customguy

> You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.

I remember how amazing that mode was on desktop, I'd sometimes enabled it on site and shrink it horizontally just to look at it handle anything perfectly. Don't remember if that was independent of the proxy though, I just cared about the removed padding and the responsiveness. Make all sites look like that and add some gutter to the side I can toggle and resize, and I'll use your browser kthx.

> How is it that sign language association learning is different from spoken language learning?

Huh? The article doesn't claim anything like this.

If someone lacks the time and energy to stand behind their views, how much of that is a result of those views? If you care about the world and justice, if you love life and living things, that's your source of energy right there. If you have half-assed ideas that sound good in the bubble and zero charisma, you have no energy, and interacting with you doesn't give anyone energy.

So much of this just strikes me as "now that I've taken a wrong turn and am in a dead end, what deus ex machina could make this work after all and turn a shitty personality into something grand?", but that will never, ever work. Whatever problem you try to solve that way, now you have two.

> Technologists don't drive decisions though. The shareholders do.

Yes, but technologists get sniped into identifying and defending them. They're the mouth pieces and the hands. Shareholders by themselves out to add my uniqueness to their assets would just be helpless randos who can't even make eye contact. Think of what "hiding behind screens" does to people, multiply that by infinite and you get shareholders hiding behind technologists.

I've been positively surprised by the result of a (overly?) thorough description, but at least to me as a math layman, this conjecture stuff is less impressive to me than a to-do app. Aren't they basically educated guesses that nobody put any real weight on, anyway? Asked differently, what does a disproven conjecture such as this change in the world that couldn't have been achieved by "Interesting idea, but you're just guessing, so let's circle back to this when you're not"? What does a disproven conjecture gain us that couldn't have been gotten more cheaply by not making it in the first place?

I'm playing/experimenting with a harness and just tested how well various models follow the instructions, and how they react to the tool claiming a local temperature of 72°C

here is how qwen3.6-27b reacted:

https://pastebin.com/srf7gjfy

try to count the number of times it "thinks" okay ready, just say the thing, no wait but what if...

this isn't (a mimicry of) thinking, this is (a mimicry of) insecurity/fear

I use LLM code for hobby/fun projects only (I also don't code for a living) and I still wouldn't want to type up the code it gives me. Instead what I dream of doing is one day to rewrite all the little things from scratch (well, with a blueprint of a working result). Your management wouldn't even talk to me, rightly so :P

We have access to and use the same tech, the difference is elsewhere.

> It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.

The things some people say, how they talk about "outraged AI critics" what they would prefer those to be, would be fucking stupid even in first grade.

These, and things like "AI-generated news sites to attack critics" really speak for themselves. There is something worth really calling out here, and it fell out naturally.

That is not the worst possible outcome, that's the baseline. Pure obedience the reason to replace humans with it, at least to whatever degree is needed to bring all other humans 100% in line, too.

Each watcher, robotic or software, can be watched by 99 other watchers, and get destroyed at the slightest deviation. If you are not a whitelisted owner, and don't have a valid personal and task ID for the location you are detected in, you get zapped. If you get detected without collar or your collar detects something odd, zap. Why take chances, so fill all the commoner areas and the wilderness with tiny surveillance drones, too. People will get detected thinking about lifting a finger they shouldn't lift, hear a short beep they associate with people getting zapped, and either stop or get zapped.

> we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances

Oh, so "we" doesn't actually refer to humans in general.

Gullible people can now automatically be detected and exploited, gnawed down to the bone and thrown away with none of the people who harvest their resources ever meeting or even thinking of them, but you are too smart for that, so it's fine. You don't need there to be a public space that is rational and allows humans to grow in, you had parents, you had an education, and there isn't anyone dear to you that you'd have to worry about either.

But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why? What's in it for the majority of people to accept something they don't like just because you like it? Why should they accept chaos because you think you'd rise above it? What kind of unilateral partaking in society is that? Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.

Because it's fun! I don't "really" use LLM for anything serious yet, but after discovering playing with a custom harness I licked blood. Like going back to edit any message to start a new conversation branch off that, or being able to go back and remove things that turned out to to be dead ends from the history. Not really "useful" [0] for now, I always wondered about that and I was dumbfounded how trivial and tiny a first MVP was. Of course, that's also because it is trivial, it's just chat, it affords none of the usefulness you'd want for any "work", but it's still very interesting.

