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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#791

Post by keeda »

simoncion wrote: post #785
keeda wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them... Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little and turn to "breathless naysaying" without any effort to really figure out this new technology. I mean, the series literally ends with "maybe I'll try to code with it." > Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved…

> Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little... From the footnote in section 1.5: The examples I give in this essay are mainly from major commercial models (e.g. ChatGPT GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, or Claude Opus 4.6) in the last three months; several are from late March. Several of them come from experienced software engineers who use LLMs professionally in their work. Modern…

>. Several of them come from experienced software engineers who use LLMs professionally in their work.

So, not from personal experience. And we don't know which examples came from which users or what they used them for. We get enough hearsay on HN and again, there's nothing in this series that has not been discussed here. There is however, a ton of other hearsay missing in the series, which is the utility so many people are finding (in many cases, along with actual data or open source projects.)

> Every six-ish months we hear ...

I've been yelling about LLMs since early 2024 [0]! They needed much more "holding it right" back then. Now it's way easier, but the massive potential was clear way back then.

> They also still make the same classes of stupid mistakes, are pretty much as dangerously unreliable as they always have been.

Yes, and this is where a lot of the skill in managing them comes into play. Hint: people are dangerously unreliable too.

> One can rely on both one's informed understanding of the fundamentals behind the system under consideration, as well as first-hand testimony from enormous-bosom-equipped people to arrive at that conclusion.

Of course, but when faced with many contradictory opinions, I prefer data. And the preponderence of data I've looked at and discussed [0] paints a very different picture.

> There's a certain subtlety to this that you missed.

From TFA:

> I want to use them. I probably will at some point.

My complaint is that he is speaking entirely from second-hand information and provides no new insight of his own. That he has trepidations to actually get his hands dirty with them does not change it, and only makes it worse that he spent 10 pages going on about them! He's a technologist, not a journalist! So, I'm genuinely curious, what subtlety did I miss?

[0] Available in my comment history. To allay suspicion that I only engage in breathless boosterism, some relevant comments about the negatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47405189 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830919

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#792

Post by dublinben »

dpark wrote: post #665
dublinben wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.[0] The movement to pave roads was started by bicyclists decades before the rise of the automobile.[1] Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars. We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative. [0] https://e…

Paved roads have been around for thousands of years longer than the bicycle. > Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years. And they used roads that already existed for transit and transport. People have always built roads. > Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars. This is some significant historical revisionism. You’re ma…

Roads that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years certainly weren't built for cars.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#793

Post by anon84873628 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #787
anon84873628 wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the commenter's circumscribed scope of discussion only reinforces the point that they are informed by personal experience and not the internet echo chamber. Whereas you are throwing out these gatekeep-y acronyms to establish transit advocate street cred. In my town the issues are rail trails and kids dying on e-bikes. Are my opinions on rail banking invalid if I don't know all the rules about wheelchair…

If you're going to post something as contrarian as they did then yes. Cars are popular and the American built environment is oriented around them. You might not like it, but nobody will take your seriously if you don't acknowledge the status quo. The exact set of topics they brought up are very online. I may be wrong about their experience with urbanism but it literally looks like something out of r/fuckcars

Or they're just one of the many people who experienced a similar "what radicalized you" moment.

This type hate is part of the status quo with cars. I've been on both sides of it - there are times I catch the entitlement building within myself as a driver!

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#794

Post by anon84873628 »

coderenegade wrote: post #586
ryandrake wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable. I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).

Cars won because they were (and are) better than the alternatives. The need for powerful individual transportation with utility has always existed, and was originally met with horses. Bicycles meet the transportation need, but not the need for utility. Cars do both, and they do it better than anything else. Even before fueling infrastructure was rolled out, you could still run a car on petroleum you bought from the c…

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#795

Post by dang »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #705
dang wrote: post #249

Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change): ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments) The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyance…

> Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting This is in jest right? Yesterday hn posted a paper from 1983... I regularly see 20 year old articles reposted, you've even got a section in your code of conduct arguing how you aren't Reddit despite the apparent nature of this site....

I think I see the misunderstanding here! By repetition I didn't mean "anything that has ever appeared before". I meant "the frontpage being too similar to other recent frontpages". We could call the former absolute repetition and the latter relative repetition.

For community happiness, what matters is avoiding relative repetition. Absolute repetition isn't a problem because, once enough time has gone by, everything old becomes new again. It's like the second-hand clothing store in my home town that used to be called "New to You". (Actually it was called "New 2 You", but I'm pot-committed to the wrong spelling: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....)

In this sense, historical material usually counts as non-repetitive because it doesn't appear much and when it does, the topic is usuually unlike anything else. It is, in fact, some of our most uncorrelated material, so we encourage it.

For example, today we have lunar dust, Trojan coins, and a lost folk singer. A few days ago we had APL source code, medieval pronouns, and lord knows what else.

In the case of classics—perennial submissions that most HN readers either know or would probably enjoy—we explicitly allow them to be reposted after a year or so, and often list the previous discussions because many readers enjoy scrolling back through those too. Here's a current example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811186.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#796

Post by lyu07282 »

yesbut wrote: post #500
pjc50 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

> We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope. Unfortunately, that is the current stage of humanity. We all currently live in a global subscription model for food, housing, safety, etc. No doubt that we will move beyond it eventually, but the current organization of society is kept in pl…

Worth mentioning that Chinese people have a vastly different perspective on new technology, in the west people are incredibly pessimistic. It's not the technology itself, it's the surrounding system that makes that difference. The alternative vision for the future already exists.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#797

Post by littlexsparkee »

gosub100 wrote: post #517
Gigachad wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it. Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?

how are you going to compare cars with no fixed location premium with housing? also utilization is totally different - cars sit ~95% of the time, housing can be nearly round the clock if you work at home. transportation is more like a utility/commodity whereas there are so many personal factors for where to live.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#799

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

>> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

You're ignoring the astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia, the scribes of Egypt, the grammarians of India, the philosophers of ancient Greece, the orators of Rome, the physicians of Islam, the scholars of the Middle Ages, the masters of the Renaissance, and all the great natural philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, of all the ages up to 1800.

We are a technological civilisation, a scientific civilisation. Who do you think comes up with all the technology? Alexander, the Great Butcher? Attila the Hun? Jenghis Khan?

We live in the civilisation that was born in Athens, not in Sparta. Knowledge and wisdom always are the greatest power that shapes reality. This won't change just because OpenAI made a viral app.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#800

Post by rogerrogerr »

koonsolo wrote: post #702
CJefferson wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a professor at uni, and this is what is happening -- many students are never really learning. Then they crash into exams at the end of term when they don't have their AI, and they bomb, I'm seeing failure rates like never before. Now, part of me thinks 'is not letting students having AI like not letting them have a calculator'. On the other hand, if I just let the AI do the exam, well I don't really need the stud…

When kids learn calculation, they indeed are not allowed to use a calculator. Same is true for your field now. When kids learn things the AI already knows, it's clear they can't use the AI. If you want them to become smarter than the AI, they will have to pass through a period where they are dumber than the AI, and it's clear at that point they can't use it. AI raised the bar, that's all. But it's still a bar that ca…

> it's still a bar that can be passed with human intelligence

Can you expand on this?

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