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It's just the thought process that comes with shallow understanding:

    "I can buy a server"
    "We can put things in space"
    "What do you mean I can't get a server in space?!"

Those sneaky freeloaders, materially improving their lives and futures just to “prove” that social programs work.

And then they went back to homelessness. Those social workers running the survey won't even notice how poisoned the data set is.

> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.

Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.


Maids are unaffordable in most rich countries that do not have access to ultracheap foreign labor or/and have stringent labor regs.

What do you consider affordable?

I can google "maid service seattle" and see dozens of entries. The first one in the yelp list is available to book and will clean a 1000 - 1500 sq ft, 2 bed, 2 bath house for well under $200. There's even a decent discount if you book is as a weekly or biweekly service.

That feels pretty affordable? I know it's a scale, but minimum wage here is $21/hr now.

I have enough time to take care of my own space, but for comparison Comcast internet is well over $120/month for crappy speeds. I think in comparison a little more than that for 1 deep cleaning a month is reasonable.


It also feels like using one of those cereal encoder wheels, to some degree. If someone sends me 10 paragraphs of output from chatGPT, and they only wrote a sentence to prompt it, then the output is really just a re-encoding of the information in the original prompt.

Quite literally - if they sent me the text of the prompt I could obtain the same output, so the output is just a more verbose way of stating the prompt.

I find it really disrespectful to talk to people through an LLM like that.


Generally speaking, a person can write a long rambling email without much effort. It takes some work to distill it down to keep the meaning without the verbosity.

If anything, AI should be used to take the long rambling email and send off the shorter distilled version.


There's a big difference between seeing an immigration raid where you know whoever gets picked up is going to have access to a lawyer, be subject to proper due process, and at worst be sent back to their home country. We knew - or at least believed - that if they detained someone who was a citizen, that person would be released.

Now, when we see ICE grabbing someone, we know that person probably won't have access to legal representation even if they are here legally, even if they're a citizen. We know they might be sent to a concentration camp in a foreign country they aren't from, and we know they might even get murdered in the street. It's a very different dynamic.


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Exactly. Comply with the armed men and you won't die. Compliance is required for a healthy society. Just comply and you won't be hurt. Compliance is required for a functioning society. Comply and purge society of undesirables. Even if your rights are violated, comply or you will be hurt. Remember America's slogans: land of the free, home of the brave if you comply with the masked mens' orders. Remember the hacker ethos: compliance with the government is required for your safety. Otherwise, you are engaging in domestic terrorism and will be dealt with swiftly by anonymous agents of the state.

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Truly ridiculous. I briefly wondered if you actually believe this rhetoric, but then I saw your three-day-old account.

Not going to debate with someone who doesn't have the courage to stand behind their convictions. Your account is a throwaway and only exists to launder white supremacist talking points. Best of luck with your new American government, we all know it ended well for the leaders of Italy and Germany.


The only lunatics in this scenario are the ones executing people in the street and dragging children out of their homes and into concentration camps as well as the people who think that's all reasonable. It's entirely reasonable, and right, to resist them.

"They are actively committing a crime against the citizens of the US." What crime? You are confused if you think being an undocumented immigrant is a crime in it of itself. It's not, despite the right's attempts to paint them as "illegal." And, even if it were a crime, that doesn't suddenly make it "evil" or something that victimizes the "citizens of the US." The law is not the arbiter of good and evil, and very often it's on the side of evil. Miscegenation was a crime. Sodomy was a crime. Those acts were no more evil then than they are now.


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So next time when they arrest you, thinking you’re an illegals immigrant, put you in jail for 2-4 weeks, without access to a lawyer or even a phone call, and then release, will you be stretching your neck to make it more comfortable for them to tread on it?

lol, "your people." I've seen enough of you guys in real life to know what lies behind the bold Nazi larp online. Meek, resentful, small men. You may piss your pants at the sight of a non-white person, but 99% of people don't. Nothing you hope for or think is going to happen will happen. The world you yearn for never existed and never will. Much like every other fascist movement in history, the current one will only be remembered as a pathetic failure.

Ernesto Miranda was a criminal. Nevertheless, we have Miranda rights.

If you aren't afraid you must be white. ICE has been arresting citizens because they fit racial profiles: https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-us-citizen-...

Huh? We have no reason to believe e.g. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was non-compliant in any way with anything, and he was sent to a foreign torture prison without access to a lawyer, without being charged with a crime, without being afforded basic rights that everyone (citizen or not) has under the US Constitution.

We have numerous examples of people who have followed all legal procedures and have legal status in the US who were likewise denied basic Constitutional protections.

Here are a few relevant sources:

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2025-04/FIRE%20Ozt...

https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...


