dingnuts

there's a lot of evidence things do generally get better over time, though. Jon Haidt and his ilk... I forget all involved... have done research into it

obviously it can be bumpy and maybe there's a Great Filter or you happen to live during a bad period but life is certainly much longer and less brutal than it was for 99.9% of human history

Close, but it's actually Nixon and the end of Bretton Woods

deception implies intent. this is confabulation, more widely called "hallucination" until this thread.

confabulation doesn't require knowledge, which as we know, the only knowledge a language model has is the relationships between tokens, and sometimes that rhymes with reality enough to be useful, but it isn't knowledge of facts of any kind.

and never has been.

Arch and its wikin were already pretty good when it happened, but the real turning point was when the Gentoo wiki got hacked. After that, it never really recovered, and the Arch wiki must have absorbed a lot of that expertise because that's when it really took off.

as I recall anyway. can't believe it's been so long.

It is amazing in fact how willingly Europe seems to be running into the arms of the actual fascist dictator, Xi, at the first sign of turmoil in the US. The US is written off as a lost cause and you cozy up with a government that is everything you dislike about the current US administration but on steroids. All because the US wants the EU to pay for its own war.

youll get cheaper EVs though I guess

You bought a relationship with a service company that locked you in and sold you out. That's absolutely a bait and switch, just one of service instead of goods, because it's a SaaS company.

This is the real reason I'm tired of subscriptions. I don't even care about the "pay in perpetuity" problem in some cases, I just don't want the entity I chose to do business with to completely change.

That's absolutely a bait and switch.

Are you joking? It looks just as ugly as mountaintop removal to me.

They could preserve all that scenery by just building out nuclear. That's without mentioning the horrible ecological impact of blanketing an entire ecosystem in panels.

I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one to talk to at all about many things.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater

particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol

this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!

the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!

I didn't see any complaints about any kind of artificial intelligence, research or otherwise, besides large language models, in this article.

Large language models are a single kind of AI, and a particularly annoying kind when you are forced to use them for deterministic or fact seeking tasks

or did you read the article? you're probably an LLM. why am I here? fuck this website

This is an astute comment, despite "Arathorn" CEO of Matrix LLC's downvote ring pushing down the score. (Hey bud you know you can just read without commenting, right? Sit and listen for awhile)

ActivityPub has the same problem. Browse a Japanese MissKey server and it'll start loading yours up with questionable drawings. I turned off my server FAST

This is a big, big problem for federated software that I have not seen addressed or even frequently discussed. Arbitrary file upload by the public is not something small operators can reasonably allow on their servers.

Even large operators of non federated systems with controlled access like Facebook struggle with this. It's impossible to protect yourself as a server operator on Matrix or ActivityPub from malicious actors that want to use your server to distribute illegal material, and you'll be the one found liable!

No thanks!

the issue is false advertising.

you'll understand the first time you lose half an hour evaluating a library that has all the old signs of competent design and even the trivial examples don't work and you realize the project was generated and you've had your time completely wasted

It's a mirror. Address it like it's a friendly person and it will glaze you; that's the source of much of the sycophancy.

My queries look like the beginning of encyclopedia articles, and my system prompt tells the machine to use that style and tone. It works because it's a continuation engine. I start the article describing what I want to be explained like it's the synopsis at the beginning of the encyclopedia article, and the machine completes the entry.

It doesn't use the first person, and the sycophancy is gone. It also doesn't add cute bullshit, and it helps me avoid LLM psychosis, of which the author of this piece definitely has a mild case.

I'm also tired of seeing claims about productivity improvements from engineers who are self reporting; the METR paper showed those reports are not reliable.

the reason they got defunded is because many people do not agree

I can't find the CPC certificate for this product. Children's toys are heavily regulated in the US and based on the thermal paper, the lack of display of their authorization to sell, the fly by night nature of a drop shipping website like this ...

I don't think this is a legal product to market towards children in the US

and that's without even mentioning the LLM usage

real glad my nibblings all got real art supplies when they were little. that fosters real creativity and the lot of them can draw better than any of the examples on the sales page, and they're still little kids. and there's no subscription, no EULA, their supplies are legal and safe to use, etc.

This product is actual trash

the faddish nature of these tools fits the narrative of the METR findings that the tools slow you down while making you feel faster.

since nobody (other than that paper) has been trying to measure output, everything is based on feelings and fashion, like you say.

