MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Worrying flood of delusional AI consciousness posts?
by gavinray | 2025-07-01 13:13:31+00:00
I've noticed an unsettling trend in the past weeks.

There appear to be a growing number of posts by persons suffering what appear to be psychosis or a manic episode, generally revolving around nonsensical "math" and AI consciousness.

Some examples:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Trenthug

- https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=NetRunnerSu

- https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kamil_gr

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421649

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44392181

I'm unsure of what the right response to this is, but it's concerning to say the least.
by ainiriand | 2025-07-01 13:13:54+00:00
Yes that is a very accurate assessment, I use Claude almost all the time for other tasks, but when it was a moment to really put it to the test I was not able to produce anything at least usable.

My request involved a local web application that acted as a server for other clients in the same network using Rust.

I wanted to use websockets, it never worked and I was never able to nudge it in any meaningful direction, it started to make circular edits on the codebase and it just never worked.
by jackettm | 2025-07-01 13:15:22+00:00
I have a somewhat similar problem when programming the Parallax Propeller chip. I always forget to write JMP #address (which jumps to the specified memory location) and write JMP address instead (which jumps to the address read from the specified memory location). This is kinda because the 6502 assembler is still in my muscle memory:

Propeller: JMP #address 6502: JMP address

Propeller: JMP address 6502: JMP (address)

And the worst thing, my buggy Propeller code sometimes works, like in this article. Until it stops and I spend hours figuring out why.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-01 13:15:28+00:00
“Human and AI creativity may not be so different”

I guess they need more funding and grants. A human does not need to ingest the entire Internet in order to plagiarize what was read. A human does not need a prompt in order to take action. Two humans can have a conversation that does not collapse immediately.

These people apparently need coaching on the most basic activities. How to solve this in the future? Perhaps women should refuse to procreate with "AI" researchers, who prefer machines anyway.
by perlgeek | 2025-07-01 13:15:37+00:00
> Would you consider those people obsessive in the pursuit of traveling?

Could be, depending on how much they give up for traveling.

> The reason why I'm asking is that my impression seems to be that there is a lot more acceptance for obsession when the obsession is considered extroverted and conforming to society's expectation.

Maybe it's also related to the accumulation of things related to the hobby.

If you see somebody's collection of model trains and their tracks, it's pretty visceral that they must have spent lots of time and money on this. Same for basically any other hobby that involves collecting this (that aren't tiny, like postage stamps).

If, on the other hand, you hear that somebody has traveled a lot, that doesn't hit home to the same degree..

Maybe another factor is that we tend to associate at least some forms of neurodivergence (autism and AD(H)D at least) with hyperfocus on a few topics, whereas travel exposes one basically automatically to many new experiences. Haven't really thought that through yet...
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-01 13:15:42+00:00
It’s not region locked, and as the sibling post notes it’s been there for a while. I’m not sure how much more simple it can be made (open Settings, tap Apps, and there it is at the top of the page).

I suppose it could be possible for apps to prompt the user to change the default, but I’m honestly pretty sick of that behavior on desktop (e.g. I have several browsers installed for various reasons and they nearly all bug me about being default) and would rather not see it copied to mobile OSes too (I don’t believe Android allows apps to show such a prompt either).
by maxsilver | 2025-07-01 13:15:48+00:00
> people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.

In general I'd agree -- but academic researchers (and the projects previously funded by the National Science Foundation) are not this. By definition, they are testing "if the ideas actually work", that testing is what the funding is paying for.

