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stuartjohnson12

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14 points·by stuartjohnson12·5 mesi fa·0 comments

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stuartjohnson12
·mese scorso·discuss
What the hell is going on in this thread? This isn't good. The "threats" don't make sense. Oh no, all the sensitive information in my package.json...
stuartjohnson12
·2 mesi fa·discuss
I hate when people say this, as if there's any world in which I would want my AWS API gateway to do this, let alone accidentally. HTTP is littered with these footguns, differences between slashes and no slashes is a classic. A good piece of software would make it hard to do this by accident, and probably should default to having the same behaviour with or without trailing slash.

Yes yes, I know, folder/file naming convention dating from...

But it's current year now
stuartjohnson12
·2 mesi fa·discuss
I recently saw a funny video on TikTok of someone's proposal where the man was lunging weirdly far forward in order to present the ring.

The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.

This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.

There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
stuartjohnson12
·2 mesi fa·discuss
I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.

Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.

My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.

The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.

The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
stuartjohnson12
·3 mesi fa·discuss
one of my favourite genres of AI generated content is when someone gets so mad at Claude they order it to make a massive self-flagellatory artefact letting the world know how much it sucks
stuartjohnson12
·3 mesi fa·discuss
and then all the serverless platforms will start using Astral's new rust-based runtime to reduce cold starts, and in theory it's identical, except half of packages now don't work and it's very hard to anticipate which ones will and will not and behold! You have achieved Deno
stuartjohnson12
·3 mesi fa·discuss
> No more generic AI slop. Just professional content that sounds human.

irony
stuartjohnson12
·4 mesi fa·discuss
It's from the rapid exploitation of an asset. If I have a cow, I can milk the cow or kill the cow. If a cow costs $1, maybe I can get $5 worth of milk over the cow's lifespan, or I can kill the cow immediately and get $2 of meat. The man with $100 who buys all the cows in town and kills all of them doubles his money in a short timespan, but now there's a shortage of both meat and milk next season.
stuartjohnson12
·4 mesi fa·discuss
It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.
stuartjohnson12
·4 mesi fa·discuss
VHS, The Dewey Decimal system, punchtape programming, fletching, sailmaking
stuartjohnson12
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Unfortunately you are replying to an AI spambot
stuartjohnson12
·5 mesi fa·discuss
...and I usually come to doubt my own intuitions that this is the case when people say things like this, but my experience is usually that the LLM is doing more heavy lifting than you realise.

> Distill - deterministic context deduplication for LLMs. No LLM calls, no embeddings, no probabilistic heuristics. Pure algorithms that clean your context in ~12ms.

I simply do not believe that this is human-generated framing. Maybe you think it said something similar before. But I don't believe that is the case. I am left trying to work out what you meant through the words of something that is trying to interpret your meaning for you.
stuartjohnson12
·5 mesi fa·discuss
Absolute middlebrow dismissal incoming, but the real thinking atrophy is writing blog posts about thinking atrophy caused by LLMs using an LLM.

It is getting very hard to continue viewing HN as a place where I want to come and read content others have written when blog posts written largely with ChatGPT are constantly upvoted to the top.

It's not the co-writing process I have a problem with, it's that ChatGPT can turn a shower thought into a 10 minute essay. This whole post could have been four paragraphs. The introduction was clearly written by an intelligent and skilled human, and then by the second half there's "it's not X, it's Y" reframe slop every second sentence.

The writing is too good to be entirely LLM generated, but the prose is awful enough that I'm confident this was a "paste outline into chatgpt and it generates an essay" workflow.

Frustrating world. I'm lambasting OP, but I want him to write, but actually, and not via a lens that turns every cool thought into marketing sludge.
stuartjohnson12
·5 mesi fa·discuss
It's only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for their software to Microsoft in exchange
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
Lots of comments here from new accounts.
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
Anecdotally, from the AI startup scene in London, I do not know folks who swear by Langfuse. Honestly, evals platforms are still only just starting to catch on. I haven't used any tracing/monitoring tools for LLMs that made me feel like, say, Honeycomb does.
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
I think what people miss about indexing on social signals is that convincing social performance is hard. My suspicion when people say things like "ah but if you index on a social signal then everyone will just perform the social signal" are themselves feeling as though they do not naturally signal that thing, and ironically are frustrated by the effort that it takes to appear as though they do.
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
This is a huge break from the original post you made - take a step back and compare the two. The LLM is tricking you again into thinking that it wasn't trying to make a claim about the world. In the original post, the LLM was causing you to use language like "quantify", "formal proof" and "concrete engineering" to describe what you'd come up with and position it as a mathematical/computational/engineering idea. It wasn't that.

Now that you got some outside input, it's reframing it for you as an abstract philosophical/legal/moral concept, but the underlying problems are the same. The reason it's talking to you using high level abstract words like "concept" and "proposal" and "framework" now is because the process you just went through - the "step 1" - beat back its potential to frame the idea as a real model of the world. This may feel like just a different way to describe the same idea, but really it's the LLM pulling back from trying to ground the concept in the world at all.

If you're continuing to talk to the LLM about the idea, it's going to try and convince you that really this was a moral/theory of mind discovery and not a mathematical one all along. You're going to end up convinced of the importance and novelty of this idea in exactly the same way, but this time there are no pesky ideas like rigor or testability that could falsify it.

If you ask ChatGPT about this comment without this bit I'm writing at the end, it'll tell you that this is fair pushback, but really your work is still important because really you're not trying to write about engineering or philosophy directly, but rather something connecting these two or a new category entirely. It's important you don't fall for this because exaggerating the explanatory power of pattern recognition is how ChatGPT gets you. Patterns and ideas exist everywhere, and you should be able to identify those patterns and ideas, acknowledge them, and then move on. Getting stuck on trying to prove the greatness of a true but simple observation will lead you to the frustration you experienced today.
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
Awesome - now read it really closely and compare it to the version of reality in your OP. And DON'T paste it or this comment into your normal ChatGPT instance and ask it to respond. Really just think for a moment on your own.

> The goal: replace vague legal and philosophical notions of “manipulation” with a concrete engineering variable. [...] formally define the metric

What's the conclusion? Is this a "concrete engineering paper"? Has anything been "formally proved"? From your link:

> The math is conceptual, not formal.

> This is serious, careful, and intellectually honest work, but it is not conventional science.

> The project would be strongest if positioned explicitly as foundational theory + open design pattern, rather than as something awaiting “validation.”

> it is valid as a design pattern or architectural disclosure, not as experimental systems research

Be careful before immediately dismissing this as just imprecise language or a translation issue. There's a reason I suggested this to you.
stuartjohnson12
·6 mesi fa·discuss
Since OpenAI patched the LLM spiritual awakening attractor state, physics and computer science is what sycophantic AI is pushing people towards now. My theory is that those things tend to be especially optimised for deceit because they involve modelling and many people can become confused between the difference between a model as the expression of a concept and a model as in the colloquial idea of "the way the universe works".