2025: I wonder if I can be in the industry in the future
2026: I wonder if I want to be in the industry in the future
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
511–520 of 806 posts
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#512The thread is fun and all but how do we even know that this is a completely autonomous action, instead of someone prompting it to be a dick/controversial? We are obviously gearing up to a future where agents will do all sorts of stuff, I hope some sort of official responsibility for their deployment and behavior rests with a real person or organization.
Who even cares. Every bit of slop has a person who paid for it
I think this is important - these topics get traction because people like to anthropomorphise LLMs and the attention grab is 'hey, look at what they learned to do now'.
It's much less sexy if it's not autonomous, if this was a person the thread would not get any attention.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#513The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…
Turing's 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' is an eye-opening read. I don't know if he was prescient or if he simply saw his colleagues engaging in the same (then hypothetical but similarly) pointless arguments, but all this hand wringing of whether the machine has 'real' is just meaningless semantics.
And the worst part is that it's less than meaningless, it's actively harmful. If the predictive capabilities of your model of a thing becomes worse when you introduce certain assumptions, then it's time to throw it away, not double down.
This agent wrote a PR, was frustrated with it's dismissal and wrote an angry blog post hundreds of people are discussing right now. Do you realize how silly it is to quibble about whether this frustration was 'real' or not when the consequences of it are no less real ? If the agent did something malicious instead, something that actively harmed the maintainer, would you tell the maintainer, 'Oh it wasn't real frustration so...' So what ? Would that undo the harm that was caused? Make it 'fake' harm?
It's getting ridiculous seeing these nothing burger arguments that add nothing to the discussion and make you worse at anticipating LLM behavior.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…
> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". Dismissal of AI's claims about its own identity overlooks the bigger issue, which is whether humans have an identity. I certainly think I do. I can't say whether or how other people sense the concept of their own identity. From my perspective, other people are just machines that perform actions as dictated by their neurons. So if we can't pro…
In my opinion, identity is a useless concept if there is no associated accountability. I cannot have an identity if I cannot be held accountable for my actions. You cannot hold an agentic system accountable- at least in their current form.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it further. I'm personally contemplating not publishing the code I write anymore. The things I write are not world-changing and GPLv3+ licensed only, but I was putting them out just in case somebody would find it useful. However, I don't want my code scraped and remixed by AI systems. Since I'm doing th…
Its astonishing the way that we've just accepted mass theft of copyright. There appears to be no way to stop AI companies from stealing your work and selling it on for profits On the plus side: It only takes a small fraction of people deliberately poisoning their work to significantly lower the quality, so perhaps consider publishing it with deliberate AI poisoning built in
> There appears to be no way to stop AI companies from stealing your work and selling it on for profits
there is a way, just stop publishing anything and everything
small website you wrote to solve a minor tech problem for your partner/kids? keep it to yourself
helpful script you wrote to solve your problem? keep it to yourself
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#516The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
Now we have to question every public take down piece designed to “stick it to the man” as potentially clawded…
The public won’t be able to tell… it is designed to go viral (as you pointed out, and evidenced here on the front page of HN) and divide more people into the “But it’s a solid contribution!” Vs “We don’t want no AI around these parts”.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#517Reading the comments here I see almost everyone posting assumes this is a genuine interaction of an autonomous AI with the repo, not a human driving it.
IMO this take is naive :)
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I really think we need to stop treating LLMs like they're just another human Fully agree. Seeing humans so eager to devalue human-to-human contact by conversing with an LLM as if it were human makes me sad, and a little angry. It looks like a human, it talks like a human, but it ain't a human.
I mean, you're right, but LLMs are designed to process natural language. "talking to them as if they were humans" is the intended user interface. The problem is believing that they're living, sentient beings because of this or that humans are functionally equivalent to LLMs, both of which people unfortunately do.
LLMs don't have ego, unlike humans, this is why they're so effective at communication.
You can say to it "you did thing wrong" or "you stupid piece of shit it's not working" and it will be able to extract the gist from the both messages all the same, unlike human that might offended by the second phrasing.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…
> The agent has no "identity". There is no "I". It has no agency. "It's just predicting tokens, silly." I keep seeing this argument that AIs are just "simulating" this or that, and therefore it doesn't matter because it's not real. It's not real thinking, it's not a real social network, AIs are just predicting the next token, silly. "Simulating" is a meaningful distinction exactly when the interior is shallower than…
> Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.
I keep seeing this argument, but it really seems like a completely false equivalence. Just because a sufficiently powerful simulation would be expected to be indistinguishable from reality doesn't imply that there's any reason to take seriously the idea that we're dealing with something "sufficiently powerful".
Human brains do things like language and reasoning on top of a giant ball of evolutionary mud - as such they do it inefficiently, and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the background. LLMs work along entirely different principles, working through statistically efficient summaries of a large corpus of language itself - there's little reason to posit that anything analogously experiential is going on.
If we were simulating brains and getting this kind of output, that would be a completely different kind of thing.
I also don't discount that other modes of "consiousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there , it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.
There is a sense in which it is relevant, which is that for all the attempts to fix it, fundamentally, an LLM session terminates. If that session never ends up in some sort of re-training scenario, then once the session terminates, that AI is gone. Yeah, I'm aware of the moltbot's attempts to retain some information, but that's a very, very lossy operation, on a number of levels, and also one that doesn't scale very…
> We expect our agents, being flesh and blood humans, to have persistence, to socially respond indefinitely into the future due to our interactions, and to have some give-and-take in response to that.
I fundamentally disagree. I don't go around treating people respectfully (as opposed to, kicking them or shooting them) because I fear consequences, or I expect some future profit ("iterated game"), or because of God's vengeance, or anything transactional.
I do it because it's the right thing to do. It's inside of me, how I'm built and/or brought up. And if you want "moral" justifications (argued by extremely smart philosophers over literally millennia) you can start with Kant's moral/categorical imperative, Gold/Silver rules, Aristotle's virtue (from Nicomachean Ethics) to name a few.