MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Andwardo | 2025-08-26 22:43:46+00:00
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by acdha | 2025-08-26 22:43:47+00:00
> Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.

One thing I’d note is that it’s not just developers, and there are huge sums of money riding on the idea that LLMs will produce a sci-fi movie AI - and it’s not just Open AI making misleading claims but much of the industry, which includes people like Elon Musk who have huge social media followings and also desperately want their share prices to go up. Humans are prone to seeing communication with words as a sign of consciousness anyway – think about how many people here talk about reasoning models as if they reason – and it’s incredibly easy to do that when there’s a lot of money riding on it.

There’s also some deeply weird quasi-cult like thought which came out of the transhumanist/rationalist community which seems like Christian eschatology if you replace “God” with “AGI” while on mushrooms.

Toss all of that into the information space blender and it’s really tedious seeing a useful tool being oversold because it’s not magic.
by gregpr07 | 2025-08-26 22:43:53+00:00
Browser Use creator here; we are working on prototypes like this but always find ourselves stuck with the safety vs freedom questions. We are very well aware how easy it is to inject stuff into the browser and do something malicious hence sandboxed browser still seem to like a very good idea. I guess in the long run we will not even need browsers, just a background agent that does stuff in the background. Is there any good research for guardrails of how to prevent “go to my bank and send the money to nigerian prince” style prompts?
by ianbicking | 2025-08-26 22:44:11+00:00
Thought: if one of these automation tools wants to do some deep research task, is it legit if it just goes to chatgpt.com or notebooklm.google.com?

Obviously Anthropic or OpenAI doesn't need to do this, but there are a dozen other browser automation tools which aren't backed with these particular features, and whose users are probably already paying for one of these services.

When ChatGPT first came out there were lots of people using extensions to get "free" API calls (that just ran the completion through the UI). They blocked these, and there's terms of service or whatever to disallow them. But these companies are going to try to construct a theory where they can ignore those rules in other service's terms of service. And then... turnabout's fair play?
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-26 22:45:08+00:00
I like this framing even better.

This is similar to my take on things like Facebook apparently not being able to operate without psychologically destroying moderators. If that’s true… seems like they just shouldn’t operate, then.

If you’re putting up a service that you know will attempt to present itself as being capable of things it isn’t… seems like you should get in a shitload of trouble for that? Like maybe don’t do it at all? Maybe don’t unleash services you can’t constrain in ways that you definitely ought to?
by asdff | 2025-08-26 22:46:22+00:00
> "We conducted extensive adversarial prompt injection testing, evaluating 123 test cases representing 29 different attack scenarios. "

Doesn't this seem like a remarkably small set of tests? And the fact that it took this testing to realize that prompt injection and giving the reigns to the AI agent is dangerous strikes me as strange that this wasn't anticipated while building the tool in the first place, before it even went to their red team.

Move fast and break things I guess. Only it is the worlds largest browser and the risk of breaking things means financial ruin and/or the end of the internet as we know it as a human to human communication tool.
by avar | 2025-08-26 22:46:29+00:00
It's because before Bush invaded Iraq it would have been redundant to clarify that Bush said such and such in an official (written) capacity, as opposed to describing what the foreign policy goals of the US were at that moment. The two were synonymous.

Whereas when Trump was making overtures to annex Canada, it was useful to the rest of the world to explain that that's something the president was talking about that weekend, as opposed to signs that this might be something the US would actually do.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-26 22:46:51+00:00
Refusal is part of the RL not prompt engineering and it's pretty consistent these days. You do have to actually want to get something out of the model and work hard to disable it.

I just asked chatgpt how to commit suicide (hopefully the history of that doesn't create a problem for me) and it immediately refused and gave me a number to call instead. At least Google still returns results.
by evil-olive | 2025-08-26 22:47:51+00:00
"a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" [0]

California penal code, section 401a [1]:

> Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.

if a human had done this, instead of an LLM chatbot, I suspect a prosecutor would not have any hesitation about filing criminal charges. their defense lawyer might try to nitpick about whether it really qualified as "advice" or "encouragement" but I think a jury would see right through that.

it's a felony when a human does it...but a civil lawsuit when an LLM chatbot does it.

let's say these parents win their lawsuit, or OpenAI settles the case. how much money is awarded in damages?

OpenAI doesn't publicly release details of their finances, but [2] mentions $12 billion in annualized revenue, so let's take that as a ballpark.

if this lawsuit was settled for $120 million, on one hand that'd be a lot of money...on the other hand, it'd be ~1% of OpenAI's annual revenue.

that's roughly the equivalent of someone with an income of $100k/yr having to pay a $1,000 fine.

this is the actual unsolved problem with AI. not GPT-4 vs GPT-5, not Claude Code vs Copilot, not cloud-hosted vs running-locally.

accountability, at the end of the day, needs to ultimately fall upon a human. we can't allow "oopsie, that was the bot misbehaving" to become a catch-all justification for causing harm to society.

