ThrowawayR2

Surely you jest. Since people here are fans of LLMs, the Google summary describes said publication as: "The Daily Mail is widely regarded as a sensationalist tabloid with low factual credibility and a strong right-leaning bias."

I was there in the 1990s too and we were deluged with headlines trumpeting how everyone, young and old, was rushing headlong onto the Information Superhighway as the dotcom bubble kept inflating.

"And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones."

Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.

"Gatekeeping" is a derogatory way of saying "maintaining standards of quality", usually by those who stand to benefit from lowered standards. I heartily approve of "gatekeeping" because I like having competent co-workers.

LLMs are inherently backward looking; their training corpus consists of existing works and their ability to extrapolate is ultimately constrained by that corpus. However powerful their proponents claim them to be, they aren't powerful enough to predict the evolution of human society and culture as a whole.

Changes to that corpus that reflect the real world are going to come from incorporating future works created by humans. (LLM generated training data can reinforce fidelity to the current corpus but don't alter it.) The future still belongs to human creativity.

Google used to have such policies but gave them up sometime in the '10s. A casual search finds: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013...

That seems to depend on the category of the institution? The websites of two R1 universities for CS I skimmed don't mention jobs but websites for two local community colleges mention career and earnings benefits front and center.

Welcome to Hacker News. Such submissions are mostly not on-topic according to the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin pretext that "everything is political". Most such submissions don't have the momentum to reach the HN front page but occasionally one does.

The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.

If I recall correctly, the text of Yudkowsky's response to Roko's Basilisk used to be part of the Wikipedia page but was removed and not even a reference link was provided even though the response was mentioned in the body of the article. For posterity's sake, from https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk/Original_pos... here it is in all its hilariously unhinged glory:

"One might think that the possibility of CEV punishing people couldn't possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them. But in fact one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares, though ve wishes to remain anonymous. I don't usually talk like this, but I'm going to make an exception for this case.

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

There's an obvious equilibrium to this problem where you engage in all positive acausal trades and ignore all attempts at acausal blackmail. Until we have a better worked-out version of TDT and we can prove that formally, it should just be OBVIOUS that you DO NOT THINK ABOUT DISTANT BLACKMAILERS in SUFFICIENT DETAIL that they have a motive to ACTUALLY BLACKMAIL YOU.

If there is any part of this acausal trade that is positive-sum and actually worth doing, that is exactly the sort of thing you leave up to an FAI. We probably also have the FAI take actions that cancel out the impact of anyone motivated by true rather than imagined blackmail, so as to obliterate the motive of any superintelligences to engage in blackmail.

Meanwhile I'm banning this post so that it doesn't (a) give people horrible nightmares and (b) give distant superintelligences a motive to follow through on blackmail against people dumb enough to think about them in sufficient detail, though, thankfully, I doubt anyone dumb enough to do this knows the sufficient detail. (I'm not sure I know the sufficient detail.)

You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.

(For those who have no idea why I'm using capital letters for something that just sounds like a random crazy idea, and worry that it means I'm as crazy as Roko, the gist of it was that he just did something that potentially gives superintelligences an increased motive to do extremely evil things in an attempt to blackmail us. It is the sort of thing you want to be EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE about NOT DOING.)"

The author's example is too extreme, which is turning people off. Better examples would have been LLMs subtly giving inadequate responses on how to increase token efficiency or how to organize labor unions or info about protesting against datacenter construction because they're against the business interests of the LLM providers. Crimes against their business model, so to speak.

Wasn't there some HN submission recently about one of the LLM providers fingerprinting responses or refusing to respond to hinder R&D of competing LLMs?

[EDIT] Or, if he did want to be extreme but in a way that aligns with the American historical mythos, he could have used fomenting armed rebellion against a tyrannical government as the example.

Yep, that's horrifying. Imagine LLMs not just denying information about, to intentionally choose a hot button example, abortions but also invisibly logging a black mark against the asker for thoughtcrime/precrime because the current ruling party has baked their ideology into law. [EDIT] Imagine subtle injection of biases into responses that support the agenda of the current ruling party and failing to include any counterarguments. That wasn't possible with just the internet but it is very possible with centralized LLMs and a public dependent on them for looking up information and doing their reasoning for them. Authoritarians of every stripe must be salivating over the prospect.

"For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)"

That example works against the argument since that policy was rendered moot when Commodore Perry arrived at Japan in 1853 with a squadron of American warships and demanded opening of trade and diplomatic relations at gunpoint.

"If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."

It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.

The parent poster argument boils down to "[something] is theoretically possible, therefore 1) it is guaranteed to practically implementable 2) in the reasonably near future". Both are simply prima facie false; one can ask an LLM to explain why if there's any doubt.

Steam, at least in theory, has Gabe's long ago pledge that they'd un-DRM purchased games if Valve ever went out of business. Whether Gabe or his successor actually would honor that pledge today if it happened or even could contractually is a different question.

Phased array antennas (in use since the 1960s) and AESA (in use since the 1990s) are very mature tech that RF engineers are well aware of.

This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.

Hot printed circuit boards, of course. Probably a blow dryer on max temperature for 10 minutes against an old PCIe card would give you an idea of what that smells like. (Do this outside, obviously.)

More voter turnout wouldn't have changed anything. From https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turno... , "The survey suggests that 'if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different'"

This also matches what Democratic-leaning pollsters like David Shor have said in their own analyses.

Among other things, unions have been commonly anti-immigrant, seeing them as taking jobs that are "rightfully" theirs. Even on supposedly cosmopolitan Hacker News, you'll see users saying they support unions pushing for harsh restrictions on H1-B and other visas.

If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.

Why are people responding to a submission that's a thinly disguised ad for a paid app?

It is true that most software development jobs don't need much CS knowledge to perform. The majority of developers simply kludge together common libraries, frameworks, and software packages without needing to understand all that much about the internals.

It is also true that the software development jobs that don't need much CS knowledge to perform are the ones most vulnerable to being automated away by LLMs. If a kludge is sufficient, AI can kludge it cheaper than a human.

Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.

It's very noticeable among the progressive left who post on HN, highly paid software developers attempting to LARP as the oppressed poor. Don't they realize they're still wealthy enough that they'd still go the chopping block if a people's revolution came?

"I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it."

While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.

"... every launch with 10+ comments..."

Using "launch" may give readers the wrong impression. Show HN is not for product launches or advertising. It is for "something you've made that other people can play with" according to the specific rules for such submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html .

Submitters try to game the system to self-promote constantly but generally such improper submissions are ignored or shut down by the site moderators or users very quickly. Those who want to advertise or SEO on Hacker News are not welcome here.

Google's purchase and subsequent integration of Doubleclick, reviled industry-wide for their invasive, sleazy adtech, was 18 years ago.

Archive link: https://archive.is/QFHJF

As much as I like Steam and dislike Sony (quite a bit in both cases), I will point out that while you can still download every single thing you've bought on Steam, there's no guarantee that it will run on a modern PC. A handful of my past Steam purchases don't. Consoles still hold the advantage of being a tightly defined target platform and a game written targeting a console is compatible with it indefinitely.

I, on the other hand, wouldn't support that because it's too often true that the submission is low value AI output.

The people under GNSS jamming in war zones might disagree with you about the value of being able to read a map.

(And I'm unfortunately no longer as certain that "Well, that sort of thing can't happen where _I_ live." as I would have been a decade ago.)

Don't forget their patent trolling, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43059215 and general IP related bullying.