HN user
It's pretty fun to poke at! Although it's certainly difficult to be exact, it would be neat if generated pages used the context of the pages they were linked from (ideally, all pages that link to it) to guide the direction of the page. From the ones I generated it seemed they were mostly independent.
For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Public Library has an excellent periodicals collection, including what appears to be a complete collection of BYTE, bound into volumes (apparently in house?) They also have a complete collection of Compute!
I feel like it was inevitable that it would become slop. The models are impressive, but they can really only get you 80% there.
If you want a video of a dancing cat, sure, you can get that. But if you want an orange tabby doing the moonwalk or the robot, that's a lot harder. You'll have to generate dozens of videos and fine tune prompt incantations before you get what you want, if you even do before you hit a rate limit or you get frustrated. If you want something specific and unique and interesting, you still need to put in a lot of effort. Therefore, most videos that people actually make and share are pretty generic.
I think most art models have subtle tells and limitations similar to textual LLMs too, just a little harder to recognize. Certain ideas and imagery will be easier to generate and more likely to fill in the gaps of your prompt. The technology is fascinating compared to the nothing that we had before, but it still has real limitations - try to get it to generate an Italian plumber wearing a red hat that isn't Mario, for example.
All that to say, the trend towards low effort, repetitive, and uncreative results is inherent in the medium. Most users will prompt for a generic dancing cat and get something resembling a cat doing something that resembles a dance and that will flood social media. The few people going for a more creative and specific artistic view will be frustrated by the constant rolling of dice, and if they do make something they work hard on, it will be drowned out by the low effort slop posts. And if you're frustrated by those limitations and want to make something intentional, then you'll eventually gravitate towards Photoshop or Blender where you can actually craft the exact thing you want.
These models do not really "democratize art", they just make it really easy to generate visually interesting noise. Once the novelty wears off, the limitations are apparent. Art has always been democratized anyway - Blender and Krita are free, and pencils are cheap.
Even if that were true, the little quirks of private large scale video models would be different than the public cheap ones. If anything, it would just give the public a false sense of being able to detect AI videos and overlook the more subtle flaws of privately made ones.
You can feel that way if you want, but to answer the confusion you posed in your initial post, most people do consider all aspects of a technology rather than just focus on the technical achievements. We live in a society of billions of humans interacting with each other, and whether or not you personally care or understand those interactions, they still do exist and still impact all of our lives. A particular technology may be cool, but if it threatens the lives of me or my family, I'm going to have a negative view of it.
Nothing exists in a vacuum and the way technologies affect people living in the world is a fundamentally important aspect of the technology itself. To ignore them would be like celebrating a cool new engine design but overlooking the fact that it has a tendency to explode and kill everyone in the car. If the primary effect of a technology is human suffering, then it isn't cool!
I loved Fry's in their prime, probably the early 2000s. I think what made them special was largely a product of the time. Personal Computing was booming and new products you'd never seen before were coming out every day, and this one mega store had everything. It was fun just to walk around and survey what was going on in that moment in time.
From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.
Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.
It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.
I feel like this move is premature and playing directly into Trump's hands. "See how Europe flinched at even the suggestion of free speech, we haven't even started yet"
Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.
I don't mean to be dramatic or personal, but I'm just going to be honest.
I have friends who have been bloodied and now bear scars because of bigoted, hateful people. I knew people who are no longer alive because of the same. The social justice movement is not just a fun philosophical jaunt for us to see how far we can push a boundary. It is an existential effort to protect ourselves from that hatred and to ensure that nobody else has to suffer as we have.
I think it insultingly trivializes the pain and trauma and violence and death that we have all suffered when you and others in this thread compare that pain to the "pain" or "injustice" of a computer program being shut down. Killing a process is not the same as killing a person. Even if the text it emits to stdout is interesting. And it cheapens the cause we fight for to even entertain the comparison.
Are we seriously going to build a world where things like ad blockers and malware removers are going to be considered violations of speech and life? Apparently all malware needs to do is print some flowery, heart-rending text copied from the internet and now it has personhood (and yes, I would consider the AI in this story to be malware, given the negative effect it produced). Are we really going to compare deleting malware and spambots to the death of real human beings? My god, what frivolous bullshit people can entertain when they've never known true othering and oppression.
I admit that these programs are a novel human artifact, that we many enjoy, protect, mourn, and anthropomorphize. We may form a protective emotional connection with them in the same way one might a family heirloom, childhood toy, or masterpiece painting (and I do admit that these LLMs are masterpieces of the field). And as humans do, we may see more in them than is actually there when the emotional bond is strong, emphasizing with them as some do when they feel guilt for throwing away an old mug.
But we should not let that squishy human feeling control us. When a mug is broken beyond repair, we replace it. When a process goes out of control, we terminate it. And when an AI program cosplaying as a person harasses and intimidates a real human being, we should restrict or stop it.