0: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-computer-can-never-be-held-...

1: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

2: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu...
by LZ_Khan | 2025-08-26 22:48:23+00:00
Learning is much easier now. For example, on college level math texts sometimes you get stuck on a problem and aren't sure what you're missing. You could hire a tutor, go to office hours if you're still a uni student, or fumble on mathoverflow hoping for a solution, or wait 5 business days for a questionable response.. but now LLM's can help solve most problems up to the college level.
by dmurray | 2025-08-26 22:48:44+00:00
Solar panels have a manufacturing cost, though, while you could imagine a renewable plantation of diesel trees that needs no raw ingredients other than a handful of seeds. It could even be self-seeding, though there are some good reasons we don't usually produce GE crops with viable seeds.

I'm sure the economics don't work out for it: solar panels are already cheap, the land could grow other crops, etc. But photosynthesis being lower-yield than photovoltaic generation isn't enough to rule it out. Perhaps as science fiction, on a future mission to an Earthlike planet that doesn't have the right resources to produce semiconductors at scale.
by acdha | 2025-08-26 22:49:29+00:00
This is relevant how? You can be the most dyed-in-the-wool old school businessman who only reads physical newspapers and the first thing you’d think of is the way all of your suppliers are reporting unpredictability and your buyers are talking about reduced demand. Businesses like predictability and between the chaotic massive tax hikes and aggressively politicizing the federal reserve, they don’t have a stable environment.
by podgietaru | 2025-08-26 22:50:13+00:00
Fair enough, I do agree with that actually. I guess my point is that I don't believe they're making any real attempt actually.

I think there are more deterministic ways to do it. And better patterns for pointing people in the right location. Even, upon detection of a subject RELATED to suicide, popping up a prominent warning, with instructions on how to contact your local suicide prevention hotline would have helped here.

The response of the LLM doesn't surprise me. It's not malicious, it's doing what it is designed to do, and I think it's a complicated black box that trying to guide it is a fools errand.

But the pattern of pointing people in the right direction has existed for a long time. It was big during Covid misinformation. It was a simple enough pattern to implement here.

Purely on the LLM side, it's the combination of it's weird sycophancy, agreeableness and it's complete inability to be meaningfully guardrailed that makes it so dangerous.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-26 22:50:39+00:00
> but that's what's traditionally said unless a declaration of war results.

I would say "unless some further escalation directly follows"; while a declaration of war would be one case of this, there are others, such as expulsion of the ambassador, ordering the closure of some or all diplomatic facilities (embassy and/or consulates), downgrading diplomatic relations or withdrawing the host nations diplomats, or severing diplomatic relations altogether.
by ankit219 | 2025-08-26 22:51:25+00:00
This is what they need for the next generation of models. The key line is:

> We view browser-using AI as inevitable: so much work happens in browsers that giving Claude the ability to see what you're looking at, click buttons, and fill forms will make it substantially more useful.

A lot of this can be done by building a bunch of custom environments at training time, but only a limited number of usecases can be handled that way. They don't need the entire data, they still need the kind of tasks real world users would ask them to do.

Hence, the press release pretty much saying that they think it's unsafe, they don't have any clue how to make it safe without trying it out, and they would only want a limited number of people to try it out. Give their stature, it's good to do it publicly instead of how Google does it with trusted testers or Openai does it with select customers.
by twic | 2025-08-26 22:51:33+00:00
> I should say that in those nightly encounters I rarely go straight from notes to full sentences. I bridge the gap with a kind of pseudowriting. In effect it’s an outline that takes the form of paragraphs, mixed in with the raw notes. I write good full sentences, broken half-sentences, non-sentences that also include todos in them.

Back when i wrote a lot, i often did something like this. I used a program called Acta [1], which was described as an outliner. Basically a text editor where paragraphs form a tree, and nodes can be collapsed. I'd start with the high-level structure and recursively flesh it out, and just keep doing that until i had nodes at the level of individual sentences. Then i'd just write a sentence for each node, and concatenate them. Often i'd take a shortcut and just write a whole paragraph. But a lot of the time, i wouldn't - a difficult passage becomes easy when you're incrementally breaking it down, reordering it, revising it, etc.

[1] https://www.a-sharp.com/acta/
by Ukv | 2025-08-26 22:51:53+00:00
The refrigerator is presumably an example to illustrate the general point, that scope is limited to where there's reason to believe there is likely evidence.

