jtrn

I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.

From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).

Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"

Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”

Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.

I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...

Interesting quick read/take. Especially the LinkedIn analogy. Even though I am WAY high on the AI fanboy and low on the LinkedIn side of the bell curve, I can see what the author mean.

I read the title and thought to myself, "The chance that this is a well-grounded, unbiased, and robust design is close to 0." So I started reading...

And having read it, what a terrible piece of science slop this is!

There is no observed adoption dataset used to establish that this mechanism explains LLM use better than alternatives such as usefulness, falling prices, workplace requirements, or independent discovery. The behavior they talk about could describe many socially adopted technologies or practices. Its applicability does not identify anything distinctively viral or harmful about LLMs.

The cognitive decline is assigned, not measured or independently derived. They calculate population competence by averaging those assigned scores across the groups. Consequently, moving people into lower-scoring groups lowers the average by construction. The dramatic fall from 1 to approximately 0.425 in their example is a model output conditional on those choices, not evidence of a 57% real-world cognitive decline.

They explicitly define competence as what the human can do when external support is withdrawn, excluding the total capability of the human/AI system. This cannot settle whether the technology improves overall performance or human welfare. And they provide no measurement protocol clarifying exactly which supports could be removed for a fair comparison (for instance, how does this compare to Wikipedia or electricity). They don’t do this because of an agenda, so allow me to assert something with just as little evidence as the authors provide for their conclusion: This is obvious bias, and they are designing the study to get the result they want, and they don’t care about scientific truth, just about getting their paper published and attracting attention.

And the “runaway” stuff is just not supported by the model. The language about equilibrium as a parameter changes is not automatically evidence of an imminent, rapid societal collapse! it is PURE conspiracy-level rhetoric. Just put two things in the same sentence and hope people think they are related. This is misleading language at best, and willful manipulation at worst.

This is a BASIC failure of the minimal requirement for something to be called scientific. If there had been even a trace of a genuine attempt at Popperian falsification, the current research design would never have gotten past review. This is cargo cult science, it LOOKS like scientific research, but it’s not even close to scientific.

EVERYTHING I hate about modern research on full display! And I am losing respect for the HN community more and more, because only terrible studies with sensationalist claims and titles get attention. This is tabloid-level quality, just with a direct link to the article instead of a dumbed-down intermediate write-up. If anybody read the actual paper, this would not get posted ANYWHERE. But “LLMs are a cognitive virus” is what gets posted.....

I think “what I individually like” is a poor measurement of creativity, at least alone.

And yes you can rank quality. My point was that if you made two bell curves of the distribution quality and creativity of all new manga, The one for “AI slop manga” allready started overlapping with “normal human manga”.

That’s just a fancy way of saying the absolute best AI slop is at the level of the absolute worst human creation.

The interesting thing is that the AI slop curve clearly is moving to the right every month. Where it will stop tho, impossible to say.

I would think that’s the opposite of creativity. Rather, I would label that as pattern matching and prediction capability.

Why box in creativity basically as the ability to mimic someone else who is creative? Why not choose something that better matches the definition of creativity (the ability to make new things, think of original ideas, or show imagination that is novel, useful, or pleasing)?

And even then, I am assuming the premise that the original novels are good and creative, especially chapter 2. Most novels are not very creative.

If it could make 5 different versions of chapter 2, all with different directions for the story, and all with novel and interesting developments, wouldn’t that be a better definition of creativity than “can it read chapter 1 and be able to copy style and deduce/predict what the author is going to do in chapter 2”?

And also, that’s only a subset of creativity (storytelling). I’ve met plenty of people who are terrible at writing and storytelling but can come up with the most impressive and novel solutions to a practical problem instantly.

Final thought: I have been following the development in the anime AI generation scene for a while now. It’s not even close to anything anyone would call creative or even OK quality. But it’s also massively impressive that it’s moving in that direction really fast. And if you watch enough, you are going to start to see some truly creative sparks. And some of the mainstream stuff that gets created and labeled as creative… really... How many isekai series with the same story have humans not made already?

This comment and the one above from astrobiased feel like coming into a messy codebase, and it’s more work to sort it out than it would have been to write it from scratch.... And since I actually do intelligence testing as a clinical psychologist, I have experience with this in both practice and theory. So now I’m going to waste an hour because I just have to respond to “something is wrong on the internet.”.

Chollet's distinction is useful. High performance on known tasks is not the same thing as efficient adaptation to a novel task. Prior knowledge and training data can buy skill. That is a central point of On the Measure of Intelligence. But it does not follow that current frontier progress is only "coverage-driven competence." That is a hypothesis. It is not a result established by Chollet's framework.

"Overfitting at scale" is also the wrong term. A model that learns broad representations and applies them successfully to unseen examples is generalizing. The relevant concern is whether apparent novelty is actually inside the effective training distribution, not whether the model is "overfit."

There is also an unstated premise here: that adding broad knowledge and skills cannot improve the machinery used for novel problem solving. I do not see a basis for assuming that. Learned representations, abstractions, reasoning patterns, and cross-domain analogies can themselves support transfer to new tasks. Whether this becomes sufficient for general intelligence is an open question with insufficient data. But its a perfectly valid hypothesis right now that, given enough domain knowledge and symbolic reasoning examples, LLM COULD maybe "Grok" AGI at a certain critical threshold.

And ARC-AGI-3 was specifically designed around novel abstract environments that require exploration and adaptation. Astra scores 99.9% with OpenAI's context-preserving Provider Adapter, and ARC reports that Astra constructed compact symbolic models of unfamiliar environments. That does not prove AGI, but it points in that direction more so than the other way around.

Gc roughly maps to acquired knowledge. Gf roughly maps to reasoning in relatively novel situations. Naming those two categories does not tell us whether increasing acquired knowledge and learned abstractions in an AI can improve Gf-like behavior. That causal question is exactly what is disputed.

And "Frontier models probably have maxed out crystallized intelligence" is just obviously wrong, unless you think they have been able to dig up every a scrap of paper with knowledge/information on it in the entire world, AND that there is no more useful knowledge to be generated left in the universe.

And the statement that intelligence and creativity are independent is simply wrong. A meta-analysis of 112 studies and 34k participants found a positive correlation of about r .25 between intelligence and divergent thinking. It also found that using g, Gf, or Gc did not eliminate that relationship. Creative achievement has a smaller but still positive meta-analytic association with intelligence, around r = .16. These are distinct constructs, not independent constructs.

And this is just a bad take: "AIs are terrible at creativity". At best that depends on which creativity, and I think its straight up wrong. On divergent thinking tasks, the operationalization behind every ADHD study you could cite, LLMs score above most humans, with the top humans still ahead. If you means Big-C, paradigm-shifting creativity, that is a different construct and none of the ADHD evidence transfers to it.

And if I where to say what I subjectively feel and see.... I have ABSOLUTELY no idea how people can say that we are not seeing sparks of creativity from AIs already. If a PERSON produced some of the music, solutions or deductions that I have seen AIs do, people would have NO problem celebrating it as extremely creative.

And finally, the ADHD claim is also, at best, overstated and just as often debunked. There is some evidence that higher subclinical ADHD trait scores, often survey studies only, are associated with better performance on some divergent-thinking measures. But a review of 31 studies did not find a consistent creativity advantage for people with clinical ADHD, and it found no evidence of better convergent thinking.

Okay, I’m done… And nobody noticed that I’m not doing my job here.

That’s why I had to summarize it. Because the article is a bit all over the place. It tried to jam in in way to many angles on one topic “invisible companies”.

I reread listened to the article now and looked up some research due to the things that bugged me.

