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Everything we like is a psyop?

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Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#91

Post by simplyluke »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
simplyluke wrote: post #5

I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit" I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis…

> Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with…

Those were both narratives going around, but one was clearly winning in terms of volume, and that's what I'm speaking to here. The dismissal towards the open source models has always smelled more like marketing campaigns to me than the actual sentiments of any hackers I know. We all want the open source options to close the gap, but the labs are definitely staying ahead.

My own experience was relatively similar, good, but with a notable gap that went beyond cherrypicked benchmarks.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#92

Post by boxedemp »

autoexec wrote: post #43
kylecazar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly. Think simonw and his pelicans... but there are lesser known trustworthy voices as well. It just takes some time to find them for a given area of interest. Also bring back blogrolls.

> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly. As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.

Unless you're RMS

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#93

Post by gen220 »

operatingthetan wrote: post #16
apsurd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been? But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating…

I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.

FWIW, cursor (company) has a CLI tool/harness similar to Claude Code called agent.

It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).

(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#94

Post by SkyPuncher »

simplyluke wrote: post #5

I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit" I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis…

> What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing?

I for one work on an agentic product where we use all 3 of the major frontier models. The models absolutely have preferences and "personality" that lead to different characteristics.

In my eyes:

* Gemini - consistently the best at pure reasoning and tunability. Flash models are particularly good at latency sensitive small-scale reasoning. The tradeoff is they struggle with some basic behavior, like tool calling.

* Claude - consistently good at long standing sessions. Opus may or may not be the best model, but it was the first model that crossed the "holy shit" threshold. I understand it's quirks/nuances and it's consistently solid. It's the best for me because I've learn how to be incredibly effective with it.

* ChatGPT - Probably really good, but probably not worth switching from Claude. Last time I used their frontier model, it was a bit random. It would have moments of brilliance immediately followed by falling flat on it's face.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#95

Post by blast »

jrmg wrote: post #64

Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)

A 'psyop' psyop!

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#96

Post by cogman10 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #68
autoexec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good reason to find specific individuals with relevant knowledge and follow their writing directly. As soon as they get popular enough they'll be approached with offers to shill in exchange for huge piles of money. That's the entire point of "influencers". Trusted people being turned into secret advertisers and billboards.

Not all are swayed. The hard thing is finding which ones are, and which ones aren't. I rely on a web of trust. When I see another new hot AI trend, I check it against whether any of the people I've followed via RSS or manually curated on Twitter, Mastodon, etc (many of whom I met IRL) have said anything about it. There's still a an undercurrent of people blogging and posting and chatting who are trustworthy and haven…

It's hard to express, but it seems the best way to sus-out who is a shill and who's authentic is by comparing across reviews for a product.

It's almost a bit like AI speak. The shills will all have very similar sounding content. They'll all hit on the same (ad copy) points. They might mix in a few negative tidbits, but generally speaking you'll catch them all praising the same wizbang features.

Mkbhd is my favorite baseline shill. He practically just reads the product sheet. You know if he says it, it was probably given to him by the person paying for the review and, indeed, you can find the points he brings up echoed in other people's reviews.

On the flip side, I generally trust Gamers Nexus to not shill. Primarily because their lack of playing ball has actually hurt their access.

I've enjoyed your videos as well. They don't come off as a shill particularly because there's a number of products where the negative points you've put out have been strong enough to actually discourage a purchase. They haven't been weak "The colors could pop more".

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#97

Post by stavros »

apsurd wrote: post #8
simplyluke wrote: post #5

I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit" I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis…

related: Cursor composer line of models is so good relative to cost. "auto" served me just fine until they recommended Composer and I've been continually happy with it. Then Claude Code with Opus dropped and everyone went bananas and I gotta say I just assumed I'm too casual to know how bad Cursor has been? But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating…

I haven't used Cursor much lately, but with Opus/Codex I can program with very few bugs without having to look at any code at all, over months of working on the same codebase. I don't think any other model can do that, no?

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#98

Post by tombert »

jrecyclebin wrote: post #82
tombert wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I did a few years ago was buy a thing on eBay of 300 random CDs for like $10. Most of the CDs were unsurprisingly stuff that was pretty common, but I would occasionally find a few artists that I had never heard of that I ended up really liking, like "Hoss" by Lagwagon. I haven't done this in awhile, but I might do it again soonish. It was fun digging through all the CDs to find stuff I ended up actually lik…

Found a favorite band through a similar technique: pile of CDs given from a friend who worked at a music store and no one wanted them. You have to be willing to sift through junk. Which I think is hard for many to accept. However, the algorithms are often giving you junk anyway. Kind of no way around it.

Yeah, most of the CDs there were pretty unremarkable; a lot of them were unsurprisingly stuff that was extremely popular (since those have the most CDs available). A lot of the stuff that wasn't extremely popular was pretty bad.

Still, in that 300, there was about ~30 albums that I hadn't hear of that I ended up really liking.

Took awhile to sift through them all, which is why I haven't done it again, but it was a fun experiment all the same.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#99

Post by sph »

The fact that I never heard of this indie rock band until two days ago, when I came across three separate instances of it on forums, including on a tech website, is itself a psyop and you cannot convince me otherwise. Because why the hell would TechCrunch of all places write about it, and why the hell would it make the Hacker News front page.

But seriously, more than psyop, it’s the stupid recommendation algorithms pushing the same thing to people. It’s quite apparent when browsing music on Youtube and finding new discoveries. Everybody in your same niche is pushed the same new bands, rather than the algo pushing different bands to different people, as one would expect.

The reason that I completely missed Geese until the psyop reached HN is probably because it was pushed by TikTok which I don’t interact with, so I was insulated from it until the word-of-mouth phase of the viral spread.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#100

Post by vermilingua »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #65
vermilingua wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree; but the odds of that coincidence are extremely long.

I'm sad my second thought about this (after dismissing it as a coincidence) was that it could be used for marketing - "I randomly thought about this book/show/movie whatever, and hey what do you know? The sequel is coming out!". Basically another variation on 'organic' advertising in comments that's been around for a while. Of course I highly doubt that's what actually happening here, but the idea is unpleasant. I ha…

This idea makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I shouldn't have included the name of the book in my original comment (now too late to edit).
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