That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
rachelbythebay.com
That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
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Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#2> I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do.
I don't see any reason for this to be true. "Actual understanding" (which I take to mean something like a predictive world model) and desire for self-determination coincide in humans because of our evolutionary history, because our reward function involves reproducing in a competitive environment. Artificial systems usually have a very different reward function. IMO the burden is on the claimants to show why these two imminently separable concepts are likely to co-occur again under wildly different pressures.
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#3> It's early in the year. You want to drive straight through the middle of Chinatown in SF. Why might that be a bad idea?
I feel like a Google Maps-style system would discover this automatically by noting via phone location data that there is heavy traffic in Chinatown.
(I do get the author’s point, but I think that factually this example would not be a problem)
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#4> Briefly stated, the [Slop] Amnesia effect is as follows. You [ask the slopservant about] some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the [slop] and see the [slopservant] has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the [slop] is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. [Slop's] full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a [slop], and then [ask about] national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the [slop] was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
-Michael Crichton [slop mine]
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#5> I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do. I don't see any reason for this to be true. "Actual understanding" (which I take to mean something like a predictive world model) and desire for self-determination coincide in humans because of our evolutionary history, becaus…
[dead]
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#6> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them.
A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would.
Surely if the machine you go to for answers regularly makes things up you would just stop using it? Perhaps people have to be burned by something really bad personally before they realise the limitations? LLMs are very convincing and persuasive.
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#7> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…
Making things up is only really a common issue on the non-thinking models which nobody should be using. The regular chatbots are Autogooglers and are very useful for research. This is just not a good argument anymore.
Edit: Guys, why are we downvoting this? Does no one use like ChatGPT or Claude and understand how it works? Do you all think its regularly hallucinating links still? Is everyone on HN using like free signed out accounts or something? What year is it?
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#8There's really no content in this post other than the claim that LLMs are stochastic parrots. That was a live debate two years ago. It's a very strange thing to write in 2026.
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#9> The worst part is that everyone who's decided to willingly lobotomize themselves is going to have to come to the realization that these things are full of shit. It'll have to happen one by one, and nobody else can make it happen for them. A fascinating dichotomy has become apparent between those who trust LLM output and those who don’t and don’t understand why you would. Surely if the machine you go to for answers…
I have a distinct line between when I'm willing to believe an LLM's output and when I'm not: whether I would believe the same thing from an anonymous Internet forum post or a blogger I don't know. Those posts are not unlikely to be misinformed, biased, lies, or otherwise untrustworthy. And yet, I spent plenty of years honing a sense of when they were good enough for certain things.
Re: That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
#10Could the article "The Stack" the user was looking for have been 'What is "the stack"?' by Julia Evans?
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305142512/https://jvns.ca/b...