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

The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

acko.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 500 posts

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#471

Post by ezst »

tptacek wrote: post #338
wolvesechoes wrote: post #155

I am bit tired of such discussions. I don't care if LLMs are good at coding or bad at it (in my experience the answer is "it depends"). I don't care how good are they at anything else. What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). It is not here to make our lives better, more worthwhile, more satisfying (it could do these as well). It is there to reduce our agency, t…

This argument can be used, and has been used, about every innovation in automation since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

No it hasn't. Work mechanisation throughout history has resulted in a shift from manual labour to one that's more intellectual in nature. Modern AI believers pretend that it will take over those jobs soon as well.

This would essentially bring us to a cross-roads between, on one hand, a utopia with UBI and people not needing to work (because their labour is unnecessary), or a dystopia, where few technocratic "lords" own the means of work automation and rule over a submissive world.

I don't think it takes a genius to guess where this is heading in our current political climate.

Personally, I'm not scared about any of that, because I don't believe LLMs to be very potent as an AI tool. Robotic militias (remotely controlled by BI or AI) seem a much more tangible threat.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#472

Post by pigpop »

bunderbunder wrote: post #340
slibhb wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What matters in the end is that this tech is not to empower a common person (although it could). How do you figure? 20 dollars/month is insanely cheap for what OpenAI/Anthropic/Google offer. That absolutely qualifies as "empowering a common person". It lowers barriers! A lot of the anti-AI sentiment on HN concerns people losing their jobs. I don't think this will happen: programmers who know what they're doing are…

It's also, for example, the studies finding that when companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay. $20/month in return for measurable reductions in quality of life is not an amazin…

>More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay.

Similar things happened with the adoption of computers in the workplace. Perhaps there's a case for banning all digital technology and hiring typists and other assistants to perform the work using typewriters and mechanical calculators? There would certainly be less multitasking when you have 8 hours worth of documents to retype and file/mail. Perhaps there would be less overtime when your boss can see you have a high workload by the state of papers piled upon your desk. Or maybe we can solve these problems in a different way.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#473

Post by classified »

> In order for vibe-coding to be acceptable and justifiable, they have to consider their own output disposable, highly uncreative, and not worthy of credit.

This seems to describe most commenters in this thread, seeing how the majority defend vibe-coding.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#474

Post by Ensorceled »

antonvs wrote: post #448
Ensorceled wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: are you enjoying this? I looked at your comment history and you don't seem like a troll. What is going on right now?

The person you’re replying to has only posted two short comments in this thread. The reason a few different people are arguing this point is because it is in fact wrong, or at least poorly expressed, to refer to someone’s unfamiliarity with some aspect of a field like the gaming market as “wildly uneducated.” Ironically, the person using that phrase is demonstrating a lack of understanding of its common meaning, sugg…

> The person you’re replying to has only posted two short comments in this thread.

FYI: You can click on the user name and from there see their full comment history on hacker news.

Wild that you even mentioned this, considering the context.

> As Wittgenstein put it, we’re playing language games.

Yes.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#475

Post by incomingpain »

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #261
incomingpain wrote: post #214

I find these criticisms to be similar to those low context brain teasers. If a woman gets married at 25 and her kid is 25, how old is she? This is what LLMs are dealing with. You dont tell them everything they need to know and they are left to fill in the gaps. Which may, and sometimes often means they lie. That's what Agentic does differently, it'll go find the gaps before answering. Agentic is AGI. You can hire man…

> You can hire many minimum wage workers who are generally intelligent who dont even go to that level. That's pretty rude to say, at minimum.

Oh noes, an anonymous person on the internet thinks my anonymous account is rude. Whatever will I do?

Plus this is a valid discussion. A minimum wage worker is generally intelligent, BGI - Biological General Intelligence.

Hiring them to do tasks that AGI does is a cost-benefit analysis. Whereas that BGI has sick days and may not even work. Afterall minimum wage, minimum work.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#476

Post by spacecadet »

pixl97 wrote: post #441
spacecadet wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im familiar. Our group employs game theory in our research... In practice, if you are at the point of blame- yes you have failed.

