Hacker News Reader

Comment by specproc | Hacker News Reader

AI is snake oil. It sells you a slot machine in the guise of a colleague.

Oh, not using it right? Not the right model? Insert coin to continue.

Snake oil, total snake oil.

I just reversed engineered large parts of my 2011 car odb comms. Was able to hook a stm32 board to the car communication and have full control over a lot of stuff so that I can build my own instrument cluster from a lcd screen. It literally took me one evening to get the first proof of concept working. I never touched stm32 stuff before.

Good for you, son. I've just spent the whole f*king day screaming at an agent on a deadline.

This right here. People simp for LLM companies as if their experience of using the out-of-pocket top-of-the-line "team of PhD's" paid models will be what is deployed when trying to contact your bank, insurance, etc. No,... once tech companies stop playing the "no/some revenue until we own the world" VC game, we'll all be stuck trying to talk to GlueSnifferGPT when reporting an emergency.

That will never happen. You know that. It will only become more and more. there is no return. My advise: don't stick with those blocker ideas.

Not sure I follow; more and more what? And what do you mean by blocker ideas?

you did none of this. Did you personally learn something from that experience? Other than how to use your agent

Of course I learned from it. I mean the reverse engineering part which is basically try and error is something I rather skip. The remaining things like wiring the hardware is still there. The boring stuff is what the LLM can do for me. I still find the process to get stuff working challenging and interesting. It's not only about the end result. It's just a different approach than the old school low level one

This doesn't even make sense. Maybe if you fleshed it out?

Snake oil is something not medicine sold as medicine.

AI is something not a colleague (a slot machine), sold as a colleague.

Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?

Variable intermittent reward. Pull the lever, get something nice or something bad. I've had far too much bad today and I'm furious.

It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue.

If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.

What year is it, that you're getting frontier model responses saying to put glue in your pizza?

I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.

If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.

On a related note, just because Gemini doesn’t tell you to put glue in your pizza anymore, by no means implies that this particular problem is solved: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-t...

I'm sorry, I could have said this more plainly: no, no frontier model for the past several years has told you to put glue in your pizza.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com