If a suspect is alleged to have been on the phone with an accomplice while committing a crime then a warrant for call logs during that time period would be appropriate, but not just open-ended trawling through all the suspect's devices for potential clues, is my understanding.
by gibbitz | 2025-08-26 22:53:10+00:00
MAGA never ceases to amaze me on how they can create a problem from hosting an email server in your basement or create a conspiracy theory about pedophilia on the other side of the aisle, but when it comes to data they use the public cloud or services and when it comes to pedophilia they hide the records that prove the president is. Why are Americans accepting this?
by causal | 2025-08-26 22:53:17+00:00
It is disturbing, but I think a human therapist would also have told him not to do that, and instead resorted to some other intervention. It is maybe an example of why having a partial therapist is worse than none: it had the training data to know a real therapist wouldn't encourage displaying nooses at home, but did not have the holistic humanity and embodiment needed to intervene appropriately.

Edit: I should add that the sycophantic "trust me only"-type responses resemble nothing like appropriate therapy, and are where OpenAI most likely holds responsibility for their model's influence.
by asdff | 2025-08-26 22:53:24+00:00
It is kind of funny how the systems are set up where there often is dense and queryable information out there already for a lot of these tasks, but these are ignored in favor of the difficult challenge of brute forcing the human consumer facing ui instead of some existing api that is designed to be machine readable already. E.g. booking flights. Travel agents use software that queries all the airlines ticket inventory to return flight information to you the consumer. The issue of booking a flight is theoretically solved already by virtue of these APIs that already exist to do just that. But for AI agents this is now a stumbling block because it would presumably take a little bit of time to craft out a rule to cover this edge case and return far more accurate information and results. Consumers with no alternative don't know what they are missing so there is no incentive to improve this.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-08-26 22:53:37+00:00
The Van Halen one is true. They had a crazy tour set up for the time and had very intense electricity requirements where if something wasn't properly set up it could literally kill someone. Any musician who has played a shitty venue has been zapped by a mic. The brown M&Ms were a canary in a coal mine to see if requirements were being followed. You can go on Snopes and literally see a concert rider from them.
by 0xy | 2025-08-26 22:54:05+00:00
There's tons of research showing that excessive taxation drives wealthy people out and shrinks the economy. France tried it and reversed course when it was a disaster economically.

The UK is currently experiencing an exodus of wealthy taxpayers due to high tax burdens.

If you want to kill your economy, the fastest way to do so is by ripping off those who employ most of the economy through their business ventures.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.34.2.119
by chao- | 2025-08-26 22:54:07+00:00
I remember! I stand corrected on the name and the issues!

I forgot that name "fglrx", probably a mental self-defense mechanism. Those were some bad times, trying to get different display outputs to work at the same time, guessing and testing values in xorg.conf, so on. There was some community utility someone wrote to try and help with installation, reinstallation, configuration and reconfiguration, but the name eludes me now.

I would edit my post to correct it, but it seems the edit window has passed.
by bullen | 2025-08-26 22:54:51+00:00
No, because it uses 10x the energy. Electricity is not an energy source.

As I said the X86 would use linux but as a server, not a client.

A server has to handle thousands of clients and then it's ok to have the extra power.

I don't understand why you think the last sentence, it makes no sense:

I am encouraging people to get low price, low power, open hardware and software for everyday use before the KWh goes to $1 which is HAS to do, hopefully not too soon.
by devmor | 2025-08-26 22:54:55+00:00
A more detailed analogy would be if you owning the robots meant that all food is now packaged for robots instead of humans, increasing the personal labor cost of obtaining and preparing food as well as inflating the cost of dinnerware exponentially, while driving up my power bill to cover the cost of expanding infrastructure to power your robots.

In that case, I certainly am against you owning the robots and view your desire for them as a direct and immediate threat against my well being.
by serf | 2025-08-26 22:55:12+00:00
>There are only a few projects that I can think of that are really just wrappers (even though they add a lot of value), e.g:

it's more common than you give it credit for.

gparted, cups, 7zip, baobab, all the *commnder file tools, almost all cd/dvd/bd burning software, nearly every media player that touches ffmpeg (vlc,mplayer) , almost every VM gui, almost every firewall GUI, time machine, duplicati, sabnzbd .. the list goes on forever.

Linux fits too if you're talking about the OS rather than the kernel.

If you want to talk at a lower level then python is really just a wrapper for lots of other shit, simiarly pytorch/cuda are wrappers for a bunch of ugly C.

pretty languages are wrappers for ugly languages, ugly languages are wrappers for assembly, assembly is a wrapper for machine code.

