Planktonne

Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you?

I'm going to respond to just this bit of your comment, if you don't mind, because I think this is the core of both your and the author's misconception, with everything else flowing from that.

The author didn't, and still doesn't 'appreciate reason'.

They joined a cult of superiority and in-fighting that labelled itself as appreciating reason. Now they're out of the cult, but they think the issue is not with themselves, but with the others who did appreciating reason wrong. The fundamental flaw that they still haven't examined is that they still view themselves as a truth-seeker who was misled, not someone who made the wrong choices.

I've been wrong a lot, about many things, and there's always the easy temptation of reacting to that by treating it as just bad luck, believing that I did everything right but circumstances conspired against me. It's an easy option, but it's false, and it means you get stuck in the same pattern again.

Humility comes from recognising the ultimate, rather than proximal issue. Not 'I am still smart but the others were wrong and I got muddled' but 'maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was'. The article focuses on the movement as having the same flaws as everything else--it wasn't the superior home they were seeking--but doesn't consider the two most important elements required for growth here:

- Their own flaws and culpability

- The flaws inherent to the movement that aren't shared by society

The take away is 'the rationalist movement is no better than other groups, but I am' rather than 'both I and the rationalist movement have significant flaws that are not shared by everyone'.

I think my issue with this project--and so many other similar ones--is that the provenance of the code does undermine the intention. If a project purports to be about quality, then knowing that the creator abdicated some of the responsibility for creating the thing they ostensibly care about makes it harder to put faith in them as having high standards elsewhere.

Perhaps I am just old-fashioned, and vibe-coding is something that can be done with full focus and care for high quality, but I remain unconvinced. This is a project that needs to be cared about sincerely to be trustable/meaningful/useful, and the approach taken casts doubt on that.

Programming, even systems engineering, is a surprisingly shallow field.

I agree, and I don't think we should be at all ashamed of this.

The beauty of programming is that we can produce incredibly complex and powerful things by manipulating a small set of simple constructs together. There are only a few core tools--iteration, conditionals, etc.--but they can be snapped together into much more capable configurations.

Good programming is the art of deconstructing complex behaviour into these few constructs, and that's really fascinating.

It's generated prose; the author's understanding doesn't factor in, because they didn't actually write it.

This would be an interesting project if it was written intentionally by a human.

As it is, the generated prose telling you how to appreciate art is ghoulish.

Those numbers seem in conflict.

900M active users per week, but less than 6B visits in a month. Those users don't seem very active.

I fully agree with everything you've said, but crucially, I don't think this article, or the others like it, are actually recognising their own vulnerability.

The framing isn't 'I fell for this and I was wrong', but 'I am the first one f all of you to see the truth'; there's no humility, no recognition, just the exact same self-delusion, which means they'll fall into the next pit head-first as well.

I have very little patience with the regular appearance of articles that follow the below flow.

1. I believe I'm very smart

2. I fell down a rabbit hole into a subculture filled with people who also think they are smart

3. Eventually I realised that they weren't that smart, and were actually most just a fad + spite (+ generally bigotry)

4. I worked this out because I'm very smart, and now I'm here to tell you, people who never fell for it, that that subculture isn't all it claims to be

5. Wow

It never, ever comes with the realisation that maybe the problem is the initial flawed belief and the smugness inherent in it.

The US defines its objectives on a large scale (e.g. regime change, or peace in the Middle East), but doesn't then use tactics that can achieve that.

What they're doing in Iran, for example, is probably best described as 'raiding'--quick, damaging strikes--but that doesn't lead to the final result they want. It hurts the attacked country, but it doesn't control it.

I know, but currently we still have rhubarb. The article is extremely blasé about even more species losing their environment.

...while we say goodbye to some old favourites.

An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.

The US is currently infamous for weakly enforcing copyright law when it comes to AI companies.

My experience was so much different to this, that I have the unfortunate impression that you're shilling

I think you might both just be reading way too much into one-off random experiences that you've decided are evidence of significant and stable capability.

AI is just a tool to help translate the original project into English.

1. It seems unlikely that you wrote the original filled with LLM-speak, so this isn't a faithful translation; your tool to help translate has added a lot that will negatively affect the translation's impact

2. Your target readership does not want to communicate with generated text; it's going to give you the exact opposite of connection because they'll respond negatively to it

I think it would only be irony if it was guilty of the same issue it's complaining about in celeb news: not sufficiently explaining the context. If anything, it's too exhaustive.

This post needs a bunch more context; right now it's only immediately accessible to people who don't need the announcement [1].

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha

No one who wants to read, and no one worth reading, is going to go to a site that so clearly doesn't value human expression.

AI-generated prose isn't an obstacle to lots of people, but it absolutely is to the demographic you want to attract.

This article represents such a poverty of imagination and culture that I find it genuinely concerning. What is wrong with the people behind this?

They've correctly identified that a lot of emoji use is figurative, but then are trying to contribute to that by making them 3D. Here is a symbol you use meaningfully, we made it different to help.