And for some simple recurring tasks or local housekeeping stuff, having something where I 100% know what files it reads or writes will surely be useful. E.g. if I wanted to watch out for certain topics on HN, I'd rather make something myself that grabs the feed and turns that into a list of titles and topic ID, which is probably 1% of what the front page HTML would be, and then only have the LLM process that output -- rather than telling an LLM to do all that every time. Even if tokens may not be that precious, and the difference in "cognitive performance" not worth speaking of, that would feel way neater to me.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/ZL8dhYg

No, we now assume naturally full lips might be a lip job, too, and the naturally positive reaction is delayed or not forthcoming at all. That is all that achieved.

my bad, thanks for clarifying

> but Anthropic created the playbook

So? Serial killers created the playbook for serial killing, how does absolve any "copycats"?

It didn't say it's impossible, but saying "it turned out" implies a revelation that does not exist. If you think you'll have more success shooing me with the c-word rather than just parsing English and leaving it at that, I have two bridges to sell you, at the price of just one bridge!

> Turns out two separate trillion-dollar companies failed that test.

How did that "turn out"? For all we know they're all lying.

That's a bit like saying a tail is swayed by a dog, as if it could exist without one, or would have anything to do if it did.

That'd be denial. Psychosis isn't just some insult, it means something.

> It has to just be a stochastic parrot, because it's scary to imagine a non-anthropocentric world.

That makes no sense. The world doesn't revolve around humans, true, but for us it kinda does. We're the authors of the concepts we use to interact with it, such as "world", which is not something the world itself knows or cares about. A "non-anthropocentric world" is not a "world" because "world" is a purely human idea.

The implication that "AI" would somehow dethrone humans [0] is nonsense, too. It has no drive on its own, we push electricity into circuits to force the whole data ingestion and weight generation, everything. The second we stop pushing the sock puppet, it stops moving. It's still just our hand really. People act like those pets that go crazy when you put your hand under a blanket, and should stop.

What's more real is how some people seek to use tech, and "AI", as a glove to exploit other humans even more. The sicker the individual, the greater their need to take from the world, and the derpier the individual, the more impressive and vast their exoskeleton, to the point that some are more like carrier fleets than exoskeletons. The less they can face themselves, the thicker it is written on their foreheads. So if we're going to talk about denial and psychosis let's talk about the Gollums on the couch, too.

[0] In the eyes of humans... which is the only throne we're on in the first place, just like honey badgers probably think honey badgers rock and everything is their playground. That's what life does, otherwise it would not be able to get up in the morning.

Companies don't advertise their wins (the real results), what they advertise is just as or more offensive but not a win (not really real results), but the outraged Jerry Springer crowd with their hair on fire wants drama. Media is literally a multi dollar business these days, they'd do anything to boost their stocks further, so they provide that drama. Best to ignore all of that and focus on what is hidden from view and therefore real and serious.

And it's somewhat responsive even, has a sticky footer... keeping the best of the past while also staying up to date with modern developments, I think we all can learn from this <3

I vouched for your comment not because I think this is or isn't helpful advice (I have no idea), but just to thank you for the concept of "narrating the shape of one's own answer". It's something that often annoys me, though I'm sure I often do it myself, but I never thought about what it is, exactly, I just filed it under the generic category of bloat.

That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.

I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.

And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".

The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.

And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.

Yeah, and it's not necessarily mobbing to only tell people you really like about your party. But where it occurs, people never admit it to themselves and justify it in such a way, so that justification is meaningless. All wars of aggression are called a defensive emergency measure. Hundreds and thousands and rarely would anyone say "we'll take this because we can and you're helpless". No matter how glaringly obvious it is, it's never admitted.

In the same way, I can acccept "cultural fit" as a summary of things a person can describe, sure. But I think more often than not it's just a thought-terminating cliché. It can also just mean "I cannot verbalize my reasons and/or don't want to admit to them".

