pickleRick243

Either HN has become much more accepting of LLM-generated content or it can't tell the difference. Still, it was a decent skim. These models are fairly smart; I wouldn't say they are complete wastes of time. I find LLM articles are best read impressionistically. Don't take every sentence or even paragraph too seriously as no one, not even the machine put that much effort into it.

I actually find it funny the downvoters can't tell this was definitely LLM-assisted writing.

I'll admit it's more subtle than usual and the writer put some real work in (it wasn't just a one-shot prompt to "write tech article"). I don't even mind LLM-assisted writing if it has real content (like this article). It is a bit hypocritical though given the typical anti-AI tone.

Some sample "LLMisms", although the "AI-ness" is really at a more abstract stylistic level (eventually strong enough LLMs will eliminate all simple "LLMisms" so that only the more abstract identifiers will remain)

"a potent visual reminder of the imbalance shaping the modern EV economy."

"Xiaomi did not simply impress him. It appeared to unsettle him."

"Simultaneously, people like me have a “Neo plugged into the Matrix like a battery” sense that they and their credit cards are exactly where US industry icons, notably Elon Musk, prefer them to be."

"It’s a strange inversion: China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear. "

Journalists used to decry the use of LLMs. Now they use it freely to write their own articles.

It's not different- there's a line of research and reasoning where people who don't use LLM's regularly point out issues that have been known (and more or less solved) for more than a year now (which is an eternity in the LLM space).

It's like people who expect ChatGPT to be really good at chess because chess engines with super-human performance have been around for decades, so obviously the latest frontier LLM that took billions to train should find the task trivial.

Actually, I'm curious what ChatGPT 5.5's ELO is- I wouldn't be too surprised if it's 2000+ just from its basic understanding of chess principles from all the content it has digested.

Ah yeah, it probably is. I noticed I guess the more subtle LLMisms earlier on. I stopped reading fairly early on when I noticed I was wasting my time reading a long AI slop article. I do admittedly read a fair amount of "AI slop", but I prefer to read the ones coming from my own prompt.

Yep, clearly LLM assisted writing. It was likely prompted in stages, not one shot with a single prompt. I'm surprised you are basically the only one to notice. It seems most people need to literally see "not X, but Y" or "You're absolutely right!" to recognize it. Interestingly, I think it's gotten to the point that those who don't use LLM's or engage with LLM output often are unable to detect it.

Not a Nobel prize winner (his advisor was though), but Stephen Hsu was a fairly high profile case. I remember watching a 2008 Google lecture of his on YouTube in 2019 and wondering- wow, the kind of research people could present a decade ago. Lo and behold...

I don't see much point in continuing this thread. You're fixated on defending the poster's level-headed criticism of AI in music. I'm addressing a much more specific point- that despite the poster's claim, his distaste for AI in music is based on principle. No matter how many advances AI makes in music, he will be unmoved because his preference for human-made music is exactly that it is not made by AI.

I didn't say there was anything to fix (I didn't use that word). The poster I replied to is free to dislike AI on principle. I'm just pointing out that his dislike of AI is in fact based on principle.

This is obviously "hating AI music on principle". Your last sentence means that there is literally nothing Suno can produce to change your mind.

Not hating it on principle would be something like "Suno-produced music I've listened to is derivative/soulless and has that annoying AI quality that makes me want to turn it off immediately. Maybe one day it could produce something genuinely moving and beautiful, but I'm skeptical."

Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know? I recently rewatched "Measure of a Man" in Star Trek TNG and Picard's closing argument in Data's trial was quite memorable:

PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?"

MADDOX: "I don't understand..."

PICARD: "What is he?"

MADDOX: "A machine!"

PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience... so what if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer."

Implicit in this article is that consciousness has to look like human consciousness. The author all but admits that he cannot fathom consciousness evolving in any manner besides how biological life evolved on earth. He needs to read/watch more science fiction to broaden his philosophical imagination. Is HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey 2001 conscious? Are the beings from the future who built the tesseract in Interstellar conscious? There's no evidence they have hormones or indeed are embodied at all.

Yes, I disabled all smart features. I'm surprised anyone here (or the type who bothers customizing their inbox layout) finds the Primary/Social/Promotions split useful. The original blog post mentioned "automatic thread categorization", which I thought just meant grouping emails in a conversation together (which doesn't really require any "smart" logic).

It seems a lot of people do though.

I found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is this annoying thing". Now, if/when Google removes the option to disable, this blog post would be much more impactful IMO.

I'm just curious- how many of you changed your portfolio allocation last April because "obviously" the Trump tariffs would tank the market? If you had similar thoughts when TSLA joined the S&P 500, what are your thoughts on its performance since then?

