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

AI Usage Policy

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 293 posts

Re: AI Usage Policy

#161

Post by benldrmn »

kleiba wrote: post #28
Version467 wrote: post #24

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.) It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Funny, I had a similar experience TAing “Intro to CS” (first semester C programming course). The student was certain he encountered a compiler bug (pushing back on my assumption there was something wrong with their code, since while compilers do have bugs, they are probably not in the code generation of a nested for loop). After spending a few minutes parsing their totally unindented code, the off-by-one error revealed itself

Re: AI Usage Policy

#162

Post by simonw »

radarsat1 wrote: post #159
simonw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's increasingly the work . I spend more time in Claude Code going back and forth with the agent than I do in my text editor hacking on the code by hand. Those transcripts ARE the work I've been doing. I want to save them in the same way that I archive my notes and issues and other ephemera around my projects. My latest attempt at this is https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts which produces output…

Right, I get that writing prompts is "the work", but if you run them again you don't get the same code. So what's the point of keeping them? They are not 'source code' in the same sense as a programming language.

That's why I want the transcript that shows the prompts AND the responses. The prompts alone have little value. The overall conversation shows me exactly what I did, what the agent did and the end result.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#163

Post by Aurornis »

Version467 wrote: post #24

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…

A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.

Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).

In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.

There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#166

Post by NoGravitas »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #113
IgorPartola wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Luke Skywalker: Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.

Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged. Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.

Just a weird little guy.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#167

Post by miki123211 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120
buggy6257 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspect…

> [1]

Cybersecurity is also an exception here.

"men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred.

If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#168

Post by tveita »

Sharlin wrote: post #55
monegator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT? ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text? no, people have no shame. they have a need for a l…

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate…

I think people's attitude would be better calibrated to reality if LLM providers were legally required to call their service "a random drunk guy on the subway"

E.g.

"A random drunk guy on the subway suggested that this wouldn't be a problem if we were running the latest SOL server version" "Huh, I guess that's worth testing"

Re: AI Usage Policy

#169

Post by pjc50 »

Sharlin wrote: post #55
monegator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT? ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text? no, people have no shame. they have a need for a l…

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate…

Billions of dollars of marketing have been spent to enable them to believe that, in order to justify the trillions of investment. Why would you invest a trillion dollars in a machine that occasionally randomly gave wrong answers?

Re: AI Usage Policy

#170

Post by rsynnott »

Suzuran wrote: post #107
Sharlin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate…

My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.

And just how many rs does your boss think are in strawberry?
Post reply on HN