MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-07-07 23:17:54+00:00
> It wasn't a simple brute force.

I think you misunderstood me.

"Simple" is the key word here, right? You agree that it is still under the broad class of "brute force"?

I'm not saying Claude is naively brute forcing. In fact, with lack of interpretibility of these machines it is difficult to say what kind of optimization it is doing and how complex that it (this was a key part tbh).

My point was to help with this

> I really don't want to anthropomorphize these programs, but it's just so hard when it's acting so much like a person...

Which requires you to understand how some actions can be mechanical. You admitted to cognitive dissonance (something we all do and I fully agree is hard not to do) and wanting to fight it. We're just trying to find some helpful avenues to do so.

> It's "responding" to stimuli in logical ways.

And so too can a simple program, right? A program can respond to user input and there is certainly a logic path it will follow. Our non-ML program is likely going to have a deterministic path (there is still probabilistic programming...), but that doesn't mean it isn't logic, right?

But the real question here, which you have to ask yourself (constantly) is "how do I differentiate a complex program that I don't understand from a conscious entity?" I guarantee you that you don't have the answer (because no one does). But isn't that a really good reason to be careful about anthropomorphizing it?

That's the duck test.

How do you determine if it is a real duck or a highly sophisticated animatronic?

If you anthropomorphize, you rule out the possibility that it is a highly sophisticated animatronic and you *MUST* make the assumption that you are not only an expert, but a perfect, duck detector. But simultaneously we cannot rule out that it is a duck, right? Because, we aren't a perfect duck detector *AND* we aren't an expert in highly sophisticated animatronics (especially of the duck kind).

Remember, there are not two answers to every True-False question, there are three. Every True-False question either has an answer of "True", "False", or "Indeterminate". So don't naively assume it is binary. We all know the Halting Problem, right? (also see my namesake or quantum physics if you want to see such things pop up outside computing)

Though I agree, it can be very spooky. But that only increases the importance of trying to develop mental models that help us more objectively evaluate things. And that requires "indeterminate" be a possibility. This is probably the best place to start to combat the cognitive dissonance.
by Boldened15 | 2025-07-07 23:18:56+00:00
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.

Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.

Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 23:19:01+00:00
> Consider:

>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]

It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.

But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
by bastawhiz | 2025-07-07 23:19:25+00:00
Some of the arguments are very strange:

> Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).

> we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects.

An AI agent, even if it's just "MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities" can be an insider threat. The research proves it:

[PDF] See 4.1.1.2: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686...

It really doesn't matter whether the AI agent is conscious or just crunching numbers on a GPU. If something inside your system is capable of—given some inputs—sabotaging and blackmailing your organization on its own (which is to say, taking on realistic behavior of a threat actor), the outcome is the same! You don't need believe it's thinking, the moment that this software has flipped its bits into "blackmail mode", it's acting nefariously.

The vocabulary to describe what's happening is completely and utterly moot: the software is printing out some reasoning for its actions _and then attempting the actions_. It's making "harmful actions" and the printed context appears to demonstrate a goal that the software is working towards. Whether or not that goal is invented through some linear algebra isn't going to make your security engineers sleep any better.

> This muddles the public discussion. We have many historical examples of humanity ascribing bad random events to "the wrath of god(s)" (earthquakes, famines, etc.), "evil spirits" and so forth. The fact that intelligent highly educated researchers talk about these mathematical objects in anthropomorphic terms makes the technology seem mysterious, scary, and magical.

The anthropomorphization, IMO, is due to the fact that it's _essentially impossible_ to talk about the very real, demonstrable behaviors and problems that LLMs exhibit today without using terms that evoke human functions. We don't have another word for "do" or "remember" or "learn" or "think" when it comes to LLMs that _isn't_ anthropomorphic, and while you can argue endlessly about "hormones" and "neurons" and "millions of years of selection pressure", that's not going to help anyone have a conversation about their work. If AI researchers started coming up with new, non-anthropomorphic verbs, it would be objectively worse and more complicated in every way.
by m4x | 2025-07-07 23:21:12+00:00
Aaron Swartz wanted to provide the public with open access to paywalled journal articles, while Anthropic want to use other people's copyrighted material to train their own private models that they restrict access to via a paywall. It's wild (but unsurprising) that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under the CFAA for this while Anthropic is allowed to become commercially successful
by p1necone | 2025-07-07 23:21:50+00:00
I think it heavily depends on who you're working for.

