MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What do you do about real art/work being called "AI Slop?"
by SunshineTheCat | 2025-12-09 20:32:14+00:00
I posted about this in response to another post, however, I wanted to post it separately in case anyone had any unique perspectives/insights on this.

The other day I posted a short showcasing some artwork I made for a TCG I'm in the process of creating.

Comments poured in saying it was "doomed to fail" because it was just "AI slop."

In the video itself I explained how I made them, in Adobe Illustrator (even showing some of the layers, elements, pieces etc).

Next I'm actually posting a recording of me making a character from start to finish, a timelapse.

Will be interesting if I get any more "AI slop" comments, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to share anything drawn now because people immediately assume it's generated.

Has anyone else ran into this with creative work/projects they've created?

I know it's easy enough to ignore comments like this. My concern is that they're common enough that for people genuinely interested in what I'm making, they'll be turned off by the people tossing the AI slop comments around. Sharing BTS of work seems to be a great way to get attention on something I'm hoping to launch, apart from this.

I've been illustrating characters/designing games for many years now (long before you could generate art) so it's a new experience having everything I make being immediately called into question.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-09 20:32:56+00:00
I think you're going to need a superhuman intelligence's idea of a super-superhuman intelligence at the very least if you're going to expect C programs that are memory safe.

I'll admit that I'd like to do a programming challenge with or without AI that would be like "advent of code" in assembly but if it was actual "advent of code" the direct route is to write something that looks like a language runtime system so you have the dynamic data structures you need on your fingertips.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-09 20:33:06+00:00
EV validated not only that a domain was under control of the server requesting the cert, but that the domain was under control of the entity claiming it.

I kind of wish they still had it, and I kind of wish browsers indicated that a cert was signed by a global CA (real cert store trusted by the browsers) or an aftermarket CA, so people can see that their stuff is being decrypted by their company.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-09 20:33:54+00:00
It hints there may be common higher-level abstraction and compression processes in human consciousness.

The "human" part of that matters. This is all human-made data, collected from human technology, which was created to assist human thinking and experience.

So I wonder if this isn't so much about universals or Platonic ideals. More that we're starting to see the outlines of the shapes that define - perhaps constrict - our own minds.
by chippiewill | 2025-12-09 20:34:19+00:00
Lets Encrypt are doing is because of the decision that CAs and browser makers made that it needs to be reduced (browsers have been reducing the length of certs that they trust).

The why is because it's safer: it reduces the validity period of private keys that could be used in a MITM attack if they're leaked. It also encourages automation of cert renewal which is also more secure. It also makes responding to incidents at certificate authorities more practical.
by infecto | 2025-12-09 20:34:33+00:00
Not sure if it is just a US thing but it to add a little more depth. Most stores as already stated want you to wander a bit to possibly purchase more things but the other piece is most stores custom to local preferences both on what they carry and where it’s located.

Thought differently most major chains capture all of this data and can optimize stores for sales.

I think the bigger complaint is a typical US grocery store carries an insane amount of SKUs. If I was just going to Trader Joe’s it’s no problem. Low sku count layouts never change. Walmart has probably 10x the skus and it’s a struggle sometimes just finding what you want. Oh I need dry dill, well in the spice section there are 3 or 4 brands. Within those sometimes it’s not in alphabetical order. Things are misplaced or just out of stock.
by x0x0 | 2025-12-09 20:34:42+00:00
Interesting work, but ultimately silly: of course google maps ranks results. No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name, when they type in restaurant. And I cannot put into words how uneager I am to have the city or state government manage what comes up when I put indian or burrito into a map.
by muricula | 2025-12-09 20:34:58+00:00
I've played with something similar with my M1 using Apple's MLX framework. The problem is I'm compute bound. I've never managed to get my M1 Max's GPU to process more than ~7.8k tokens per second at bf16 precision, so to train a 112M parameter model on ~20 billion tokens I'd need to run the model training for ~30 days.

One solution is to reduce the scope of the problem -- you can train on a smaller less diverse dataset such as TinyStories which is a collection of 1 billion tokens of chatGPT generated children's stories. After about 40 hours, less than one weekend, you'll have a model which can generate mostly grammatical children's stories.

If you have a newer mac and/or an ultra chip you'll have more and faster GPU cores, and might be able to train on FineWeb or a similar, larger and more diverse dataset.
by al_borland | 2025-12-09 20:35:04+00:00
I don’t mind the coding, it’s the requirements gathering and status meetings I want AI to automate away. Those are the parts I don’t like and where we’d see the biggest productivity gains. They are also the hardest to solve for, because so much of it is subjective. It also often involves decisions from leadership which can come with a lot of personal bias and occasionally some ego.
by djoldman | 2025-12-09 20:35:36+00:00
I think it's interesting how "shortage" is defined across different products.

