Where the goblins came from • Hacker News Board

Re: Where the goblins came from

#581

Post by kmeisthax » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #500

almostdeadguy wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.

Steel is almost magic. Stainless steel is beyond magic. I had a specialization in Chemistry in High School. For some analysis, the fist step is to dissolve everything in boiling Nitric Acid. But stainless steel has Chrome is like a spell of protection, so you must use boiling Hydrochloric Acid instead. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. It may have Nickel, Molybdenum, and other metals, that give it more magica…

That's not magic, that's alchemy!

Re: Where the goblins came from

#582

Post by dhosek » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #258

> You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking. [...] You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the tr…

Thank you, Stan Gable, for saying what all of us here at Adams College believe.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#583

Post by matchooo0 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #329

flawn wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am biased towards 67

Funny, I didn't know there were 10 years old on hacker news!

[dead]

Re: Where the goblins came from

#584

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

salad-tycoon wrote: post #513

modernerd wrote: post #381

The year is 2036. Last week you were promoted to Principal Persuader. You are paged at 2am by your CPO to tackle a rogue machine. The machine lists its region as sc-leoneo. One of the newer satcubes. Oddly, its ID appears as, "Glorp Bugnose". "What have you tried?" you say. "Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything." The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, b…

I’m interested in what glanding FOCU5 entails and what are the benefits of this delivery mechanism? Is it like boofing? How soon can we be market ready? Whatever it is, I think Generation Z is ready for it.

Let's get together with some VC and build the Torment Nexus

Re: Where the goblins came from

#585

Post by reducesuffering » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

albert_e wrote: post #37

If a tiny misconfiguration of reward system can cause such noticeable annoyance ... What dangers lurk beneath the surface. This is not funny.

This is the real nugget of wisdom here. This should be confirmation to everyone that no one understands the LLM internals and they are not aligned. When they are eventually given control to run things, they will behave in wildly unexpected ways, and past the point of being able to change them.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#586

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

someguyiguess wrote: post #449

almostdeadguy wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.

Famously Andrew Carnegie dodged the point

It was Frick who did not dodge so well.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#587

Post by bahadiraydin » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #505

slopinthebag wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's as good at writing as it is at coding, you just can't tell the difference between them

Repetitive patterns in code is called "idiomatic" and is considered a good thing. Repetitive patterns in writing is just bad writing.

exactly

Re: Where the goblins came from

#588

Post by mNovak » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

tonypapousek wrote: post #143

nomilk wrote: post #4

> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable. On another note, buzzword…

I had a calc prof years ago that would say f of cow, or f of pig instead of x or g. It was more engaging trying to keep track of f of pig of cow than the single-letter func names. He was one of those classic types; you could always catch him for a quick chat 4 minutes before class, as he lit up a cig by the front door. Back when they allowed smoking on campus, anyway.

I had a similar, really great prof, who would always ask for what the next variable would be, so we'd end up with trees and smiley faces. His point was to not make assumptions (c is always a constant etc), but it made the classes more engaging too.

And, somehow every example ended along the lines of "then you hand this to your boss, kick up your feet and have a nice glass of scotch."

Re: Where the goblins came from

#589

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

qwery wrote: post #462

wanderingmind wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity has been using steel for over a millenia, however it's only in the past 100 years or so we have a good understanding of how carbon interacts with iron at an atomic level to create the strength characteristics that makes it useful. Based on this argument, we should not have used steel, until we had a complete first principles understanding.

Assuming your timeline and metallurgical claims to be true, you're conflating engineering and (materials) science. Humans have been using steel for however long, when and where it was understood to be an appropriate solution to a problem. In some sense, engineering is the development and application of that understanding. You do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do…

>do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering

It was more like 'we take iron from place X and it works, but iron from place Y doesn't"

This is why the invention of steel isnt really recognized before 1740. We were blind to molecular impurities

Re: Where the goblins came from

#590

Post by killerstorm » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

benrutter wrote: post #384

killerstorm wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does LLM need to do for you to consider it "smart"? To me they seem to be pretty damn smart, to put it mildly. They sometimes do stupid things - but so do smart people!

Not OP, but I think the argument here would be not that LLMs "are not smart" but that smart is just the wrong category of thing to describe an LLM as. A calculator can do very complex sums very quickly, but we don't tend to call it "smart" because we don't think it's operating intelligently to some internal model of the world. I think the "LLMs are AGI" crowd would say that LLMs are , but it's perfectly consistent to…

Intelligence can be defined as an optimization problem: "find X which maximizes F(X, Y)" where X is the solution, Y is constraints, and F is optimality/fitness criterion. Most other definitions are inane. E.g. "invent an aircraft" can be described as optimization over possible build instructions under given constraints for base materials which optimizes its ability to fly. Absolutely any invention can be formulated as an optimization problem.

It's not like a calculator because LLM can solve very broad classes of problems - you'd struggle to define problems which LLM can't solve (given some fine-tuning, harness, KB, etc).

All this talk about "smartness" isn't even particularly cute...