The Cognitive Dark Forest • Hacker News Board

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#141

Post by Den_VR » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

arkensaw wrote: post #74

xantronix wrote: post #51

I have been mulling this over and I think I have some solutions in mind, at least for myself. • No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. • Bring back LAN parties. Not for gamin…

I don't know, I think it's an overreaction. > No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet. If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that th…

I’m not afraid of the llm, but also acknowledge that some people _feel_ a fear of theft by soulless robots.

What I do fear is the possibility of megacorp robots being the only ones… local and “dark” technology are essential.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#142

Post by annie511266728 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

[dead]

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#143

Post by block_dagger » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

This is one of those naive takes from a human who thinks he is even 1/1000th the intelligence of ASI which is just on the horizon.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#144

Post by JeremyHerrman » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

I reject pretty much every point of this article, and I worry that it will lead readers down two dark roads: apathy and secrecy

do you really think bigco is going to steal your vibecoded app just because you used their API? ridiculous. They could already do this before AI with their army of devs.

should you hide all of your ideas until they're perfect and ready for millions of users? we all know this goes against a core tenet of startups which is still true today: launch early and often.

promptfoo/openclaw weren't cloned by openai when they got poplular, they were bought for real $$$

also, regarding this:

> 2009, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad, installed Xubuntu, and started coding.

you can still do this, even with that same 2009 thinkpad. the hard work is in getting your app out there in front of people, coding is just a small piece of a successful business

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#145

Post by shlewis » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:04 AM UTC

block_dagger wrote: post #143

This is one of those naive takes from a human who thinks he is even 1/1000th the intelligence of ASI which is just on the horizon.

Pretty rude remark. And what makes you think that ASI is _just on the horizon_?

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#146

Post by RajT88 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

hrimfaxi wrote: post #95

RajT88 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. You've almost captured the full picture of it. If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk. Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figur…

> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts. Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.

I've seen big companies manage to duplicate startup-like culture with small teams internally. Weird things like directors handling builds and source control duties. 12 hour days, working weekends.

These teams said that per man-hour they brought more value to the company than any other team. (But you know, they all say that)

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#147

Post by 8bitsrule » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow.

March 20, 1926: Hungarian physicist, electrical engineer Kalman Tihanyi applies for his first patent for a fully electronic television system. Tihanyi's ideas are so essential that, in 1934, RCA is required to buy his patents.

Kalman who ?

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#148

Post by Dusseldorf » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #137

Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

>Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly. Was this just awkward phrasing or did something change and they learn after training?

There have been several projects lately attempting to create running context/memory, and Claude Code also has some concept of continuous conversational memory, but all if these are bolted at inference time, there's still no concept of conversations feeding back into base model training/weights on the fly.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#149

Post by 6510 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #126

Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. The article says: "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard" "Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind." That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state o…

Just a side note:

> "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"

I would argue this mantra says more about the person repeating it. It simply means the person has no good ideas and is bad at execution.

I've not met many but I'm sure there are many out there who are scary good at execution. Something like 1% transpiration, 99% experience. I can have a designer do a 100 euro design, hire someone to write nice code, rent a factory or an office, I might even be able to buy the machines at a good price. What I cant do is spin the rolodex and (in 20 minutes) land enough clients who would absolutely love to work with me again. I cant find those private meetings and wouldn't be able to extend my reputation with the new project.

People with good ideas don't talk about them unless it is required. They don't talk with "ideas are cheap" people, it's pearls for pigs. You can spot some of them if they did bursts of multiple unrelated complex patents. My favorite are the rube Goldberg type of machines that combine well known things in ways that exceed the sum of the parts. Something like step 5 uses the vibrations from step 1 while step 3 uses the heat from step 6.

To have good ideas you need many of them but you also need to know execution or you end up thinking the easy stuff is hard and the hard stuff is easy. Improvement is unlikely from there.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#150

Post by ozozozd » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

I guess not many people know but app templates for Uber, AirBnb etc. have been around for years now. You don’t even have to prompt. It’s sitting on the shelf, complete.

“Execution is hard” was never about the code part.

Up until 2 years ago I was an engineer/entrepreneur. I could build anything. Other stuff, selling, supporting (execution) was hard.

LLMs made building some of the things I could build faster/easier, others not so much.

Well, the other stuff is still pretty hard. Maybe harder because there is a tonne of spam.

So feel free to share your ideas. Everyone’s gonna think they’re LLM generated anyways.