"There are tens of millions of people in the country illegally. They must go."

Why?


> And I'll celebrate with my lawyer if it does.

LOL. Why do you assume you'll get a hearing?

As Timothy Snyder (an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust) observed last year:

> If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

* https://xcancel.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/190429656556234343...


It's truly unbelievable how many allegedly intelligent people fail to grasp this basic corollary of their beliefs.

"Well I'll get due process because I just need to say I'm a citizen!"

Bro... to whom do you say that? When? In what forum? That is literally the entire point of contention!


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The source of this particular quote is irrelevant, how about you engage with the simple logical structure being put in front of you?

Can you name one thing generative AI enables that wasn't previously possible?

Can you name one thing a plow enables that wasn't previously possible?

This line of thinking is ridiculous.


A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

The phone let's you talk to someone you couldn't before when shouting can't.

ChatGPT let's you...

Please complete the sentence without an analogy


This conversation is naive and simplifies technologies into “does it achieve something you otherwise couldn’t”.

The answer is that chatgpt allows you to do things more efficiently than before. Efficiency doesn’t sound sexy but this is what adds up to higher prosperity.

Arguments like this can be used against internet. What does it allow you to do now that you couldn’t do before?

Answer might be “oh I don’t know, it allows me to search and index information, talk to friends”.

It doesn’t sound that sexy. You can still visit a library. You can still phone your friends. But the ease of doing so adds up and creates a whole ecosystem that brings so many things.


>A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

It does not. You could still till the land with hand tools. You just get a lot more done.

ChatGPT let's me program in languages I was not efficient in before.

Anyway, I'm done with your technology purity contest, it has about zero basis in reality.


Why are you so mad? You're the only one in these comments dismissing arguments because you don't like them. Are you invested?

No. I'm just stating that a huge portion of these comments have their own emotional investment and are confusing OUGHT/IS. On top of that their arguments aren't particularly sound, and if they were applied to any other technologies that we worship here in the church of HN would seem like an advanced form of hypocrisy.

They tilled by hand for thousands of years before inventing a plow to speed it up.

They spoke slowly, through letters, until phones sped it up.

We coded slowly, letter by letter, until agents sped it up.


...generate piles of low quality content for almost free.

AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work.

I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.


There is a particular problem that comes with your line of thinking and why AI will never be able to solve it. In fact it's not a solved human problem either.

And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.

To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.


> Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.

If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities.

If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.


I do mean this is a pretty piss poor example.

Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.

To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.


>that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place

Yes, and now porn is highly regulated. Maybe that's a hint?


Email volume is mostly robots fighting robots these days.

Today if we could survey AI contact with humans, I'm afraid the top 3 by a wide margin would be scams, cheating, deep fakes, and porn.


Is it possible that these are in the top 10, but not the top 5? I'm pretty sure programming, email/meeting summaries, cheating on homework, random QA, and maybe roleplay/chat are the most popular uses.

The number of programmers in the world is vastly outnumbered by the people that do not program. Email / meeting summaries: maybe. Cheating on homework: maybe not your best example.

I was going to reply to the post above but you said it perfectly.

LLMs are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop.

After you eliminate anything that requires accountability and trustworthiness from the tasks which LLMs may be responsibly used for, the most obvious remaining use-cases are those built around lying:

- advertising

- astroturfing

- other forms of botting

- scamming old people out of their money


> [...] are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop.

True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Saying that the tools make mistakes is correct. Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

History is paved with people who got steamrollered by technology they didn't think would ever work. On a practical level AI seems very median in that sense. It's notable only because it's... kinda creepy, I guess.


> True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Incorrect. People are capable of learning by observation, introspection, and reasoning. LLMs can only be trained by rote example.

Hallucinations are, in fact, an unavoidable property of the technology - something which is not true for people. [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817


What you (and the authors) call "hallucination," other people call "imagination."

Also, you don't know very many people, including yourself, if you think that confabulation and self-deception aren't integral parts of our core psychological makeup. LLMs work so well because they inherit not just our logical thinking patterns, but our faults and fallacies.


what I call it is "buggy garbage"

it's not a person, it doesn't hallucinate or have imagination

it's simply unreliable software, riddled with bugs


(Shrug) Perhaps other sites beckon.

The suggestion that hallucinations are avoidable in humans is quite a bold claim.

> Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

It is, though. We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture, and numerous case studies by companies who have tried putting them in control loops! We have about 4 years of examples of bad things happening because the trigger was given to an LLM.


> We have numerous studies on why hallucinations are central to the architecture,

And we have tens of thousands of years of shared experience of "People Were Wrong and Fucked Shit Up". What's your point?