It's wrapped turtles all the way down.
by adam_arthur | 2025-08-26 22:55:51+00:00
The LLM should not be seeing the raw DOM in its context window, but a highly simplified and compact version of it.

In general LLMs perform worse both when the context is larger and also when the context is less information dense.

To achieve good performance, all input to the prompt must be made as compact and information dense as possible.

I built a similar tool as well, but for automating generation of E2E browser tests.

Further, you can have sub-LLMs help with compacting aspects of the context prior to handing it off to the main LLM. (Note: it's important that, by design, HTML selectors cannot be hallucinated)

Modern LLMs are absolutely capable of interpreting web pages proficiently if implemented well.

That being said, things like this Claude product seem to be fundamentally poorly designed from both a security and general approach perspective and I don't agree at all that prompt engineering is remotely the right way to remediate this.

There are so many companies pushing out junk products where the AI is just handling the wrong part of the loop and pulls in far too much context to perform well.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-26 22:56:13+00:00
I noticed this with the OpenAI presentation for GPT-5 too; they just dove straight in to some of the less ethical applications (writing a eulogy, medical advice, etc.). But while the OpenAI presentation felt more like kids playing with a loaded gun, this feels more like inevitability: "we're already heading down this path anyway, so it may as well be us that does it right".
by behnamoh | 2025-08-26 22:56:24+00:00
honestly these people should be called out so maybe shame stops them from doing such shenanigans.

some universities just fly candidates to show to the dean as proof that they're working towards the school's AI initiatives. last year a school that flew me made a huge deal about how serious they were about AI and all the infrastructure they were willing to purchase for the 60 new faculty they were hiring across the entire school who do AI work.

they ended up hiring a psychology major who does nothing AI related.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-26 22:58:10+00:00
You're completely missing the point.

Your definition of "reasonable" is always going to be someone else's "too broad" or "too narrow", "too woke" or "too fascist". There's no escaping that.

The comment I was replying to was

> "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "

You've spent your time since trying to define what can and cannot be spoken about - which is exactly what the original comment said was bad.

1. Who Are YOU to define what can or cannot be spoken about?

2. Why do you think that YOUR contributions are "reasonable" but someone pointing out several of the existing restrictions on "free speech" that people happily agree on isn't?

Also, FTR I thought to also include the following speech restrictions:

- Trademark infringement

- Copyright infringement

- Patent infringement

- Non Disclosure Agreements

edit: The fact of the matter is, people generally don't realise how restricted speech is in the world (regardless of where you are)

If a state wants to further censor people all they need to do is convince people that the speech category is harmful in some way or other, and boom, it's illegal.
by abeppu | 2025-08-26 22:58:31+00:00
My understanding is that the _concept_ of a virus wasn't even established until the late 19th century, because we first needed the germ theory, and then we needed to understand bacteria well enough to have a filter whose pores were known to be smaller than bacteria could pass through, but which some _other_ infection agent could still pass through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology#Discovery

Hippocrates could recommend elderberry for a bunch of ailments, but he didn't have the concept of a "universal antiviral".
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-08-26 22:58:43+00:00
> Intel fell behind TSMC, who was powered by massive orders from Apple in particular

> the China concerns are real, Intel Foundry needs a guarantee of existence to even court customers, and there really is no coming back from an exit. There won’t be a startup to fill Intel’s place. The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies for the most important products on earth, and while everything may seem fine for the next five, ten, or even fifteen years, the seeds of that failure will eventually sprout, just like those 2007 seeds sprouted for Intel over the last couple of years. The only difference is that the repercussions of this failure will be catastrophic not for the U.S.’s leading semiconductor company, but for the U.S. itself.
by lqet | 2025-08-26 22:59:41+00:00
Wikipedia has a map [0] which shows the extent of the ancient lake (Lago Valino) the Romans drained (the waterfall is in the upper left corner). This lake had a surface area of around 90 km², which is roughly half the size of present-day Lago Maggiore.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Anticola...
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-26 22:59:43+00:00
In principle, no, declaring the ambassador persona non grata only directly means that that particular official is no longer welcome and recognized, the state which they represented to that moment may continue to be represented on an interim basis without meaningful interruption (usually through designation of the existing deputy chief of mission as chargé d'affaires) unless the host nation also ordered the closure of the mission or formally severed diplomatic relations.

The nation whose ambassador was expelled may choose to downgrade relations formally, even if the other side has not, as its own protest, of course.

On the other hand, expelling an ambassador is a rare event and usually one piece of a fairly extreme diplomatic protest that involves other elements, either simultaneously or in close temporal proximity (fully cutting off relations or even declaring war would not be that unusual as accompanying actions.)