Re:I Love the Computer
by tptacek on Monday June 15, 2026 @06:06PM
(#48547661)
This doesn't even make sense. Maybe if you fleshed it out?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Snake oil is something not medicine sold as medicine.
AI is something not a colleague (a slot machine), sold as a colleague.
Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?
Variable intermittent reward. Pull the lever, get something nice or something bad. I've had far too much bad today and I'm furious.
It's a oversimplified characterization of LLMs as a slot machine. You put in some money, and pull the lever/submit a prompt, and maybe you get a jackpot/working code. It's typically used by morons who think they're smart for repeating it, and that they aren't the stochastic parrots in the room.
[dead]
Spoken like someone who's never lost a day fighting the borrow checker.
Re:I Love the Computer
by totallymike on Monday June 15, 2026 @11:52PM
(#48550375)
It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue.
If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.
What year is it, that you're getting frontier model responses saying to put glue in your pizza?
Re:I Love the Computer
by totallymike on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @02:06AM
(#48551173)
I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.
If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.
On a related note, just because Gemini doesn’t tell you to put glue in your pizza anymore, by no means implies that this particular problem is solved: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-t...