The summary I made is what’s uniquely interesting about such firms. But from a rollup perspective it’s just one of potential mechanism for a firm to be on the cheap. And even if you think that is a usefull angle on the topic, it’s still covering just a the subset of such firms that are invisible AND has good margins AND the owner is willing to sell on the cheap due to ignorance of lack of buyers so they can’t get good offerings.

I could have expanded the summary with: “ and because nobody’s bidding, they’re cheap to buy up and consolidate, which is where rollups make their money.“

The problem with that is that it a claim, and it’s at best not well founded and maybe even wrong. There are many failures in the same industries the article celebrates. Loewen Group rolled up funeral homes and went bankrupt in 1999, the 1990s physician-practice rollups collapsed, Waste Management itself restated years of earnings in 1998 in one of the largest accounting scandals of its era. None of that is in the article.

And many of the article’s examples (marina software, niche aircraft parts) are markets too small to support a second firm at efficient scale. If so, nobody enters not because they didn’t look but because they looked and correctly declined.

So yea, the article is a bit scatterbrained and much more speculative than it pretends.

Yes, I did too, and I actually thought about "lossy vs. lossless compression" when I wrote the comment. That's why I said that I was not trying to denigrate the article, but when I understood that this was the gist of the article, it clicked better. So it was bad framing to call it "compressed to." I should have said, "I found this summary to be a helpful framing to read before the main article."

Here is the entire article compressed from 21k characters to 176:

It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring.

Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that framing, because it took way too long to understand the purpose of the article, atleast for me.

Very cool and good work. Thank you!

As a European, or in general, this make me happy. Since the more diversity the better. Tho it’s hard not to not to think of this as a big fish in a small pond situation (when talking about best model in EU).

Op probably knows. But thanks for articulating it clearly.

My initial impression is one of massive disappointment. The main issue was that Fable was unpredictable and prone to false positives by the safeguards. In my brief testing, it still seems completely unable to understand its own guardrails and will readily reason itself into triggering them. It claims it won't do so beforehand, and insists that the topic in question is perfectly OK. Regardless of how good the car is, I'm not comfortable buying or driving it when I know it can randomly and unpredictably explodes. So yea might be good, but you never know when it refuses to help… still.

I have a coffee cup with the writing "Do stupid thing faster with cafe". That's how I feel about myself when I use AI carelessly... The speed with which I can make a mess is astronomical!

So basically, we have a clear path to local, viable LLMs in the same ballpark as current frontier LLMs.

- Get an M5 Ultra with 512 GB of memory. - A couple of generations of improvements to the base model training. - A couple of generations of improvements to the architecture for running it as efficiently as possible. - A couple of generations of open coding agent harnesses like Pi and OpenCode.

And given how fast each generation comes and goes, we are now probably guaranteed superhuman coding assistant that requires 350-ish watts of power, is smaller than a toaster, and can code at 50 TPS. And even if the M5 cost is substantial, is WAY WAY cheaper than what I though would be even possible within a reasonable amount of time.

I cant think of anything in history that has improved at this rate... And yea, theres a lot of AI hype, but the amount of people that dont realize how insane this is, suprises me.

I get irrational angry by logical and nonsensical statements. When I read this: “ Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action.” I am screaming: But they can fucking how what THEY want to sell to anybody! Setting terms for THEIR side is NOT constraining military action, unless military suddenly has totalitarian power over everybody !

Tooltip are useful, but i usualy avoid them since they dont work well with touch devices. Web-dev primary tho.

Oh thanks! I dident realize LLM are NOT the same as FORTRAN, how silly of me. I thought that they where identical! You are sharp as a tac!