If they get out of the way and let you do the thing you love how you want to do it you'll get good results for you and them.

If they treat you like a cog in a machine and assume they need to carrot and stick you into doing things because you might not really want to be there, you'll be miserable.
by echelon | 2025-07-07 23:22:03+00:00
Disney invited me to talk about my GenAI startup and research in front of a bunch of their execs across ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Streaming, etc. All of their folks were super nice and gracious to our small startup except for one.

Steve May basically scoffed at how little my small team could accomplish. Mind you we were using mocapped skeletal animation and object animation curves to fully steer video diffusion over a year and a half ago. Before image to video modalities. He picked apart our training and engineering and gloated that they could do better.

The incident is seared into my brain.

I can't help but think of Disney as the Empire and Pixar as the Death Star.
by adambatkin | 2025-07-07 23:22:26+00:00
My car beeps occasionally, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level you describe. Some of them represent real safety issues, even if you don't think they do in that moment. For example, my TPMS has saved alerted me to low tire pressure when I didn't know I had a leak, and the fact that it beeps a couple times every time I start the car is both helpful ("oh right, I need to get that fixed soon") and far from annoying.

Accidentally leaving a kid locked in a car on a hot Summer day is beyond horrific. How many kids should die before we think the annoyance of an extra beep would be worth it?
by lelanthran | 2025-07-07 23:23:21+00:00
> I think you're absolutely right that judging LLMs' "intelligence" on their ability to count letters is silly.

I don't think it is silly; it's an accurate reflection that what is happening inside the black box is not at all similar to what is happening inside a brain.

Computer: trained on trillions of words, gets tripped up by spelling puzzles.

My five year old: trained on Distar alphabet since three, working vocab of perhaps a thousand words, can read maybe half of those and still gets the spelling puzzles correct.

There's something fundamentally very different that has emerged from the black box, but it is not intelligence as we know it.
by mattigames | 2025-07-07 23:23:29+00:00
Yes they do manipulate them into being active on social media, among other ways by faking having private messages with them, which of course they will talk about on their circles: "Within the past few years, the industry has pioneered a new way to monetize fans’ emotional needs by creating dedicated mobile apps, such as Bubble and Universe, that simulate private messaging between idols and fans." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/kpop-private-messaging/
by computably | 2025-07-07 23:23:38+00:00
> "one plus one equals two" can be understood and worked with without ever feeling water over your hand. It is a priori knowledge

"Understood" and "worked with" are completely different.

The complete absence of embodiment is several degrees removed from "feeling water over your hand." LLMs have no sensory apparatus to relate the word "one" to actual, discrete, singular objects. The most rudimentary calculator can represent and compute "1+1=2", but I doubt any philosophical tradition or even an educated layperson would claim calculators "understand what 1+1=2 means." The "understanding" part has nothing to do with the accuracy or truthfulness of the computation; it comes from the relation of the abstract statement to counting of actual objects.
by pcurve | 2025-07-07 23:24:00+00:00
Figma has neglected its core audience - the designers.

Instead, it is trying to be all things to everyone, except it's serving no on well at this point.

And it all started with FigJam. Still a half-baked product trying to take piece of pie from Miro.

Then they released Dev Mode to extract more revenue. Now Figma Sites to compete against web build/hosting sites.

So many half baked products, it's frustrating. They're abusing their monopolistic position in the market.

there will be a time where they'll have to pull a Google and retire products that never worked out.
by nradov | 2025-07-07 23:24:35+00:00
Who is "us"? Youths are welcome to get as mad as they like but seething with impotent rage and posting hot takes on social media isn't going to get them anywhere. If they want to improve the world then first they'll have to work hard and pay their dues just like every other generation before them.

Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
by seabombs | 2025-07-07 23:24:58+00:00
I take my 18-month old to daycare each morning, before parking my car a few streets away and catching the train into work. It is terrifying to think that one day I might just forget to drop him off.

My partner usually picks him up in the evening. About 6 months ago she was busy so I did it. I picked him up, drove home, parked the car in the garage and walked straight into the house. Something felt wrong, but it was maybe 30 seconds until I realised I'd left him in the car. He was completely fine, but it put the fear of God into me.

Anyway, I'll contribute my poorly thought out technical solution - a thermal camera that monitors the seats for warm bodies, if you lock the car when present it beeps the horn.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-07 23:26:18+00:00
For someone not heavy in this space. I use GH copilot at work. I might switch to cursor. I am not into the details of the tools just care does it help me or not. For us it might be worth having an easier to understand value proposition.

It may take a bit if explaining and that's OK. But the big question is as someone doing my enterprise microservice who isn't heavy into AI why do I switch to you.
by Awisvamya | 2025-07-07 23:26:21+00:00
> do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics?

I don't.

The point is not that we, humans, cannot arrange physical matter such that it have emergent properties just like the human brain.

The point is that we shouldn't.

Does responsibility mean anything to these people posing as Evolution?

Nobody's personally responsible for what we've evolved into; evolution has simply happened. Nobody's responsible for the evolutionary history that's carried in and by every single one of us. And our psychology too has been formed by (the pressures of) evolution, of course.

But if you create an artificial human, and create it from zero, then all of its emergent properties are on you. Can you take responsibility for that? If something goes wrong, can you correct it, or undo it?

I don't consider our current evolutionary state "scripture", so we certainly tweak, one way or another, aspects that we think deserve tweaking. To me, it boils down to our level of hubris. Some of our "mistaken tweaks" are now visible at an evolutionary scale, too; for a mild example, our jaws have been getting smaller (leaving less room for our teeth) due to our bad up diet (thanks, agriculture). But worse than that, humans have been breeding plants, animals, modifying DNA left and right, and so on -- and they've summarily failed to take responsibility for their atrocious mistakes.

Thus, I have zero trust in, and zero hope for, assholes who unabashedly aim to create artificial intelligence knowing full well that such properties might emerge that we'd have to call artificial psyche. Anyone taking this risk is criminally reckless, in my opinion.

It's not that humans are necessarily unable to create new sentient beings. Instead: they shouldn't even try! Because they will inevitably fuck it up, bringing about untold misery; and they won't be able to contain the damage.
by jcelerier | 2025-07-07 23:26:58+00:00
Chataigne is a really good software but I'm not sure they're too comparable...

Nowadays ossia is more about the content creation part, with a whole graphics pipeline amenable to VJ and real-time audioreactive visuals, where you can for instance have AI models like streamdiffusion & the like (https://streamable.com/zfrbo3) or just play with VST plug-ins and drum machines to make beats (https://streamable.com/fc02so)

All the recent artworks I've worked on involving ossia have used it exclusively, for instance for light, sound and video design, while if I'm not mistaken Chataigne is more commonly used in conjunction with for instance software such as Live or TouchDesigner.
by trealira | 2025-07-07 23:27:18+00:00
> We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.

We're still taught very basic phonetic rules in English. Like how vowels have a long sound and a short sound, where "ee" is the long e sound, or "<vowel> <consonant> e" triggers the long sound for that vowel. But you're also taught that many words are exceptions (e.g. bear vs beard). And you learn there are patterns to the exceptions, like how "ea," if it doesn't sound like "ee," will sound like a short e, like in "head" or "breadth," and particularly in cases like "dream - dreamt" or "leap - leapt."

And if you do a lot of reading as a kid, you vaguely recognize in the back of your mind some words that seem to follow a different set of pronunciation rules not taught in school (e.g. rouge, mirage, entourage, entrée, matinée, parfait, buffet, memoir, soirée, patois), which you learn implicitly. I remember this as a kid, only later learning those were French.

