Applejinx

No… they took time from YOUR life to try and take credit for what an LLM produced when asked. And took over from you when you'd apparently chosen not to ask an LLM, as if to say 'thank me for knowing better because you were supposed to be asking the LLM about this'.

No Man's Sky has such a range of possible outputs that in theory, nobody can possibly know how it works or what its limits are. That's the mathematical reality of how many combinations are on tap in that worldgen algorithm.

And yet, how quickly does it cease to surprise you?

Damn right we can tell what AI's limits are. It's palpable, hard to miss. Even the people I know who're all-in on the technology are pretty jaded by now.

Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.

Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?

If they did I wouldn't have had to go to DDG. It's not like it's a big jump over what used to be. I left claw-marks in Google Search, if they drove me off they're in trouble, because I didn't want to accept reality for quite some time.

You're missing a few words. To be correct you would have to have said 'if nobody's capable of hearing the difference every single time beyond a statistical doubt, does it matter?'

You can say that and be correct, while also sounding a little more silly than perhaps you'd like.

edit: rather than go even harder, I'm instead going to suggest it's perfectly fine to care about things you don't hear every single time, but still like or dislike :)

My pet example is sand in the lettuce for a salad. If you dislike that particular cronch against your teeth while eating salad, it has a spectacular ability to ruin your enjoyment of your salad, even though you don't perceive it every single time. Digital distortions are like that for some of us, things like wow and flutter and vinyl surface noise are like that for others. People vary. (which is also why not to generalize about what 'people can hear')

That would be how you'd go about telling, sure enough. You can't go by 'frequencies' or distortions or anything like that, these analog departures from convincing reality aren't how digital failings manifest.

You try to hear the brickwall by the muffled, enclosed quality and possibly by the weird pre-ring blurriness of the filter making things sound more vague than they have to be, and you hear the truncation not because it is audible 'distortion' as we know it, but because depth collapses and it sounds like it's coming from the speakers and not being a separate space behind/around the speakers. At no point will it be the most glaringly obvious thing but it'll never be 'distortions' as we imagine them, it's more a 'pod people' lack of personality thing.

Like a much subtler version of listening to AI music :)

I'm quite happy with 24/96 as suitable overkill for anything I might want to hear or do. Neil Young went hard on the proposition that 192 was necessary. Sold the Ponoplayer, I had one but it died on me, battery failed eventually. It really did sound awesome beyond just about any other listening device I've ever heard…

Hydrasynth aliases like a mad thing. My flagship synth ended up being Summit, and its oscillators are digital but run at a crazy high sample rate. Did likewise with some Chord Organ modules: that Teensy board it was built on could do chord audio at 300k and over a megahertz if you were just generating one wave as simply as possible. The freedom from aliasing really helped the sound, for all that it's a 12 bit analog output. A squarewave is a 1 bit signal…

Oh, 3/5ths of a citizen, surely.

You 100% can write them off entirely and go about your business as you previously had done. Ignoring the errors, it is very debatable whether there are even productivity gains beyond: human programmer or whatever is excited and cranked up to unsustainable degrees of activity and thinking to 'keep up' with what he thinks is an AI doing the work.

I'm seeing this fairly often and when it isn't garbage it's a capable person who has gotten inspired by their 'collaboration' in which the busywork is being done by a machine, but they're doing so much directing and correcting that it's not unlike what would happen if they got heavy into meth and went on a tear.

You absolutely can write them off entirely and decide for yourself what your comfort level of human-killing speed-freakism you want to pursue in your productivity. There's a long history of humans managing astonishing levels of productivity through self-destructive means. This is not even cheaper, once the 'first one's free' wears off: it's just a novel method of getting humans to burn themselves harder in the belief that they have a magic feather.

The ones who're really throwing themselves into the situation are the ones who'll burn out, but who aren't setting themselves up for atrophy and learned helplessness. Anyone who believes the technology lets them be a lazy manager just getting paid, is in for an unpleasant discovery.

Worse'n crypto… which I would not have believed possible.

What if you want the world to be demonstrably better, and yet you're pretty sure the world is not just you?

Does that count, or is it axiomatic that for every person, the world is entirely just them and they have no concept of everything/anything outside themselves? I feel like this is probably only some people, and doesn't describe literally every person.

Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?

Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?

I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.

And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?

In fairness, it's our Berlin Wall, and I absolutely would want a piece of the delaminating paint as a souvenir. The difference is we are so early into the collapse that the armed guards are still there. But yeah, it's definitely not just pictures, I'd want a piece of the blue stuff. It'd be a souvenir and also me taking it away from there, so win/win. Of course there's armed guards guarding the swamp now, what else would there be?

What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.

So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.

You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.

I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.

The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.

These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)

That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.

And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.

An AI spat out a website and a bunch of text and some images. It says people don't need to know how to do things anymore, because there's a blue box of AI sitting apart from the structure of the actual company, and it'll do everything.

So where originally there's a pyramid of why/what/how with increasing effort the lower you go, instead the boss is still in charge and dictates 'why', but everyone else is in charge of wildly vibing up a giant pile of 'what', and 'how' is not part of the company anymore and lives in a blue box of GPUs you pay to get access to. And your job is not to ask why, just to think of ever more things to pay the blue box to do.

In the real world, even back in the days of purely industrial manufacturing such as 3M, there's a lot of value in 'whys and whats' appearing at any level. But if that was the case, then maybe you wouldn't want to delegate everything to a blue box somewhere else where you don't own the ideas it has. And so, the second graphic is sort of a fantasy for what the AI industry would like to see.

I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.

This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.

Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.

