0x262d
0x262d on Hacker News
This is an interesting distinction. I can't stand AI writing but have no problem with AI coding.
I think the key difference is that code is a tool used for a given purpose. It can be slop, or structured better or worse, but at the end of the day it exists to be executed, and its execution is either correct or not. Additionally, good code that does a given thing can only be expressed so many reasonable ways, probably. So LLM-generated code can be perfectly fine.
By contrast, human writing is about exchanging thoughts. Often those thoughts are about infinitely complicated and poorly understood systems, like other people, or emotions, or politics, so it's not a matter of exactly encoding something but attempting to describe it imperfectly. All the tiny little details encoded in how someone writes something can work to this end and are also a product of the writer's thought patterns and overall personality; this all conveys useful information to the reader. In other words, there is a much greater degree of fine detail that affects the quality of writing than of code, and LLMs suck at those fine details for most subjects that are interesting. On top of that, they don't have original thoughts.
Really? How many times can Democrats take power and shrug their shoulders and mostly do nothing before you stop expecting fireworks?
I use the free-tier Oracle server, but: Nextcloud. Minecraft server. I will probably move my Joplin and Wallabag hosting there soon, currently paying for both. I tried running a Valheim server there, but ran into bugs emulating it with FEX, unfortunately.
Yeah, getting all your sensitive stuff off your phone onto a secure cloud service seems like the obvious approach here right? They can still escalate what they try to coerce you to do, but they don't have physical access to your data just by taking your phone, and you can also leave the phone with them and only lose the device if needed. In my likely scenario - innocent traveler, they aren't looking for anything specific, but I still don't want them to look through my files and photos just because I happen to travel internationally - that seems like it puts it out of reach (and out of obvious view) for now.
To what extent is it organic demand rather than manufactured demand? Clearly there's some demand for AI use but a lot of it has been shoved down people's throats with usage quotas, pushing it into every webpage and application, etc. To me it seems like there is a large degree of central dictate to use it pushed, at some level, by the perceived need to invest in it faster than China.
This observation is exactly the Marxist prediction of how capitalism gradually transforms society from early capitalism, which nearly fit the Econ 101 assumptions of many small producers and consumers and such, into something that operates economically more like communism by being centrally planned, but with the severe drawbacks of a minority ruling class and being run undemocratically on the basis of private profit not usefulness to people. This is an interesting book on the subject of how far we have come in this regard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
That's certainly an opinion... Quite a lot of condemnation for no real argument. I personally think surplus value and socially necessary labor time are quite straightforward, intuitive concepts. Meanwhile, I found this tidbit on Henry George's wikipedia page: "Upon Marx's death, George admitted he has not read any of his works, which were untranslated into English at the time,"
For anyone interested in reading more from Marx's side, Wage Labour And Capital by Marx is a pamphlet meant for mass distribution and not a difficult read. I've heard A People's Guide To Capitalism recommended as a high quality modernized version of the same ideas.
How could two people die from it in Germany with modern medicine? Is malaria randomly fatal despite treatment, or did they not understand what the infection was or not seek treatment or something?
"getting people to bet against themselves" ie forcing them to via oligopoly and regulatory capture.
I think this comment is mistaken. The blog post is simplistic and doesn't cover the case you're describing of multiple good products for different consumers, but it's ultimately still right. Ads are not a good solution for this use case either because they don't exist to actually match consumers to good products, they exist to selfishly drive sales to their brand owners. That goal is parasitic to the service of product recommendation. Similarly with Amazon itself, their goal is to maximize some combination of sales revenue and ad revenue.
The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.
The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.
One would hope it means it sorts by sales volume.
They also keep making it more annoying to even get to and read the reviews. It feels like it gets more hidden at the bottom of the page every few months. What a shame! Imagine how useful it could be.
The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.
edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.
wow, hadn't heard about this until now. article:
https://archive.is/J9Antcorrection that it says:
> The investigators who questioned Jon told him Homeland Security couldn’t obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, he said, but the breadth of what federal investigators did ask for shook him.
> Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
However, what information the US government can or can't get from tech companies seems like a moving target.
look at every paid streaming service...
Thanks for clarifying this. The article is heavily AI-written and unsurprisingly does not make that distinction, which is annoying. Not a very high quality source post for this.
Right, that was egregiously misleading. Well, I'm not sure how misleading it is because the average is a meaningless metric for most people's experience, so probably very.
just putting "rewritten by AI" in the headline would prevent the missed expectation feeling I got from clicking into it. but it would also sound less cool and probably get fewer upvotes, so...
What is the downside of this if I trust the software provider (eg Riot Games or presumably Valve if this ever comes to Linux)? I have recently come around in support of Riot's anticheat because multiplayer competitive games are so damaged without it, even though I use Linux 95% of the time.
This is not a valid critique - I don't agree with your conception that "the people and businesses that frequent this forum" have a shared ideological viewpoint either. I equally distrust Chinese and American capitalist perspectives.
I just read the linked Fast Company article [0]. One question that particularly frustrates me about this process is: why are the former leadership of companies that become enshittified so quiet about it? Do they just get paid out with restrictive NDAs?
One of the only exceptions to this I can remember is the founder of Whatsapp, who gave an interview pretty critical of Meta some years back after it acquired Whatsapp.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/91542655/bitwarden-scrubs-always...
I'm getting really tired of the enshittification cycle. Learning about android verification and captcha changes recently has been another big frustration point. I moved to android as a more open alternative to apple just a few years ago, and to bitwarden from lastpass around the same time. I would like to just have these infrastructural services work well and quietly without thinking about them for many years. Do I really have to put up with this happening faster and faster for the rest of capitalism? (I think so)
right, that comment reads as if they're victims for intentionally putting themselves in the position of holding and reading the maximum amount of information about everyone they can. bizarre
is this better than normal communication in any way, or just not much worse?
A lot of people expect to be owning the capital. However I also just don't think the technology will displace programmers that quickly.
Is it meaningfully misleading? How often is this an obstacle for the FBI?
sorry, owning a tesla is a sign of being poor?
I'm curious if you think the same thing was lost with the transition from reading man pages and first-party documentation to going to stackoverflow or google first (at least, I assume the former was more common a couple decades ago)