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socialcommenteron The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting

Really sorry in advance, but I thought this whole HN thread could use a bit of positivity. I turned your satire into a mad-lib and asked AI to fill it in in a happy way.

But not me, I’m a dreamer. I have gifts, like the courage to kindle hope, or the patience to lose track of time if I am laughing with friends. Thank god there are no frowns here in this sun-drenched park where people are gathering to get together for picnics or music or stargazing.

Have a nice day!

(A human posted this)

socialcommenteron The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting

I tend to think you're right about what happened in this instance.

It contrasts with your first paragraph though; for the record do you think AI agents are a house-burn-down-toaster AND it was used neglectfully by the human, or just the human-at-fault thing?

socialcommenteron The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting

The operator (airline) pays the compensation to the victims in the first instance, right?

The label and the consequence go to two different parties, both of whom are responsible in some way. Sounds reasonable.

socialcommenteron The AI Vampire

https://archive.md/ks83q

Let's spare the guy some web traffic.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

> Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes

Please enjoy an excellent podcast I quite like: https://youtu.be/YvE164Ubgss?t=900 (wait for 15:45)

Again, probably only relevant for extremely long term ownership, but someone will need to own and maintain all the high mileage decade-old EVs a decade from now.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

I'd love to see the itemized bill.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

Not the person you replied to, but I'm not sure how you arrived here. Brakes, coolant, washer fluid, diff oil, gearbox oil, cabin air filter, wiper blades. Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes (at hundreds of thousands of miles, in fairness)?

Nice Michelins for my ICE have been something resembling 1/3 of service costs. Not 2/3 but not negligible either.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

Why do they think we want to look at snail-paced scrolling, stuttery animations?

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

CarPlay has become somewhat of a standard. It's fine to say you personally don't need it, but many/most laymen will still expect their new car to support it.

If a PC was launched without Windows support, most people on HN might be able to live with it day-to-day, but it would still be a dealbreaker for the general population. Admittedly this isn't a fair comparison, but hopefully you understand my point.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

Nice edit.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

In addition, that's presumably not on the base model price point. Will be interesting to find out.

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

That video makes it look like a physical button for the rear door manual release (albeit in a very hidden location)?

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

This was half the reason I posted to HN, honestly. I've seen several recent examples of modern product pages which render awfully because they're trying to be "quirky".

Edit: look at this, scrolling an entire screen only to have a photo zoom by <1.25x: https://imgur.com/a/G2Hfe3Q

socialcommenteron Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!

socialcommenteron The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

The hyperbolic fit isn't just unhinged, it's clearly in bad faith. The metric is normalized to [0, 1], and one of the series is literally (x_1, 0) followed by (x_2, 1). That can't be deemed to converge to anything meaningful.

socialcommenteron Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

> That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

I would imagine that your "more lines" approach does manage to select for those who meet targets for the right reasons over those who decontextualise everything and "just" meet the targets? The people in the latter camp would be inclined to (try to) move goalposts once they've established themselves - made harder by having the conflicting success criteria with the narrow runway to success.

In other words, good ideas and thanks for the reply (length is no problem!). I do however think that this is all idealised and not happening enough in the real world - much agreed re: psychopathy etc.

If you wouldn't mind running some training courses in a few key megacorporations, that might make a really big difference to the world!

socialcommenteron Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

I find this framing of corporates a bit unsatisfying because it doesn't address hierarchy. By your reckoning, the employees just follow the group norm over their own ethics. Sure, but those norms are handed down by the people in charge (and, with decent overlap, those that have been around longest and have shaped the work culture).

What type of person seeks to be in charge in the corporate world? YMMV but I tend to see the ones who value ethics (e.g. their employees' wellbeing) over results and KPIs tend to burn out, or decide management isn't for them, or avoid seeking out positions of power.

socialcommenteron Software factories and the agentic moment

Amusingly, it appears the README (that would be code, right?) has hallucinated the existence of a docker image - someone filed an issue at https://github.com/strongdm/cxdb/issues/1

In-house employees don't read code or do code reviews, so presumably they don't raise issues either. I guess the issue was picked up by an astute HN reader.

socialcommenteron Software factories and the agentic moment

Do you have any successful examples of software build by this factory in a main that isn't AI-adjacent? I.e. not an SaaS clone, not another code linter/database/whatever? Can the factory build, e.g. a crypto trading algorithm, an e-commerce site, etc.?

To come up with a software spec for the agents to follow, first you need to understand what your business is and where the money is.

socialcommenteron The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

We're discussing an article about the human externalities of AI progress. It absolutely matters in this context.

socialcommenteron The Waymo World Model

How many of the 70 human accidents would be adequately explained by controlling for speed, alcohol, wanton inattention, etc? (The first two alone reduce it by 70%)

No customer would turn on FSD on an icy road, or on country lanes in the UK which are one lane but run in both directions; it's much harder to have a passenger fatality in stop-start traffic jams in downtown US cities.

Even if those numbers are genuine (2 vs 70) I wouldn't consider it apples-for-apples.

Public information campaigns and proper policing have a role to play in car safety, if that's the stated goal we don't necessarily need to sink billions into researching self driving

socialcommenteron Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

It's much easier for someone who blurs the facts to keep a clear conscience because they don't have to acknowledge (to themselves) what they've done.

Someone who's clear-eyed about the facts is much more likely to have a guilty conscience/think someone's actions are unconscionable.

I don't mean to argue either side in this discussion, but both sides might be ignoring the facts here.

socialcommenteron Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

They do when purchased outside China (largely EU, UK, also Singapore and others)

socialcommenteron Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

I tend to agree with your overall point, but if we're talking about a 1-2 kW of "standby" regen, surely the rolling resistance of any kind of vehicle is in the same ballpark anyway (source: it takes multiple people to push a broken down car).

socialcommenteron Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

Unfortunately Microsoft are working hard to get rid of local accounts, meaning the alternative here isn't much of an alternative.

socialcommenteron The microstructure of wealth transfer in prediction markets

Parent comment has a strong implication that the bets will impact their decisions, and invariably for the worse.

If "Politician XYZ takes the day off and sits on the couch" were paying 100-1 odds, it wouldn't be such a big drama (although, again, the existence of the bet would still impact their behaviour)

socialcommenteron PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

I use it in command prompt semi-regularly, for some reason never thought to use Win+R to run it...

socialcommenteron PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Can this be pasted into Win+R? That might give a novice user more confidence; pasting a short command that literally says "shutdown" into a small, easily identified text dialog box seems clear enough.

Small added benefit, presumably it's harder to accidentally run a multi-line multi-stage command because you had the wrong thing in your clipboard (I don't have my windows PC handy, but if you paste multiple lines into Win+R it doesn't execute anything, correct?)

socialcommenteron PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

> If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem.

On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?

Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.

socialcommenteron Vietnam bans unskippable ads

Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.

It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.

ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference