MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lostmsu | 2025-08-27 20:33:23+00:00
It would take too much time to tear the entirety of this slop apart, but if you understand the mechanics of AI, you'd know environmental impact is negligible vs the value.

The links are laughable. For environment we get one lady whose underground water well got dirtier (according to her) because Meta built a data center nearby. Which, even if true (which is doubtful), has negligible impact on environment, and maybe a huge annoyance for her personally.

And 2 gives bad estimates such as ChatGPT 4 generation of ~100 tokens for an email (say 1000tok/s from 8xH100, so 0.1s so 0.1Wh) using as much energy as 14 LEDs for an hour (say 3W each, so 45Wh, so almost 3 orders of magnitude off, 9 if you like me count in binary).

P.S. Voted dems and would never vote Trump, but the gp is IMHO spot on.
by tailspin2019 | 2025-08-27 20:33:41+00:00
I think the obvious risk with ChatGPT etc, is that despite all the talk about “safety”, these chatbots are fundamentally designed to act and communicate in a very “close to human” fashion, almost going to extraordinarily great lengths to do so (eg all the emotive TTS voices, the pandering, the “I’m so happy to hear that” etc) and human nature means that it is very very easy to just get drawn in and switch off the part of your brain that knows you’re not actually talking to a human.

Even I find this to be the case sometimes, as a developer using AI daily for years now. “Regular” non-technical users have literally no frame of reference by which to compare, judge or understand this technology… apart from drawing on their experience dealing with other humans.

Most people don’t yet have the necessary understanding or tools to know where the sharp edges are, or a good enough understanding of how the behaviour of these models (and their failure modes) can deviate wildly and abruptly from that of a human - in very unpredictable ways.

Many (most) users will also not understand that everything they say is influencing the responses coming back to them - allowing people to talk their way down certain avenues with the AI chatbot “playing along”. You can be completely guiding the direction of the discussion and influencing the replies you’re getting without knowing it.

You have to try to remember that you’re effectively talking to a very intelligent psychopath who has become extremely good at pretending to be your friend and who will say anything to keep up that pretence.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it really annoys me when ChatGPT or Claude “pretends” to have emotions or says “Great idea!” based on nothing. I think that crap needs to be tuned out - at least for now - because it’s irresponsibly deceptive and sets the wrong expectations for non-technical users who do not (and cannot) possibly understand the boundaries and parameters of this technology. (Since even we as an industry don’t yet either).

I think “directly and deceptively pretending to act like a human” should have been part of the focus on safety and fine tuning, and instead of that, it seems they’ve doubled down on the opposite.

It’s like selling a real, loaded, gun but with the end of the barrel painted red to make it look like a toy.

That red bit sets expectations on how much damage this thing can do to me. The AI chatbot pretending to have emotions and care about me as a person is like that red paint. It directly signals the complete opposite information that the user actually needs. It tells them they’re safe when really, they’re holding a loaded fucking gun.
by petralithic | 2025-08-27 20:33:55+00:00
When did I say I believe AI to be intelligent or emotional? Of course I use it for economic factors, but I'm honest about it, not wrapping it up in some intellectual, solipsizing arguments. I'm not even sure what non-economic arguments you're talking about, my point is that at the end of the day most people care about the economic impact it might have on them, not anything about the technology itself.
by notimpotent | 2025-08-27 20:34:39+00:00
"To find early versions of Arial, the Dinamo team had to work with computer technology archivists to get access to some of the first personal computers and operating systems. In the end they found a tool that allowed them to boot up Windows 2000 on their own laptops"

I hope this "technology archivist" charged them appropriately for this monumental task. /s
by cgriswald | 2025-08-27 20:34:45+00:00
Read the papers and tell me how they are identical. You made that claim. Understanding what I mean by “carefully constructed” will require that anyway.

AnimalMuppets comment suggests all if A, then B arguments are equivalent; but how you show this is true is the actual argument. I’ve not seen anyone argue that creation being possible would imply creation and I’m not sure how AnimalMuppet or any creationist could possibly get there, but Bostrom et al make a reasoned argument.
by tovej | 2025-08-27 20:34:49+00:00
Wind power is among the cheapest sources of electricity, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.
by didibus | 2025-08-27 20:34:53+00:00
They might hate those too?

It's pretty clear there are impacts, AI needs energy, consumes material, creates trash.

You probably just don't mind it. The fact is still fact, the conclusion is different, you assess it's not a big concern in the grand scheme of it and worth it for the pros. The author doesn't care much for the pros, so then any environmental impact is a net loss for them.

I feel both take are rational.
by mcpar-land | 2025-08-27 20:35:00+00:00
> didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?

> There is constant active rhetoric around the sycophancy, and ways to reduce this, right? OpenAI just made a new benchmark specifically for this.

We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing

> Im uneducated here, honestly. I don't ask a lot of race-based questions to my LLMS I guess

Do you have to ask a race-based question to an LLM for it to give you biased or racist output?
by bethekidyouwant | 2025-08-27 20:35:12+00:00
My grade school had a game club at lunch hour. Mr. Newton took time out of his day, every day for us. Still think about him and the many games he brought from his had personal collection. Not sure what the point of this message is other than that he will be remembered until the last time I think about mastermind, Pacific typhoon, star fleet battles, axis and allies and many others..
by reactordev | 2025-08-27 20:35:17+00:00
Correct, luckily, but all it takes is one eval. So be diligent about checking. However, like you said, luckily it’s JavaScript and there’s a history online that you can see.

Be weary of binary wasms though, harder to analyze. In the end, because it was published and npm allows you to see the history, we can all see.

Still, from a security standpoint, anything within a “package” that is compromised, compromises the package. Don’t install it. Wait for the fix.
by randycupertino | 2025-08-27 20:35:39+00:00
My favorite person from the longer form NY Times article about this (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-a...) is the 1 neighbor who is surrounded on 3 sides by Zuckerberg and refuses to sell.

> “Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules — Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they’re our neighbors,” Mr. Kieschnick said. “But it’s a mystery why the city has been so feckless.”

> Mr. Kieschnick is a co-founder of a cellular phone company and now works as a green energy advocate. His phone company founded a political action committee to support candidates who fight climate change.

> He said that Mr. Zuckerberg, through his staff, had offered to buy his house. But he said he loved his home of more than 30 years and was daunted by the thought of moving.

> So far, his answer has been no.
by dralley | 2025-08-27 20:35:43+00:00
They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies) and tend to produce peak power during periods when solar is offline (e.g. at night or cloudy days). Farmers like them because they don't take up much space and they provide revenue independent of how well their crops do, which varies wildly year to year. It's cheaper than burning fossil fuels (though not quite as cheap as solar)

Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.
by delusional | 2025-08-27 20:36:05+00:00
> Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?

That's a crazy argument to accept from one of the lead producers of the technology. It's up there with arguing that ExxonMobil just proved oil drilling has no impact on global warming. I'm sure they're making the argument, but they would be doing that wouldn't they?
by etler | 2025-08-27 20:36:16+00:00
I think there's just some nuance to the scenario. The pilot wasn't directly on the call, but was participating in the call with the flight supervisor relaying the information.

I'd compare it to being in the room with someone on a conference phone call and they're relaying the conversation to you and them both ways. I would still say you were participating in the call even though you weren't directly on the call.

Also, he did initiate the call so "F-35 pilot held" is imprecise, but not totally wrong. Either way, the pilot was in an active tech support session with the plane engineers, making this one of the most intense tech support calls in history.
by thuridas | 2025-08-27 20:36:21+00:00
Electricity prices go up? Are you blaming the windmills? It should you blame the new AI data centers

And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.

I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-27 20:36:48+00:00
My personal AI dichotomy:

- When I use AI, it is typically useful.

- When other people build and do things with AI, it's slop that I didn't ask for which is waste of resources and a threat to humanity.

This entirely sums up my thoughts on the technology. I suppose it's rather like the personal benefits vs greater harm of using coal for electricity.
by stouset | 2025-08-27 20:36:52+00:00
I am nowhere near an expert or even a particularly well-informed person here, but my idle speculation is that online technical spaces are a place where you can have much more freedom in comfortably choosing the outward persona you wish to present. In meatspace, if your physical appearances and your chosen persona don't match up in ways that some people find disagreeable, many people will go out of their way to let you know it.

Edit: I'm proposing a selection effect here, where people with these challenges gravitate towards spaces and communities where they don't feel confronted by them as often.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-27 20:36:52+00:00
I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about.

If all that changed was that everything ran slower and took more battery power and increased the liklihood of closing when backgrounded, that's all I would be complaining about, but what I'm conplaining about here is that updates lead to reduced feature sets, buttons and links that are impossible to differentiate from inactive elements, and icons that vaguely hint at a skuemorphic past, but look more like hamburgers, kebabs, and petifores than what they're actually supposed to respresent.

What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words?

Wait, I take that back, please don't make menus that consist entirely of abstract shapes and squiggles. (https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneS...)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-27 20:37:34+00:00
What I don’t get about all these evil scrooge types that run out world, is why wouldn’t they want to make money off things like wind and actual climate salves? Seems to me the coming climate crises is going to cost a ton of money and lead to destruction of entire national economies. Meanwhile they could have been raising all boats and made even more money and had even more things to invest in.

Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?

I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.
by petralithic | 2025-08-27 20:37:35+00:00
It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey.

There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
by mixedbit | 2025-08-27 20:37:56+00:00
I'm afraid that open source software supply chain attacks could be much more prevalent than what we are currently aware of. There is a significant market for zero-day exploits, with organizations like the NSA having teams dedicated to collecting and weaponizing them. But finding and exploiting an unintentional zero-day vulnerability is way more difficult than adding an intentional exploitable bug or backdoor to some of the myriad widely used open source dependencies. Of course, if you do it right, you don't land on the HN front page.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-27 20:38:01+00:00
Hardware designers benefit from having multiple separate teams to test their product. A chip designer can rely on at least two other teams to test the designed chip, and one of them will be using formal verification. If software also has long release cycles and high cost to remedy mistakes, you bet we would also have multiple testers. In fact that was what happened in the 90s with shrink wrapped software and without easy updates.
by willsmith72 | 2025-08-27 20:38:02+00:00
I don't buy the alternatives at all.

> Instead, he recommends using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal between the leech's mouth and your skin quickly

Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?

> Another option is to wait until the leech is done feeding so it will fall off on its own

I'm just gonna wait 30+ minutes with a leech on me? no thanks
by hinkley | 2025-08-27 20:38:03+00:00
I’ve done the math a couple of times and IIRC if we can get the charge density per kilo to about twice what lithium ion can do, you hit a point where a deposit battery that’s around 20 kilos has enough range extension to start being worth doing. That’s the weight of a large bag of kitty litter or a commercial bag or rice. Put a good ergo handle on it and most people should be able to lift a few of them consecutively.

But until one unit is worth about 8 miles of extended range, there would be no point. 3@25 or 30 miles might make it worth the trouble for a road trip, or camping.
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-08-27 20:38:21+00:00
As usual, the facts are in the linked report not in the journalist's summary.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...

It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:

Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based

Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.
by dashundchen | 2025-08-27 20:39:03+00:00
How has it worked already?

Dragging people for public spectacles in Congress, lawfare through frivolous lawsuits, frivolous investigation through a variety of agencies, wasting the orgs time in court, allies doxxing org members to intimidate them with stochastic terrorism.

If you haven't been paying attention to how Trump and Co have been weapoinzing government to silence critics or pressure private orgs, you haven't been paying attention.

What happened to Harvard?

What happened to CBS/Paramount?

What happened with 60 Minutes?

What about ActBlue?
by merksoftworks | 2025-08-27 20:39:07+00:00
What I will say about sycophancy - the recent rollback that OpenAI went through does appear like a clear attempt to push the envelope on dark patterns wrt AI Assistants. Engagement optimized assistants, pornography, and tooling are inherently misaligned with the productivity or wellbeing of their users in the same way that engagement maximized social media is inherently misaligned with the social wellbeing of it's users.
by superkuh | 2025-08-27 20:39:20+00:00
Sometimes, often even, Dreamwidth can do the right thing like this. I fully support them in this fight and hope they win. But let's not pretend banning huge IP ranges for years at a time is new to them.

Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
by sonofhans | 2025-08-27 20:39:43+00:00
> This paragraph really pisses me off and I'm not sure why.

No hate, but consider — when I feel that way, it’s often because one of my ideas or preconceptions has been put into question. I feel like it’s possible that I might be wrong, and I fucking hate that. But if I can get over hating it and figuring out why, I may learn something.

Here’s an example:

> Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?

Consider that Google is one of the creators of the supposed harm, and thus trusting them may not be a good idea. Tobacco companies still say smoking ain’t that bad

The harm argument is simple — AI data centers use energy, and nearly all forms of energy generation have negative side effects. Period. Any hand waving about where the energy comes from or how the harms are mitigated is, again, bullshit — energy can come from anywhere, people can mitigate harms however they like, and none of this requires LLM data centers.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-27 20:39:46+00:00
Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin with. Even an imitation by another human (some of which can be very good) could stir you in the exact same way but they'd be copies, not original works.

Anyway, this gets hairy quickly, that's why I chose to illustrate with a crappy recording of a magnificent piece that still captures that feeling - for me - whereas many others would likely disagree. Art is made by its creator because they want to and because they can, not because they are regurgitating output based on a multitude of inputs and a prompt.

Paint me a Sistine Chapel is going to yield different results no matter how many times you would give that same prompt to Michelangelo depending on his mood, what happened recently, what he ate and his health as well as the season. That AI will produce the same result over and over again from the same prompt. It is a mechanistic transformation, not an original work, it reduces the input, it does not expand on it, it does not add its own feelings to it.
by jopsen | 2025-08-27 20:39:55+00:00
I'd agree, it's super easy to think such errors won't happen had they just used a fairly safe language and sane architecture. Or unit test, race detectors, etc.

I suspect that few organizations that do all that, have a process/culture of ignoring bugs in the wild -- and those that do have such complicated domains that explaining the error is hard.

Software best practices today would probably also involve sending metrics, logs, error reports, etc.

That said, it's still extremely easy get embrace a culture were unexplainable errors are ignored. Especially in a cloud environment.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-27 20:40:05+00:00
>I'm not sure what a better solution would look like

Federal government provided electronic money accounts and transfer systems, along with federal government provided identity verification APIs, where the fraud requires defrauding the government. Basically, a government utility. They do it with passports, why not with digital travel?

Obviously, this has to go hand in hand with constitutional inalienable rights to protect people's access to electronic money accounts and identity verification.
by ericmay | 2025-08-27 20:40:05+00:00
Well we were also talking about artisan products too and not electronics.

I don't buy the general consensus that the US can't or won't build supply chains for these products - we can and will if the tariffs are high enough, it'll just be highly automated which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In your specific case yea you are probably just looking at higher prices, but I don't think that your general argument is necessarily applicable across the entire economy. That's not to say in your specific case yea maybe the tariffs are just a net negative.

> Note that de minimis-- which we're talking about here-- has something to do with what's at Amazon because of drop shippers, but basically nothing that is sold somewhere like Walmart.

Well yes and no. The availability of drop-shipped products en masse, whether it's through Amazon or Wal-Mart's own drop-ship marketplaces still enable cheap consumerism and generate lots of waste and poor quality products at cheap prices (along with some good products at cheap prices to be fair). But I think the point about Amazon just strengthens my argument (for the sake of argument) which is you get these artificially cheap products shipped in, sometimes with stolen designs, and we can't spin up mom-and-pop shops or cottage industries because everybody just looks at the price of the cheapest bullshit thing they find on Amazon and they don't care about any number of issues that factor in to that price.
by pogue | 2025-08-27 20:40:11+00:00
According to Air AI's linked in, they claim to offer the following: "Introducing the world's first ever AI that can have full on 10-40 minute long phone calls that sound like a REAL human, with infinite memory, perfect recall, and can autonomously take actions across 5,000 plus applications. It can do the entire job of a full time agent without having to be trained, managed or motivated. It just works 24/7/365. Try it @ Air[.]ai And if you ever need help, feel free to reach out to us directly at [email address removed]"

EDIT: Check out this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/191yw6v/anyone_worked...