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

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

aphyr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 117 posts

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#81

Post by satvikpendem »

observationist wrote: post #62
satvikpendem wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the show the device is not autonomous, humans use it.

That can be a type of mind, though? It can also be a type of interface - a tap into a system not fully understood, controlling the perspective or view but not the process. The whole "mind of god" Deus/Devs, etc - I think it's left ambiguous on purpose for the hook but I always took it to be an AI flavored story at the core.

Maybe. The plot itself is based on a short story that Garland read, both the 2007 original [0] and its 2022 rewrite [1]. Qntm is great and their latest book, There Is No Antimemetics Division, recently was on HN as well [2].

[0] https://qntm.org/responsibility

[1] https://qntm.org/responsibilit

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660853

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#82

Post by archagon »

crabmusket wrote: post #69
mzajc wrote: post #10

> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…” May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

Yes. The creator has said he didn't have AI in mind while writing the show, but I think it's still a very stimulating AI parable despite that. The sycophancy, the grinding inevitablity of assimilation, the homogeneous entity that speaks out of a billion mouths. It's all there.

“You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen.”

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#83

Post by pseudalopex »

andrewaylett wrote: post #25
embedding-shape wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work fine in Spain, so lets not jump on the all to typical EU-made-the-internet-suck bandwagon all too quickly. Seems this is a UK problem. But what do I know, I actually read the error message.

It's the author's problem with the UK (and the UK's Online Safety Act, which establishes requirements on hosts that can't be avoided by merely not being in the UK), rather than the UK's problem with the author. But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.

Visitors are subject to UK law.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

XorNot wrote: post #66
anigbrowl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.

Frankly, who are these people? Because this is just another "they" idle conspiracy theory. "They" are against me. Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as t…

I was thinking specifically of political pundits who are doing a roaring trade (in opinion columns, TV hits, book promotions etc) talking about authoritarianism and its many causal factors. They're curiously mute when it comes to discussing solutions, with very generic advice like 'go to a protest' or 'vote for the opposition' despite the abundant evidence from authoritarian regimes around the world of these tactics not being very effective. You never hear them talk about things like general strikes or mass civil disobedience campaigns for some reason.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#85

Post by hackable_sand »

satvikpendem wrote: post #47
throwanem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the…

You're right, not necessarily AI, more so what an omniscient and omnipotent device could do especially in the wrong hands.

"in the wrong hands"

that's fucking funny

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#86

Post by usefulcat »

jspash wrote: post #20
rdevilla wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.

With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.

More likely you’ll return to an industry utterly swamped in technical debt.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#87

Post by elzbardico »

apsurd wrote: post #14

Best line: > I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all. It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care? (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

I sometimes see myself writing too much manual code, so I reprompt my work in another directory for claude, and let it do whatever the fuck he wants, because I know for a fact that my company is monitoring claude usage as a metric.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#88

Post by elzbardico »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #79
sethev wrote: post #75

It's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.

Is it? The observation seems patently obvious if one has even the most superficial understanding of how LLMs work? Why is this not common knowledge?

Understanding LLMs require a few pieces of knowledge that are not very common in the industry, not only ML stuff, but I think that having worked in the past with NLP helps a lot.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#89

Post by bluefirebrand »

seer wrote: post #54
embedding-shape wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.) As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for th…

We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago. Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid. The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap. Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher…

> Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation

Frankly if your devs weren't doing this stuff before, forcing them to do it with AI assistance is probably going to be counter productive. If it is possible to produce good quality code and tests and such with LLMs, it is not likely by forcing LLMs on people who didn't care about code quality or tests before

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#90

Post by forgetfreeman »

elzbardico wrote: post #88
forgetfreeman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? The observation seems patently obvious if one has even the most superficial understanding of how LLMs work? Why is this not common knowledge?

Understanding LLMs require a few pieces of knowledge that are not very common in the industry, not only ML stuff, but I think that having worked in the past with NLP helps a lot.

I fucked around with dissociate press 30 years ago just to see what would happen if you fed it a combination of random chapters from Alice in Wonderland and the book of Revelations. This hardly represents insider knowledge.
Post reply on HN