HN user
Your theory is that he found "very dark stuff" that is accessible to any MIT student? Schwartz didn't "hack" anything, he connected to their student network and downloaded articles that they had access to but the public didn't.
Nobody expects the scroll behavior to be different on a webpage, so it's always a surprise when a page does something like this. Then, you have to learn to adapt to how it expects you to scroll so that you don't screw up its animations or overshoot.
It's the kind of UI that works if you scroll a specific way. A lot of people probably do. But if you don't, it's all very tedious. I consider that to be poor design.
Look at the HN comments and you'll see many saying they don't get the point
The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in 100. You've doubled the efficacy.
There is simple correctness but there are also second order effects to consider. How does this particular implementation allow you to grow, and in which directions? What does it prevent? If you don't already have an opinion about this, then the LLM is going to do something and you're going to have to live with it, because it has no idea that it is "making a decision". And now, neither do you!
This is why LLMs do their best work at "leaf nodes", building on existing infrastructure but not designing new patterns on their own.
LLMs can't introspect, reason, or build internal models of the world. You can get very far without that, but there are some subtle ways it will bite you, and it's a fundamental limitation. Hallucinations are one: they are the feature, not a bug.
This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.
The setup may be simple, but what about the maintenance?
That was the fearmongering, which made no sense because advertisers can't put a dollar value on "the AI will kind of sort of mention you", and because every conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.
Ad technology is really old. They're just going to use the same proven tech that has a track record of creating billionaires: intersperse content with sponsored blocks.
Using FizzBuzz as your proxy for "unreviewed code" is extremely misleading. It has practically no complexity, it's completely self-contained and easy to verify. In any codebase of even modest complexity, the challenge shifts from "does this produce the correct outputs" to "is this going to let me grow the way I need it to in the future" and thornier questions like "does this have the performance characteristics that I need".
No, because they are not blindly passing on the briefing to the board. It's a starting point, and presumably they're going to tweak it.
How many documents can be used to prove your citizenship? How many times do people have to go back to the DMV because they forgot something or another? Now imagine that everyone has one shot to get that right on voting day.
Each board director could ask for a particular thing they require, or a briefing themself, eliminating human intermediary
You are missing the point of board briefings. The CEO serves as a critical filter of information, deciding what to tell the board and how to frame it. If you take the CEO out of it, you're giving the board full access to the company's state. There's enough going on day-to-day that each member can tell themselves the story they want to believe. The CEO is there to advocate for the company and present a unified front, you can't take them out of the equation.
Voter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of voting as well?
I didn't say that there wasn't a reason. I said it was absolute trash to use. It's so bad that the moment I need even the slightest bit of complexity, I will switch away from bash. Can't really say that for any other language.
Uh, reading a bash script shouldn't be as hard as doing your taxes. Bash syntax has to be simple because bash code is going to be read and reasoned by humans. Reading just a simple if statement in bash syntax requires a TON of knowledge to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. That's a massive failure of usability just to save a couple of keystrokes.
This is like saying "what's wrong with brainfuck??? makes sense to me!" Every syntax can be understood, that does not automatically make them all good ideas.
Oh lord, yeah this convinces me even more that this is a bad idea. I can't even tell at a glance if those do the same thing. Just pick one and move on, you're requiring everyone to pass around sourcemaps literally everywhere they go, one for every single pair of syntaxes. You can't even talk about the code with the same language with each other. Is Bean a "class" or a "datatype"? If I'm using one syntax, how do I tell you to fix a bug in your syntax?
Bash syntax is anything but simple or logical. Just look at the insane if-statement syntax. Or how the choice of quotes fundamentally changes behavior. Argument parsing, looping, the list goes on.
Those are both formatting examples though? You're suggesting totally different syntaxes, which means you can't even point to the same line in a codebase when talking about a PR. This throws up massive hurdles around communication when you could just agree on one standard and move on.
This is a Very Bad Idea. Two people working with the same language will be unable to reason about each other's code, because it requires understanding their bespoke syntax and its nuances.
I depend on the community to vet libraries that I add to my stack. The community of people.
When I use AI to write code, I have absolutely no guarantee about what it just did, so I have to read through it all carefully.
I love TRMNL for this exact type of usecase! Only ~$150, and you can self-host if you want.
When I write the code myself, I'm not worried that I snuck a `git reset --hard` somewhere.
Okay, so they did all that and then posted an apology blog almost right after ? Seems pretty strange.
You mean double down on the hoax? That seems required if this was actually orchestrated.
Yes, you're right. You can't say your function operates in Z "but has solutions in Q". That's what people are doing when they take a real function and go "ooh look, secret complex solutions!"
If you say "this function f operates on the integers", you can't turn around and then go "ooh but it has solutions in the rationals!" No it doesn't, it doesn't exist in that space.
Complex numbers are just a field over 2D vectors, no? When you find "complex solutions to an equation", you're not working with a real equation anymore, you're working in C. I hate when people talk about complex zeroes like they're a "secret solution", because you're literally not talking about the same equation anymore.
There's this lack of rigor where people casually move "between" R and C as if a complex number without an imaginary component suddenly becomes a real number, and it's all because of this terrible "a + bi" notation. It's more like (a, b). You can't ever discard that second component, it's always there.
Great writeup! Looks like this is going to be relevant very soon.
Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
Falling sand games bring back a lot of nostalgia. If you're interested, you should check out dan-ball's version which is one of the progenitors of the genre. Over the years he's added a ton of features, elements, and interactions, to the point where it now has a fluid mechanics simulation for air!
People need to let go of this strange and erroneous idea that humans somehow have this privileged access to the 'real world'.
This is irrelevant, the point is that you do have access to a world which LLMs don't, at all. They only get the text we produce after we interact with the world. It is working with "compressed data" at all times, and have absolutely no idea what we subconsciously internalized that we decided not to write down or why.
You can't ask ChatGPT a question like that, because it cannot introspect. What it says has absolutely no bearing on how it may actually respond, it just tells you what it "should" say. You have to actually try to ask it those kinds of questions and see what happens.