These folks aren't really "elite" -- not in perception, nor in class or wages. (they usually make less than the average programmer or CS graduate).
by Lerc | 2025-07-01 13:16:13+00:00
I'm not a Lua user but is this a falsiness issue?

local function report(result) print(result ?? "The value was nil.") end

report(filesize("/path/to/file/of/length/zero"))

If filesize returns nil for file-not-found and the length otherwise. Wouldn't coalescing work and or would not be able to identify existing but empty files.
by elboru | 2025-07-01 13:16:50+00:00
By auto-play I mean in the feed, there’s an option to stop it from doing that, but after a while YouTube decides to turn it on again. It also has an option to hide Shorts, but same thing, they simply ignore it. About the dub thing, I get it could be tunnel vision coming from english-only speakers, it didn’t occurred to them that outside their circles is common for people to be bilingual or even multilingual, but that auto dub thing hasn’t been fixed for years there are tons of complains, the way I “fixed” it was setting my language to English, but from time to time I get my own language dubbed to English.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-01 13:17:29+00:00
Interesting. I am assuming that is nominally "one ordinary peasant's rice consumption", not "enough rice to live on". One gō appears to be about 5 ounces/150 grams, and that is about 550 calories, or 25% of a nominal daily calorie need. One can quibble with the exact numbers - smaller stature Japanese feudal peasants, but heavier physical demands, etc.

It works out to 25% of the calorie need, ironically close to the amount supplied by beer in an estimate of a European medieval monastery.
by Scarblac | 2025-07-01 13:17:43+00:00
That can only be decided in hindsight. By the time everybody agrees that the system is clearly generally intelligent, it will have been for ages already. It will already be far more intelligent than even very smart humans.

But I think general problem solving is a part of it. Coming up with its own ideas for possible solutions rather than what it generalized from a training set, and being able to try them out and iterate. In an environment it wasn't specifically designed for by humans.

(not claiming most humans can do that)
by pyman | 2025-07-01 13:17:57+00:00
I have a similar philosophical question:

My dog doesn't know what I do for a living, and he has no concept of how intelligent I am. So if we're limited by our own intelligence, how would we ever recognise or measure the intelligence of an AI that's more advanced than us?

If an AI surpasses us, not just in memory or calculation but in reasoning, self-reflection, and abstraction, how would we even know?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-01 13:18:50+00:00
What is your definition of happiness? Money, "freedom", and "autonomy"? But what are these for? What is the point of being free? What is the point of money?

The point of both freedom and money is to be able to do what is good. Freedom and autonomy and money have no value in themselves; they have only instrumental value. They only enable the good (and money, only specific kinds of goods). They are not sources of happiness per se. So being free to have children is the freedom to pursue the good that are children and of being a parent. Being a parent is meaningful. Freedom, full stop, is not. And money, full stop, is certainly not.
by elcritch | 2025-07-01 13:19:49+00:00
> If half of the world’s water supplies had lead levels of X you’d expect evolution to make that specific level a non issue. Obviously lead levels above that can and are still problematic.

Not necessarily true if the effect is relatively small compared to other evolutionary pressures. A few points drop in IQ might not be bad for ancient hunter-gatherer tribes but does have a much larger impact in our modern age. Every point increase of average IQ at the population level generally leads to better societal outcomes overall.

To your earlier question, filtering flouride might be beneficial then. We can do flouride teeth treatments at dentists or switch more to nano-hydroxyapatite [1]. Though it'd seem nano-hydroxyapatite needs more safety studies as well.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6747619/
by sotix | 2025-07-01 13:19:58+00:00
Yes. However, really it’s our lead VC investors who are forcing it and want to see us have 75-100% AI teams. Yet now we’re in a mini panic after customers said the core functionality of my team’s product isn’t up to muster. So we’ll probably put the AI features on hold while marketing calls our non-AI features “powered by AI”.

I suppose us engineers familiar with the product had just a bit more context than the investors issuing a blanket statement to their portfolios to use AI.
by jdex | 2025-07-01 13:20:48+00:00
Building Ongoing Things

https://ongoingthings.com

Most of my personal life updates were shared in group chats. Those chat updates were scattered, repetitive, and for some people easy to miss.

When my son was born, I wanted to start telling his story to the people in my life. I started developing Ongoing Things with a baby in a carrier on my chest.

