adamtaylor_13

Your search engine doesn't think for you. It never did. It still doesn't, even with AI summaries. What it does do, is summarize information.

It's up to you, the human, to decide what path you get the information and how to digest it and use it. I use LLMs for 99% of my "querying" these days because 99% of the information I'm looking for is either verifiable (coding) or low-stakes (how to do low-risk DIY house thing).

If I need actual search, I use Kagi. Otherwise, Claude has taken 99.8% of what Google used to do for me and it feels better than ever.

The biggest problem here is the operating system. If they could fix that, this might be enticing.

People are free to do exactly that. The problem is very few people actually believe as strongly as they'd like to posture online.

SUVs aren't vandalized because people talk a big game online where there are zero consequences, and shrink down to the level of their actual beliefs in real life.

It's all just posturing to show that you fit in with some crowd. Very few people actually care as much as they want everyone to believe. So, uh, yeah... I guess points to the jqwik crew for being "true believers". Hope that works out as well as it should for them.

This is beyond childish. Despite many people saying it's "defensible" it's clearly as defensible as putting bear traps in your front yard beside a "Don't walk on the grass" sign and then chuckling that someone didn't do their due diligence when reading the sign.

I'd also add that this sort of "activism" is more indicative about someone's character than just waving a sign and chanting about something you feel passionately about.

It's a great way to torpedo your own career simply because you couldn't regulate your emotions.

So if you need to prevent bot abuse, but also don't want an ugly captcha every time someone goes to sign up, is there a better option?

That's... that's not how social perception works at all.

I'll point out that this presupposes that skill retention is necessary, as opposed to something like "taste" retention. I'm not arguing against this, just pointing out that it carries a supposition that may or may not be true.

I am not yet convinced that the skill loss is as bad as people make it out to be, nor am I convinced that "taste" degrades like "skill" does. After all, it's easy to teach someone a framework. It's very hard to communicate why something is not as functional or why the UX isn't as good as it could be.

All this to say, I believe these are valuable questions, but we should be careful what presuppositions we bring into the equation. My value has never been my ability to write code. It's been my ability to make people's problems elegantly go away. I do not believe AI is making that worse (yet).

Side-note: If it IS making my skills worse... I'll just sharpen them later. It's not like experimenting with AI for a few years is going to permanently disable me.

I'm going to design an AI agent to preview Hacker News posts so that I don't have to sift through smug, self-righteous posts like this to get to actual, thoughtful dialog on technology.

I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.

You claimed to "fix a logical fallacy" by merely stating your opinion that this is theft. Many (most?) disagree with the premise that using an LLM is somehow tantamount to theft.

I invited you to attempt to present an argument, which you have neatly side-stepped.

Re-stating an opinion does not somehow establish it as a fact. I'd welcome an effort to support what you're saying instead of just hand-waving this as some sort of self-evident fact of the universe.

Why do people insist on using extreme rhetoric like this? If you don't personally like using LLMs, that's fine. The only point this comment serves is to stir the pot.

Using your first example, if it was true and universally accepted that this was plaigerism--we wouldn't use it, now would we? But that's not the universal opinion so instead you're just twisting someone else's comment to stir the pot.

Again, if you don't personally like LLMs and you personally feel like it's plagiarism cool, don't use them. Or at least make an argument for it.

But as it stands, this comment is just low-effort trolling.

Yep. And yet, there's still some level of specification you have to do.

While pedantically correct, I think the comment above assumed that you've correctly specified the work. If you can't correctly specify your work, AI agents are just going to help you get a non-solution faster.

People get so wrapped around the axle with "anthropomorphizing". For regular folks with no technical background, sure maybe a bit of caveat sprinkled here or there is useful to help them understand what is or isn't true, but on HN it would seem to me that the bar is high enough that we can just use shared language to generally talk about capabilities.

When they say "Honesty" I don't think to myself, "Goodness, does this model have moral understanding?" No, I understand they mean it's less likely to directly bullshit me, which models frequently do.

