Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

opusfived.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 442 posts

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#251

Post by digitaltrees »

qurren wrote: post #217
dudeinhawaii wrote: post #164

Great site, triggered memories! haha. To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful". Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works". I've had to stop models no…

One thing it's missing: "smoking guns" and "smoke tests" If you search my company's Slack for "smoke" the results are almost all within the past 2 years ...

What, you didn’t smoke test before AI? I mean did you even really code then? :)

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#254

Post by bevr1337 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #225
captainbland wrote: post #40

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on…

> It was a gamble against your own time and patience.

At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?

> Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered.

Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#255

Post by Foobar8568 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #61

I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things. For my sanity. (I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)

With weak models, yeah if you get things compiled, with any Opus 4.6 or Codex, not really...

It's a sad parody that people will take as reality.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#258

Post by dhosek »

cm11 wrote: post #208
alex_c wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprising how much of life this applies to when you really think about it!

Avoiding disagreement is more ominous with people though.

You’re absolutely right, but I need to go to the bathroom/get some coffee/take a smoke break/get back to this task now so we’ll have to discuss this further later.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#259

Post by rnjesus »

dpark wrote: post #241
rnjesus wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to gambling. regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “to…

I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial. If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money. If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing,…

i agree with you that it’s principally different from a slot machine, and that it’s possible to use it in a way (like you describe) that is much more focused, for lack of a better term, to great effect

most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output)

perhaps it’s better to compare it to gacha than slots?

Post reply on HN