The app is now where we share the real stuff - raising a child, a trip, a project - each in its own place that we call a "thing", with just the people it's meant for. No feed. No comments. No signup required - people need only an email to follow along.

We have a small user base, and tons of features are still missing. We are working on making it better. Our roadmap includes:

- "Partner Things" to allow few people to share updates to one thing

- E2E encryption for posts

- Customizable layout of posts

- RSS feeds

Would love feedback if anyone is interested in trying it.

Edit: formatting.
by georgeecollins | 2025-07-01 13:21:19+00:00
It's probably like the price of gas in America. Easily seen, frequently bought so it causes anxiety. I know for some in America transportation is a serious concern, but there is also a lot of irrational reaction as well. After COVID, the person in the office next to mine was really upset that gas was like +$1. Like your house went up a quarter million in value and your mad because gas cost $5. You're never going to buy enough gas for it to matter. People are strange.
by 1dom | 2025-07-01 13:22:12+00:00
I can't work out how an open protocol implementation of this could work without crypto: ultimately if it's just fiat, a business entity needs to be the payment processor who aggregates microtransactions and pays them out to content owners, this is the role cloudflare is playing.

The problem is microtransactions are not feasible in fiat, and to remove the aggregator role like Cloudflare means a huge amount of microtransactions from each potential crawler to each content owner. That's just too much expensive work compared to the current position.

I agree though, I shed no tears for crawlers, but hopefully we're beyond the naivety of honour systems - again, the thing crypto was supposed to be solving.

Forcing big evil crawler entities to bend the knee by hiding behind big evil CDN entities feels silly though.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-07-01 13:22:19+00:00
We are not alone. Mathematically, it is all but impossible. All the available evidence shows that many (if not most) stars have a planetary system similar to ours.

It is inconceivable that with billions of similar planetary systems just within our own galaxy, we are the only one with life.

What remains without scientific proof is whether travel or even communication between these similar systems is possible. Using the most advanced techniques we have available, simply sending a message to one of these systems would take years for the message to arrive and more years for any reply that we are capable of understanding.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-01 13:22:42+00:00
> Sometimes I wonder if LLM proponents even understand their own bullshit.

Categorically, no. Most are not software engineers, in fact most are not engineers of any sort. A whole lot of them are marketers, the same kinds of people who pumped crypto way back.

LLMs have uses. Machine learning has a ton of uses. AI art is shit, LLM writing is boring, code generation and debugging is pretty cool, information digestion is a godsend some days when I simply cannot make my brain engage with whatever I must understand.

As with most things, it's about choosing the right tool for the right task, and people like AI hype folk are carpenters with a brand new, shiny hammer, and they're gonna turn every fuckin problem they can find into a nail.

Also for the love of god do not have ChatGPT draft text messages to your spouse, genuinely what the hell is wrong with you?
by mysteria | 2025-07-01 13:22:44+00:00
> If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless.

A smartphone from Google or Apple is also pretty much required for certain government apps, banking/financial services, and so forth. I wouldn't call it a stretch to say that in the future it would be mandatory to have these duopoly controlled devices on your person at all times, like how you need to carry an ID card.

Many of those apps don't work on rooted phones or custom ROMs without workarounds and doing so is a TOS violation in many cases as well. Also imagine what it would be like if your Google or Apple account got banned by accident with no human support to sort it out.
by nialse | 2025-07-01 13:22:57+00:00
Although Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince pre-launched their new offering with a compelling speech and numbers to boot, the mechanics does not add up. There is an assumption that AI companies need to scrape the web for content. This is certainly true for new AI companies and new content, but the vast majority of scraping useful content has already been completed. In addition new content will tend to be AI generated itself, which might not help training, and in the US training on purchased content has been deemed fair use recently.

What problem is being solved? The perceived issues are twofold, increasing crawling by AI scraping bots is causing traffic and thus an additional cost, and content creators lack compensation for their work in terms of money or notoriety (according to Matt). Cloudflare obviously have traditionally focused on the first, and needing to grow they see the potential in being a middle man in the second.

