HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pickleRick243

183 karma · joined June 21, 2019

if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time
submissionscomments
pickleRick243··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
Yes but unironically. It may seem obvious now that the LLM is just a word salad generator with no sentience, but look at the astounding evolution of ChatGPT 2 to ChatGPT 5 in a mere 3 years. I don't think it's at all improbable that ChatGPT 8 could be prompted to blend seamlessly in almost any online forum and be essentially undetectable. Is the argument essentially that life must be carbon based? Anything produced from neural network weights inside silicon simply cannot achieve sentience? If that's true, why?
pickleRick243··on Do not apologize for replying late to my email
Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.
pickleRick243··on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
LLM slop article.
pickleRick243··on Stop generating, start thinking
> I think it’s important to highlight at this stage that I am not, in fact, “anti-LLM”. I’m anti-the branding of it as “artificial intelligence”, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a form of machine learning.

It's a bit weird to be against the use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" and not "machine learning". Is it possible to learn without intelligence? Methinks the author is a bit triggered by the term "intelligence" at a base primal level ("machines can't think!").

> “Generative AI” is just a very good Markov chain that people expect far too much from.

The author of this post doesn't know the basics of how LLMs work. The whole reason LLMs work so well is that they are extremely stateful and not memoryless, the key property of Markov processes.

pickleRick243··on I am happier writing code by hand
A lot of this discussion is just sort of moot because the cold hard calculus of economics will dictate the future of AI coding. If it turns out it's just a cognitive burden that makes programmers worse, the bubble will pop and eventually the companies that move away from the technology will come out on top. If it turns out to make software engineering much more efficient, it will become the de factor standard and you will become obsolete as a professional engineer (at least at the vast majority of employers) regardless of how you feel about it. How you wish to code in your free time is up to you and one that doesn't really warrant an argument one way or the other since there is no wrong answer.
pickleRick243··on First Proof
I don't think either of these are the best choices for this. Chatgpt 5.2 pro and gemini 3 pro deep thinking I believe are the strongest LLMs at "pure thought", i.e. things like mathematical reasoning.
pickleRick243··on First Proof
I don't think it's that serious...it's an interesting experiment that assumes people will take it in good faith. The idea is also of course to attach the transcript log and how you prompted the LLM so that anyone can attempt to reproduce if they wish.
pickleRick243··on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
I'm surprised I don't see many (or any) comments mentioning this: this blog post was clearly written with heavy LLM assistance.
pickleRick243··on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
I don't think it's that hard. MacKenzie Scott Bezos managed to give away nearly half (not accounting for appreciation) of the wealth she obtained from her divorce in a few short years.
pickleRick243··on How to effectively write quality code with AI
Do you have this same understanding for all the people whose livelihoods are threatened (or already extinct) due to the work of engineers?
pickleRick243··on CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
I have bad news for you regarding pupils who "care about getting good grades"...
pickleRick243··on ICE seeks industry input on ad tech location data for investigative use
It certainly cares about your political preferences though?
pickleRick243··on GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2-Codex are now 40% faster
This makes no sense. Why lower extended thinking time? Those who want faster answers can just use standard. The only purpose this serves is to "trick" the user into thinking he's still receiving "extended thinking" level answers at faster speed.
pickleRick243··on What if writing tests was a joyful experience? (2023)
Oftentimes, the main purpose of writing the tests is to prevent future regressions. This is pretty common for instance in ML (pytorch) code. You put in some tests with various random inputs and assert it against whatever your network says the output is. That way you don't accidentally change how the network works in future refactors.
pickleRick243··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing.

There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?

pickleRick243··on I miss thinking hard
so AI can actually replace software engineers? It's relatively unusual to see someone who "believes in AI", but is "anti-AI", at least among the HN crowd.

Also, I find this view very selfish. Yes, let's gatekeep a ground-breaking technology because it will hurt my specific profession. That's literally what technological progress is- it always (at least temporarily) disadvantages a particular sector of workers that specialized in that skill for the benefit of society. It's just funny because usually it's the blue collar workers who have to worry about this and the white collar workers who sanctimoniously tell them to suck it up or learn to code.

Also, I can't help but chuckle slightly at the irony here. The entire purpose of software engineering and computers is automation, and the lost jobs in other sectors due to SWEs is massive. To spend one's entire life in pursuit of this and be morally opposed to the "ultimate" automation (automating this process of automation itself) is a bit rich.

pickleRick243··on I miss thinking hard
I think the disagreement is over what exactly will be taken away. Certainly, like any technology that came before, AI will automate something. A programmer that finds joy in the raw act of coding- thinking of how to solve a problem and crafting the resulting logic line by line will indeed have something taken away by AI.

But there is a spectrum here. AI is a cruder, less fine-grained method of producing output. But it is a very powerful tool. Instead of "chiseling" the code line by line, it transforms relatively short prompts along with "context" into an imperfect, but much larger/fully formed product. The more you ask it to do in one go, usually the more imperfect it is. But the more precise your prompts, and the "better" your context, the more you can ask it to do while still hanging on to its "form" (always battling against the entropy of AI slop).

Incidentally, those "prompts" are the thinking. The point is to operate at the edge of LLM/machine competence. And as the LLMs become more capable, your vision can grow bigger.

pickleRick243··on Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors
I don't think this is really true if you look at the results of the last election. Activism just on the transgender issue alone looks to have swung a lot of votes.
pickleRick243··on Did a celebrated researcher obscure a baby's poisoning?
Are you Koren? Did we read the same article? The one that calls into question anything Koren says or claims?