You can say if something fits only if you either can describe both sides in sufficient detail and where it wouldn't fit, e.g. a plug and a socket. But if it's dark, you barely see anything, and just have a "hunch", then "fit" doesn't even apply. It's like telling someone you won't let them through a door because they wouldn't "fit" anyway -- okay, so let them try, if they actually won't fit you don't need to read tea leaves and gate keep based on that.

Preferring to go with a more safe and familiar and obvious candidate, fine. But don't pretend it's because the others won't "fit".

Culture, in so far as it deserves the name, shapes the people exposed to or in it, as well as the other way around. E.g. if only people who fit the culture can work at a company, no company can exist in the first place, because for there to be a culture there need to be people there. So that leaves setting the culture in stone after it grew to a certain size, and only looking for more of the same, which also isn't great, but at least still honest.

If a culture is so brittle it cannot integrate people who aren't already a product of it, that may be a legitimate choice of the company, but my assessment to find that lame is also valid.

I feel the same way about immigration troubles, tangentially. We moan because people we don't actively try to get to know don't care for our rules which we don't enforce in a confident, but respectful manner. We basically require sterile, bland input because we have no immune system worth speaking of and no way to process and refine what comes in.

For a one time coin flip, sure. For a lot of them, depending on the stakes, that can be very, very wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+99.99+accuracy+is+not+en...

It doesn't take a lot of thought experiments to realize this. Imagine if every bite of food we eat had a 0.01% chance to turn into something instantly lethal in our mouth. Average lifespans would be reduced measurably, and apart from anxiety, we'd develop all sorts of strategies and laws around that. E.g. absolutely NO eating for airplane pilots. You wouldn't go on a date to have dinner, dancing and sex, you'd go dancing and have sex, and then have breakfast. People would modify their jaws and stomachs so they could eat less, but bigger chunks of food. It would be a whole thing!

And that's not even talking about water changing on us, or a tiny chance of getting sucked into the toilet whenever we use it, and a lot of other things where going from damn near 100% to 99.99% would change everything for the worse, by so much.

Not having clear, objective criteria enables arbitrary decisions (not against OP, I mean in general.. and in general I dislike this pattern a lot). On the extreme other end of the spectrum would be 100% objective criteria, and companies being forced to pick a random applicant that matches them. If they want only the best, they have to have high expectations, but be able to actually define them. You say "cultural fit", I say "corruption", let's blow this whole joint.

> human beings on average will only go through the work if they are FORCED to go through the work

So force them.

We still see green colored things in more detail than, say, blue stuff, because once upon a time we relied on that to better navigate dense foliage, and also always had one eye peeled for dangerous animals hiding in said foliage (AFAIK, I wasn't there).

But we can't proofread stuff because it's too easy to cheat? No. If most people don't bass the minimum bar then most people don't pass the minimum bar, that doesn't move the bar. Being unable to see green doesn't make the jungle blue. Even if "the average person" no longer can't. And if most people cheat whenever they can, and if they can cheat most of the time, then we can't have a society. That is, we can have one without them, or none at all.

> It has been getting easier to create creative works over time

When it comes to writing, paper and pens, and then typewriters, have been rather cheap for a long time. Computers made it even cheaper, but it was already so cheap that wasn't the bottleneck. Or take playing instruments, singing even.

But you are totally right about distribution being essentially free now, and with all my qualms about slop and algorithms etc. it's also true that some things become widely known simply because they're really good, sometimes leading someone from rags to riches so to speak, and I can't hate that. I'm sure it would do the same for novels or other "long texts" if more people were into reading those digitally. So while I'd say TV and other stuff killed reading by being louder and more shiny and offering instant rewards, I can't really blame the internet as such for that.

> Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper.

It's faster and cheaper to do all sort of shitty things and people still don't generally do them. AI training may be a numbers game, but the life of none of the involved persons solely consists of AI training. They are persons, not AI training. Likewise, companies only want to make money, fine, but none of the involved people are a company.

It's just shitty people doing shitty things out of sheer greed. This isn't poor people cutting corners so they might survive, bleh to pleading for sympathy for those who are last in queue to warrant it.

> if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media.

Or physical media, for that matter.

> so now electricity consumption is even higher

Which is not great because it's wasteful, so you're making the same "moralistic argument". Unless your point is just that it's hypocritical, of course.