Applejinx

I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'.

Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy words and phrasings (and semicolons! All the trimmings) it's fair to ask if it's systemically bullshitting you: i.e. the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions.

Who's driving that is still important: if the company's directing it to do that in system prompts that are adversarial to users, that's a big yikes. If it's an epiphenomenon of the company demanding it get ever smarter, maybe it's a sign that their demands are not having that result, rather they're making it bullshit more explicitly and mimic more 'smart' signifiers.

Wait.

You may say that, but it seems to me that by definition vibecoding things will make them less unique because the technology is best suited to reproducing best practices even when those are cumbersome. Your best case scenario is a nontechnical person with a bright idea vibecoding something far beyond their ability to understand, and that's a recipe for implementation problems that'll harm the value of the novel thing being created.

If the things you're thinking about are intrinsically so totally worthless outside of impressing people with them, and if that's all there is, please do not attempt to do those things, with or without an LLM.

Heck, if everything is worthless, please, please try not to do anything :)

Even if you're entreprenurial, LLMs are useless for this.

You can't go really hard unless you can come up with something people weren't expecting, but when they discover it they want it. You can't just sit around waiting for people to want things properly. That's extremely passive.

The point being, the idea of using LLMs to find what people already passively want is itself flawed, even if you like marketing and selling to people. It's a really fundamental problem with the idea.

It's probably an AI-written article. I was curious enough about the premise, but there wasn't any intention in there, it sort of wanders about going 'ooh'.

I was talking to some friends that are heavy Claude users and suggested it was bullshitting, and got some pushback along the lines of it wasn't a person and didn't have agency. I'm not sure it's that simple.

The jargon can be functionally like bullshitting. It's preferentially aping language that's over everybody's heads in hopes of not being criticized. Whether that is a person's toxic habits (it's not, there's nobody in there) or an epiphenomenon of the design of the machine is less important: it's bullshitting if it's a social behavior there to manipulate people.

(jargon included where relevant, in hopes that people who know it will see it's the right word to use :) )

Alcohol has existed for zillions of years, but not literally every person is a useless drunkard.

You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.

"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined.

In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.

It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.

I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.

Oh, they still are, it's just that it's a rare parrot that can reproduce 'all of the written corpus of three.js' or stochastically align all that with arbitrary and weird conditions for what to squawk out.

This is what you get. It's like the more general concept of starting with the written word (or 1000 words) and then replacing it with a picture. You've done something strikingly different, but is it serving the same function?

It's fascinating to see this stuff combine such disparate sources in unexpected ways. But it is parrot, just not in the way you're expecting.

If you framed it as 'the biggest criminal' it'd still be impressive but would read mighty different. Acquiring money and power is no way to go through life. Not at that cost.

I went back to Ohio…

No… they took time from YOUR life to try and take credit for what an LLM produced when asked. And took over from you when you'd apparently chosen not to ask an LLM, as if to say 'thank me for knowing better because you were supposed to be asking the LLM about this'.

No Man's Sky has such a range of possible outputs that in theory, nobody can possibly know how it works or what its limits are. That's the mathematical reality of how many combinations are on tap in that worldgen algorithm.

And yet, how quickly does it cease to surprise you?

Damn right we can tell what AI's limits are. It's palpable, hard to miss. Even the people I know who're all-in on the technology are pretty jaded by now.

Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.

Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?

If they did I wouldn't have had to go to DDG. It's not like it's a big jump over what used to be. I left claw-marks in Google Search, if they drove me off they're in trouble, because I didn't want to accept reality for quite some time.

You're missing a few words. To be correct you would have to have said 'if nobody's capable of hearing the difference every single time beyond a statistical doubt, does it matter?'

You can say that and be correct, while also sounding a little more silly than perhaps you'd like.

edit: rather than go even harder, I'm instead going to suggest it's perfectly fine to care about things you don't hear every single time, but still like or dislike :)

My pet example is sand in the lettuce for a salad. If you dislike that particular cronch against your teeth while eating salad, it has a spectacular ability to ruin your enjoyment of your salad, even though you don't perceive it every single time. Digital distortions are like that for some of us, things like wow and flutter and vinyl surface noise are like that for others. People vary. (which is also why not to generalize about what 'people can hear')

That would be how you'd go about telling, sure enough. You can't go by 'frequencies' or distortions or anything like that, these analog departures from convincing reality aren't how digital failings manifest.

