Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenavocado | Hacker News Reader

We are so jaded by constant breakthroughs that 100 year old unsolved ciphers are referred to as "low hanging fruit"

They are low hanging fruit. This is the sort of thing it ought to be good at, and it's not particularly surprising that it is. But it is also not what is being promoted by LLM advocates on the public stage.

Investors are not putting billions into OpenAI to crack historical ciphertexts. This is supposedly a trillion dollar general purpose artificial intelligence, but still can't reliably tell me how many p's are in 'raspberry'.

Cracking pre-computer era ciphers with LLMs is like me claiming I have a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine that will revolutionize all forms of transportation, and then for a demo bragging about how nicely I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.

> But it is also not what is being promoted by LLM advocates on the public stage.

It quite literally is. Right here, right now. It’s happening before your eyes, you’re actively engaging with it.

Sam Altman in July: "We are in the singularity"[3]

Anthropic's alignment lead two weeks ago: "What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement"[2]

The media, last week: "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"[3]

Meanwhile, the topic of this thread is how ChatGPT decoded a century-old ciphertext using a known method and a published key. :-| One of these four items is not in the same ballpark as the others.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/anthropic-openai-ai-existent...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/ai-superi...

If you define "LLM Advocates" as Sam, Dario, and the mainstream media outlets that they are directly feeding their propaganda to, sure, your 3 examples are an exhaustive list and this is all that happens.

Yesterday I had one try and use Generics in a language that doesn't have Generics and then use a type declaration that is a trivially obvious error at run time. (Qwen both times).

I just asked chatgpt the run time error and this was the entire thing...

> Me: is `?mixed $foobar = null` a error in PHP 8.5?

> ChatGPT: No. In PHP 8.5, this is valid: `mixed $foobar = null` mixed includes null (as well as all other PHP types), so the default value is compatible.

> Me: did you miss the ?

> ChatGPT: Yes <SmileyEmojii> — I missed the ?. ?mixed $foobar = null is an error in PHP 8.5.

If I'd invested trillions of dollars in that industry I'd be getting worried...

Also it using emojii's and words describing emotions just makes my soul shudder.

It's not that they don’t generate useful things, they can and then the next minute they smash into the wall repeatedly because the door is 3ft to the left.

Since it's stochastic by nature you never know which the answer is going to be and they are making the same kinds of mistakes they where making a couple of years ago, I'm not sure it's actually solvable with the current approach.

>a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine

>I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.

I like it!

Something being old and unsolved does not make it impressive when it’s solved. The question is “has there been any concerted effort to solve it and if so how much time/effort has gone in?”

I’m sure I can make some brand new “discovery” that is completely useless, which is why it wasn’t “discovered” in the first place.

It’s simply a lot of grunt work to do these which is why many are unsolved.

Maybe with this piece of information we can end WWI

some things are unsolved because they're hard

but most things are unsolved because nobody even knows they exist

Reply on news.ycombinator.com