This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.
[1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now.
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two...
does seem like more things will have to go this way though
This seems hard to say without knowing how large it is. To me, it seems like a relatively small community, far smaller than HN anyway.
Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs
I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.
The Entra feature you thinking of lets somebody say "Only things which can prove they're in this list work". This could make sense if you, as their employer, issue every employee a custom DoodadCorp Doodad FIDO key and so you don't want somebody's Yubikey or off-brand generic device to work. It's stupid and you shouldn't do it in other scenarios, but your "this is how we detect humans" idea is arguably a scenario where that could make sense.
[Edited to add: This feature is called "Attestation"]
I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version.
The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website.
If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try:
1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look.
2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum.
3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them.
That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.
Anyway, marketers see a popular site like a physical billboard, where they would pay thousands a month for their message to be seen by thousands of people. If you made it cost pennies to post, and a few more pennies to boost and astroturf, AND that the post would be seen by millions of people, they'd say "By Grabthar's hammer, what a bargain!!" and order a hundred more per day...
Plus "AI" is a spectrum, with "the AI fixed a typo for me" at one end, and "the AI writes my posts for me" at the other.
It would give the web of trust a flair of biblical damnnation, and after your fall you could always seek a new certification authority more aligned with your values, like Milei or Putin.
When a world leader dies, the tree pruning would be almost apocaliptic.
I believe it’s the opposite: You have to pay competent human moderators. Like here on HN.
Look at Advent of Code. Free site, fun community, but it had a leaderboard. The moment AI was advanced enough, it began dominating the leaderboard. The solution: kill the leaderboard. Sure, you can still solve all the problems with AI and get yourself full points, but you're not competing against anybody, so why bother?
As soon as you can get ahead of others at something, even for something as stupid as a karma score on Reddit or on Hacker News, somebody's going to want to increase it badly enough to start cheating.
This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.
That's lobsters I guess. AI posts got banned there after a 300+ comment discussion, probably the biggest ever on the site.
The exact rule the moderators settled on was "meaningful human authorship" but don't be fooled: a lot of people on lobsters are ideologically opposed to LLMs. Doesn't matter how "meaningfully" the technology was applied. My work was classified as slop simply because AI touched it. People referred to me as an exhibitionist and fetishist when I talked about using AI. Just a heads up for anyone who's thinking of joining.
I haven't found a way to join Lobsters yet hence for the meantime I keep posting here only. Not so much of an issue since I am mostly a happy lurker.
https://lobste.rs/s/29pm2f/llm_generated_submissions_should_...
TL;DR Plenty of ideological opposition which will loudly call you out for any usage of AI, and also quite a few nuanced takes which will no doubt be overridden by the vocal opposition. It got to the point the site itself told me to leave.
I don't feel comfortable posting my projects there anymore, even though they do have meaningful human authorship. Still have my account, but I'm essentially a lurker now. I'll participate if someone else independently posts my stuff there.
Feel free to reach out and introduce yourself if you want an invite.
How is the syntax new?
It looks like lispy - see the outer parens in the examples given.
Not anymore. I started with Racket and went through the Little Schemer. I did Clojure for a while. I even used Babashka to write all my scripts, then later rewrote them in other languages.
I gave it a good try. Maybe it wasn't enough to properly "get it"?
What did you end up rewriting your bb scripts in?
Let's write some very silly code to turn an integer into a list of digits in Common Lisp:
(deftype Digit ()
"A non-negative integer smaller than 10."
'(Mod 10))
(defun integer->digits (integer)
"Turns a given INTEGER into a list of digits."
(declare (type Integer integer))
(labels ((digit-loop (integer digits)
(declare (type Integer integer)
(type List digits))
(if (< integer 10)
(list* integer digits)
(multiple-value-bind (quotient remainder)
(truncate integer 10)
(declare (type Integer quotient)
(type Digit remainder))
(digit-loop quotient
(list* remainder digits))))))
(declare (ftype (Function (Integer List) List) digit-loop))
(digit-loop (abs integer)
nil)))
(digit-loop 2026) ; => (2 0 2 6)
(digit-loop "2026")
; The value
; "2026"
; is not of type
; INTEGER
; when binding INTEGER
;
; Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXIT:EXIT) to exit from SBCL.
;
; Restarts:
; 0: [ABORT] Exit debugger, returning to top level.> the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable
I've found that getting rid of the parentheses helps.
f(x)
(f x)
["f", "x"]
(print (< 10 20))
["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
code = ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
def eval(code):
# magic
eval(code)
True
These articles are very good and accessible:
I "get" Lisp just fine, have made my own hobby Lisp interpreters, have written programs in Lisp, am an emacs user, etc. etc.
And yet if you handed me a terminal and an editor and asked me to write a program, I would never reach for Lisp to do it. My eyes don't like it. (Also I like static types).
What's the quintessential "now I get it" experience, in your mind?
If I could explain the moment, I would. But I really can’t. That said, one aha moment for me was reading McCarthy’s original Lisp paper and realizing the whole core of the language was a single page (17).
https://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/lehre/pi3/folien/...
Learning that https://calva.io/paredit/ exists and moving your cursor along the AST or moving expressions around with nice hotkeys. Then making simple macros for infix notation and SQL and so on, which operate on the AST too. Realizing that there is no "architecture" because any repeated code or pattern can be easily abstracted away with a macro. Realizing that you can just describe your problem on paper, making up the perfect notation, then implement that notation in a few hours.
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The syntax is actually a big pro for a lot of people. I love its streamlined look that basically reads like Python once you let your IDE indent properly and learn to see "through" the parentheses (CL, Scheme).
The original language where everything is an expression and it shows. Where Python still needs an ugly ternary and made match a statement, Lisp has had the perfect IF and COND since the dawn of time.
Symbols are still a cool and useful concept that almost no other language I know of got.
The numerical tower - despite some holes - is amazing. Built-in rationals and "correct math" as sane default (i.e. 1/2 not returning 0) never get old.
------
And if you let me rave about CL specifically (e.g. DECLARATIONs as "#pragma done well", restarts, CLOS/MOP, runtime READ/COMPILE, etc...), there are a lot of cool features barely copied anywhere that'd improve other languages, but these aren't part of "what make Lisp Lisp".
I was really impressed by how small the executable file was. I’d only ever done web development with Node.js up until then.