davebranton

"The End"

No. It is not the end.

This phrase always fascinates me : "AI-generated content must not be treated as authoritative without independent verification appropriate to its context."

I've heard the same thing expressed somewhat more concisely as "Never ask AI a question to which you don't already know the answer".

Which raises the question, and I do think it's an important one. Given that this is true, what function does AI answering a question actually serve? You can't rely on its output, so you have to go and check anyway. You could achieve precisely the same outcome by using search engines and normal research.

This, and for many other reasons, is exactly why I never ask it anything.

I wrote something like this for windows 20 years ago, a friend of mine used it to make some cutout models for an art exhibition.

It's an interesting problem to try to solve. Anything but the simplest model requires more than one cutout, which you then (in my app at least) have to position by hand onto sheets of paper for printing. Performing the unfold to minimise the number of separate sections was not something I even attempted.

Interesting how many people "Like AI" because it's good at all the jobs other than the one they happen to make a living doing.

Did you hear about the screenwriters school in which the professors said to avoid AI for writing, but it's great for storyboards. And the storyboard school where the professors said the opposite?

The reality is that AI isn't actually "good" at anything. It produces passable ersatz facsimiles of work that can fool those not skilled in the art. The second reality of AI is that everyone is busy cramming it into their products at the expense of what their products are actually useful for.

Once people realise (1), and stop doing (2), the tech industry has a chance of recovering.

Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams, for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level" intelligence. Will the machine dream?

What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?

AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.

I made such a thing ten years ago with an ESP8226 and a basic iOS app built using HTML and javascript. It still works perfectly.

The valves were 12v solenoids from ali express, and the plumbing was from the hardware store. I almost guarantee it was far, far cheaper than this project.

Precisely. As I wrote in my assessment of AI for my workplace;

"Your unique human voice is more valuable than a thousand prompt-driven LLM doggerels."

The more you write, the less this will be true. The more you write, the better you will become at it. Using an LLM to write is like sending a robot to the gym for you.

The more you use an LLM to write for you, the worse you will become at writing yourself. There is simply no other possible outcome. It's even true of spellcheck - the more you use a spellcheck the worse you become at spelling. I know this for a fact because I can no longer spell for shit. However, spelling is to writing as arithmetic is to mathematics. I also can't add up, but I have a degree in pure mathematics.

LLMs are a cancer on human thought and expression.

It doesn't matter.

The guidelines are perfectly clear, no matter the outcome of your thought experiment. Hacker News wants intelligent conversation between human beings, and that's the beginning and the end of it.

If you want LLM-enhanced conversation then I'm sure you will find places to have that desire met, and then some. Hacker News is not that place, and I pray that it will never become that place. In short, and in answer to "Do we prefer text with the right "provenance" over higher quality text?".

Yes. Yes, we do.

Why would somebody read something that somebody couldn't be bothered to write? This article is AI slop.

The deep, profound, cruel irony of this post is that it was written by AI.

Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and safety, the I believe it will not.

The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful.

"And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off."

Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere.

Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?

If I see another AI-written trash article I am going to scream. Overlong, overwritten garbage. People used to write, and there was personality in that writing. Now people believe it's acceptable to generate reams of utter formless shite and post it on the internet.

If you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's good earth would you expect anyone to be bothered to read it?

I stopped reading at the AI image at the top of the page. The comments here suggest I was right to.

I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.

This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.

In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.

My (much simpler, decades old) one

https://plasticeagle.com/fractal.html

I'm sure many people have written similar things, in various technologies, over the years. Let's see them.

YAML is much too complex. I am never able to remember all the different ways of formatting text, for instance, and have to resort to cheat-sheet guides such as this all the time.

https://yaml-multiline.info/

The YAML spec is thousands of lines long (23k words, to be more exact). This is even longer than XML (20k words). JSON's spec is less than two thousand words. For a language that's supposed to be human-readable, YAML is maddeningly complex.

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

Plus, of course, you can execute arbitrary code with it. By design. AND it contains semantic whitespace, which is personally my least favourite innovation ever.

Art is alot more than JPEGs. I don't have JPEGs on my walls, I have paintings and etchings and collages and even a small tapestry. I have some small ceramics, and a handmade charred wooden bowl. I have photographs printed on fibre-based paper, and funny little watercolours.

Art is going to be just fine.

The answer to this question is that we don't make bread like we used to. There's a wonderful documentary on Netflix about this, called "Cooked" (the episode entitled "Air" is about bread). Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough. My wife couldn't eat bread without falling asleep on the couch a couple of hours afterwards. But she can eat sourdough - which costs about the same as the gluten-free variety we used to buy. Also, it's beyond delicious.