alphazard

There's a whole lot of information on this page that doesn't tell me anything about what this actually is. Can anyone spell out what the architecture is here?

They claim it's not an LLM, which I read as "not an auto-regressive token generator". I assume they are still using a transformer, otherwise they would be talking about the thing that's not a transformer, instead of all the fluff on the linked page. But they emphasize parallel generation, so is it like a text diffusion model?

> NPC can't comprehend working hard on creative projects to avoid being a wage slave

> Democratization of access has its victims.

Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.

For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.

This framing of security as something that belongs in the harness is completely wrong, and I hope no one is relying on a correct harness to keep their agents isolated.

VM, or even just a container will do. The agent should be able to run as root in its environment and do whatever it wants. If you can't give it that, you aren't sandboxing correctly.

> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition...

This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process). The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system. This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.

EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.

Not sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment.

It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.

Humans have been inserting benign noise into their writing without affecting the signal for thousands of years. They called it "style".

Apparently superfluous descriptions, unnecessary words, and paragraph footnotes are all fine, but gumbel softmax (or whatever's going on here) isn't.

I should have expected this level of discourse from 2026 HN.

Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken?

1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth.

2. Preserving immune function later into life.

3. Preserving genetic and epigenetic accuracy later into life.

Maybe it will be 1. But I would bet on 2 or 3. Which both assume that by reducing the difference between rates, the phenomenon of cancer could be reduced or eliminated.

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from.

A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.

Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries.

The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the imposters can point to a difference that they were responsible for, knowing that upper management also has no idea whether that difference was actually an improvement.

The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better.

All of this was obvious decades ago, but now everyone wants to have a do-nothing job at a tech company, and to help their friends get one too. The result is imposters everywhere, "imposter syndrome" was brought into the vernacular to normalize a lack of expertise. "No one knows what they are doing, it's okay to not know how to do your job". That's what your (product) manager tells themself in the mirror each morning. Turns out: skill predicts quality, and an org ships quality proportional to the skill of the decision makers.

I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.

Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.

In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?

> If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.

The problem that I imagine you see with this, is that it doesn't conform to a particular, special, notion of fairness that you think the market should have.

Informed parties have an edge over uninformed parties. This edge is "unfair" if you believe the market should be a lottery. The market is designed to pay people with accurate beliefs, by taking from people with inaccurate beliefs. Everyone's belief is valued based on its accuracy, and the market is fair in that sense. Fairness is actually irrelevant to the societal good the market provides, which is to produce accurate prices. A third party, who doesn't participate, shouldn't care about the market being "fair", they should care about it giving good information.

> A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.

If you are betting on what a person will say, and the person knows about the market, that is a chaotic system. If you bid the price away from max entropy then you deserve the outcome.

> Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,

This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals. The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.

For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.

I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.

This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software.

What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion about, or start using day-to-day.

Things on the front page used to be high quality software, research papers, etc. And now it is entirely driven by marketing operations, and social circles. There is no differential amplification of quality.

I don't know what the solution is, but I imagine it involves some kind of weighted voting. That would be a step towards a complicated engagement algorithm, instead of the elegant and predictable exponential decay that HN is known for.

Instead of understanding all of this, and when it does or does not apply, it's probably better to disclose vulnerabilities anonymously over Tor. It's not worth the hassle of being forced to hire a lawyer, just to be a white hat.

> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.

I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building software.

The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that and just build the software they have in mind using AI.

> And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces more problems than it solves. A sign of an elite engineer is knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed rather than call into it. Or to re-implement something because the library that does it is a bad fit.

The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a shared understanding.

People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work.

I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets.

All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.

In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people. Software is going to become an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly. The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.

> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.

The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy. That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.

Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target. Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.

Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.

This kind of "but for us it's different" thinking is a little amusing.

I don't care about the implementation process or the RFCs or what-have-you. If there is a democratic committee of humans that decides what goes in, and there is no bias for minimalism (e.g. 1/3 could strike down a proposal instead of 1/2) then the process will tend towards bloat.

Yes agree, we are definitely past peak Go.

Suspiciously, after Rob Pike retired from the project, the amount of language and standard library changes skyrocketed. Lot's of people now trying to get their thing into the language so they can add it to their list of accomplishments.

Clear evidence that you need someone saying "no" often.

What no one wants to hear is rust is destined for the same fate. If you want to see the future of rust, look at C++. Rust has a much better initial state, but the rules evolving the system (the governance model, the kinds of developers that work on it, etc.) are the same as C++ and so we should expect the same trajectory.

Unless you have a system that says "no" a lot, and occasionally removes features, programming languages decay, and the game has been (historically, before LLMs) to pick a language that would be in the sweet spot for the time that you need to use it, while keeping your eye out for something else to switch to once it becomes sufficiently unusable.

Can someone, who knows computer graphics, explain why the old library had so many issues with flickering and black triangles or rectangles flashing on the app, and why the new library is expected to not have those same problems?

> Voila: you've re-invented product management.

This is a names vs. structure thing. For a moment, taboo the term product manager.

What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.

The conventional wisdom (bad meme) is going to the labor market with a search term for people who claim to know what the users want, any user, any problem, doesn't matter. These people are usually incompetent and have never written software. Then hiring 1 and potentially more of the people that respond to the shibboleth.

If you want the first case, then you can't say "product manager" because people will automatically do the second case.

> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.

It's not.

Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI. That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality.

Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house. Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes?

So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving. And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them. No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be. The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs.

If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.

There are individuals who have good taste for products in certain domains. Their own preferences are an accurate approximation for those of the users. Those people might add value when they are given control of the product.

That good taste doesn't translate between domains very often. Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good taste for a video game inventory screen. And that's the crux of the problem. There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent, and spread lies about their importance to the success of every business. What's worse is that otherwise smart people (founders, executives) fall for it because they think hiring them is what they are supposed to do.

Over time, as more and more people realized that PM is a side door into big companies with lots of money, "Product Manager" became an imposter role like "Scrum Master". Now product orgs are pretty much synonymous with incompetence.

Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?

It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.