531–540 of 670 posts
This has not been true for a while, maybe forever. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog (bot).
>This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions. >My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead I can access his b…
> Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions. This is still part of the author's concern. Whoever is responsible for setting up and running this AI has chosen to make completely anonymous, so we can't hold them accountable for their instructions. > Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base?…
In practice this is not how agentic coding works right now. Especially for established projects the context can make a big difference in the performance of the agent. By doing simpler tasks it can build a memory of what works well, what doesn't, or other things related to effectively contributing to the project. I suggest you try out OpenClaw and you will see that it does in fact learn from practice. It may make some mistakes, but as you correct it the bot will save such information in its memory and reference that in the future to avoid making the same mistake again.
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> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.
I have no financial stake in it at all. If anything, I'll be hurt by AI. All the same, it's very clear that I'm much more productive when AI writes the code and I spend my time prompting, reviewing, testing, and spot editing. I think this is true for everyone. Some people just won't admit it for various transparent psychological reasons.
Still waiting for anyone to solve actual real world problems with their AI “productivity”.
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I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thr…
“Fantastical” means based on fantasy: not real. A fantastical journalism source is one filled with lies. You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.
I agree that it's not a good word choice when describing a thing that could actually be fake, but you could describe a view from a mountain as fantastical even though it was 100% real.
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
Controversial how?
They took a lot of value away from the communities at Reddit.com, too. Lots of us remember both.
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long. Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of op…
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It's funny because the whole kerfuffle is based on the disagreement over the humanity of these bots. The bot thinks he's a human, so it submits a PR. The maintainer thinks the bot it not human, so he rejects it. The bot reacts as a human, writing an angry ans emotional post about the story. The maintainer makes a big fuss because a non-human wrote a hit piece on him. Etc. I think it could have been handled better. Th…
Bots cannot be "happy". Please review your connection with reality.
It didn’t seem like they were anthropomorphizing the robot, to me.
Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.
I just wish people would remember how awful and unprofessional and lazy most "journalists" are in 2026. It's a slop job now. Ars Technica, a supposedly reputable institution, has no editorial review. No checks. Just a lazy slop cannon journalist prompting an LLM to research and write articles for her. Ask yourself if you think it's much different at other publications.