I don't feel like this level of pedantry around language is useful for people who more or less know what's going on with LLMs. (Again, I concede that perhaps with a less technical audience, there's more need for it.)

Others are willing to do my job for less. And yet... here I am making what I make.

This is a lot of words to confirm what we already know: we have exosuits, not robots.

Use them as capability enhancers, not drones who go do all the things without review.

I believe capitalism is the least-bad system we've created so far. Perhaps there is a better one, but as I said elsewhere the failed experiment of communism isn't one we should keep attempting--the cost in human lives is far too high.

But, to your other point, I think human greed is innate. I can't think of evidence that would suggest that greed is somehow cultural or learned. Boil the system down to the lowest common denominator, you find greed. Scale it up: greed. No matter what you do, you cannot remove human greed systematically.

I did not excuse capitalism from critique. I'm not sure how you arrived there from my comment.

The specific evil in my mind was the Great Leap Forward, but there are dozens we could draw from history.

And I attribute them to communism because that's literally how history attributes them, though obviously pro-Communism thinkers would disagree.

Re: B my guess is probably not (human nature and all that), but I'm open to ideas! I just think failed experiments where tens of millions died are probably not ones where we just flippantly "try again".

You have to somehow separate the horrible evils that have been inflicted on the world by Communism before you can get people to consider words closely associated with it.

Being anti-communism is good not only for the individual's health but for their society as a whole.

Those studies have well known flaws. I'm measuring my output so I happen to know I'm not only going faster, but the quality is better.

I'm not vibe-measuring my output ;)

We desperately need some new terminology to describe using LLMs to support development work. "Vibe code" has a strict definition but no one really cares. I have a really hard time believing that the Rust port was 100% "vibed" the way the original definition was laid out.

It's a big slushy of emotions that I understand (both positive and negative) but it makes it so hard to actually tells what problem someone actually has when they just use "vibe coding" as a general LLM usage slur.

I'm using LLMs to assist my development and I'm measurably (in all the ways we engineers could possibly care about) doing better work faster.

I read the article, but I disagree. People are angry, and that's completely understandable. I believe it's a justifiable response to the huge upheaval happening. But being angry about LLMs does not magically transmute their output into "plagiarism".

It has always been possible to take someone's public work, put a twist on it, and then sell it as unique. (I'm not making a moral/ethical argument, only a legal one.) I have yet to see any evidence that LLMs are fundamentally different from that approach.

Perhaps you don't notice GCP outages because so few companies rely on them?

LLM hallucinations are better than Google results these days and I'm not even trying to tell a silly joke. It's more useful for an LLM to lie to my face about 10% of my query, be suspicious and dig out that useful information than to try to parse the absolute slop returned by a normal, non-AI Google query.

I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.

The implication is that it's a bot saying this, not a person.

Well, yes and no. What I mean is, being a related person who is indeed a person (by whatever means you establish that) and having some sort of standard by which you won't be bought, seems increasingly rare and therefore valuable.

By "bought" I don't mean they won't sponsor stuff. I mean they've got a public standard that can be trusted to some degree.

Your final example isn't exactly what I'm thinking of here. I'm thinking that a well-known identity and name within a community bypasses a lot of this BS with AI slop and communities bombarded by the slop will continue to close themselves off which will increase the value of being a known, contributing member.

Idk I need to figure out a way to articulate this better but essentially the value of being verifiably human is increasing IMO.

Being a verifiable human identity (not as-in age verification or whatever) but as in having a known, public, reputation online will go a long way in this new slop-first world.

> Did you have other plans for the weekend? Or a long term project you’re prioritizing? That’s nice, you have a new plan — fix every vulnerability that comes in NOW.

Umm... no? It's called OPEN source. Expecting people to cancel their plans to make your free software more secure is pretty audacious. Luckily, many WILL, but the expectation is just foolish.