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We asked you about this just recently, but it's still most of what you're posting. You're making the site worse by doing this, right at the point where it's most vulnerable these days.
Your comment here is a shallow dismissal of exactly the type the HN guidelines ask users to avoid here:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Predictably, it led to by far the worst subthread on this article. That's not cool. I don't want to ban you because you're also occasionally posting good comments that don't fit these negative categories, but we need you to fix this and stop degrading the threads.
If you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 are other places I wrote about this recently.
It's the biggest problem facing HN, in my opinion.
Surprisingly the latest increase in polarization around generative AI has impacted Hacker News the least our of all tech social spaces.
What I'm interested in is how well HN does at fulfilling its own mandate in its own terms. On that scale, it's getting worse—in this respect, at least, which is a big one. We're going to do something about it, the same way we've always tried to stave off the decline of this place (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you're right that the phenomenon is affecting other places even more than HN then I guess we get to be the-worst-internet-forum-except-for-all-the-others even more than before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - not a bad outcome for HN, though I think it might be overly optimistic.
I don't mean to express doubt (you would know better than I) but what makes you say that?
Do you think it's a consequence of external factors like the current political climate or of internal factors like HN getting larger?
I'm not sure it's about HN getting larger, though. It's a bit hard to tell, but at least some of the upswing in cynical and curmudgeonly comments is coming from established users.
What's the connection between these two things? They don't seem related to me. How would making HN worse contribute to alleviating world suffering or saving millions of people?
It seems to me that in your view the sheer openness to evaluate LLM use, anecdotally or otherwise, is already a bias.
I don't see how that's sensible, given that to evaluate the utility of something, it's necessary to accept the possibility of that utility existing in the first place.
On the other hand, if this is not just me strawmanning you, your rejection of such a possibility is absolutely a bias, and it inhibits exploration.
To willfully conflate finding such an exploration illegitimate with the findings of someone who thinks otherwise as illegitimate, strikes me as extremely deceptive. I don't appreciate being forced to think with someone else's opinion covertly laundered in very much. And no, Tao's comments do not meet this same criteria, as his position is not covert, but explicit.
That's the best part! They don't even need to, because ChatGPT will happily do its own private "literature search" and then not tell you about it - even Terence Tao has freely admitted as much in his previous comments on the topic. So we can at least afford to be a bit less curmudgeonly and cynical about that specific dynamic: we've literally seen it happen.
Also known as model inference. This is not something "private" or secret [*]. AI models are lossily compressed data stores and will always will be. The model doesn't report on such "searches", because they are not actual searches driven by model output, but just the regular operation of the model driven by the inference engine used.
> even Terence Tao has freely admitted as much
Bit of a (willfully?) misleading way of saying they actively looked for it on a best effort basis, isn't it?
[*] A valid point of criticism would be that the training data is kept private for the proprietary models Tao and co. using, so source finding becomes a goose chase with no definitive end to it.
An I think valid counterpoint however is that if locating such literature content is so difficult for subject matter experts, then the model being able to "do so" in itself is a demonstration of value. Even if the model is not able to venture a backreference, by virtue of that not being an actual search.
This is reflected in many other walks of life too. One of my long held ideas regarding UX for example is that features users are not able to find "do not exist".
I now see in the other subthread what they mean.
If that was the case, I apologize for misreading you! If you're interested, I can point you to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for past explanations about this type of misunderstanding and how to avoid it in the future.
For what it's worth, it's not even that I don't see merit to their points. I'm just unable to trust that they're being genuine, not the least for how they conduct themselves (which I only fault them for so much). This also impacts my ability to reason about their points clearly.
Sadly, I'm not able to pitch any systematic solutions.
I get how it's activating and annoying when moderators show up and start fault-finding, so I can appreciate the irritation here. But really, we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't destroy itself. I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to contribute positively to that.