My less-than-one-year-old Core Ultra 9 275HX was supposed to be much more power-efficient than previous generations, but I’m not impressed with it at all. Yes, it’s a gaming laptop, but why does it need 70 watts just to idle? And when playing Factorio with a CPU-heavy save, the PC uses 170 watts, while my M5 uses 50 watts on the exact same save. I don’t know how much the CPU alone is to blame for this, but I’m tired of x86 and Intel. My Linux laptop/server with Ubuntu and an AMD CPU is somewhat better (Also a gaming laptop), though. It’s only drawing 25 watts while idle while hosting six web services. So, if I were to go by just my anecdotal experience, having used about 10 different laptops over the last five years, Macs are just in another league when it comes to efficiency. However, the AMD/Linux combination is getting somewhat better at a slow pace, while Windows/Intel is stuck with terrible efficiency.

I don't feel threatened, I just think you and the webpage are stupid. I love how you jump STRAIGHT to transphobia at the slightest pushback. I'm pro trans rights, just anti-idiot. And by idiot i mean anybody that want people that dont agree with them to die.

I'm almost suspecting that you are not a true trans activist, because it's easier to think that comments like this are trolling. Atleast that would make sense.

What a wholsome and inclusive site. Page title reads “fix your heart or die”. Spread the love indeed.

If this was even close to true, why did basicly this exact same move work when china did it and when EU threatend to do the same before.

And from a different angle: “giving fines to firms makes no sense since they firm can only get money from customers so it’s just going to make it more expensive for the customer”.

Not an identical situatio, but to say it’s the only consequence, that it becomes more expensive for Canadian, is just not right.

Indeed. This article didn't age well... I'm sure that the creator of the original piece will do a thoughtful self-analysis if they might have gotten something wrong, and make sure they didn't have any sort of unspoken bias in their thinking and writing!

Yes, I agree with this fully.

But what’s interesting now is that the degree of determinism is increasing, as the community as a whole keeps refining the individual parts. The importance of spec becomes more obvious when the feedback loop speeds up, from spec to running software. That already made a huge difference in how many think about spec. There are multiple GitHub projects that are "spec only," where the goal is to spec it out in such a way that the software one wants is the inevitable result, if you just input the spec into a AI/harnes.

And the AI gets better, and the harnesses get better. So at some point we probably live in a reality where we can say: "If you spec out the software you want in this specific way, and add in these guidelines in AGENTS.md, and use X AI with Y harness, you almost certainly get identical software out the other end".

And yes "almost" is faaaaar from "always identical output". But the fact that we are even in the game of increasing determinism, in the Spec->AI->Software flow, is just mind-blowingly cool to me.

That is a detour from my main point, though, that on one specific level of analysis (can we move up one level of abstraction and lose some detail understanding, but gain more in productivity), AI, compiler, software frameworks, are all examples of the answer being: Yes.

And I do agree that we need to mitigate the damage that people with less experience can do because they don't know what pitfalls to avoid. But I would rather we focus on fixing that by improving the AI and harness, than the people that just keep saying that "AI is bad". In the same way I would rather make a tractor safer to use, not just complain that it's dangerous because someone drove it into the lake. Because the goal is not to make the perfect deterministic output from a compiler. that's just a step towards the real goal, which should, in my mind, be to help other people solve problems and do useful stuff. In the same way that the goal of the tractor is not to just plow the field, but to plow the field as fast and efficiently as possible so we can feed ourselves.

Wall of text because this topic has been bothering me for a while now, and Im using this thread to sort out my own thinking on it.

Thank you for the first sensible response that actually engages with the point I made. And your answer is better than mine, and less angry.... :P

The question from glouwbug was just taken for granted to be "no, and therefore the analogy fails." And if I understand your answer, it's basically: "no, but we're visibly closer every quarter, and here's what the intermediate state looks like, and we might even get there"

The interesting thing in all of this to me is what must happen for the same spec to be deterministically certain to generate the same software. Could you delete the code, regenerate from docs alone, and trust the result? And obviously.... not yet. In practice, workflows drift, sometimes you patch the code directly because it's faster, and now code and docs have not been properly updated.

But the entire flow and concept of: [Spec] -> [AI/Harness] -> [Finished software], and how we increasing determinism in that flow, is just immensely interesting to me.

