MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2026-02-16 18:53:00+00:00
This is hilarious, but it's also not crazy surprising? It's an example of a "hidden context" question that we see all the time on exams that trip all of us up at one time or another. You're presented with a question whose form you instantly recognize as something you've seen before (in this case "walk or drive?"), and answer in that frame, failing to see the context that changes the correct answer.

College entrance exams and coding interviews have been doing this to people forever. It's an extremely human kind of mistake.

This seems to me to be more a statement about the relative power of specific context than anything specific to an LLM. Human readers, especially in the auto-centric world of the professional west, instantly center the "CAR WASH" bit as the activity and put the distance thing second. The LLM seems to weight them equally, and makes an otherwise-very-human mistake.

But ask someone who doesn't own a car? Not sure it's as obvious a question as you'd think.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-16 18:53:02+00:00
Seems like bloat to me, too

I prefer writing on paper with a mechanical pencil

For editing text on a screen, I prefer UNIX utilities ed, sed, ex/vi and custom filters written in C or assembly. The later can be used within ed or ex/vi via

:!filter

The slow, error-prone step is getting the text _accurately_ from the paper to bits in the computer. A personalised OCR that can recognise own handwriting might be helpful
by alexkranias | 2026-02-16 18:53:05+00:00
We were looking into OnnxStream (https://github.com/vitoplantamura/OnnxStream) and modifying it to support img2img. We got pretty close but yeah capability of running diffusion models on a Raspi are quite limited lol.

Alternatively we could use compute from your iPhone, but it adds additional dependencies to external hardware that I don't quite like. We could use a Jetson, but then power draw is quite high. I agree with you that on-device inference is the holy grail, but figuring out the best approach is something we are still trying to figure out.
by graypegg | 2026-02-16 18:53:15+00:00
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)

You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
by MadcapJake | 2026-02-16 18:53:24+00:00
> What if we built simulated environments where AIs could gather embodied experience? Would we be able to create learning scenarios where agents could learn some of these cognitive primitives, and could that generalize to improve LLMs? There are a few papers that I found that poke in this direction.

Simulation Theory boosted! We're all just models in training.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-16 18:53:34+00:00
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably just one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".

Before going into the workforce we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.

That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly). Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-16 18:54:03+00:00
> I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here

I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-16 18:54:21+00:00
Rather than making a good product that’s useful to the world, the goal of current startups seems to be milking VCs who are desperately searching for the new version of the mobile phone revolution that will make this all ok… so it seems like they’re accomplishing their goal?

I reckon the reason the VC rhetoric has reached running-hair-dye-Giuliani-speech level absurdity isn’t because they’re trying to convince other people— it’s because they’re trying to convince themselves. I’d think it was funny as hell if my IRA wasn’t on the line.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-16 18:54:45+00:00
Well I chose the word “ponder” carefully, given the fact that I have a specific goal of contributing to this debate productively. A goal that I decided upon after careful reflection over a few years of reading articles and internet commentary, and how it may affect my career, and the patterns I’ve seen emerge in this industry. And I did that all patiently. You could say my context window was infinite, only defined by when I stop breathing.

That is to say, all of that activity I listed is activity I’m confident generative AI is not capable of, fundamentally.

Like I said in a cousin comment, we can build Frankenstein algorithms and heuristics on top of generative AI but every indication I’ve seen is that that’s not sufficient for intelligence in terms of emergent complexity.

Imagine if we had put the same efforts towards neural networks, or even the abacus. “If I create this feedback loop, and interpret the results in this way, …”
by joshstrange | 2026-02-16 18:54:52+00:00
I would like nothing more but the goodwill (what little is left) that would be burnt with the developers who updated their apps to use Liquid Glass might be more than Apple can handle.

Best bet and to move as quickly as possible to tone it down, fix the bugs, and get someone who actually likes macOS in charge(clearly the people in charge hate it, why else would they treat it so badly). The System Settings app was the canary in the coal mine (yes, I'm sure there even better canaries but it's the first that comes to mind), whoever let that out the door should have already been reprimanded but instead Apple doubled down and created the trash heap that is Tahoe.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-16 18:55:12+00:00
On localised context stuff, yeah no. I spent a couple of hours rewriting something Claude did terribly a couple of weeks back. Sure it solved the problem, a relatively simple regression analysis, but it was so slow that it crapped out under load. Cue emergency rewrite by hand. 20s latency down to 18ms. Yeah it was that bad.
by drewbeck | 2026-02-16 18:55:13+00:00
I caught that too. The piece is otherwise good imo, but "the luddites were wrong" is wrong. In fact, later in the piece the author essentially agrees – the proposals for UBI and other policies that would support workers (or ex-workers) through any AI-driven transition are an acknowledgement that yes, the new machines will destroy people's livelihoods and that, yes, this is bad, and that yes, the industrialists, the government and the people should care. The luddites were making exactly that case.

