Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not an emdash, and I don't think LLMs use dashes for emphasis that way? It's not a grammatical use.
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> [removed]
Please don't ruin subthreads by doing this.
When did AI take over Hacker News?
171–180 of 245 posts
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#172its in the running for the biggest technological change maybe in the last 100 years? whats so confusing about this, thinking machines have been invented
I'm starting to learn that AI progress is just really hard to talk about.
On the one hand, I completely agree with you. I've even said before, here on Hacker News, that AI is underhyped compared to the real world impact that it will have.
On the other, I run into people in person that seem to think dabbing a little cursor on a project will suddenly turn everyone into 100x engineers. It just doesn't work that way at all, but good luck dealing with the hypemeisters.
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.
Part of this is driven by people who have realized that they can undermine others' thinking skills by using the right emotional language. For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legi…
Probably that's good? Look at this Nim thread I just close-tabbed[1] including:
- "you should reevaluate your experience level and seniority."
- "Sounds more like "Expert Hobbyist" than "Expert Programmer"."
- "Go is hardly a replacement with its weaker type system."
- "Wouldn’t want to have to pay attention ;-)"
- "I'm surprised how devs are afraid to look behind the curtain of a library"
- "I know the author is making shit up"
- "popular with the wannabes"
Hacker News comments are absolutely riddled with this kind of empty put-down that isn't worth the diskspace it's saved on let alone the combined hours of reader-lifetime wasted reading it; is it so bad to have a reminder that there's more to a discussion than shitting on things and people?
> "legitimate technical criticism"
So what? One can make correct criticism of anything. Just because you can think of a criticism doesn't make it useful, relevant, meaningful, interesting, or valuable. Some criticism might be, but not because it is criticism and accurate.
> "they can undermine others' thinking skills"
Are you seriously arguing that not posting a flood of every legitimate criticism means the reader's thinking skills must have been undermined? That the only time it's reasonable to be positive, optimistic, enthusiastic, or supportive, is for something which is literally perfect?
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#174Here is my question
When will people realize that Hacker News DISCUSSIONS have been taken over by AI? 2027?
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#175What I found insightful about this article was the framing of another article cited. > " This pretty negative post topping Hacker News last month sparked these questions, and I decided to find some answers, of course, using AI" The pretty negative post cited is https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ . I went ahead to read it, and found it, imo, fair. It's not making any direct pretty negative claims about AI,…
Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.
Hey, why so negative man?
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#176I'm more annoyed at the - clearly - AI based comments than the articles themselves. The articles are easy to ignore, the comments are a lot harder. In light of that I'd still love it if HN created an ignore feature, I think the community is large enough now that that makes complete sense. It would certainly improve my HN experience.
As an ESL sometimes I do run my replies through LLM for rephrasing when trying to make certain points, I found it helps in making it more clear.
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of this is driven by people who have realized that they can undermine others' thinking skills by using the right emotional language. For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legi…
Probably that's good? Look at this Nim thread I just close-tabbed[1] including: - "you should reevaluate your experience level and seniority." - "Sounds more like "Expert Hobbyist" than "Expert Programmer"." - "Go is hardly a replacement with its weaker type system." - "Wouldn’t want to have to pay attention ;-)" - "I'm surprised how devs are afraid to look behind the curtain of a library" - "I know the author is mak…
> Probably that's good?
Amigdala-hijacking, emotional manipulation, and categorical dismissiveness of others' criticisms are clearly not good.
> Look at this Nim thread
Yes, I'm looking at it, and I'm seeing a lot of good criticism (including the second-to-top comment[1], some of which is out of love for the language.
You cherry-picked a tiny subset of comments that are negative, over half of which aren't even about the topic of the post - which means that they're completely unrelated to my comment, and you either put them there because you didn't read my comment carefully before replying to it, or you intentionally put them there to try to dishonestly bolster your argument.
As an example of the effect I'm referring to, this recent thread on STG[2], the top comment of which starts with "Lots of bad takes in this thread" as a way of dismissing every single valid criticism in the rest of the submission.
> is it so bad to have a reminder that there's more to a discussion than shitting on things and people?
This is a dishonest portrayal of what's going on, which is that, instead of downvoting and flagging those empty put-downs, or responding to specific bad comments, malicious users post a sneering, value-less, emotionally manipulative comment at the toplevel of a submission that vaguely gestures to "negative" comments in the rest of the thread, that dismisses every legitimate criticism along with all of the bad ones. This is "sneering", and it's against the HN guidelines, as well as dishonest and value-less.
> So what? One can make correct criticism of anything. Just because you can think of a criticism doesn't make it useful, relevant, meaningful, interesting, or valuable. Some criticism might be, but not because it is criticism and accurate.
I never claimed that all criticism is "useful, relevant, meaningful, interesting, or valuable". Don't put words in my mouth.
> Are you seriously arguing that not posting a flood of every legitimate criticism means the reader's thinking skills must have been undermined? That the only time it's reasonable to be positive, optimistic, enthusiastic, or supportive, is for something which is literally perfect?
I never claimed this either.
It appears that, given the repeated misinterpretations of my points, and the malicious technique of trying to pretend that I made claims that I didn't, you're one of those dishonest people that resorts to emotional manipulation to try to get their way, because they know they can't actually make a coherent argument for it.
Ironic (or, perhaps not?) that someone defending emotional manipulation and dishonesty resorts to it themselves.
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.
Part of this is driven by people who have realized that they can undermine others' thinking skills by using the right emotional language. For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legi…
Which is a shame, because I like to share my personal projects here because I know it'll get torn to shreds by an army of super hackers (as opposed to an LLM, which will tell me, "Great idea!" no matter what I propose).
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.
I find asking questions on the internet are increasingly seen as a negative, right out of the gate, no other questions asked. I get it to some extent, a lot of people looking to inject doubt and their own ideas show up with some sort of Socratic method that really is meant to drive the conversation to a specific point, not honest. But it also means actually honest questions are often voted or shouted down. It seems l…
I don't get it. Asking questions is never a hostile thing, regardless of the context. Honest or not, questions are simply.. that. Questions. If someone is able to find a way to take offence from a question being asked, that's pathetic.
Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what BoiledCabbage is pointing out is that the fact that it's a next-token-predictor is used as an argument for the thesis that LLMs are not intelligent, and that this is wrong, since being a next-token-predictor is compatible with being intelligent. When mikert89 says "thinking machines have been invented", dgfitz in response strongly implies that for a for thinking machines to exist, they must become "more…
> an argument for the thesis that LLMs are not intelligent, and that this is wrong, Why is that wrong? I mean, I support that thesis. > since being a next-token-predictor is compatible with being intelligent. No. My argument is by definition that is wrong. It's wisdom vs intelligence. Street-smart vs book smart. I think we all agree there is a distinction between wisdom and intelligence. I would define wisdom as bein…
> A next token predictor by definition is recalling.
I think there may be some terminology mismatch, because under the statistical definitions of these words, which are the ones used in the context of machine learning, this is very much a false assertion. A next-token predictor is a mapping that takes prior sentence context and outputs a vector of logits to predict the next most likely token in the sequence. It says nothing about the mechanisms by which this next token is chosen, so any form of intelligent text can be output.
A predictor is not necessarily memorizing either, in the same way that a line of best fit is not a hash table.
> Why exactly? You're stating a priori that the argument is wrong without saying way.
Because you can prove that for any human, there exists a next-token predictor that universally matches word-for-word their most likely response to any given query. This is indistinguishable from intelligence. That's a theoretical counterexample to the claim that next-token prediction alone is incapable of intelligence.