I'm still raw dogging my code. I'll start using these tools when someone can measure the increase in output. Leadership at work is beginning to claim they can, so maybe the writing is on the wall for me. They haven't shown their methodology for what they are measuring, just telling everyone they "can tell"

But until then, I can spot too many psychological biases inherent in their use to trust my own judgement, especially when the only real study done so far on this subject shows that our intuition lies about this.

And in the meantime, I've already lost time investigating reasonable looking open source projects that turned out to be 1) vibe coded and 2) fully non functional even in the most trivial use. I'm so sick of it. I need a new career

Honestly the comment is so poorly written I can't figure out what the GP is trying to say. They think agent coding is going to replace all existing coding because the only reason manual coding is hanging on is because engineers can't convince middle management to let them use it?

in my experience it's management forcing agent workflows on reluctant senior engineers who are afraid to speak up about how poor the tools are, as it would be career suicide to argue that agentic workflows are anything less than the inevitable future.

Isn't there something wrong with that? I have extreme suspicion towards any tech or movement that is forced top down. How can we know the effectiveness of these tools if only praising voices are allowed? Why is the inevitability of this tech a foregone conclusion?

The critical voices are self censoring

> Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive

The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case.

If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim to a number of psychological effects (sunk cost, Gell-Manns, slot machine effect) than it is that your productivity has really improved.

Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? If your productivity is now 10x mine (I don't use these tools at work because they are a waste of time in my experience) then why aren't you compensated as such and if it's because of pointy haired bosses, you should be able to start a new company with your 10x productivity to shut him and me up.

Provide links to your evidence in the replies

Besides what Sam Altman wants everyone to believe, there isn't a lot of evidence what you're saying is true. My experience with LLMs hasn't borne it out, and I also don't think it's okay -- I LIKE writing software!

I shouldn't have to accept government surveillance just because 15% of the population is functionally illiterate. We should have support structures for those people as a society, but "dumb people exist" is a fucking horrible argument for why I should have my freedom restricted

at least it's possible to be a vegan. imagine trying to be a smartphone vegan. I hope we're not headed there with this abominable technology. I hate using it and don't want to be forced

> The gap between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow

Yeah, the ONLY place I hear this where it means "AI pushers are getting faster" is on this website, where half of your salaries depend on said belief.

When I go outside and talk to real engineers who I respect, in confidence and away from the suits forcing them to use AI, away from the hype of the industry telling them only one opinion is allowed, they all agree that "agentic coding" is simply not a meaningful improvement in quality or speed of publishing working software in the real world.

Maybe you like it, and that's fine. If you want to pay a lot of money for advanced IntelliSense and you can get your boss to do that for you, have fun. Just don't force it on me.

I don't believe you'll be meaningfully faster or produce better work than I can without the clanker's help.

If I get furloughed I'm going to get a new career working with my hands.

.. no, corporations raise prices in response to the falling value of the dollar which has been occurring predictably since 2020 when the money supply was increased 20% (remember the "printer goes brr" memes and the "stimulus checks")?

Make more money supply -> money is worth less -> prices go up

simple stuff

I guess the next step is: blame corporations, nationalize them, see it causes economic problems (we're here), and then repeat (Trump promises $2k checks to everyone, this is coming soon)

It is a Linux distribution, it just turned out that "let me interrupt for a moment" meme was actually correct and what you wanted was a portable GNU distribution with an open kernel, and instead you got a Linux distribution with Google's user space and now instead of realizing the terminology was wrong from the get to you've misidentified the very trick Google played on us.

Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.

the extra value in that bill comes from the collector and historical interest; I'm not sure the US government is really obligated to pay out rare metals for your bill, if that's the distinction you're making.

Anyway, I think we as a society should normalize using silver coins for personal wealth transfer, because they are a good size and weight for not too much value, and they are shiny and make a satisfying jingle sound when kept in a bag

Manufacturers should be required to actually take back anything with that logo. You can buy so much stuff that becomes a serious problem to dispose of and that stupid logo is all that's required of the manufacturer. Cost of disposal would then get added to the price of the object, as it should to begin with!

Everything with a sealed, soldered battery makes me furious on this front. Every item with a battery that recharges through the device instead of having a battery door like a Game Boy is on a timer, and for no good reason other than planned obsolescence.

it'd be worse, just longer

physically being in the office is irrelevant. I can and do have water cooler chats with my remote teammates in the same tz as me while Manglesh is asleep in his

Timezone matters

sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets

a single fucking screenshot would go a long way to convincing me this is real. considering I lost an hour yesterday trying to use an open source library that turned out to be vibe coded non-functional slop, I have to ask for evidence that the project is real and functional be presented front and center