You are welcome to your investment opinions, but just know the level of sophistication here is more or less comparable to a wallstreetbets thread telling people to diamond hand Gamestop. At least there, what they accomplished was surprisingly clever- force liquidating short hedge funds via a bunch of shitposting.

This sounds like a fantasy in your head rather than something that actually happened. No competent VC would give meaningless feedback like this- if it's good, it's good; who cares if AI built it? If it's the same quality product but wasn't obviously vibe coded, then it would be fine? Only someone ideologically opposed to AI would care.

The use Armin wants for clanker doesn't work because it is already widely being used as a derogatory term for LLMs. Co-opting the term back to the more neutral use he wants is a long uphill battle (and basically futile).

Regarding his wider point, I think something he's not quite taking into account is how personal language is. Yes, we should always keep in mind the LLM is a machine, but because we're human it's also fine to say "please" and to otherwise "play into" the human-like text that is being outputted. Many children still hug their stuffed animals, knowing that they are inanimate. Adults have been speaking politely to Siri and Alexa for years, which do not give off any vibes of possibly being intelligent or sentient. Purposefully adjusting the way you speak just because you know the thing you're speaking to is inanimate is actually what's strange, and human beings are creatures of habit. There is nothing wrong with speaking respectfully to an LLM even if you are under no delusions that its feelings can be hurt. There is no need to speak curtly or rudely just to remind yourself of this.

You want the AI that's doing all the SWE work in 3-6 months? Somehow I doubt that.

Agent harnesses have barely been available for a year, and reasonably reliable for only half, and there's already fatigue. I think this says less about whether LLM's will actually be able to program and more about how mentally exhausting AI-assisted programming can be, which involves a higher frequency of decision making and reading an astronomical amount of both code and prose if you actually want to stay on top of what the agent is doing to your codebase. This personal/psychological exhaustion and negative sentiment is now being inaccurately transferred into a pessimistic prognosis for the advancement of the technology itself.

I find it a bit hard to believe you actually think such a line of reasoning would be convincing. I think many MAGA voters in fact are aware that many of the immigrants are smarter than them, and hence they do the rational thing of trying to reduce competition. I don't understand why you wrote "taking the jobs" in quotes. That's exactly what's happening- superior immigrant applicants are taking jobs that would have been theirs.

There's also the other side. The beneficiaries of the system never feel the need to be grateful, as the money is legally theirs. So you end up with selfish/uncharitable on one side and ungrateful/envious on the other.

It's a good word to use because it has so much in common with western religious traditions.

This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html

You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.

That's fair. If you're familiar with mathematics culture though, you'd know that "LLM hype" is not really in their blood and is certainly not something that gains you PR points. I think it's safe to take their comments at face value. I do think the ice is beginning to thaw though and perhaps in the next few years, there will begin to become more of a hype phase in math if some really high profile problems begin to fall to AI, although one might argue at that point that the hype would be deserved.

Haha, now I do think it is more likely satire. I don't think HN has many people who would post like this sincerely.

You don't know the names of the mathematicians who've given their thoughts on this? If not, you really should just not comment on anything mathematical ever again.

Human ingenuity is untangling perhaps the deepest question of all- what is the essence of Reason and the intellect that so privileges man? I don't know if it's what God wants, but it's certainly getting close to some existentially fundamental questions.

While many seem to be anxious or pessimistic about the future of intellectual/artistic pursuits (understandable although I disagree), I do find the utter lack of curiosity or interest in the incredible machinery that is causing all the fuss to be striking.

Except this has been said since the 2010's and has been proven wrong again and again. Clearly the theory that LLM's can't "extrapolate" is woefully incomplete at best (and most likely simply incorrect). Before the rise of ChatGPT, the onus was on the labs to show it was plausible. At this point, I think the more epistemologically honest position is to put the burden back on the naysayers. At the least, they need to admit they were wrong and give a satisfactory explanation why their conceptual model was unable to account for the tremendous success of LLM's and why their model is still correct going forward. Realistically, progress on the "anti-LLM" side requires a more nuanced conceptual model to be developed carefully outlining and demonstrating the fundamental deficiencies of LLMs (not just deficiencies in current LLMs, but a theory of why further advancements can't solve the deficiencies).

Incidentally, similar conversations were had about ML writ large vs. classical statistics/methods, and now they've more or less completely died down since it's clear who won (I'm not saying classical methods are useless, but rather that it's obvious the naysayers were wrong). I anticipate the same trajectory here. The main difference is that because of the nature of the domain, everyone has an opinion on LLM's while the ML vs. statistics battle was mostly confined within technical/academic spaces.

How is this different from saying the internet is inevitable? Paul Krugman famously disagreed, but that didn't make him right.