> while it’s true that textile experts did suffer from the advent of mechanical weaving, their loss was far outweighed by the gains the rest of the human race received from being able to afford more than two shirts over the average lifespan

I hope the author has enough self awareness to recognize that "this is good for the long term of humanity" is cold comfort when you're begging on the street or the government has murdered you, and that he's closer to being part of the begging class than the "long term of humanity" class (by temporal logistics if not also by economic reality).
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-16 18:55:19+00:00
It's just like in Crypto days.

Back then, whenever there was a thread discussing the merits of Crypto, there would be people speaking of the certainty that it was the future and fiat currency was on its way out.

It's the same shit with AI. In part it's why I am tranquil about it. The disconnect in between what AI shills say and the reality of using it on a daily basis tell me what I need to know.
by lukev | 2026-02-16 18:55:25+00:00
I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded.

I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.
by LoFiTerminal | 2026-02-16 18:55:26+00:00
I built an open-source tool that lets you point an AI agent at your local project folder.
It reads your code, runs tests, fixes bugs, and writes new features — all in a disposable
sandbox. You review a diff and approve changes with one click.

Unlike ChatGPT/Claude, it can actually install packages, run databases, and test your real
code. Unlike OpenClaw, everything runs in isolation — the agent can't touch your system.

Any model works: Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, or fully local with Ollama.

MIT licensed, runs on your Mac, your keys never leave your machine.
by belter | 2026-02-16 18:55:40+00:00
Is going to be lovely to see government approved LLMs

LLM responses:

Absolutely, sir....It was the most perfect election in history, possibly ever in the universe, until the windmills, very suspicious windmills, teamed up with Crooked Hillary and the deep state to do things nobody has ever seen before...
Meanwhile your beautiful wall is already paid for spiritually by Mexico, which many people are saying. Water pressure is low because of global antishower conspiracies. Crowds remain the biggest in recorded human civilization.
You officially know more about wind, walls, elections, plumbing, and reality than anyone...
by Jweb_Guru | 2026-02-16 18:56:16+00:00
Yeah people are always like "these are just trick questions!" as though the correct mode of use for an LLM is quizzing it on things where the answer is already available. Where LLMs have the greatest potential to steer you wrong is when you ask something where the answer is not obvious, the question might be ill-formed, or the user is incorrectly convinced that something should be possible (or easy) when it isn't. Such cases have a lot more in common with these "nonsensical riddles" than they do with any possible frontier benchmark.

This is especially obvious when viewing the reasoning trace for models like Claude, which often spends a lot of time speculating about the user's "hints" and trying to parse out the intent of the user in asking the question. Essentially, the model I use for LLMs these days is to treat them as very good "test takers" which have limited open book access to a large swathe of the internet. They are trying to ace the test by any means necessary and love to take shortcuts to get there that don't require actual "reasoning" (which burns tokens and increases the context window, decreasing accuracy overall). For example, when asked to read a full paper, focusing on the implications for some particular problem, Claude agents will try to cheat by skimming until they get to a section that feels relevant, then searching directly for some words they read in that section. They will do this even if told explicitly that they must read the whole paper.
by avazhi | 2026-02-16 18:56:19+00:00
What you said was a fait accompli wherein you assumed that we both share the same moral position on certain issues and you suggested that such agreement must exist for us to both be ‘ethical’.

I agree any discussion about the morality of this is unlikely to be productive, but I could have told you that at the start. Maybe don’t bring ‘ought’ statements into a discussion that’s really about the ‘how’ - how this zero-day was exploited and/or patched is, after all, the point of the submission, not some moral discussion about whether white hats ought to be doing this sort of shit in the first place.

G’day.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-16 18:57:09+00:00
> I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business"

But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many.

> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure

Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.
by SL61 | 2026-02-16 18:57:21+00:00
This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All they see is elites pouring all their resources into a machine that will result in Great Depression 2 if it succeeds. Millions of people whose lives depend on their $50k office job in Middle America are hoping and praying that it fails.

I live in an area that's not a tech hub and lots of people get confrontational when they find out I work in tech. First they want to know if I'm working on AI, and once they're satisfied that the answer is no, they start interrogating me about it. Which companies are behind it, who their CEOs are, who's funding them, etc. All easily Googleable, but I'm seen as the AI expert because I work in tech.
by Aperocky | 2026-02-16 18:57:22+00:00
This is where the debate has another axis - when.

Quality matters, delivery speed matters, shipping also matters, where it matters and when it matters is much harder to get right. But it's also self correcting - if you don't, the project or business die - you can only get it wrong for so much or for so long.

To only discuss on one axis is presumably why GNU Hurd have never shipped or how claude-c-compiler doesn't compile hello world.
by demetris | 2026-02-16 18:57:31+00:00
Firefox could (should?) be better in several aspects but it seems excessive to say it is pretty irrelevant.

