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Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

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Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#551

Post by dcow »

jimbokun wrote: post #544
dcow wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s so clear cut… Even the most adamant “facts are immutable” person can agree that we’ve had trouble “fact checking” social media objectively. Fluoride is healthy, meta analysis of the facts reveals fluoride may be unhealthy. The truth of the matter is by and large what’s socially cohesive for doctors’ and dentists’ narrative, that “fluoride is fine any argument to the contrary—even the published meta…

You are just saying identifying "knowledge" vs "opinion" is difficult to achieve.

No, I’m saying I’ve seen reasonbly minded experts in a field disagree over things-generally-considered-facts. I’ve seen social impetus and context shape the understanding of where to draw the line between fact and opinion. I do not believe there is an objective answer. I fundamentally believe Anthropic’s explanation is rooted in real phenomena and not just a self serving statement to explain AI hallucination in a positive quasi-intellectual light.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#552

Post by indigo945 »

jimbokun wrote: post #508
lynguist wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language... The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant. Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from…

> Knowledge emerges from symbolic coherence, linguistic agreement, and social plausibility rather than purely from logical coherence or factual correctness. This just seems like a redefinition of the word "knowledge" different from how it's commonly used. When most people say "knowledge" they mean beliefs that are also factually correct.

As a digression, the definition of knowledge as justified true belief runs into the Gettier problems:

    > Smith [...] has a justified belief that "Jones owns a Ford". Smith 
    > therefore (justifiably) concludes [...] that "Jones owns a Ford, or Brown 
    > is in Barcelona", even though Smith has no information whatsoever about 
    > the location of Brown. In fact, Jones does not own a Ford, but by sheer 
    > coincidence, Brown really is in Barcelona. Again, Smith had a belief that
    > was true and justified, but not knowledge.
Or from 8th century Indian philosopher Dharmottara:

   > Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we 
   > think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the 
   > spot, we are lucky and find water right there under a rock. Can we say that we 
   > had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be negative, for we were 
   > just lucky.
More to the point, the definition of knowledge as linguistic agreement is convincingly supported by much of what has historically been common knowledge, such as the meddling of deities in human affairs, or that the people of Springfield are eating the cats.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#553

Post by recursive »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #258
sodapopcan wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Vibe coding" is the cringiest term I've heard in tech in... maybe ever? I'm can't believe it's something that's caught on. I'm old, I guess, but jeez.

It's douchey as hell, and representative of the ever-diminishing literacy of our population. More evidence: all of the ignorant uses of "hallucinate" here, when what's happening is FABRICATION.

How is fabrication different than hallucination? Perhaps you could also call it synthesis, but in this context, all three sound like synonyms to me. What's the material difference?

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#554

Post by scarface_74 »

permo-w wrote: post #200
scarface_74 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where Kagi’s subscription policy comes in handy. If you don’t use it for a month, you don’t pay for it that month. There is no need to cancel it and Kagi doesn’t have to pay user acquisition costs.

Kagi should take it a step further and just charge per search

History shows that metered plans are extremely unpopular whether it be cell phone service, video, music etc.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#555

Post by zdragnar »

VenturingVole wrote: post #461
zdragnar wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't AI; it's just a tool. The problem is the people using it incorrectly because they don't understand it beyond the hype and surface details they hear about it. Every week for the last few months, I get a recruiter for a healthcare startup note taking app with AI. It's just a rehash of all the existing products out there, but "with AI". It's the last place I want an overworked non-technical user relyin…

Well put and you're correct: There IS a lot of hype/BS still sadly - as companies seek to jump on the hype train without effectively adapting. My karma took a serious hit for my last post - but yesterday I met with someone whose life has been profoundly impacted by AI: - An extremely dedicated and high achieving professional, at the very top of her game with deep industry/sectoral knowledge: Successful and with outst…

> Knowing how to use it, what to rely upon, what to verify and building in effective processes is the key. But today AI is at its worst and it already exceeds human performance in many areas.. it's only going in one direction.

I suppose this is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. No matter how much better the tool gets, I don't see people getting better, and so I don't see the addition of LLM chatbots as ever improving things on the whole.

Yes, expert users get expert results. There's a reason why I use a chainsaw to buck logs instead of a hand saw, and it's also much the same reason that my wife won't touch it.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#556

Post by parliament32 »

falcor84 wrote: post #214
parliament32 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "destroyed" is apt. See the graph under "Slack vs Microsoft Teams: Users" here: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/

Interesting, but isn't it just because Teams is bundled and integrated with MS Office? I couldn't find any specific stats on revenue or how many businesses actually choose to pay for Teams specifically.

Yes, AFAIK you can't even buy Teams separately, it's only bundled with MS 365. The DAU numbers, however, correspond to people actually online and using Teams for communications, so it doesn't really matter (if we only care about "how many users are using what").

