Mordisquitos

I think you missed the point of my message. Web browsing still happens by connecting to data centres, so why are consumer laptops so much more (unnecessarily) powerful today than they were 20 years ago? All the more so given that, at that time, you were running MS Office locally rather than using Office 365 or Google Docs remotely.

The trend over the past three decades of personal computing has been for devices to become exponentially more powerful regardless of the actual computing needs of users. The excess computing power has famously been requested by projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home, and been exploited by bad actors for crypto mining. The most basic laptop today used only for web browsing and word processing would be a powerful workstation 20 years ago, when the most basic laptop was also used only for web browsing and word processing (and arguably for more things, as it was all mostly local software).

There is no ceiling to the power of consumer hardware. If it's cheap enough, it will be bought.

> That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today.

No, we don't. It is Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. who need a fix for those problems today. Let them deal with it.

It's not the net fart that kills your connection, it is the server smell.

So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽

That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!

What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.

The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.

If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.

You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x

It sounds like Public Transport Baby Adoption is an evolution of the Cat Distribution System: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cat-distribution-system

That's an insightful prediction! Agentic LLMs won't only replace the browser, they will also optimize and enhance the content that you should consume. Would you like us to go deeper into how human comments and conversations on HN submissions will also become obsolete thanks to AI?

> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.

Absolutely, I just made a similar comment before I saw yours. In fact, I would argue that the headline is also arguably burying the lede on commencement speakers believing that their AI pep talk speeches will be well-received by students. The newsworthy item is 'Man Bites Dog', not 'Vet Treats Bitten Dog'.

What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.

> Most games bought on steam will never be played, not even once.

How did you gain access to my Steam library statistics?

In fact, I find your very comment as an example of the variety of visual experiences that exist that I hadn't even thought of. I mean when you say “Like when you are exhausted you get double vision” that itself sounds alien to me. I have been exhausted many times but never associated it with seeing double. I have only experienced involuntary double vision in certain circumstances during my recovery from a severe TBI.

I have a similar intuition to yours. On many topics it isn't so much self-censorship, it is simply that for many people there is rightly no motivation to go around announcing their nuanced, moderate, or no-opinion-but-unimpressed-by-extremes positions.

Even when people do have strong opinions on a topic (and a moderate opinion can also be strong), most people have better things to do with their lives than to go around blasting their opinions to the world as a hobby. And the few in this camp that do are not very likely to be amplified by the engagement algorithms.

I am not impacted by this issue on either side, but I am in the "dehumanising" camp, so here are my opinions:

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that Filipinos probably now do their job more efficiently without having to learn an accent that they are not exposed to?

It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent", unless their job description is to literally pretend they are from a different culture (e.g. if they were actors). Introducing an "AI" middleman to change their voice is demeaning and dehumanising.

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that they no longer enjoy having their accent heard as a externality of a counterfactual arrangement?

It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.

> Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the company does not expect their customers to be cosmopolitan enough to understand a foreign accent with ease?

Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand. And if the company is hiring customer service agents whose accents are a serious hinderance to understanding, I would argue that their hires are not likely to accurately understand the very customers they are supposed to assist.

>Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the customers are now more sensorily shielded from a current-day reality regarding globalized providers of service?

Not dehumanising, but again patronising, and also disrespectful and borderline dishonest.

I won't get into the final two points, as those are prior to the accent-middleman "AI".

The quality of the content is not the issue here.

And yet we are discussing this in the context of a reporter having been fired from Ars Technica for publishing an article which included inaccurate LLM-generated summaries in 2026. How come?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608

You can prompt LLMs to scan thousands of documents to generate text validating your hunches. In some cases those validated hunches may even be correct.

What a relief that it only applies to when they're using their computers! At first I thought it applied to all work at their desks: paperwork, typing, phonecalls, etc. That would have been crazy.

Does anyone know how many Meta employees use a computer, and what fraction of their work they do on it? It cannot be that much, surely.

No, even if morphine were metabolically safer (I don't know), its addictive potential would outweigh the potential safety benefit.

