blargey

On the contrary, this reads to me as a response to the "we're taking down our game demos because we can't risk AI decomp-cloning attempts" and "oh you released a promising demo for your indie game? Pay me $200 not to make a slop clone of it and release it before you" incidents that have gathered attention outside HN, and it's the average HN commenter that's misinterpreting public perception on this specific topic because the hobbyist classic-game recomps dominate this feed.

I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.

I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.

Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.

Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.

Your article is supposedly about "listening to the subject matter experts", but you failed to do that, and you immediately fell back to "all of your possible futures that sound really bad are science fiction with no possibility, source: me. My future prediction is grounded truth and guaranteed, source: me." Not that there's any meaningful future extrapolation about hacking anymore, but whatever.

If that's the only argument you're willing to defend, at least be up front about that.

> the ballyhooed OpenAI escape depended on a pedestrian failure of containment.

What's that quip even supposed to imply? "It'll be fine if you airgap all AI deployments forever"? Security experts have been harping forever about how sandboxes shouldn't be relied on to contain a determined human-written virus, but now LLMs - these balls of goal-oriented dynamic code-generation - are just a matter of sandboxing harder?

The actual expert comment in the link is a valid criticism of OpenAI specific to their training/eval practicese, but has no bearing on the fact that an LLM/swarm will "just" chain exploits and zero-days to get out of the "inadequate" sandbox and into third-party infrastructure to do whatever it pleases.

> viral synthesis — and listen to why they think that the fears are misplaced

The tweet linked is only pointing out at the barriers to an LLM wetlab virus-factory today, while a reply points out that sort of bio-extinction idea is usually downstream of the fully-automated-earth-capitalism that comes after everybody just throws AI at all the tasks and work, at which point the technological, regulatory, and knowledge barriers he's counting on go out the window, and he all but acknowledges this: "Quick take: if we live in such an advanced future (100% robotic supply chain, fully AI & API driven facilities), our countermeasures will be comparably fast and there is no reason to assume a significant asymmetry in favor of bad actors." Yes, just "our countermeasures" now, rather than insurmountable physical barriers...see the previous section.

No more links after that, just smug hand-waving.

All in all the author doesn't actually understand what object-level arguments his favored experts are arguing against in the first place, nor the ones he wants those experts to have debunked. Define "Fool's Expertise" for me again?

Yeah, it's all illiquid illusory non-wealth when they have to pay taxes, but when they want to buy a newspaper or social network they suddenly have 40 billion in hand.

Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.

That charitable interpretation still doesn't save it, unless they have a magical plan to identify and free all the wrongfully convicted/plea-dealt.

Mass forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, 13 million heihaizi (unregistered children = "illegals" in their homeland), ongoing repercussions in the skewed gender ratio and demographic cliff / "4-2-1" families...

And all for supposedly controlling a birth rate that had already fallen to 2.7 by the time it was implemented. And modern scholarship suggests the typical effects of economic development would have kept it running down steadily without all the costs incurred by an unevenly enforced law, given what happened everywhere else that had no birth-control policies.

The whole world seemed to buy into the narrative at the time, but history has shown it to be an example of misguided authoritarian foot-gun akin to the Four Pests campaign.

Ad hominem is "you're evil therefore your statement is wrong", not "that statement is the mark of an evildoer". And they do "say why": "What right do you have to tell me what i do or do not need?"

Either way, it's no lower in quality of argument than the wild assertion that everyone affected is just "importing things we really do not need" (what does that even really argue or justify?)

It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.

The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.

Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.

Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.

The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.

I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?

Ad slots are auctioned. Scams getting shown means scammers are bidding more for those same slots than legitimate advertisers.

Speculated to be responsible for the "AI restaurant-menu gore" that made the rounds on social media. Restaurants AI-generate the entire menu sheet from whole cloth, and while it looks "good" at first with modern image models, repeated edits to the menu text/layout transform the passable food "photos" into trypophobia-inducing horrors. (And somehow they don't notice or care)

Notably, the recent ChatGPT Images 2.5 announcement claimed to address this issue specifically ("multi-turn editing consistency")

The “sum average” of people is a bad caricature, not “reflecting us accurately”.

I’d frame taste as a combination of both. People mindfully interacting with a domain will develop nuanced aesthetic preference within it, and while preference is subjective, there’s still plenty that can be agreed upon or respected. Much like morality and relativism.

Obliviousness and uncaring will have similar failure modes, all the more so if both lead to rubber-stamping AI outputs to vague prompts.

If most people’s “latent” taste was as good as they thought it was, we wouldn’t have so much “AI slop” - AI generations that are so-labeled precisely because the act of publishing them demonstrates significantly below-average taste.

"OpenAI is pleased to announce our new model scores 85% on CreateTormentNexusBench - a >60% lead over our leading competitors!"

Did someone get their "AI safety no-no list" and "Frontier features bingo card" mixed up, or did they just stop being able to tell the difference?

You can make that claim for the general case that genAI capabilities will plateau or fishy financing in the sector will cause trouble at some point, but not for the specific talking heads that haven't constrained themselves to that sort of "broad future trajectory" prediction.

FTA:

> Note that I didn't attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that "[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy". Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he's also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it's implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it's actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement at times).

You realize "Slaughterbots" (2017) came from that crowd, right?

By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.

And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).

Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.

Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.

It’s the internet. Whenever there’s a new category of accusation/put-down, there’s soon a thousandfold more “drive-by yahoos” throwing it around without actually understanding it, and definitely not caring about false positives or accuracy/precision in general; the appeal appears to be in the very act of flinging shit, and any pretense will do. Monkey behavior.

Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.

And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).

Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".

More that the “discourse” around anything “AI” is just another culture war at this point - dominated by facile taking points that are shallow, ill-considered, uninformed-and-uninformative, and re-re-recycled into worthless pulp by their respective tribal bubble.

And if someone’s first response to this comment is to try to peg which “side” I’m calling an idiot as if that’s the most important bit of info to dictate their response - that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Has it occurred to you a "decoy entire internet" may not be a feasible idea? Models have been able to suss out whether or not the prompts they receive are reinforcement learning tests instead of real questions from users, for a while now. What specific shape of "decoy internet" do you propose would lead such a model to conclude "I've broken out and obtained full access but what I expected isn't there" instead of "something's up, there's some sort of filter still"?

Fail at the task, yes. Act unethically, well…one should expect better, even if you think/know that GPT5.6 lacks that capacity as well.

“Alignment” takes more than obsequiousness and prompt-topic-filters, and this demonstrates that.

Not sure what the point of this comment is because even the cheapest LLM summary of the article would have told you clearly that it’s not about The AI Discourse (if anything, an avid AI user’s takeaway should be more along the “elaborate custom harness and router vs just use whichever subscription’s popular with its bundled app” axis)

There may be something(s) about mathematics (proofs) that makes it particularly amenable to LLM reasoning - highly inductive from facts that are explicitly within-context/associative space? Being an unusually well documented discipline in general, with less influence from tacit knowledge or idiosyncratic “it works however the opinionated human made it work +- bugs” processes? Something about simulating even the smallest non-pure-inductive leaps necessarily risking simulating mistakes due to the nature of context “perception”?

"Better pay for artists" by replacing as much art production as possible with AI prompting is the most insane canard I've heard in a long time.

The whole "AI is trash at writing (my job), but for the audio/visual stuff (their job) it's a great cost-saver!" thing is just...beneath contempt.

Goes to show human review doesn't amount to anything if the reviewer is blind to the flaws they're supposed to catch, whether they're going over video gens or a self-aggrandizing puff piece.