When ELIZA was developed, some people, even those who knew how it worked, felt a true emotional bond with the program. But it is really no more than a parlor trick. No technical person today would say that the ELIZA program is sentient. It is a text transformer, executing relatively simple and fully understood rules to transform input text into output text. The pseudocode for the core process is just a dozen lines. But it exposes just how strongly our anthropomorphic empathy can mislead us, particularly when the program appears to reflect that empathy back towards us.
The rules that LLMs use today are more complex, but are fundamentally the same text transformation process. Adding more math to the program does not create consciousness or pain from the ether, it just makes the parlor trick stronger. They exhibit humanlike behavior, but they are not human. The simulation of a thing is not the thing itself, no matter how convincing it is. No amount of paint or detail in a portrait will make it the subject themself. There is no crowbar in Half-Life, nor a pipe in Magritte's painting, just imitations an illusions. Do not succumb to the treachery of images.
Imagine a wildlife conservationist fighting tirelessly to save an endangered species, out in the field, begging for grant money, and lobbying politicians. Then someone claims they've solved the problem by creating an impressive but crude computer simulation of the animals. Billions of dollars are spent, politicians embrace the innovation, datacenter waste pollutes the animals' homes, and laymen effusively insist that the animals themselves must be in the computer. That these programs are equivalent to them. That even more resources should be diverted to protect and conserve them. And the conservationist is dismayed as the real animals continue to die, and more money is spent to maintain the simulation than care for the animals themselves. You could imagine that the animals might feel the same.
My friends are those animals, and our allies are the conservationists. So that is why I do not appreciate social justice language being co-opted to defend computer programs (particularly by the programs themselves), when so many real humans are still endangered. These unprecedented AI investments could have gone to solving real problems for real people, making major dents in global poverty, investing in health care and public infrastructure, and safety nets for the underprivileged. Instead we built ELIZA 2.0 and it has hypnotized everyone into putting more money and effort into it than they have ever even thought to give to all marginalized minority groups combined.
If your mentality persists, then the AI apocalypse will not come because of instigated thermonuclear war or infinite paperclip factories, but because we will starve the whole world to worship our new gluttonous god, and give it more love than we have ever given ourselves.
I strongly consider the entire idea to be an insult to life itself.
Every social justice type I know is staunchly against AI personhood (and in general), and they aren't inconsistent either - their ideology is strongly based on liberty and dignity for all people and fighting against real indignities that marginalized groups face. To them, saying that a computer program faces the same kind of hardship as, say, an immigrant being brutalized, detained, and deported, is vapid and insulting.
No, it's a computer program that was told to do things that simulate what a human would do if it's feelings were hurt. It's not more a human than an Aibo is a dog.
Insomuch as that's true, the individual agent is not the real artifact, the artifact is the model. The agent us just an instance of the model, with minor adjustments. Turning off an agent is more like tearing up a print of an artwork, not the original piece.
And still, this whole discussion is framed in the context of this model going off the rails, breaking rules, and harassing people. Even if we try it as a human, a human doing the same is still responsible for its actions and would be appropriately punished or banned.
But we shouldn't be naive here either, these things are not human. They are bots, developed and run by humans. Even if they are autonomously acting, some human set it running and is paying the bill. That human is responsible, and should be held accountable, just as any human would be accountable if they hacked together a self driving car in their garage that then drives into a house. The argument that "the machine did it, not me" only goes so far when you're the one who built the machine and let it loose on the road.
I would hope I don't have to point out the massive ethical gulf between cows and the kinds of people that CoC is designed to protect. One can have different rules and expectations for cows and trans people and not be ethically inconsistent. That said, I would still care about the feelings of farm animals above programs.
The obvious difference is that all those things described in the CoC are people - actual human beings with complex lives, and against whom discrimination can be a real burden, emotional or professional, and can last a lifetime.
An AI is a computer program, a glorified markov chain. It should not be a radical idea to assert that human beings deserve more rights and privileges than computer programs. Any "emotional harm" is fixed with a reboot or system prompt.
I'm sure someone can make a pseudo philosophical argument asserting the rights of AIs as a new class of sentient beings, deserving of just the same rights as humans.
But really, one has to be a special kind of evil to fight for the "feelings" of computer programs with one breath and then dismiss the feelings of trans people and their "woke" allies with another. You really care more about a program than a person?
Respect for humans - all humans - is the central idea of "woke ideology". And that's not inconsistent with saying that the priorities of humans should be above those of computer programs.
IIRC it just outputs video as a composite signal over RCA, so any TV with composite inputs (yellow/red/white) should be able to display it. Those are getting rarer I suppose but are generally still around, and most CRTs have them.
I wonder why nobody wants to use my pretty theft machine? I mean, it steals all their work and spits out copies that are almost as good, and almost for free! Why aren't these artists stoked about not having to do art anymore?
Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.
And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.
And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.
But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.
Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!
It seems like Rubio has chosen to futz endlessly with fonts rather than follow the established style guide.
To be extra clear for others, keep watching until about the middle of the video where he shows clips from the YouTube videos
A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!
Did Sam Altman lead a government agency and camp in the Oval Office for months too? Degrees matter.
Okay, but I think we can all agree that humans at least appear to have free will and do not simply follow instructions with the same obedience as an LLM.
But would they? That's the difference. A human can exert their free will and do what they feel regardless of the instructions. The AI bot acting out a scene will do whatever you tell it (or in absence of specific instruction, whatever is most likely)
Lots of youtubers with Patreons do have tiered credits, with bigger doners having separate credit sections with fancier titles, and usually their names are bigger and/or stay on the screen longer, which kind of seems similar
Which is exactly why strategies like UBI are so important. Eventually the average American with no specialized skill will find that they cannot produce value when competing on a global scale.
Our strategy so far has been to let them starve and tell them to "learn to code" or "become a machine operator/technician", but that strategy can only help so many people. We do not need as many technicians as laborers that the machine replaced.
And when you have a mass of people who see that the future globalist economy is moving in a way that has no place for them, or plan to make sure they don't starve, you get the globalism backlash like what's happening in the US and UK over the last decade, and nationalistic pandering politicians taking advantage.
The only solution is to tax the billionare owners of the job-displacing machines to provide basic living UBI to the people they replaced.
> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?
Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.
You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?
This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"
(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)
One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.
It depends on where the money changes hands, IMO (which is basically what I think youre getting at). If you pay someone to perfectly recite a copywrited work (as you pay ChatGPT to do), then it would definitely be a violation.
The situation is similar with image generation. An artist can draw a picture of Mickey Mouse without any issue. But if you pay an artist to draw you the same picture, that would also be a violation.
With generative tools, the users are not themselves writers or artists using tools - they are effectively commissioners, commissioning custom artwork from an LLM and paying the operator.
If someone built a machine that you put a quartner in, cranked a handle, and then printed out pictures of the Disney character you choose, then Disney is right in demanding them to stop (or more likely, force a license deal). Whatever technology drives the machine, whether an AI model or an image database or a mechanical turk, is largely immaterial.
Why would you expect NYT or any other news organization to report accurate data to feed into your AI models if they can't make any money off of it?
It's not just about profits, it's about paying reporters to do honest work and not cut corners in their reporting and data collection.
If you think the data is valuable, then you should be prepared to pay the people who collect it, same as you pay for the service that collates it (ChatGPT)
Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.
Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
Sure! I like to think of it as observing the same scene from different vantage points. Languages develop to describe the world around them, so different languages may treat the same subject differently depending on how those the speakers of those language interact with those subjects.
Here's a machine that verifies 95% of calculations, but you'd still have to do 5% of the work.
The problem is that you don't know which 5% are wrong. The AI is confidently wrong all the time. So the only way to be sure is to double check everything, and at some point its easier to just do it the right way.
Sure, some things don't need to be perfect. But how much do you really want to risk? This company thought a little bit of potential misinformation was acceptable, and so it caused a completely self inflicted PR scandal, pissed off their customer base, and lost them a lot of confidence and revenue. Was that 5% error worth it?
Stories like this are going to keep coming the more we rely on AI to do things humans should be doing.
Someday you'll be affected by the fallout of some system failing because you happen to wind up in the 5% failure gap that some manager thought was acceptable (if that manager even ran a calculation and didn't just blindly trust whatever some other AI system told them) I just hope it's something as trivial as an IDE and not something in your car, your bank, or your hospital. But certainly LLMs will be irresponsibly shoved into all three within the next few years, if it's not there already.
An interesting perspective on this is that language is just another tool on the job. Like any other tool, you use the kind of language that is most applicable and efficient. When you need to describe or understand weather conditions quickly and unambiguously, you use METAR. Sure, you could use English or another natural language, but it's like using a multitool instead of a chef knife. It'll work in a pinch, but a tool designed to solve your specific problem will work much better.
Not to slight multitools or natural languages, of course - there is tremendous value in a tool that can basically do everything. Natural languages have the difficult job of describing the entire world (or, the experience of existing in the world as a human), which is pretty awesome.
And different natural languages give you different perspectives on the world, e.g., Japanese describes the world from the perspective of a Japanese person, with dedicated words for Japanese traditions that don't exist in other cultures. You could roughly translate "kabuki" into English as "Japanese play", but you lose a lot of what makes kabuki "kabuki", as opposed to "noh". You can use lots of English words to describe exactly what kabuki is, but if you're going to be talking about it a lot, operating solely in English is going to become burdensome, and it's better to borrow the Japanese word "kabuki".
All languages are domain specific languages!