99954bb63ccc

hmmmm. Good points. esp:

> Part of the transition from student to junior to senior is learning to filter your own ideas, and to guide others in the search for ideas that are likely to be fruitful.

I wonder how that'll change over time now. I think it's pretty important to have a few instances of thinking hard to come up with ideas and being totally convinced they are correct, only to have someone else trounce them with one or two succinct thoughts of their own. Those were very big personal development moments for me. And equitable, I still have folks with a lot less exp/time come out of left field with maybe not as formulated, but amazing ideas.

Agree 100%, especially with your second paragraph. The majority of domain experts I've interfaced with in my own domain, along with things I am not an expert in, are typically experts not because of the solutions they build, but because of the things they _don't_ build. It is the cliche "a clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it" paraphrase.

But I think what is lost is the value in (a) person(s) who intuitively spots and avoids these problems. My hypothetical example that I have seen play out: The domain expert spots one of these problems and succinctly explains that the problem doesn't need to be solved. Maybe it's a byproduct of bad design elsewhere, or there is a much better solution that avoids it altogether. Once the rest of the team/the lead catches on, either hindsight bias or outcome bias, or a combo, takes over and they don't recognize that all the value all along was in the person being able to spot this situation. They throw that in claude and claude does it's sycophant thing (after expressing that the previous situation was flawless for however long), and they are off to the races right back to automation bias with zero pause for thought...

So, has anyone at the frontier AI labs considered doing _good_ things with these models instead of continuously proving it is capable of doing malicious things?

Instead of burning tokens doing intellectually impressive “hacks”, or sandbox escapes from which I have concerns could contain run of the mill malware, why not focus on showing people what you can fix?

Or, make software people actually use every day better.

Or, donate efforts towards medical research.

I don’t like equating AI to nuclear energy, but, it’s a lot like continually showing people how large of an explosion you can create instead of showing them how many houses/hospitals/schools/etc you can power.

Every time I read “could” my brain automatically also says “could not!” lol “hot beverages could _not_ cause oesophageal cancer”

I know very hot beverages are group 2A probable carcinogen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A

Agreed, but am still scared. lol

Have they considered using their amazing new models to... improve something? THere'd probably be a whole lot less anti-AI sentiment if they used these things to actually make people's lives better.

Thank you!

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49493820

I totally missed this just a few days ago lol

It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].

People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like when someone from your family reads an article about your profession and then proceeds to tell you how your job works. lol

It's a really pervasive issue in society IMO. And a few prompts in someone's favorite LLM just reinforces it to people that don't know (any better|what they don't know).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. > It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance.

I feel this very strongly over the past couple of years. As always, hackernews is full of extremely smart, well read people so I'd really appreciate any good reading material on this so I can better understand it. Tips are appreciated as well (healthy diet and regular exercise, good extended blood labs (think like Function health), good consistent sleeep habits).

I agree. Whether or not it is what they are intending (I lean towards they are), IMO it has been strongly inferred in all the messaging from frontier models that it's impossible to secure software, which is just not true. In reality, it's now possible to find and fix problems faster. If attackers/adversaries can just point LLMs at software and dump zero days as we are warned/told repeatedly by every LLM vendor, then literally anyone can do it now. If that is true, then if you want to be marked safe from AI enabled attackers, test your own software with it.

I guess the doomsday stuff sells more...

yea that's kind of the crux in this whole mess we are in:

It doesn't really matter how right or wrong anyone is... They are driving and we are along for the ride.

I think it's more about not doing unnecessary things. Like a like a saying I heard somewhere "a clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it". Not every good idea _needs_ to become a feature. And if you think it's that good, give users the option to turn it on/off and track that as a metric.

Agree 100. Most of my frustration with things in the world goes right to this IE it's the folks who design/administer it that I blame. Sure, the users and/or operators of any given system can find a way to use/operate things incorrectly. But, so many things are just clearly lazy in design. And, n=1 here, in many cases having worked in service/retail/operations roles, it's usually a matter of decision makers not listening to folks that have to work around the sillyness day to day that is to blame. So long as the front line folks work around it, the decision makers consider it solved...

Ahh, I thought it was NLP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

I have often thought that without LLMs humanizing outputs they would not have caught on, even if they output the exact same data/answers. The way they answer is way more important than their output for success, IMO.

I’d say periodically now that I have it controlled. One of those instances was a dentists visit that I thought was solely due to improper measurement (wrist based, and they had me cross arms over my chest). But it was still high at home when I checked the next day.

The other was a periodic check. Both times, BP returned to normal over the course of about a week when I stopped creatine supplementation with no other changes.

I’ve always wanted to use creatine regularly but every time I’ve started taking it, I get a considerable rise in blood pressure. Would be curious to hear if anyone else experiences this or has found a good workaround.

I’ve researched it quite a bit and found that others do experience it as well, but the usual advice of “just drink more water” (which yes, I have tried) is about the extent of info I find on it. Then, the “it causes your body to retain more water” idea which doesn’t seem to be accurate as what I’ve understood is that it causes your muscles to store more water…

I like this post as it landed at a really good time for me. But, I had a remaining question based on one of the lines:

>So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones.