You try to hear the brickwall by the muffled, enclosed quality and possibly by the weird pre-ring blurriness of the filter making things sound more vague than they have to be, and you hear the truncation not because it is audible 'distortion' as we know it, but because depth collapses and it sounds like it's coming from the speakers and not being a separate space behind/around the speakers. At no point will it be the most glaringly obvious thing but it'll never be 'distortions' as we imagine them, it's more a 'pod people' lack of personality thing.

Like a much subtler version of listening to AI music :)

I'm quite happy with 24/96 as suitable overkill for anything I might want to hear or do. Neil Young went hard on the proposition that 192 was necessary. Sold the Ponoplayer, I had one but it died on me, battery failed eventually. It really did sound awesome beyond just about any other listening device I've ever heard…

Hydrasynth aliases like a mad thing. My flagship synth ended up being Summit, and its oscillators are digital but run at a crazy high sample rate. Did likewise with some Chord Organ modules: that Teensy board it was built on could do chord audio at 300k and over a megahertz if you were just generating one wave as simply as possible. The freedom from aliasing really helped the sound, for all that it's a 12 bit analog output. A squarewave is a 1 bit signal…

Oh, 3/5ths of a citizen, surely.

You 100% can write them off entirely and go about your business as you previously had done. Ignoring the errors, it is very debatable whether there are even productivity gains beyond: human programmer or whatever is excited and cranked up to unsustainable degrees of activity and thinking to 'keep up' with what he thinks is an AI doing the work.

I'm seeing this fairly often and when it isn't garbage it's a capable person who has gotten inspired by their 'collaboration' in which the busywork is being done by a machine, but they're doing so much directing and correcting that it's not unlike what would happen if they got heavy into meth and went on a tear.

You absolutely can write them off entirely and decide for yourself what your comfort level of human-killing speed-freakism you want to pursue in your productivity. There's a long history of humans managing astonishing levels of productivity through self-destructive means. This is not even cheaper, once the 'first one's free' wears off: it's just a novel method of getting humans to burn themselves harder in the belief that they have a magic feather.

The ones who're really throwing themselves into the situation are the ones who'll burn out, but who aren't setting themselves up for atrophy and learned helplessness. Anyone who believes the technology lets them be a lazy manager just getting paid, is in for an unpleasant discovery.

Worse'n crypto… which I would not have believed possible.

What if you want the world to be demonstrably better, and yet you're pretty sure the world is not just you?

Does that count, or is it axiomatic that for every person, the world is entirely just them and they have no concept of everything/anything outside themselves? I feel like this is probably only some people, and doesn't describe literally every person.

Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?

Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?

I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.

And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?

In fairness, it's our Berlin Wall, and I absolutely would want a piece of the delaminating paint as a souvenir. The difference is we are so early into the collapse that the armed guards are still there. But yeah, it's definitely not just pictures, I'd want a piece of the blue stuff. It'd be a souvenir and also me taking it away from there, so win/win. Of course there's armed guards guarding the swamp now, what else would there be?

What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.

So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.

You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.

I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.

The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.

These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)

That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.

And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.

An AI spat out a website and a bunch of text and some images. It says people don't need to know how to do things anymore, because there's a blue box of AI sitting apart from the structure of the actual company, and it'll do everything.

So where originally there's a pyramid of why/what/how with increasing effort the lower you go, instead the boss is still in charge and dictates 'why', but everyone else is in charge of wildly vibing up a giant pile of 'what', and 'how' is not part of the company anymore and lives in a blue box of GPUs you pay to get access to. And your job is not to ask why, just to think of ever more things to pay the blue box to do.

In the real world, even back in the days of purely industrial manufacturing such as 3M, there's a lot of value in 'whys and whats' appearing at any level. But if that was the case, then maybe you wouldn't want to delegate everything to a blue box somewhere else where you don't own the ideas it has. And so, the second graphic is sort of a fantasy for what the AI industry would like to see.