Again, my point isn't that LLMs are infallible; it's that they only need to be better than their competition, and their competition sucks.


It's a fine line. Humans don't always fuck shit up.

But human systems that don't fuck shit up are short-lived, rare, and fragile, and they've only become a potential - not a reality - in the last century or so.

The rest of history is mostly just endless horrors, with occasional tentative moments of useful insight.


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> I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

While i certainly respect your interactivity and subsequent force multiplayer nature of AI, this doesn't mean you should try to emulate an already given piece of work. You'll certainly gain a small dopamine when you successfully copy something but it would also atrophy your critical skills and paralyze you from making any sort of original art. You'll miss out on discovering the feeling of any frontier work that you can truly call your own.


So instead of actually making films, thing you as a filmmaker supposedly like to do, you have some chat bot to do it for you? Or what part of that is generated by chat bot?

Claims of productive boosts must always be inspected very carefully, as they are often perceived, and reality may be the opposite (eg spending more time wrestling the tools), or creating unmaintainable debt, or making someone else spend extra time to review the PR and make 50 comments.


> So instead of actually making films, thing you as a filmmaker supposedly like to do, you have some chat bot to do it for you? Or what part of that is generated by chat bot?

There's no chatbot. You can use image-to-image, ControlNets, LoRAs, IPAdapters, inpainting, outpainting, workflows, and a lot of other techniques and tools to mold images as if they were clay.

I use a lot of 3D blocking with autoregressive editing models to essentially control for scene composition, pose, blocking, camera focal length, etc.

Here's a really old example of what that looks like (the models are a lot better at this now) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYVgNNJP6Vc

There are lots of incredibly talented folks using Blender, Unreal Engine, Comfy, Touch Designer, and other tools to interface with models and play them like an orchestra - direct them like a film auteur.


As a rule real creativity blossoms under constraints, not under abundance.

But new media also lets creativity blossom. The printing press eventually enabled novels through cost reduction. Prussian blue pigment is a large part of ukyio-e's attraction; it got used a lot because it was new and was a better blue. The Gothic arch's improved strength compared to the circular arch enabled cathedrals with huge windows. Concrete enabled all sorts of fluid architecture; Soviet bus stations, for instance [1].

[1] https://www.russiabeyond.com/arts/327147-10-best-soviet-bus-...


Trying to make a dent in the universe while we metabolize and oxidize our telomeres away is a constraint.

But to be more in the spirit of your comment, if you've used these systems at all, you know how many constraints you bump into on an almost minute to minute basis. These are not magical systems and they have plenty of flaws.

Real creativity is connecting these weird, novel things together into something nobody's ever seen before. Working in new ways that are unproven and completely novel.


Genuine question: does the agent work for you if you didn't build it, train it, or host it?

It's ostensibly doing things you asked it, but in terms dictated by its owner.


indeed

and it's even worse than that: you're literally training your replacement by using it when it re-transmits what you're accepting/discarding

and you're even paying them to replace you


> AI is a force multiplier for labor capital

for an 2011 account that's a shockingly naive take

yes, AI is a labor capital multiplier. and the multiplicand is zero

hint: soon you'll be competing not with humans without AI, but with AIs using AIs


Even if it's >1, it doesn't follow that it's good news for the "labor capitalist".

"OK, so I lost my job, but even adjusting for that, I can launch so many more unfinished side-projects per hour now!"


I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

Do you know anything about "Hollywood grade VFX" ? Have you ever worked for any company that does it?

No more nepotism in Hollywood

Do you think "Hollywood VFX" is full of nepotism?


always good to be in the pick and shovel biz

Extremely exaggerated comment. LLMs dont hallucinate that much. That doesn’t rule them out of any control loop.

I mean, I think you have not put much thought into your theory.


If I was going to nitpick it I would point out that `itemsCount` could easily be confused with `items.Count`, or vice versa, depending on syntax highlighting. That kind of bug can have a negative impact if one or the other is mutated while the function is running.

So clearly distinguishing the local `numberOfItems` from `items.Count` _could_ be helpful. But I wouldn't ping it in a review.


That’s why it’s `itemCount` and not `itemsCount`. ;)

(Because the correct English term is “item count”, not “items count”.)

Personally, I tend to only name it “count” if it’s a variable that is used to keep a count, i.e. it is continually incremented as new items are processed.

Otherwise I tend to prefer `numItems`.

Yes, this is very close to bike-shedding. There is, however, an argument to be made for consistency in a code base.


They shouldn't send marketing mail from an address they want to be read. I think that's been the standard for a while, in practice - most actual transactions come from orders@<blank> or something similar while marketing mail comes from a dozen other addresses.

Agreed, but many do. They want all mail to be read. Worst offender here is a bank.

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