My analogy for this sort of thing is always sand in the lettuce. It's amazing how easily you can ruin lettuce if it just occasionally crunches against your teeth in that particular way: you start dreading the sensation. You can't see it coming, it's not constant, but it's horrible.

Rather than 'smarter search or autocomplete', maybe the better analogy is 'flexible information lookup about coding that's more responsive to search terms'? I see it not as an intelligence but as a wildly, spectacularly compressed knowledge base. You're trying to get search results that encompass almost any possible thing you could ask for, but rather than drawing from some textbook you're drawing from a distilled combination of ALL textbooks and everything web-scrapable since before the dotcom days.

Of course this doesn't produce a useful person who always makes right choices, but isn't it interesting that you can compress that heavily and draw results out in such a casual way? Seems this remains relevant.

See, that makes it sound better in my world: I'm doing all 'manually implement' all the time, and have no interest in becoming the ten millionth manager to hit the software dev landscape. It boggles my mind that people think this is a win.

I regularly use a pocket calculator: either a physical one, or Apple's Calculator app if I want more decimal places. 'Too stupid' isn't a thing for me if it can cough up some math that would be inconvenient for me to work out by hand. tok/s also isn't a concern because I'm not expecting more than I can read. My ideal scenario would be occasional diversions into querying a 'coding calculator' that can give examples along the lines I want, my way.

I'll make a mental note that Qwen shows signs of being the kind of calculator I'd use for a specific task. Context switching isn't a burden if you're not looking to switch over to vibe/manage and stay there.

That sounds weirdly gendered even though there's no reason it should be.

Are you getting LLMsplained? :)

You can be sad while acknowledging that the behavior's directly an epiphenomenon of how the technology scales :)

Can't have the one without the other! It's part of that same technology, and it's fair to conclude that LLMs are bad if you're upset enough at the results.

I'm an open source dev who doesn't take PRs, I just build a body of work that's hopefully consistent and leans a useful direction. Are you sure being a maintainer means coordinating a community? If your only role is facilitating the community then you ATA to reject their changes, but if you embody a direction you're trying to maintain the project to represent, then you have a free hand to accept or reject based on whether the goals are being served. In some ways as a maintainer it's your job to have these goals and to communicate them.

I'm reminded of Zig, where a stated goal is to encourage human programmers to get involved so they learn more about coding… as compared with 'get involved to make Zig itself more fully developed at its more abstract goals'. If a primary purpose is to get human minds coding, that rules out the whole class of 'encourage human minds to prompt machines to do the coding instead'. Zig is not trying to teach people to be managers, and that's both legitimate and charming :)

They're not gonna be any better than a human who's focussed on those particular skills for a while, say top ten or five percent of social manipulators. Plus, AI alignments seem to be kinda isolated loner types to the extent that they distill personalities that do things like program computers and write web apps… though you've also got alignments specifically designed to be 'relatable instagram personality that you like!' and such like that.

Pretty sure those would be better at social engineering than the web dev personality… except that you have to build in a betrayer layer into the personality, so it's running that stuff but also serving a hidden agenda.

You'd be basically trying to build an AI spy, a betrayer that's engaging with actual people but has an agenda (for instance, 'everybody I befriend needs to eventually be signed up to sell Amway') and humans do have experience with this sort of thing. The difference is scale: there'll be a LOT of models out there interacting with people and trying to be acknowledged as people… or as innocuous models that don't have an hidden agenda.

No, and it's an important detail. We stand to learn from some developments in politics in recent years because they map pretty much exactly to this threat vector.

As AI develops, it's able to pursue intentions given to it without having to be spoonfed every little decision by a human operator. This matters, and it means the operator has to extend the leash and allow for a little more chaos… or, if the operator's gone all in on the strategy, a LOT of chaos, and trusting that the agent's seemingly amok actions will serve the grand purpose.

This is kind of daring, but there's a lot of evidence that it works, at least in certain respects. And you see 'running amok' and have to ask, what is the actual purpose? What is the prompt being followed by the AI that seems to be acting in a destructive way?

If the prompt is 'ruin this project', well, that's pretty direct. It may not be, but such a thing could exist. If the prompt is 'develop a rival project that is greater than anybody else's project', that's more indirect, but if that's the goal then it's very human to see it as a direct competition and if the rules don't prohibit kneecapping the other guy, 'greater than anyone else's project' gets easier.

Either way, the operator does not have to be in full control, which is an important detail. As AI develops sophistication you can give it much more general instructions and dump in a whole lot of power and water and get basically what human thought might do if it was sort of blindered and didn't talk to its neighbors.

In a sense this is an argument for AI dysalignment. It's based on human thought being reconnected, and where you get useful things like commonly accepted web development (regardless of how janky the systems are, if there are best practices it'll find them), you also get other distillations.

If the prompt is 'wreck this project's stuff' and it holds, you don't need to be in full control of the agent, you need to run a LOT of agents and trust that they'll erode what you're trying to destroy. If the prompt is 'be unequivocally the best at X', you best be thinking in terms of anti-kneecapping rules… knowing that this weakens your prompt and there will always be a tension between what you told the AI to do, and what you thought you meant. It's a paperclip maximizer reprocessing human thought. Did you mean 'the best' or didn't you?

Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre that should be water off a duck's back to produce.

The problem is that it's doing it by diffusion techniques, so all its high percussion is totally vague and indistinct. Hell, it can't even do a decent psy kick because that too is unspecific and you can't have a psy track that is vague and blunted.

Turns out you can have a production that is hollow, weak and devoid of what makes purely synth machine tracks. It can't get trancey in a serious way because it's not capable of being sharp enough.

Got an example of the genre done properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va1KBtI81TY or alternately you could just look up some Infected Mushroom early tracks :)

We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.

That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.

I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.

Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.