And this lets you guess pretty well how you'd pronounce a word. Just with basic rules and a lot of input to learn from, you can guess how to pronounce pretty much anything with good accuracy, because there are rules, and even a logic to the exceptions, but the rules are overlapping, so it's more like a set of rules you choose from.

I'd liken it to machine learning. You can learn the rules without even being taught the rules, like I did in the case of French loan words. And there are probably rules we follow without even realizing it, just instinctively thinking it's the natural way to pronounce the word without knowing why.

I'm not saying it's as good as being as phonetic as Italian, but it's not like we just have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of every word as though it were a structureless string of letters and a corresponding, unrelated sound.

Sorry for the long comment.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-07 23:28:04+00:00
> When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing).

For me, it's quite the opposite: such a choice demonstrates that they their prior is that I'm sufficiently smart and knowledgable to be likely able to understand this explanation - which I rather consider to be a praise. :-)
by geoka9 | 2025-07-07 23:28:24+00:00
My "agentic" experience is mostly Aider, working across a Golang webapp codebase. I've mostly used Gemini (whatever model Aider chooses to use at the moment).

Most of my experience has been similar to yours. But yesterday, out of the blue, it spit out a commit that I accepted almost verbatim (just added some line breaks and stuff). I was actually really surprised: not only it followed the existing codebase conventions and variable naming style, but also introduced a couple of patterns that I haven't thought of (and I liked).

But it also charged me $2 for the privilege :) (On a related note, Gemini API has become noticeably more expensive compared to, say, a month ago.)

I find that with Aider managing context (what files you add to it) can make all the difference.
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-07 23:28:31+00:00
I agree that GCRS and other Earth-centered inertial systems are fundamental for astronomy, tracking, and spaceflight.

And yes, you can transform between GPS coordinates and GCRS (or ECI/ECEF), depending on what you’re trying to do. The key distinction I’m making is about contextual meaning and application. GPS (WGS-84) coordinates are geodetic.

Once you're transforming positions millions of kilometers away (eg. L2, the Moon, or Mars) into lat/lon/alt, you're applying a system optimized for geodesy to a domain where the altitude is arbitrary, and "longitude" rotates with Earth.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 23:28:39+00:00
> But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

> I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".

> So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"

Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.
by pyman | 2025-07-07 23:28:48+00:00
What does "fair use" even mean in a world where models can memorise and remix every book and song ever written? Are we erasing ownership?

The problem is, copyright law wasn't written for machines. It was written for humans who create things.

In the case of songs (or books, paintings, etc), only humans and companies can legally own copyright, a machine can't. If an AI-powered tool generates a song, there’s no author in the legal sense, unless the person using the tool claims authorship by saying they operated the tool.

So we're stuck in a grey zone: the input is human, the output is AI generated, and the law doesn't know what to do with that.

For me the real debate is: Do we need new rules for non-human creation?
by MrJohz | 2025-07-07 23:29:08+00:00
You are talking about lending, but I'm not really sure why because it's not that relevant to the case.

If you photocopy a single page from a library book, this is often (but not always) fair use because you're copying only a limited part of the book. In the same way, you can quote a section or paragraph of a book under fair use. You cannot copy the whole book, though. Therefore:

> Even if the copy they make falls under fair use and the person who does own that copy of the book has no objection to their doing this?

If the copy had been made under fair use, then yes, this wouldn't be illegal. But it wasn't, because it was a reproduction and distribution of the entire book by someone who did not have the right to do that.
by axus | 2025-07-07 23:29:41+00:00
In 2014 Russia launched a Japanese small satellite built by the University of Tokyo, designed to take selfies of Hello Kitty with text messages that were loaded before the launch: https://www.space.com/26850-hello-kitty-in-space-messages.ht...

I found this plan for art on the SCA-1, technology has come a long way in 10 years: https://www.ekac.org/the.silent.circle.kac.html