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Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

blog.terrygodier.com

281–290 of 310 posts

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] a “limited hangout”. >> The words are non-intuitive Yeah. "Incomplete mea culpa", "Incomplete admission", "Incomplete penance", "Incomplete contrition", "Incomplete remorse", actually say "the thing" instead of using a new random phrase. I like "incomplete contrition" or "gas light remorse".

> actually say "the thing" instead of using a new random phrase Apparently the phrase is very old, pre-dating the internet. It came out of the CIA. In this context hangout is a clipped form of "letting it all hang out" So it's saying you're putting on the appearance of letting it all hang out, but the information revealed is limited.

I think in this case, the existence of pedigree isn't a strong enough argument to keep around an uncommon, and uncommonly unintuitive, phrase.

"Gaslight confession" or "gaslight apology" are much clearer. By directly addressing the intent to deceive, they are both accurate, and can help discourage the practice.

("Gaslight" is also unintuitive upon first encounter, but has a widely established meaning at this point.)

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#282
post #92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gruber himself has written a number of posts critical of Apple, some of them scathingly so.

Yeah, any time I see someone accuse Gruber of being universally positive about Apple I think they can't have been reading his work very often. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th... Apple subsequently stopped providing Apple execs for his annual live podcast recording at WWDC. They don't confirm it was because of that piece (unsurprisingly) but i…

I came across a theory which seems more likely to me: Gruber lost access to Apple execs after he posted the following regarding Tim Cook and other tech CEOs congratulating Trump on winning the election in 2024:

“I wonder how much Cook dithered over that cheerful-looking exclamation mark. I hope he regrets it. … I wonder how much it stings to be reminded that all the money in the world cannot buy dignity. I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers.”

From the very end of this: https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#283
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it. There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it. And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass

> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge? Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately the…

> Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?

I dont know why, but I do know know that it doesn't. I know because I've tried similar things when playing around with AI to see what it could do. "Make an app similar to X app [link to repo]"

Depending on how its feeling, it may just read the readme or it may go through the codebase. But I've never gotten line by line code copying.

> I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on

I agree with this, to the extent of your second point

> they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.

How far does the rabbit hole go for verifying what is going on? If the LLM did indeed copy an entire codebase at its own behest, what reason would the author have to verify that it wasn't copied, given that every other time they've used an LLM to code it never copied an entire codebase?

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#284
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it. Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.

Yeah, I think that case is absolutely wild, because ostensibly the point of the recorded music was to showcase the strings.

Its telling that instead of showcasing the quality of their strings, they used an LLM to generate the sounds their strings should make.

Shows how much trust they have in their own product.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe our attention is being farmed? I have a friend who does astrology readings for a living and was curious why the app store doesn't allow astrology apps, a quick search revealed astrology apps exist on the app store so that's a red herring.

In app categories that bring a lot of low-effort submissions and clones, Apple requires new submissions to bring something new to the table. Before these requirements the app store was filling up with thousands of flashlight apps, todo lists, and other simple apps that people would build (or clone) to get something into the app store.

Make me sad that my original flashlight app (pre App Store) might not be accepted if I tried to publish it. It is an artifact of history I guess, so maybe that could be an exception.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#286
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, but you're correct. That's the reason for the complaints and the company has already taken an anti-AI stance precisely for this reason.

It’s not worth getting upset at one or two people downvoting. This is a large forum. There will always be some of that. Plus we have no clue why they did it, it could be valid

I'm not upset, that's not the important part of my message.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#287
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. Fender USA and Squier Jaguars and lots of pedals are for ppl in original bands. But the money is in Custom Shop Gibson, Fender and PRS, which are for ppl in the older generations playing mostly in 70s cover bands, or just hanging it in the wall to occasionally play Smoke on the Water. TheGearPage has become a very influential force in the industry almost like HN has.

Okay, that's a point - there's less money in the Squier Jaguars even if they sell more of them. I know I personally can't decide on a Squier Jaguar or Vintera, when I know what I really wanted is a Fender Cobain Jaguar. There's more money in the doctors & lawyers accumulating expensive gear that they rarely ever get to play. That said - the few people I know in the "rich kid buying gear" segment are deep into AI, and…

That's a good point. Interestingly, the person working for D'addario who made the video is in a self declared "east coast's best cover band", and most of the artwork is AI-based, plus a few background songs in the bands Instagram have shown to be AI.

Dunno how the lawyers and doctors think about AI music, though.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#288
post #56

The thing that stands out to me with all of this is how little accountability there is left within the field. Published a rip-off? "Sorry, Claude must have done this". Published a shitty/wrong/insensitive/ post somewhere? "Sorry, the AI wrote it" Regardless of how we view LLMs as a whole, if you produce content with AI and publish it, you personally own every line of what you published. "Claude did it" cannot ever be…

> how little accountability there is left within the field.

I don't think it's limited to the tech field: it's stronger here, due to the proximity with the tech giants who are enabling Trump's bullshit, but he and all that goes on around him are the real center of it.

More broadly, it's been on the rise for a number of years now, due to the Republican Party doing its level best to eliminate accountability for anything their people do wrong—like, for instance, cozying up to Epstein and his ilk.

They've been promoting a culture of unaccountability, trying to destroy the very idea that we have obligations to each other...as opposed to the masses having obligations to do whatever our leaders tell us.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#289
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, a lot of commercials, particularly for cars, haven’t really shot the physical product in decades and instead used CGI. I think Ikea also makes heavy use of renderings. It’s all kind of insane. OTOH, a hundred years ago ads all used illustrations… I guess you’d have to show that the real strings don’t sound or behave as shown in the video, however it was created.

In this case there's a difference between CGI and generative AI. However they came up with arrangement of pixels on the screen, the product is still portrayed accurately. Now, unless the company in question got their new strings into Sona training data, I wager that the generated output has little casual connection with the product being advertised. If I found out IKEA's newest product looks nothing like on the comme…

IMO in D'addario's case, the analogy would be like using CGI and illustrations to illustrate a painting.

Also, I think when judged by the court of public opinion, the overwhelming answer was "yes, it's fraudulent", or at least "misleading and useless" as most people even complained that the song sounds like an overproduced mess where any string would sound the same.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge? Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately the…

> Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge? I dont know why, but I do know know that it doesn't. I know because I've tried similar things when playing around with AI to see what it could do. "Make an app similar to X app [link to repo]" Depending on how its feeling, it may just read the readme or it may go through the codebase. But I've never gotten line by line…

A bit outdated, but IME never copies things verbatim because of limitations in context. Even when you want it to be a verbatim copy, like in a migration, it struggles a bit to remember everything exactly from memory and always has to cross-reference.

Might be better in newer models though.

But for a real "copy" it would default to calling `cp` in bash.

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