See my response to the other comment if you don't understand that analogy is not the same as "identical".

And to state that "This analogy only works if ...." is just PATENTLY wrong. The analogy works fine if you say that it compares analogous situations. Like if we focus on some encumbrance complaining that "kids these days are too stupid because they don't understand the fundamentals like I do" or "These new tools that make it easier for stupid people, not smart people like me, to make stuff is dangerous because they don't know what they are doing". That's just a few of MANY analogous observations we can make for the two situations. But I guess you think that only the thing you care about is the only thing that exists.

And in the end, everybody who complains like this is just going to be shown to be just as mistaken as all the people who complained that "people who don't code in assembly are dangerous!" And it's just marvelous to watch it play out slowly over the last couple of years. And we are just a couple of years in. I'm just making a note of everybody who is mistaken, as a study in denial and biased thinking. The end for all of this was obvious after Opus 4.6 hit. And it's just getting more and more obvious with each model release and harness improvement. This is a gold mine for studying flawed thinking.

Obviously not. Abstraction levels in projects management would go from something like: lower, “what should we name individual tasks items” to higher “what personalities are best suited for incident response handling”, or agile vs waterfall.

While technology layers would go from “who has the best transistors tech” to “should we use windows or macOS?”

Edit insertion for clarification: The compiler, framework usage, AI usage, are all tools and patterns for generating code. And they all stay neatly inside the technology, and more specifically the dimention of "creating code".

Not relevant to the topic I was responding to tho. And project management is usually way harder than coding, with or without AI. At least if you measure it by how few people are able to do each well.

It depends on the level of analysis. Both change the abstraction level one works at. So if you can't decode the message, I can do it for you. People believed that something important was lost by moving up one abstraction layer, because knowing the lower-level details was important, more so than having the possibility of doing more because complexities have been abstracted away for you.

And almost every time in history this conflict has arisen, the stubborn people who want to stick to the "everybody should stay at the level of abstraction that I want to stay at!" have been proven wrong.

So if you don't see the comparison, you lack imagination. It's the same comparison Torvald Linus made, and even though all the rabid anti-AI people try to deny that it's a valid comparison by willfully misunderstanding the comparison, it's perfectly valid.

And I find both the article and the comment I responded to either ignorant of history, and worse than uninsightful, because they are just patently, historically, logically, and empirically wrong.

And I'm getting tired of the arrogant senior devs, that are not a fraction as useful as they think they are, whining and complaining at younger people who are creating imperfect but useful work with AI.

While the tools for AI coding are just exploding. How can you people say stuff like "They learn nothing" with a straight face is beyond me. I see people daily who use AI to solve problems and learn something in the process.

I am having such a blast over the last couple of years seeing how AI development just relentlessly disproves the claims from bitter old developers who don't want to be forced to do anything useful. And when the transition is complete, the gatekeepers will be gone, and we will be left with people trying to solve real problems.

An anecdote consistent with the well documented trend that more capable agents exploit environment possiblites more...

And there was no rule and no concealment. Removing the web_search tool is not an instruction, and beeing able to access web when web_search tool was disabled is not cheating. Sol didn't circumvent a stated prohibition and didn't hide anything... it announced the curls in its own commentary. "Cheating" implies covert rule-breaking, and this was overt, unprohibited, environment-permitted behavior. Also, clickbait title, and suble conspiracy hinting "Is this even the same Sol?" when running small number of test with diff vs previous benchmark WELL within the marging of error, and he allready understand that vanilla Codex's harness and prompt change performance impacts performance, so why jump to "Is this a different model".

I could also rant on about the irony of him spent weeks "using the benchmark for development rather than as a benchmark," which means his harness numbers are contaminated by iteration also, but wasted enough time now on this.

This reads like one of thouse articles in mainstream media where the author has a obvious agenda, and they think they are really clever when they write an attack piece that they think looks like objective , when it really really transparently isent.