Where does this get us? Will Cloudflares service lower traffic volumes not generating revenue? Absolutely. Use of the service will be perceived as a success based on this metric and the revenue generating traffic will stay on similar and higher levels initially. Then, if the content indexed becomes more and more stale, as AI companies may or may not be willing to pay the associated costs, revenues will slide long term. Content creators seeking fame or fortune may then seek other avenues to promote and distribute their content as they perceive the alternatives as better.

The sole hope for Cloudflare is that a couple of the large AI outlets "play ball", and make the payed for indexed content available based on subscription fees or, god forbid, ads. However, then they might would want their users to be able to access the full contents guarded by other paywalls, and not only previews offered.

One would hope that this would lead to a future where creative humans are compensated more for their cognitive work. Unfortunately, with the trajectory we're on, that is a select few as the marginal cost of content is quickly approaching zero.

https://x.com/carlhendy/status/1938465616442306871
by oasnjdaskjdn | 2025-07-01 13:23:00+00:00
Came across a site offering GDPR compliance tools — and it drops tracking cookies without consent. No cookie banner. No opt-out. No visible privacy policy. Just silent data slurping.

Under GDPR (Articles 6, 7, 13) and the ePrivacy Directive, this is a textbook violation: consent must be informed, explicit, and prior. Even worse, the site’s entire pitch is about compliance and information security management. Hypocrisy aside, this could expose clients to regulatory risk if they’re trusting this vendor.

If your security tool breaks privacy law by design, what exactly are you securing?
by madmaxB | 2025-07-01 13:23:32+00:00
Not sure if this will get buried, but I wanted to share something that actually worked for me.

I’m a bootstrap founder (former no-code junkie + broke consultant) who’s been looking for ways to make ends meet and keep my lights on. I recently stumbled across a platform called QuantumAgent.store it’s like Fiverr or Etsy, but specifically for AI agents and workflows.

The wild part? I made $250 in 4 days by listing two ChatGPT-based workflows I had lying around from client projects.

You don’t need to be some big influencer or dev shop. I just uploaded the agents, wrote short descriptions, and set a price. People started buying. No Stripe setup needed, payouts came via ACH. The platform takes 11%, and the rest hit my bank.

If you’ve built anything with GPT, Zapier, n8n, Replit, or even Airtable automations this might be a good way to monetize stuff you already made.

Would love to hear if anyone else has tried this or if you're planning to.

I'm still experimenting, but it’s been the first real win for me in months. Hope this helps someone.
by codingdave | 2025-07-01 13:23:35+00:00
Ignore and move on. People post all kinds of stuff here. Some is interesting, some is not. I likewise see people showing a plethora of signs of various neurodivergences and disorders, but that doesn't change my reaction to their writing. Their writing is either interesting, and I engage with it, or it is nonsense, and I do not.

I rarely see anyone who is so off the rails that they appear to be in danger. HN as an outlet for their thoughts could even be therapeutic. So while I might not personally engage with it, I don't see that gatekeeping HN from such people or their writing would be a net good.
Show HN: Qasmtools CLI tools for formatting, linting, and highlighting OpenQASM
by orangekame3 | 2025-07-01 13:23:42+00:00
OpenQASM is a language for quantum computing, but tooling around it is still minimal.

I’ve been building a CLI-first toolchain in Go that includes: - `qasm fmt`: code formatter - `qasm lint`: basic linter - `qasm highlight`: syntax highlighter (ANSI) - `qasm lsp`: language server (VS Code extension) - WASM build for web use