It's just so wrong-headed, like responding to the news of someone's beloved cat dying by saying they should just get another. A total failure of understanding the thing they are pontificating about.

They could do it; they don't want to.

I don't think it has to be consistent, just to not do it at all is suspect behaviour.

I think it's entirely separate to the idea of LLMs as potentially thinking machines; I don't believe they are, but I do believe you should be polite to them.

Frankly, I think it's suggestive of a deficiency in people if they can't engage with non-human things as though they were human. Someone who wouldn't talk to a Roomba, for example, never chats to their laptop when it beeps, doesn't wave sliding doors open, doesn't act human except when it really benefits them--that's weird.

It's similar to the Voight-Kampff test [1], I think; how you act all the time, the emotional responses you build to things you interact with, all of this is part of being human. There's something wrong with people who don't see something wrong with bullying a robot [2], even if it can't feel pain, and most people can sense that. Our ability to form connections even with things that can't form connections with us is important [3].

An LLM isn't alive, but it pretends to be. You should have an emotional response to that, even if it's horror. The dead-eyed 'I minimise tokens' says nothing good about the speaker. Empathy should be your default, not a performance.

[1] https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Voight-Kampff_test [2] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/humanoid-robot-mi... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAwSVOlOgH8

I think another important parallel between guns and AI is that the people who say "it's just a tool" are discounting all the cultural context. Additionally and anecdotally, they tend to be the people who are most connected to that cultural element.

A gun is just a tool except it's also a symbol of countless things within American culture: freedom and independence and even masculinity sometimes. It's bound up with various cultural tropes and narratives that mean it's only a tool in the same way that Mjǫllnir is only a hammer.

Similarly, we have literally centuries of cultural context to the idea of thinking machines, and it is a tool, but a lot of the people saying that also think it's their girlfriend or god or just something that will entirely upturn society and remove [entire class of people].

"It's just a tool" is accurate but disingenuous, knowingly or not. There's a lot more bound up in a gun or AI than there is in a can opener.

I think you're struggling her with the distinction between a statement and evidence for the statement. I know what the commenter believes, but they don't have any evidence for it beyond appearance.

The appearance of similarity in two things we can already explain without having to posit identical nature is not proof that they are identical. Screwdrivers and hammers, planes and birds: we know about all sorts of things with similar effects but different mechanisms.

If you want to argue for more similarity, you need more evidence than just your belief and superficial resemblance. That's got nothing to do with the results or capabilities of LLMs (and it's either blinkered or disingenuous that you're trying to elide that).

do you not agree with a statement that giving reasonable answers is reasoning?

Note the seventh word: it's a statement. The other commenters knows it's a statement, you know it's a statement, not an argument or an explanation. but you are seemingly desperate for people to accept it as a proven fact without putting in the effort to prove it.

It's unscientific and frankly embarrassing to be so certain without being able to do anything but hector about it; if it's so obvious, prove it.

What was the word?

People hate the tech industry because it has negative effects on their lives, and these effects are deliberate rather than incidental.

There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent.

The tech industry and its figureheads have

- Lied consistently about their capabilities

- Brazenly flouted the law

- Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything

- Increased prices again and again

- Supported oppressive governments and war crimes

- Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods

- Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path

- Deployed bots everywhere, polluting online communities

- Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography

I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad.

Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?

You didn't provide either; you made a claim--in your own words--and nothing more. There's nothing to refute [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor

This is actually a perfect example of what I was referring to in my earlier comment; the strident [1] and rather aggressive insistence that your unsupported belief be proved wrong, rather than you providing literally any evidence that two distinct things are identical other than the assertion itself.

You're making a strong claim here; the burden of proof [2] lies with you, in much the same way that it would if you declared that horoscopes know the future. We have a sufficient explanation for LLM behaviour that we have no reason to discard based solely on your whim; if you want to be convincing, then you'll need more than assertion.

Similar appearance does not mean identical nature, and your position does not warrant serious consideration until you provide support for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

Crucially it's the responsibility of those who are making the claim here to bring evidence and definitions. The other approach, very popular on HN, has led to endless carping by people making outlandish claims without evidence and then demanding that every term possible be defined before they can be dismissed out of hand.

The claim that any two things are equivalent just because they look similar is a strong one, and the onus is on the person advancing it to bring evidence, not to insist that they are considered correct until it is disproved. That's how it works with the flat earth and religion and everything else; we shouldn't accept an unsupported conclusion just because some people really, really like AI and don't want to have to justify their claims.

The traditional response to such claims is ridicule [1]; we know trivially from all sorts of examples that presentation is not identity, and so 'but it looks similar' is not a convincing stance.

1 https://sites.psu.edu/sierraastle/2019/10/21/behold-a-man/

I think there’s fairly strong evidence that there is something that convincingly looks like reasoning.

No one is disputing that, but there is an enormous difference between evidence of 'something that looks like a thing' and evidence of the thing itself.

Making a problem harder to sport is not a way to fix it.