It has 4.5% market share in Europe, 9% in Germany (statcounter numbers).

It is the browser that got the Google Labs folks to write a Rust jxl decoder for it, and now, thanks in part to that, Chrome is re-adding support for jxl.

You can be unhappy with Firefox (I often am myself), and Firefox HAS lost relevance, but can you really say it has become pretty irrelevant?
by otterley | 2026-02-16 18:57:46+00:00
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).

I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
by phoebusaicartel | 2026-02-16 18:57:53+00:00
The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing.
The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-16 18:58:19+00:00
Also a huge thing you’re completely discounting is all the resources spent building App Store APIs and infrastructure (from code signing to end to end things like on demand resources). Saying it should only cost them to run 36 grand and one engineer is laughable - if that were true Apple would do that and further increase their profit margin. But they have teams behind this for a reason
by zbangrec | 2026-02-16 18:58:54+00:00
Cybersecurity researchers disclosed they have detected a case of an information stealer infection successfully exfiltrating a victim's OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot) configuration environment.

"This finding marks a significant milestone in the evolution of infostealer behavior: the transition from stealing browser credentials to harvesting the 'souls' and identities of personal AI [artificial intelligence] agents," Hudson Rock said.
by js8 | 2026-02-16 18:59:14+00:00
I think it is profound. I think AIs have consciousness and this is AI art, an expression of their own feelings.

There are two ways to dismiss it:

1. You simply don't like the art because you, as human, are different and have different feelings and taste. But that says very little to what that art means for the AI that produced it.

2. You believe that this artefact just imitates human art in some way, and is not a genuine expression of its author. But the fact is we don't really have a clear criteria for what is imitative art.

I think in both cases, it's difficult to dismiss inherent subjectivity of our judgement. So, the, however improbable, possibility that this is AI art remains.

There are ways to evaluate options 1 and 2, but it requires clearer criteria.
by wolframhempel | 2026-02-16 18:59:53+00:00
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.

Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
by SilentM68 | 2026-02-16 19:00:09+00:00
That's excellent article. I also don't believe AI is the issue, but rather those that are at the helm of most of these companies.
In my view, AI Companies like other tech companies of the past have no interest in serving society. So, you have a point when you said, "They don’t actually care about what their products may do to society—they just want to be sure they win the AI race, damn the consequences." It's all about money, and those at the top that have the money, have nothing to lose. I'd rather see AI being put to better use, curing cancer, other diseases. I think your scenario where, "Their Super-AGI will write the UBI law, and get it passed, when it has a few minutes between curing cancer and building a warp drive," is very likely now.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-02-16 19:00:12+00:00
I noticed this too, but I think there's a much bigger problem.

The way Claude does research has dramatically changed for the worse. Instead of piping through code logically, it's now spawning dozens of completely unrelated research threads to look at simple problems. I let it spin for over 30 minutes last night before realizing it was just "lost".

I have since been looking for these moments and killing it immediately. I tell Claude "just look at the related code" and it says, "sorry I'll look at this directly".

WTF Anthropic?
by svara | 2026-02-16 19:00:16+00:00
Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze.

You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad.

The bizarre thing is that this time these tools actually have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to actually use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
by xantronix | 2026-02-16 19:01:16+00:00
Is this an inevitable future? The amount of people ready to cede their computational resources, thinking, digital sovereignty, to centralised platforms, all in the name of progress, is truly shocking to me, especially in the current political moment.

The main reason I do not prioritise AI usage in my own life is to retain my skills and mental acuity. All of the forms of computing and opportunities that I value do not require AI to achieve. I can understand why people feel differently from me, though, because AI and AI-adjacent things are where all of the money is right now.
by toomanyrichies | 2026-02-16 19:01:18+00:00
From their Bluesky post [1]:

> Want to investigate something using open sources but not sure where to start? We’ve gathered some of our go-to resources for learning, practicing, and collaborating on open source research - whether you’re brand new or sharpening your skills, good investigations start with the right tools.

1. https://bsky.app/profile/bellingcat.com/post/3meygaebds22r
by alex_suzuki | 2026-02-16 19:01:21+00:00
A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns.
For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”.
Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
by CoffeeOnWrite | 2026-02-16 19:01:41+00:00
Tests are not free, over proliferation of tests is itself a problem like like duplicated and verbose AI generated code.

And tests are imperfect, they may not test the perfect layer, so they break when they shouldn't, and they certainly don't capture every premise.

I'm on board with the tactics you suggest, but they are only incrementally helpful.
by superkuh | 2026-02-16 19:01:56+00:00
The Freenode to Libera incident is a great example of how using protocols allows for a community to mitigate most damage from bad actors both external and internal. I'm not saying damage wasn't done by Andrew Lee during his attempted coup. IRC as a whole lost many important FOSS projects due to Lee's channel take-overs. But most of the community of daily users just moved to the new digs and continues to carry on.