From the article I read:

"A twelve-day-old infant cannot crawl. It cannot grab, and it cannot put something into its own mouth. “It also cannot swallow a Tylenol-3 pill,” Juurlink told me. “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”"

pickleRick243··on Did a celebrated researcher obscure a baby's poisoning?
> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".

pickleRick243··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
Almost 40% of California voted for Trump. The political polarity of a group can be measured in multiple ways. If you measure it by the views of its elected representatives or leaders of its institutions, it will look quite extreme because every 55/45 gets converted to a +1. In other words, you can have nearly 30% of a state being against gay marriage, yet "obviously" California is extremely gay-friendly.

I suspect (for no concrete reason in particular besides a feeling) that the readership of HN is fairly similar to California in political demographics. Active commentators are considerably more left-wing due to selection effects.

pickleRick243··on Amazon cuts 16k jobs
Better for whom?
pickleRick243··on Doing the thing is doing the thing
This is true, but the need to read critically especially on the internet has become an indispensable skill anyway.

Psy-ops, astroturfing, now LLM slop.

pickleRick243··on Prism
The democratization is mostly in allowing people from outside the field with mediocre mathematical ideas to finally put them to paper and submit them to mediocre journals. And occasionally it might help a modern day Ramanujan with "exceptional mathematical insights" and a highly unconventional background to not have his work dismissed as that of a crank. Yes, most people with exceptional mathematical insights can typeset quite well. Democratization as I understand the term has quite a higher bar though.

Being against this is essentially to be in favor of a form of discrimination by proxy- if you can't typeset, then likely you can't do research either. And wouldn't it be really annoying if those people who can't research could magically typeset. It's a fundamentally undemocratic impulse: Since those who cannot typeset well are unlikely to produce quality mathematics, we can (and should) use this as an effective barrier to entry. If you replace ability to typeset with a number of other traits, they would be rather controversial positions.

pickleRick243··on Prism
LLMs are tools. In the hands of adept, conscientious researchers, they can only be a boon, assisting in the crafting of the research manuscript. In the hands of less adept, less conscientious users, they accelerate the production of slop. The poster I'm responding to seems to be noting an asymmetry- those who find the most use from these tools could be inept researchers who have no business submitting their work. This is because experienced researchers find writing up their results relatively easy.

To me, this is directly relevant to the issue of democratization of science. There seems to be a tool that is inconveniently resulting in the "wrong" people accelerating their output. That is essentially the complaint here rather than any criticism inherent to LLMs (e.g. water/resource usage, environmental impact, psychological/societal harm, etc.). The post I'm responding to could have been written if LLMs were replaced by any technology that resulted in less experienced or capable researchers disproportionately being able to submit to journals.

To be concrete, let's just take one of prism's capabilities- the ability to "turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX". What a monstrous thing to give to the masses! Before, those uneducated cranks would send word docs to journals with poorly typeset equations, making it a trivial matter to filter them into the trash bin. Now, they can polish everything up and pass off their chicken scratch as respectable work. Ideally, we'd put up enough obstacles so that only those who should publish will publish.

pickleRick243··on Prism
I'm curious if you'd be in favor of other forms of academic gate keeping as well. Isn't the lower quality overall of submissions (an ongoing trend with a history far pre-dating LLMs) an issue? Isn't the real question (that you are alluding to) whether there should be limits to the democratization of science? If my tone seems acerbic, it is only because I sense cognitive dissonance between the anti-AI stance common among many academics and the purported support for inclusivity measures.

"which is really not the point of these journals at all"- it seems that it very much is one of the main points? Why do you think people publish in journals instead of just putting their work on the arxiv? Do you think postdocs and APs are suffering through depression and stressing out about their publications because they're agonizing over whether their research has genuinely contributed substantively to the academic literature? Are academic employers poring over the publishing record of their researchers and obsessing over how well they publish in top journals in an altruistic effort to ensure that the research of their employees has made the world a better place?

pickleRick243··on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than the population at large? Following this logically, some profession would have to have lower than average ethics or perhaps only the unemployed do?

I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.

pickleRick243··on Data Leak Exposes 149M Logins, Including Gmail, Facebook
I don't understand, why do you say this? I would think that google's security is very solid, and am not aware of them ever being hacked to gain access to user accounts/passwords. Are you saying they're deliberately leaking user passwords to 3rd parties?
pickleRick243··on European Alternatives
The actions of the current US administration seem to have provoked intense negative reactions, or perhaps caused long simmering resentment to boil over. I hope some of this energy goes towards cultivating a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in Europe.

As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.

pickleRick243··on Civic honesty around the globe
To me, the biggest confounding variable is the race/culture of the researchers. From the supplementary material: "We recruited eleven male and two female research assistants to perform the drop-offs. All research assistants were recruited from two German speaking universities and born between 1985 and 1993." Seems somewhat fortuitous that German/Nordic countries uniformly performed the best. In many countries, they would stick out like a sore thumb. To make this study more complete, they really should have someone who looks and speaks more native do this as well. Especially as race/culture seems to be so highly correlated with the result, it is only natural to see whether factors like distrust/xenophobia play a part. I mean, some random stranger (possibly using a language translator app!?) tells you to do something with a package they drop off and then leaves very quickly. How I react would certainly depend at least somewhat on my impression of the person and how that brief interaction went.
← PreviousPage 4 of 4