So uh... anyone have any tips on _identifying_ the kinds of folks the author is describing here? I guess I'm left to presume it would mean those people _would_ explicitly ask, but if not how would you determine what kind of person you are dealing with? Sure, I can brainstorm and reason through, but looking for feedback from folks who have been successful in doing this professionally.

Yea. Just my observation, they are losing some pretty big markets in that region. It's pretty clear from going in the Kroger stores anywhere near an HEB that HEB is really hurting them. They are all empty (dystopian as the OP of thos thread put it) any time I go in. And HEB shows no signs of slowing down...

Yep. And they don't charge much of a premium to deliver this. I can buy things at HEB and not worry about them being expired/etc, even for grocery pickup. Kroger, afaict, _chooses_ the expiring/broken stuff if you do grocery pickup. Kroger is closer to me so I've given it several chances, but every time they seem to get me in a new way to get me with opened, expired, or damaged stuff, and I won't be bothered to establish a quality control process just to buy some groceries. Meanwhile I've done grocery pickup from HEB for a couple years now and have maybe 3-4 things I've had to request a refund. The whole foods near me is heading down the Kroger route too.

It's literally just doing the core service better than average and allowing it to yield results. "hmmm lets try not scamming people so we can save pennies on some expired bell peppers in a loss leader area to begin with... Perhaps they'll also pick up some prescriptions while they are here! Heck, I bet if we make some effort to keep our employees relatively happy, customers might also have a better experience in our stores!"

IMO/rant, few businesses/people seem to grasp this and all think there is some magic "business hack" they can do while avoiding doing the core business thing well. And I don't think it's that they don't know it, it's the divorce between the reality they themselves likely desire to live in and experience, and the reality they build/provide day to day in their work. But, that plagues everything these days tbh. Nobody just wants to do the fundamentals well, everyone is looking for "this one simple hack" that alleviates having to just do the work. The calculator might save you some money, but it'll never, by itself, extract the gold from the mine.

I've gone back and forth several times in my head because I truly love Fedora and am happiest on that OS, but these ongoing supply chain compromises just make me lose sleep. I wish there was a Fedora LTS that had the same community size, build system, etc because I really like all that, as well as the transparency of it all.

I know there are concerns no matter what OS, and would appreciate insights/discussion as well, but I sleep a little better just running a boring old Ubuntu LTS instance for a balance of dwell time between releases and hitting my system, as well as enough visibility/usage so something gets caught. And I know, this was the installer, not a system package.

Tangent to this topic, if you are deficient or sensitive to B vitamin supplementation, it may be worthwhile to get tested for MTHFR/COMT genetic variants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenetetrahydrofolate_redu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechol-O-methyltransferase

If you've done 23andme, ancestryDNA, etc, you can likely just use your raw data to get this information.

So, a lot of the article makes several points that aren't necessarily new, but

> The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”

> This is a bad CEO.

As described, this seems to me more like a lack of reasoning/critical thinking ability, and it's not unique to CEOs. Tracks more with a combo of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" and automation bias IMO.

> This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen.

"Cargo culting" as described here by the author may be happening. But, I think it's CEOs seeing other CEOs doing layoffs and claiming it's because of AI efficiency gains. They see the other CEO's stock go up/get hyped/etc, so they decide to do it. I think it's the same thing that happens inside companies IE people see how others behave and it works, so they do the same. Effectiveness aside because that's not at all what I'm arguing, AI is just the current flavor; it is a very safe thing to "cargo cult" at the moment.

Wow, amazing answer! I have a lot of reading and then thinking to do, but if you are documenting your research anywhere, I'd greatly appreciate somewhere to follow it.

Thank you so much! This is why I love HN.

I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here.

I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.

Obviously nobody here is going to know what I do or don't know, but I'm just increasingly curious what I am not understanding about this type of thing. It seems so obvious, yet that makes me ever more suspect that I'm oversimplifying it, or just totally ignorant about the problem in general.

It is funny how I do believe this is true, but also can't help but notice how much effort they spend defeating this exact user base. Reminds me of ad companies... I'm sure they also don't care about targeting some fraction of a percentage of their base, but look how much effort they spend defeating ad blockers lol.

> So a truly great engineer also needs to be arrogant/assertive/loud as that is the only way to fight other arrogant people. The "quiet confident" engineers opinion will be overruled by loud incomptent engineers.

What is the underlying cause here? Or is this just a product of group psychology...(?) I feel like it's typically weak and/or incompetent management but hesitating to jump right to that because it's largely out of most people's control beyond a job change.

> True security comes from general IT practices followed by engineers themselves

Sounds exactly like something the average security practitioner would say...

`not_sure_if.jpg`

I would donate money for this comment to be on billboards. It's exactly how I feel.

Heck, gemeni is obviously so successful and gets used so frequently that android had to hijack the power button (at least on pixels) so when you hold the power button, it activates gemini instead of turns the phone off. Clearly, that is because everyone intends to activate AI instead of turn the damn phone off when they hold the power button. `usage_metric++;` /s

Yet I know most people are also [probably] irritated by stuff like this. But _we_ do it anyway...