How humans can differentiate the things they make has been something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently. What markers signal to you this is AI generated?
628 karma · joined October 21, 2024
It is weird that the author seems to understand that the pro-AI claims made by AI companies about the product’s necessity are not falsifiable, but then backtracks with “woah woah woah but don’t think I’m anti-AI.”
How is the assertion above any more rigorous than the productivity claims the author is criticizing throughout the rest of the article? That you won’t “survive” if you don’t adopt AI within a few months?
It is not true when the AI CEO says it, and it is not true when the person calling BS on the AI CEO… for some reason also says it…
If you give a human a programming task and tell them to use a specific programming language, how many times are they going to use a different language? I think the answer is very close to zero. At most, they’d push back and have further discussion about the language choice, but once everyone gets on the same page, they’d use the specified language, no?
The author is making up a human flaw and seeing it in LLMs.
I don’t understand how this person can have gone to all these places and be so cynical about them. The above quote is the kind of reaction I get from people who don’t get out much when talking about the National Parks.
Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.
>Below, what Perplexity Pro had to say.
When will this be as socially embarrassing as sending someone a “let me google that for you” link?
If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.
However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.
I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.
>He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.
Is that false? It also discusses a new policy:
>Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.
Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.
It seems like “you’re not doing it correctly” is just a rationalization to protect the pro-AI person’s established opinion.
For the reasons I stated above, the response comes off as faking understanding to manage a PR issue rather than genuine empathy and possible negotiation, but I am often wrong about many things.
Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.
This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
I have an iPhone 11 which also has a camera bump and the experience of typing while the phone is on a flat surface is laughably annoying. For a company that prides itself on design aesthetics, it is honestly an embarrassing miss.
There is also pattern matching and guard clauses so you can write something like:
def add(a, b) when is_integer(a) and is_integer(b), do: a + b
def add(_, _), do: :error
It’s up to personal preference and the exact context if you want a fall through case like this. Could also have it raise an error if that is preferred. Not including the fallback case will cause an error if the conditions aren’t met for values passed to the function.
I’m not accusing you of anything, just giving the feedback that this line makes your post sound like it is AI slop. This is an extremely typical phrase when you prompt any current AI with some variation of “explain this post”. Honestly, the verbosity of the rest of your post also reinforces this signal. The typo here also indicates cutting and pasting things together “Given what he has to say about . But more importantly,”
If it is not AI slop, then hopefully you can use this feedback for future writing.
What is your accuracy on software development estimates? I always see these productivity claims matched again “It would’ve taken me” timelines.
But, it’s never examined if we’re good at estimating. I know I am not good at estimates.
It’s also never examined if the quality of the PR is the same as it would’ve been. Are you skipping steps and system understanding which let you go faster, but with a higher % chance of bugs? You can do that without AI and get the same speed up.
Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor.
If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users.
There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.
Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...
Page 53
> The study of general artificial intelligence is a field still in its infancy, and we do not wish to convey the impression that we have provided a definitive solution to the problem of characterizing and measuring the intelligence held by an AI system.
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I’m listening to my own experience. Just today I gave it another fair shot. GitHub Copilot agent mode with GPT-4.1. Still unimpressed.
This is a really insightful look at why people perceive the usefulness of these models differently. It is fair to both sides without being dismissive as one side just not “getting it” or how we should be “so far” past debate:
https://ferd.ca/the-gap-through-which-we-praise-the-machine....
Personally, my goalpost still hasn’t moved: I’ll invest in using AI when we are past this grand debate about its usefulness. The utility of a calculator is self-evident. The utility of an LLM requires 30k words of explanation and nuanced caveats. I just can’t even be bothered to read the sales pitch anymore.
>The training data for LLMs is stolen. I don’t mean like “pirated” in the sense where someone illicitly shares a copy they obtained legitimately; I mean their scrapers are ignoring both norms and laws to obtain copies under false pretenses, destroying other people’s infrastructure. [footnotes omitted]
“I think I'm done thinking about GenAI for now” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193018
[meta] Here’s where I wish I could personally flag HN accounts.