Everything is in Go, and it's a work in progress. Feedback welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/orangekame3/qasmtools Playground: https://www.orangekame3.net/qasmtools/ VSCode extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=orangeka...
by captainbland | 2025-07-01 13:23:44+00:00
I think with the Turing test, it's turned out to be a fuzzier line than expected. People are to various degrees learning LLM tells even as they improve. So what might have passed the Turing test in 2020 might not today. Similarly it seems to be a case that conversations with LLMs often start better than they end, even today - so an LLM might pass a short turing test but fail a very long one that goes into hundreds of rounds.
by dhx | 2025-07-01 13:24:12+00:00
It depends on the content producer. I would argue the best resourced content producers (governments and large companies) are incentivised to give AI bots as much curated content as possible that is favourable to their branding and objectives. Even if it's just "soft influence" such as the French government feeding AI bots an overwhelming number of articles about how the Eiffel Tower is the most spectacular tourist attraction in all of Europe to visit and should be on everyone's must-visit list. Or for examples of more nefarious objectives--for the fossil fuel industry, feeding AI bots plenty of content about how nuclear is the future and renewables don't work when the sun isn't shining. Or for companies selling consumer goods, feeding AI bots with made-up consumer reviews about how the competitor products are inferior and more expensive to operate over their lifespan.

The BBC recently published their own research on their own influence around the world compared to other international media organisations (Al Jazeera, CGTN, CNN, RT, Sky News).[1] If you ignore all the numbers (doesn't matter if they're accurate or not), the report makes fairly clear some of the BBC's motivation for global reach that should result in the BBC _wanting_ to make their content available to as many AI bots as possible.

Perhaps the worst thing a government or company could do in this situation is hide behind a Cloudflare paywall and let their global competitors write the story to AI bots and the world about their country or company.

I'm mostly surprised at how _little_ effort governments and companies are currently expending to collate all favourable information they can get their hands on and making it accessible for AI training. Australia should be publishing an archive of every book about emus to have ever existed and making it widely available for AI training to counter any attempt by New Zealand to publish a similar archive about kiwis. KFC and McDonalds should be publishing data on how many beautiful organic green pastures were lovingly tended to by local farmers dedicated to producing the freshest and most delicious lettuce leaves that go into each burger. etc

[1] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/new-research-reveals-bb...
by Mohsin_Gatz | 2025-07-01 13:24:13+00:00
I built an AI that lets you recreate someone using their WhatsApp and Instagram chats, voice notes, and even photos. Out of curiosity (and maybe a bit of heartbreak), I tried it on an old conversation with my ex.

The result was so good, so eerily accurate in tone, memory, and personality that it genuinely freaked me out.

What started as a late night idea became CeresAI, a tool for creating AI companions from real conversations. It's useful, emotional, and occasionally unsettling.

Curious what this community thinks about the ethics, future use cases, or limits of something like this.
by thesuitonym | 2025-07-01 13:25:55+00:00
AIM also had useful states. If you were away for a decent chunk of time (And you could configure what that amount of time was!) it would mark you as idle, and you could set custom away messages (That were actually visible) so folks could know why you were away, or more realistically, what song was on your mind.

Nowadays the status is completely meaningless. It's a small dot that doesn't accurately reflect your status, and if you choose to set a message, most of the apps hide it anyway.
by chrptvn | 2025-07-01 13:25:57+00:00
I built MinuteMail to help people get a quick disposable email address for signups, newsletters, or trials without revealing their real email.

No signup required. Generates a random temporary address instantly. You can receive emails in real-time on the site, and emails auto-expire shortly after.

It's privacy-focused with no trackers or cookies, and has a clean, fast, mobile-friendly interface.

It's a small tool, but I use it daily and thought others might find it useful too.

Would love your feedback on speed, clarity, or anything you think could improve it.
by Cyph0n | 2025-07-01 13:26:53+00:00
I really despise the analogy with Steam. And this is not the first time I hear it. People somehow fail to understand that the core problem with the App Store is that it is operated by the platform owner.

To bring the analogy in line with the App Store, imagine if: (1) Steam was operated by Microsoft, (2) Microsoft only allowed installation of games on Windows through Steam, and (3) Microsoft disallowed installation of alternate OSes on Microsoft PCs.