From an economics standpoint, "shortage" isn't a useful word, unless it's applied in the extremely unlikely scenario where there nothing is available at any price. Generally, this is because price dictates supply.

"Shortage" for the current housing market is generally used to mean, "relative to historic trends, many people want houses who can't afford the current prices."
by BubbleRings | 2025-12-09 20:35:37+00:00
First let’s have it create maybe 100 more entries, then have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions. As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be made twice as good. And have a set of short “explain xkcd”-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or something.

Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:

FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose intolerance (fda.gov)
by abustamam | 2025-12-09 20:35:48+00:00
Agreed with them not thinking they're doing anything wrong. Disagree with them not wanting to disguise it. If they don't think they're doing anything wrong, then they likely don't think it's against the rules. If they knew it were against the rules, they'd probably disguise it better.

This may actually be a good thing because it'd force them to put some thought into dissecting the comment from AI instead of just pasting it in wholesale. Depending on how well they try to disguise it, of course.
by glenstein | 2025-12-09 20:35:50+00:00
I agree with your characterization (not a literal interpretation of the prompt), and think that's the most important thing I wish more people ITT would understand. But I nevertheless think Gemini did create that in response. Sometimes people think they want "prediction" when actually they want cheeky inside jokes and vibes. If anything Gemini is probably faithfully responding to the vibes of the prompt as well as following traditional signals of "success" per it's training.
by casenmgreen | 2025-12-09 20:36:12+00:00
Do we need to be skeptical of NIH because of Trump? or they're still okay?

Also, remember - don't take D on its own. Always with magnesium, or you get harmed by it, for all that it also does you good. Body is not built for raw D.

Also also remember, D2 is a vitamin, D3 is a hormone.
by guywithahat | 2025-12-09 20:36:14+00:00
I love the idea of using Go for games, but go-routines and channels aren't really low-enough latency to be used in games. In particular, ebiten, one of the largest go game engines doesn't use a single go-routine under the hood for (presumably) this very reason. Attempting to use channels and such in my own project (https://thomashansen.xyz/blog/ebiten-and-go.html) left me with about 70% cpu utilization I couldn't pass
by kulahan | 2025-12-09 20:36:36+00:00
I remember being bummed when I played WC3 and there was no oil resource. Lots of sky and ground units, but I guess a navy just wasn't useful enough? Which I suppose I could see. A big benefit in militaries is the ability to quickly project power (from a carrier) or provide tons of logistics - supplies, blockades, etc.

These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.

It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
by chatmasta | 2025-12-09 20:36:44+00:00
If someone is asking a technical question along the lines of “how does this work” or “can I do this,” then I’d expect them to Google it first. Nowadays I’d also expect them to ask ChatGPT. So I’d appreciate their preamble explaining that they already did that, and giving me the chance to say “yep, ChatGPT is basically right, but there’s some nuance about X, Y, and Z…”
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-09 20:36:50+00:00
> For most of history, individual people owned real estate. Only recently did we manage to screw that up. We can unscrew it.

Corporate ownership of real estate is ancient - read about the land rents (and in-kind labor rents) that early Christian monasteries were entitled to in late Roman/early-middle-ages Europe, or how Buddhist monasteries have been funded from local levees for thousands of years. Or how the British crown as a corporate entity currently vested in Charles III still owns substantial chunks of British real estate. History is long and for most of it it was not the case that ordinary middle class people even existed, let alone owned houses.
by GeekyBear | 2025-12-09 20:37:07+00:00
Google's headline new AI feature for this year's Pixel phone, Magic Cue, shipped despite not working.

> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.

However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...

I'd rather see companies admit that a promised feature isn't ready for prime time than hype it up only to ship it broken.
by mcny | 2025-12-09 20:37:39+00:00
> If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C?

Or assembly, or binary

Yes, this is a completely valid take and it is the ultimate answer to why vibe coding, the way most people define vibe coding is a dead end.

The point is we want the LLM to generate code that is first and foremost readable by humans and structured in such a way that a human can take over control at any time.

If you think this is how LLM should generate code, congratulations we are already in agreement.

