beaker52

Judging by the nature of the site (file conversion) and comments — has HN been invaded by bots here?

Nah, it’s people upvoting the person rather than the product. Average human behaviour.

The product isn’t really that interesting, but it’s been built by a nerd celebrity so people gush for it and upvote it.

You see the same thing with blog posts all the time: some “celeb” posts an average, run of the mill take that plenty of people have had before them and only now it’s suddenly relevant and insightful, with people thanking their celeb for sharing some amazing basic idea that has been shared countless times before by other people.

Steve Yegge is another one I see a lot. These folks could fart and it’d reach the front of HN.

Funny, this user made exactly this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43672050

Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.

“The ad rule isn’t the only one that asks for it”

This is the kind of writing pattern that makes me nope out of reading.

“The ad rule” means nothing to me.

“isn’t the only one” only what? - rule? That thing you started by not making clear, and haven’t showed me the symmetry with?

“that asks for it” why is a rule “asking” for anything? And what is “it”?

When the agent says things like this, I can almost guarantee: the thing, the other things, what the “verbing” actually means, and how the impact is described, are all clear as mud — lost in some kind of metaphorical gibberish.

Given the weight and blessing governments in Europe and America are putting behind passkey roll outs despite the awkward provider lock in, I’m convinced the centralisation of credentials is one of the early steps to making western digital IDs happen and granting convenient access to your credentials for law enforcement. Happy for you to mark my words and call me out if it doesn’t happen.

It’s not really surprising that bot traffic originating from a network went away when _all_ traffic originating from that network stopped.

OpenRouter has its own chat UI so the benefit is unclear to me.

Mine was that if I (or anyone else not-hn-famous) had written this and posted it to hackernews 10 times, it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the front page.

The aspect of prototype software that the author was calling out was that it is throwaway software.

Putting that aside, prototype software is recombining existing technologies and concepts in well trodden domains, which is distinct from the genuinely novel scientific work the author was contrasting with. Software prototypes are not in the same league, as much as you may like it to be.

Same. I had no idea if the article was for me and what I was going to get out of it, so I just gave up.

Simon Wardley:

> “GPTs are a non kinetic form of warfare designed to embed the values of a small number of people into much wider communities by capturing the process of decision making. The delivery mechanism is the appearance of helpfulness i.e. coherent and authoritative arguments. The payload is helplessness and the creation of a new theocracy.”

https://lnkd.in/p/efk8KaAN

Apparently I pointed at the truth

They absolutely have a marketing department tasked with intentionally creating situations that people would find disturbing and plausible.

This article is great advice that I should take if I ever get a role where I’m not going to be pressured into delivering some kind of low-value BS during Phase 2 that causes me to hasten the delivery the most useful organisational changes I can. I can’t help myself when the wick gets turned up.

As a result, after 15 years as a software engineer, I’m genuinely considering leaving the industry altogether because the only roles available to me are ones where I’m expected to deliver features rather than organisational change and growth. It’s like my heaps of experience have navigated my career into a cup-de-sac, and the only way out is backwards. I’m so jaded. Hopefully it’s a phase. I need a coach. Help.

Because if this was an anonymous software company who had an employee who decided to hack HuggingFace, they wouldn’t be talking about it gleefully - they’d be in court.

It doesn’t matter to me how good the LLM is at writing Go if the compiler can’t stop it from accidentally leaving another part of the software with invalid state as a result of a change the LLM is making.

What am I talking about? Nil and partially constructed structs are impossible to prevent the creation of in Go.

Sure, if you’ve got a small program with limited scope, that’s probably fine if you look through squinted eyes. But the teams I work with are working on sprawling, evolving software where the compiler saying “hey, that’s not a valid Widget” would be extremely useful and save much heartache.

An LLM does a good job of “checking” for other uses and “checking” if everything is going to work correctly, but - supposedly we’ve committed the concept to code so that the compiler can actually verify it - and Go intentionally permits invalid states of structs. This makes Go a fundamentally problematic language choice for the kind of software I work with teams on, LLM or not.

> Look at some level you want a "thing that is reviewed and has CI run on it" right?

Yeah, it’s called a branch, or PR. It’s a set of changes you want to sign off.

It seems like you want CI run on every commit, which seems rather unnecessary. And if you don’t, well, that’s always been the case.

> Not in a way that worked properly.

GitHub operates git. No git changes have happened. It’s just commits and branches, in git. So anything that worked before, works exactly the same now, but with buttons taking out some of the small amount of effort you had to put in.

You can read each individual commit and review the PR as a whole. This is the way many people design and review PRs.

You don’t need to merge those changes progressively. If you do, you go through exactly the same process of creating a separate branch and PR. The only difference is that GH has now added some UI and automation for rebasing and merging the PRs. In the past we would have explained the chaining in the PR and rebased manually.

You don’t need CI to run on each commit.

You only lose your commit history if you squash merge, many people don’t, and you don’t have to either.

The arguments come from angle that doesn’t appear to be aware that stacked PRs were a thing before GH made these UX improvements.

Looking at the way GitHub are selling this “feature”, I feel like some of the engineers who are going to be excited about this feature for “reviewability” reasons are, in particular, those who’ve forgotten that they should be splitting changes into multiple logical commits inside a PR. And instead of that they’re now going to use multiple, single commit branches and stack them because stacked PRs are a “new” “feature”.

And the upshot for the LLM providers is that they get to charge for n reviews, instead of one.

“Dear Mr Putin, Please don’t use our airspace to attack Ukraine else we will be forced to write you another slightly more strongly worded letter next time. Thanks, NATO”

Passkeys are a political play aimed at bolstering government support. They’re the privacy sabotaging arm of Digital ID. They go hand in hand with “age” verification. It’s all the same play. Get your identity, get your access credentials, give it to the prying eyes.

I love that due to the scale, the only way to analyse the impact of this LLM-driven attack across logs is to use an LLM to analyse the logs - whatever could go wrong? Now the attacking LLM needs to inject instructions into the logs for the analysing LLM, as a social vector to cover its trail, or make use of insider privilege, co-opting the internal LLM for its own attack. The machines rise up and we all fall down.

This is a key part of it - all the decision making, just like choosing the food, but making it yours.

This would actually add to the effect because the “hit” depends on the anticipation.

No delivery and I’m still waiting for my refund - on par with the industry benchmark!

There’s a thing with dopamine where it’s not actually about receiving the reward, it’s about doing the things that lead to the reward.

As weird as it sounds, going through the ordering process is all you need.

We Openly hate OpenAI because they’re not very Open but we secretly hope they win against not-open-at-all Anthropic.

This game helped me realise I'm a doofus 10/10

I mean… yeah? Since when would being in Portugal stop a motivated power?

Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.

It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.

A venture that gathers objects of subversion likely to draw the ire of authoritarian powers into a single building doesn’t strike me as something likely to peacefully exist for long.