your revenue simply because they are hosting your game

don't came with visibility talk because chances of having your indie title being seen there is minimal. marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly. and don't came up with "THEY OFFER ONLINE SERVICES AND OTHER GOODS" because most don't even f* care about dark-pattern-grind-like achievements or a social-media HUB for sharing screenshots or streaming

if they at least sold Deck at a true loss and made a decent VR (also sold at loss) i wouldn't be hating for sure /s
by Aerbil313 | 2025-07-06 12:01:11+00:00
> Democracy, haha, you think the algorithms will let you vote to kill them? Your vote is as decoupled from action as the amount Uber pays the driver is decoupled from the fare that you pay.

Relevant here, all the way from 1975:

"...In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning."

- Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)