If you think programmers should not exist and that you will help your bottom line by reducing the number of programmers on your payroll or worse, completely eliminate programmers from your payroll by paying product managers who will never ever look at the code (which is required for vibe coding the way I understand it), then this question at the top is for you.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-09 20:37:52+00:00
I would say that's what Nvidia is doing.

I'm not sure how Apple is enabling anything interesting around AI right now.

That's what this bland article is not even touching on. Yes, having missed the boat is great if the boat ends up sinking. That doesn't make missing boats a great strategy.

Building huge models and huge data centers is not the only thing they could have done.

They had some interesting early ideas on letting AI tap app functionality client-side. But that has gone nowhere, and now everything of relevance is happening on servers.

Apple's devices are not even remotely the best dumb terminals to tap into that. Even that crown goes to Android.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-09 20:38:13+00:00
Let's concede that Windows sucks.

If you have macOS, it's supported until the OEM (Apple) stops supporting it. If you have Linux with some proprietary driver, it's supported until the OEM (e.g. Nvidia) stops supporting it. If you have Linux with open source drivers, it keeps working pretty much indefinitely.

Meanwhile 10+ year old hardware is serviceable for many uses. A 15 year old machine from the scrap heap could have 64GB of RAM, a different one could have a low idle power draw for a use where that's the only thing that matters. Put a cheap SSD in a machine of that vintage and someone who is just using web and email could keep using it for the rest of their life.
by deathanatos | 2025-12-09 20:38:18+00:00
> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that.

… well, you are wrong.

I recently gave the "vibe" AI the assignment of "using GTK [4, I think], establish a global shortcut key".

No amount of massaging the prompt, specifying the version of GTK, etc. could prevent it from just outright hallucinating the functions it wanted to call into existence. The entire reason I was asking was because I did not know what function to call, and was having difficulty discerning that from GTK's documentation. (I know how to do this now, and it is effectively undocumented.)

Prior to that, an assignment to determine some information from Alembic. Again, the AI desired to just hallucinate the functions it required into existence.

A script to fetch the merge queue length from GH. It decided to call GH's GraphQL API, which is fine, and doable for the task, but the query was entirely hallucinated.

A bash script to count files change in git. The code ran, and the output was wrong. The author did not check the LLM's code.

Even non-programming tasks are the same. Image generation is a constant fight of trying to get the AI to understand what you mean, or it just ignoring your prompts, etc. I went about 10 prompts trying to get an image with a stone statue of 4 ASCII characters in a field. The last character was consistently just wrong, and no amount of prompting to fix.

"Generate a character with a speech bubble that says 'Hi'" -> speech bubble has Japanese in it! (And the Japanese is gibberish, but if you ask AI to translate it, it "will".)
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 20:38:32+00:00
When there's nothing else to go on, it's still more useful than nothing.

The story was being upvoted and on the front page, but with no substantive comments, clearly because nobody understood what the significance of the paper was supposed to be.

I mean, HN comments are wrong all the time too. But if an LLM summary can at least start the conversation, I'm not really worried if its summary isn't 100% faithful.
by hoomanb | 2025-12-09 20:38:46+00:00
The issue ( https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238 ) affects thousands of users trying to use third-party tools (like LibrePods) for AirPods feature parity on Android.

The frustrating part is that the OP actually identified the exact lines of code causing the deadlock (l2c_link.cc line 118) and verified that disabling the check fixes the ANR (Application Not Responding) crash.

Despite having 9,100+ stars and being the #1 most-viewed issue on the tracker, it has been sitting in 'Assigned' status with zero communication from the assignee (vi...@google.com) since October 2024. This single bug is blocking a whole ecosystem of apps.
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-09 20:38:53+00:00
>A pocket calculator that would give the right numbers 99.7% of the time would be fairly useless.

Well that's great and all, but the vast majority of llm use is not for stuff you can just pluck out a pocket calculator (or run a similarly airtight deterministic algorithm) for, so this is just a moot point.

People really need to let go of this obsession with a perfect general intelligence that never makes errors. It doesn't and has never existed besides in fiction.
by twodave | 2025-12-09 20:40:45+00:00
Well, I would just say to take into account the fact that we're starting to see LLMs be responsible for substantial electricity use, to the point that AI companies are lobbying for (significant) added capacity. And remember that we're all getting these sub-optimal toys at such a steep discount that it would be price gouging if everyone weren't doing it.

Basically, there's an upper limit even to how much we can get out of the LLMs we have, and it's more expensive than it seems to be.

Not to mention, poorly-functioning software companies won't be made any better by AI. Right now there's a lot of hype behind AI, but IMO it's very much an "emperor has no clothes" sort of situation. We're all just waiting for someone important enough to admit it.
by kbenson | 2025-12-09 20:41:06+00:00
This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization.

