Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

acko.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 500 posts

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#81

Post by utopiah »

hwers wrote: post #75

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally wr…

> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives

I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc.

It would feel a bit like walking on thin ice to get to a beautiful island. Sure, it's not infeasible and if you somehow make it, it might be worth the risk, but honestly wouldn't you prefer a slower boat?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#82

Post by einpoklum »

> Open source software maintainers have been one of the first to feel the downsides. ... The last thing they needed was to receive slop-coded pull requests from contributors merely looking to cheat their way into having a credible GitHub resumé... As a result, projects have closed down public contributions and dropped their bug bounties...

Has this really been people's experience?

I develop and maintain several small FOSS projects, some of which are moderately popular (e.g. 90,000-user Thunderbird extension; a library with 850 stars on GitHub). So, I'm no superstar or in the center of attention but also not a tumbleweed. I've not received a single AI-slop pull request, so far.

Am I an exception to the rule? Or is this something that only happens for very "fashionable" projects?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#83

Post by marginalia_nu »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Most of the people doing the most rote and monotonous work were and are doing so in some of the least productive circumstances, with clear ways of increasing speed and productivity.

If development velocity was truly an important factor in these businesses, we'd migrated away from that gang of four ass Java 8 codebase, given these poor souls offices, or at least cubicles to reduce the noise, we wouldn't make them spend 3 hours a day in ceremonial meetings.

The reason none of this happens is that even if these developers crank out code 10x faster, by the time it's made it past all the inertia and inefficiencies of the organization, the change is nearly imperceptible. Though the bill for the new office and the 2 year refactoring effort are much more tangible.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#84

Post by hwers »

utopiah wrote: post #81
hwers wrote: post #75

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally wr…

> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a b…

I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating at times. My rule is that if it “compiles” in my brain as an understood idea then i accept it. I also push back a lot (sometimes it points out good errors in my thinking, sometimes it admits it hallucinated). Real humans hallucinate a lot as well or confidently state subtly wrong ideas, it’s a good habit anyway. It’s basically the same approach when presented with a “formula” for something in school. If i dont know how to derive/prove it then i dont accept it as part of my memorized or accepted toolkit/things i use (and try to forget it). If it fits with the rest of my network of understood ideas i do. It’s annoying but still more time efficient than trawling through lecture slides with domain specific language etc

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#85

Post by wormpilled »

delaminator wrote: post #65
theshrike79 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk…

"I hate CGI video" "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?" "What? that's not CGI!" This video is 15 years old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY

I think that's a different category, though. Those backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real' because the background actually exists.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#86

Post by DonHopkins »

Pretend Intelligence (PI) — Design Note & Tribute

A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability.

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...

1. What PI Is

Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.

From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxPJs1EPS4

> "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.

So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3).

[...]

Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org) 42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757411

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-sta...

Gnu: Words to Avoid: Artificial Intelligence:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...

...currently not responding... archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260303004610/https://www.gnu.o...

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#87

Post by doodaddy »

There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable.

We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#88

Post by endymion-light »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Books are just simple theses and themes with hundreds of pages of boilerplate

This is a great example actually.

To me, a function is a single sentence within a book. It may approach the larger picture, but that sentence can be reviewed, changed, switched around, killed by an editor.

Some programmers believe they're fantastic sentence writers. They brag about how good of a sentence they write, they're entire worldview has been built on being good sentence creators. Especially within enterprises, you may spend your entire life writing sentences without ever really understanding the whole book.

If your worldview has been built on sentence creation, and suddenly there's a sentence creator AI, you're going to be deathly afraid of it replacing you as a sentence writer.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#89

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

zorked wrote: post #62
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers aren't paid to code. FORTRAN ("formula translator") was one of the first programs ever written and it was supposed to make coding obsolete. Scientists will now be able to just type in formulas and the computer will just calculate the result, imagine that!

Is this claim historical? As in, it was actually made at the time?

Which claim, exactly? That "coding will be made obsolete"?

Yes, it is. Literally every programming innovation claims to "make coding obsolete". I've seen a half dozen in my own lifetime.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#90

Post by endymion-light »

utopiah wrote: post #81
hwers wrote: post #75

Its unfortunate that there’s mode collapse around what the consensus “best way” to use these things are. It’s too bad we didn’t have a period where these things were great teachers but didn’t attempt to write code because in my opinion the ideal way to use them is not by agents mass producing sloppy buggy disorganized code, but to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives, rubber duck, and occasionally wr…

> to teach you things way faster than the old alternatives I'm not sure if you ever had a teacher or instructor that you didn't trust, because they were a compulsive liar or addiction or any other issue. I didn't (as least not that I can remember) but I know I would be VERY on guard about it. I imagine I would consequently be quite stressed learning with them, even if they were brilliant, kind, etc. It would feel a b…

I feel like this is partially a skill issue - You can get direct, cited information from LLMs. There's a level of personal responsibility for over-using the tools and letting them feed you bad/false information, but if you try researching specific abstractions, newer documentation, most LLMS now correctly call and research the tools available, directly citing them.

I think you can build a very easy workflow that reinforces rather than replaces learning, I've used a citation flow to link and put into practice a ton of more advanced programming techniques, that I found incredibly difficult to locate and research before AI.

I'd say the comparison is faulty, it's more akin to swimming to an island (no-ai) vs using a boat. You control the speed and direction of the boat, which also means you have the responsbility of directing it to the correct location.

Post reply on HN