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Comment by doawoo | Hacker News Reader

Did you really need to ask a massive LLM and burn tokens on this?? A few minutes of googling has revealed a huge amount of this information just laying out in the open, and, a whole tool to author your own files that someone sells as independent software! (https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/)

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Yes. How else could the LLM even begin to do what it did otherwise. Not a criticism of you, just a place for a rant but I still find it incredible when people think they're doing something novel when really they're just reassembling existing work.

What really reinforced this for me was that I recently vibe coded a home assistant addon that, as it turns out, there was a github project that did almost the same thing. The initial implementation that came out of the LLM was essentially the same just with just some small tell in things like the logging that came from what I prompted it.

It was a very small project (maybe 500 LOC) so there's a greater chance of coincidence but it really felt like the office junior had just ripped off someone else's work and tried to hide it (badly) and really, that's exactly what they do

How else could the LLM even begin to do what it did otherwise.

Are we really still having the "LLMs can only regurgitate what was in their training data" argument? Where did the counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture come from?

I had performed a quick GitHub search and not found any code. It certainly didn't have these decoy notes documented on its own. It only found them because I provided it a known Erik Satie piece, which has a specific number of notes, and it dug in to figure out what the excess notes were.

I'd found this code as well, and in a previous chat, Fable pointed me to it but first, I have a $100/month Claude subscription, and typically just barely run out every week, so I throw tokens at just about anything. Second, I'd come across that code, but it's windows software, not open source. Third, the encoder isn't anything exciting, and not really a concern except that the Fable version offers the ability to include the decoy notes. Finally, I literally just wrote "Yes, please write that encoder" when fable asked if I want it to "Bigger picture: since the Prodigy plays this format over Bluetooth, an encoder that writes your own MIDI into the right channel this way is probably the missing link for the MP3-to-piano project. I can build a test file if you want to try it."

I wasn’t trying to invoke the argument of “they can only regurgitate information” - the argument I was making was why resign all thinking to a company who does not have your interest in mind

The hackers of hacker news are forgetting how to hack

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