My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1]

1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555
Show HN: Async web scraping framework on top of Rust
by yehors | 2025-12-09 20:41:13+00:00
Meet silkworm-rs: a fast, async web scraping framework for Python built on Rust components (rnet and scraper-rs). It features browser impersonation, typed spiders, and built-in pipelines (SQLite, CSV, Taskiq) without the boilerplate. With configurable concurrency and robust middleware, it’s designed for efficient, scalable crawlers.
by agloe_dreams | 2025-12-09 20:41:15+00:00
I mean, this is a textbook over-simplifaction to devalue an idea. Hell, with that logic, you could call all kinds of things a non-starter.

"Why buy a watch, it just shows the time on my phone" "Why buy a car, I can just use uber" "Why buy headphones? My phone has speakers."

The context of where something is changes the idea of what it is. Just become something tells the time, for example, doesn't mean it is the same thing as a watch.
by bunabhucan | 2025-12-09 20:41:15+00:00
>Sargent also said Kroger would refocus its e-commerce efforts on its fleet of more than 2,700 grocery supermarkets because it believed that its stores gave it a way to “reach new customer segments and expand rapid delivery capabilities without significant capital investments.”

Someone didn't read the 26 year old Webvan case study at CEO-school.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=26728
by c-linkage | 2025-12-09 20:41:16+00:00
Usually a root-cause analysis asks for five why's so your analysis seems a bit short.

One should ask why it is that housing / land is more profitable than those investments in which banks and private equity previously invested. And then when you follow that line of reasoning (too much capital and credit -- thanks quantitative easing! -- poor performance on bonds due to low interest rates and restrictions on the quality of investment vehicles) and you'll see that the root cause is probably more financial rather than _just_ too little housing.

Debts need to be cleared, losses need to be accepted, and leverage unwound. Building more housing just gives banks and private equity more stuff to buy.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-09 20:42:25+00:00
My understanding is Meta didn't weaponize algos until they started going after acquisitions and saw what other companies were doing. Then just like they were paranoid if they didn't buy new companies they would loses relevance, they became paranoid if they didn't incorporate much more excessive manipulation they would lose relevance?

I got the impression they were pretty freaked out by some of the stuff they saw going on initially. I can't believe they got on board with it to the extent they did.
by hackerbeat | 2025-12-09 20:42:26+00:00
Relying on AI to just ‘summarize and link back’ is like expecting a blender to cook a gourmet meal - it’s technically doing something, but the nuance gets lost. Meanwhile, millions of site owners are already watching their traffic drop like ice cubes in a hot sun. The EU isn’t ‘anti-AI,’ they’re just noticing the kitchen is on fire.
by NickC25 | 2025-12-09 20:42:56+00:00
> institutional investors purchase only 3% of homes nationwide (but much higher in some cities).

This is crucial. People are in cities - in the day and age of corporate consolidation, less and less jobs are available, and they are increasingly in-office, and increasingly in only a select few metro areas.

Nobody would give a damn if a glut of housing was built in the middle of South Dakota or Maine or Wyoming. That's because there's very little to no jobs growth in those regions.
by tmsbrg | 2025-12-09 20:44:07+00:00
Even experts create C/C++ code that is routinely exploited in the wild (see: pegasus malware, Zerodium, Windows zero days, Chrome zero days, etc.). No, please don't vibe code anything security critical, and please don't create unnecessary security risk by writing it in unsafe languages such as C/C++. The only advantage I can see is it creates some fun easy targets for beginning exploit developers. But that's not an advantage for you.
by wavemode | 2025-12-09 20:44:07+00:00
> if vibe coding is the future of software development (and it is), then why bother with languages that were designed for people who are not vibe coding? Shouldn’t there be such a thing as a “vibe-oriented programming language?” VOP.

A language designed for vibe coding could certainly be useful, but what that means is the opposite of what the author thinks that means.

The author thinks that such a language wouldn't need to have lots of high-level features and structure, since those are things that exist for human comprehension.

But actually, the opposite is true. If you're designing a language for LLMs, the language should be extremely strict and wordy and inconvenient and verbose. You should have to organize your code in a certain way, and be forced to check every condition, catch every error, consider every edge case, or the code won't compile.

Such a language would aggravate a human, but a machine wouldn't care. And LLMs would benefit from the rigidness, as it would help prevent any confusion or hallucination from causing bugs in the finished software.