God damnit eukaryotes, I told you this bullshit was going to have long term ramifications 2 billion years ago!

Now thats good! :)

I think you and I likely agree more than we disagree. Its just out of context...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#477

Post by wolvesechoes »

idopmstuff wrote: post #405
wolvesechoes wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also worth nothing that the "our" in that sentence is just SWEs It isn't, it just a matter of seeing ahead of the curve. Delegating stuff to AI and agents by necessity leads to atrophy of skills that are being delegated. Using AI to write code leads to reduced capability to write code (among people). Using AI for decision-making reduces capability for making decisions. Using AI for math reduces capability for…

I'll grant that it does extend beyond SWEs, but whether AI atrophies skills is entirely up to the user. I used to use a bookkeeper, but I got Claude a QuickBooks API key and have had it doing my books since then. I give it the same inputs and it generates all the various journal entries, etc. that I need. The difference between using it and my bookkeeper is I can ask it all kinds of questions about why it's doing thi…

> but whether AI atrophies skills is entirely up to the user

Thing with society is that we cannot simply rely on self-discipline and self-control of individuals. For the same reason we have universal and legally enforced education system. We would still live in mostly illiterate society if people were not forced to learn or not forced to send their children to school.

Analogies to past inventions are limited due to the fact that AI doesn't automate physical-labor, hard or light - it automates, or at least its overlords claim it automates, lot of cognitive and creative labor. Thinking itself, at least in some of its aspects.

From sociological and political perspective there is a huge difference between majority of population losing capability to forge swords or sew dresses by hand and capability to formulate coherent opinions and communicate them.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#478

Post by stratos123 »

ezst wrote: post #463
wepple wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batshit crazy? 3 years ago LLMs couldn’t solve 7x8. Now they’re building complex applications in one shot, solving previously unsolved math and science problems. Heck, one company built a (prototype but functional) web browser And you say it’s crazy that in the future it’ll be able to build a mail app or OS?

JFYI, LLMs still can't solve 7x8, and well possibly never will. A more rudimentary text processor shoves that into a calculator for consumption by the LLM. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to keep the illusion flying, and that lot is a patchwork of conventional CS techniques that has nothing to do with cutting edge research. To many interested in actual AI research, LLMs are known as the very flawed and limit…

This is false. You can run a small open-weights model in ollama and check for yourself that it can multiply three-digit numbers correctly without having access to any tools. There's even quite a bit of interpretability research into how exactly LLMs multiply numbers under the hood. [1]

When an LLM does have access to an appropriate tool, it's trained to use the tool* instead of wasting hundreds of tokens on drudgery. If that's enough to make you think of them as a "flawed and limiting technique", consider instead evaluating them on capabilities there aren't any tools for, like theorem proving.

* Which, incidentally, I wouldn't describe as invoking a "more rudimentary text processor" - it's still the LLM that generates the text of the tool call.

[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#479

Post by luxuryballs »

vips7L wrote: post #300
luxuryballs wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno if counterfeit is the right word here, a lab grown diamond is still a diamond.

I’m not sure you’re viewing this correctly. No one is claiming a counterfeit painting is not a painting. It’s just not a Rembrandt.

are we talking about a painting that someone is trying to pass off as a Rembrandt?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#480

Post by whywhywhywhy »

dannersy wrote: post #391
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space. They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor. You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fall…

I think my point stands. Procedural generation is a tool that usually works best when it is supplementary. What makes New Vegas an amazing game is all the hand built narratives and intricate storylines. So yeah, I agree, Starfield is boring because of the story. But if the procedural vastness was interesting enough to not be boring, then we wouldn't be talking about this to begin with.

Starfield wasn't procedural vastness though, No Man's Sky is but what Starfield was is handmade content then a loading screen then a minigame then a loading screen then a small procedural "instance"/"dungeon" not a vast seamless world to explore.
Post reply on HN