On the other hand, if in the early 2000s you were to share those concerns with certain doctors, they would propose a more effective and non addictive alternative to morphine instead. Only the first part of what they would tell you was true.

I agree that Purdue Pharma was probably the most significant factor, maybe enhanced by the relative ease of granular lobbying of private doctors as compared to the challenges it may face in universal healthcare systems. However, I do suspect that the limited rights of most US workers to take sick leave served as one more cultural advantage in favour of Purdue's campaign.

In many countries if a doctor believes you're too sick to work you have a right to take leave until you recover, without risking your job and without expending limited "sick days". In those circumstances the doctor will of course prescribe something for your pain, but as a patient you have no incentive to insist the painkiller is strong enough to allow you to continue working.

The LLMs didn't only talk about the disease when prompted by the neologism. They also brought it up when asked about the symptoms. From the article:

> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.

And yes, sure, in this example the scientific peer-review process may have eventually criticised and countered 'bixonimania' as a hoax were the researcher to have never revealed its falsity—emphasis on 'may', few researchers have the time and energies to trawl through crap papermill articles and publish criticisms. Either way, that is a feature of the scientific process and is not a given to any online information.

What happens when false information is divulged by other means that do not attempt to self-regulate? And how do we distinguish one-off falsities from the myriad of obscure true things that the public is expecting LLMs to 'know' even when there is comparatively little published information about them and therefore no consensus per se?

> This seems like a wasted effort when AI will primarily learn the majority consensus view and not one-off misinformation.

We have evidence to the contrary. Two blog articles and two preprints of fake academic articles [0] were able to convince CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity AI of the existence of a fake disease, against all majority consensus. And even though the falsity of this information was made public by the author of the experiment and the results of their actions were widely published, it took a while before the models started to get wind of it and stopped treating the fake disease as real. Imagine what you can do if you publish false information and have absolutely no reason to later reveal that you did so in the first place.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

> The same people that shout "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" are the exact same types that hate AI. The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.

What is your source on them being "the exact same types"?

I'll admit I am not an expert in the field, but the fact that "chain-of-thought" optimisations function by getting the model to extend its own context window with more language to me hints that what we consider an "intelligent" response is ultimately contingent of the language processing.

In any case though, if language is just the input/output modality, where is the intelligence when language is not involved? Is the "intelligence" of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini models dependent on the human-decision-curated linguistic dataset they have been trained upon, or is it prior to that? If a SOA LLM were to be trained on the same dataset as them but was not in any way put through RLHF for it to respond to human prompts, would it be intelligent? What would be the expression of that intelligence?

I'm reminded of a book on my bookshelf (which I still haven't read, story of my life...), by the recently deceased ethologist Frans de Waal, titled 'Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?'. Of course, Betteridge's law applies to its title.

In my opinion, the vast multitude of different animal intelligences is a clear hint that language does not an intelligence make. We're animals, and our intelligences did not come from language; language allowed us to supercharge it. We can and do think and make decisions without using language, and the idea that a statistical model based solely on our language can be intelligent does not follow.

> It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want.

What do you mean it's like dumping kids on a farm? Are the suburbs really THAT lethally dangerous?

Source [22 minutes]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLAfDrFUBkA

> I can't imagine a real use case where you'd think this is desirable.

Not S3, but here's a literal real use case: the entry for the Iraqw word /ameeni (woman) in Wiktionary.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki//ameeni

If for whatever reason your S3 keys contained English words and their translations separated by a slash, you would have a real problem if one of your scripts were to concatenate woman, / and /ameeni as woman/ameeni instead of woman//ameeni in the English/Iraqw case.

I would say that the restaurant would be wasting its time and resources by catering their website to hypothetical customers who are choosing to use inferior and overly engineered methods to find information about their physical surroundings out of technological fetishism. But that's just me.

So you're saying that I, as a human customer, can see offers that AI agents are missing out on? Sounds great!

As a user, why would I trust an AI agent that cannot consistently use non-AI-tailored websites? If it cannot even do that, who knows what other failure modes it may hit me with.