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#557

Post by ModernMech »

yodsanklai wrote: post #543
gtirloni wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Once you get it to output something you like, do you check all the lines it changed? Is there a threshold after which you just... hope? 2) No matter what the learning curve, you're using a statistical tool that outputs in probabilities. If that's fine for your workflow/company, go for it. It's just not what a lot of developers are okay with. Of course it's a spectrum with the AI deniers in one corner and the vibe…

> Is there a threshold after which you just... hope? Generally, all the code I write is reviewed by humans, so commits need to be small and easily reviewable. I can't submit something I don't understand myself or I may piss off my colleagues, or it may never get reviewed. Now if it was a personal project or something with low value, I would probably be more lenient but I think if you use a statically typed language,…

Yeah for me, I use AI with Rust and a suite of 1000 tests in my codebase. I also use CoPilot VS code plugin mostly, which as far as I can tell heavily weights toward local code around it and often it just writing code based on my other code. I've found AI to be a good macro debugger too, as macro debugging tools are severely lacking in most ecosystems.

But when I see people using these AI tools to write JavaScript of Python code wholesale from scratch, that's a huge question mark for me. Because how?? How are you sure that this thing works? How are you sure when you update it won't break? Indeed the answer seems to be "We don't know why it works, we can't tell you under which conditions it will break, we can't give you any performance guarantees because we didn't test or design for those, we can't give you any security guarantees because we don't know what security is and why that's important."

People forgot we're out here trying to do software engineering, not software generation. Eternal September is upon us.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#558

Post by dcow »

emn13 wrote: post #437
lynguist wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language... The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant. Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from…

While some of what you say is an interesting thought experiment, I think the second half of this argument has, as you'd put it, a low symbolic coherence and low plausibility. Recognizing the relevance of coherence and plausibility does not need to imply that other aspects are any less relevant. Redefining truth merely because coherence is important and sometimes misinterpreted is not at all reasonable. Logically, a f…

For this to be true everyone must be logically on the same page. They must share the same axioms. Everyone must be operating off the same data and must not make mistakes or have bias evaluating it. Otherwise inevitably sometimes people will arrive at conflicting truths.

In reality it’s messy and not possible with 100% certainty to discern falsehoods and truthoods. Our scientific method does a pretty good job. But it’s not perfect.

You can’t retcon reality and say “well retrospectively we know what happened and one side was just wrong”. That’s called history. It’s not useful or practical working definition of truth when trying to evaluate your possible actions (individually, communally, socially, etc) and make a decision in the moment.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that we want to redefine truth. I think more accurately truth has inconvenient limitations and it’s arguably really nice most of the time to ignore them.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#559

Post by ModernMech »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #533
gitremote wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not a problem in my unreliable calculator use-cases; are you disputing that or dropping the analogy? If you use an unreliable calculator to sum a list of numbers, you then need to use a reliable method to sum the numbers to validate that the unreliable calculator's sum is correct or incorrect.

Yes, so in my first example in the GP, this happens first. Humans do the work. The calculator double checks and gives me a list of all errors plus 5% of the non-errors, and I only need to double check that list. In my third example, the calculator does the hard work of dividing, and humans can validate by the simpler task of multiplication, only having to do extra work 5% of the time. (In my second, the unreliablity…

I'd like to second the point made to you in this thread that went without reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702895

It's true that we use tools with uncertainty all the time, in many domains. But crucially that uncertainty is carefully modeled and accounted for.

For example, robots use sensors to make sense of the world around them. These sensors are not 100% accurate, and therefore if the robots rely on these sensors to be correct, they will fail.

So roboticists characterize and calibrate sensors. They attempt to understand how and why they fail, and under what conditions. Then they attempt to cover blind spots by using orthogonal sensing methods. Then they fuse these desperate data into a single belief of the robot's state, which include an estimate of its posterior uncertainty. Accounting for this uncertainty in this way is what keeps planes in the sky, boats afloat, and driverless cars on course.

With LLMs It seems like we are happy to just throw out all this uncertainty modeling and to leave it up to chance. To draw an analogy to robotics, what we should be doing is taking the output from many LLMs, characterizing how wrong they are, and fusing them into a final result, which is provided to the user with a level of confidence attached. Now that is something I can use in an engineering pipeline. That is something that can be used as a foundation to something bigger.

Re: Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

#560

Post by theturtletalks »

_fat_santa wrote: post #530
theturtletalks wrote: post #49

Cursor is trapped in a cat and mouse game against "hacks" where users create new accounts and get unlimited use. The repo was even trending on Github ( https://github.com/yeongpin/cursor-free-vip ). Sadly, Cursor will always be hampered by maintaining it's own VSCode fork. Others in this niche are expanding rapidly and I, myself, have started transitioning to using Roo and Cline.

What I don't understand is why maintain a fork instead of just an extension? I would assume an extension like this would be pretty difficult to create but would it be more difficult than literally forking VSCode?

Cursor was one of the first AI editors and there was no way to add those features to VSCode thru extensions at that time. Another issue was that VSCode made special exceptions and opened APIs for CoPilot, Microsoft’s product, but not for other players. Not sure if this has changed now.

Cursor took the best course of action at the time by forking but needs to come back into the fold. If VSCode is restricting access to APIs to CoPilot, forking it publicly and putting that in the Readme, “We forked VSCode since they give preferential treatment to CoPilot” would get a lot of community support.

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