psyklic
psyklic on Hacker News
Almost all of this did happen, but in my experience was much rarer than the article makes it sound:
- I've never heard or experienced NES cartridges rusting -- but I've had to blow on them, and I've had plenty of CDs scratched (typically when storing them without a case).
- Yes, Windows had significantly more blue screens; however, the cause of lost work was always failure to Ctrl+S (not a blue screen).
- Memory was certainly limited (and in DOS there mostly was no multi-tasking), but only fanatical players would run into the issue described. And you were aware that many games required a memory extender.
- Even now, games are massively hacked e.g. GTA V Online.
- My original PC had a TURBO button, but I never had to use it.
Math research isn't all or nothing on a single problem. Rather, the problem would serve as inspiration to explore achievable subproblems, weaker problems, related topics, etc. These would be interesting papers by themselves, but if lucky may also lead to progress on the main problem. So this leaves lots of room for using AI as an assistant.
Why aren't they running agents on isolated computers without Internet access? This way, breaking free of containers would not matter.
It is truly a security nightmare that so many people are have given agents root access to their entire computers, in addition to presumably very private personal information.
Motivation can come from many sources, not only grading, e.g. individual encouragement, exciting applications, day-to-day relevance, interest shown by peers. Also students can just be intrinsically motivated.
According to the article, #1 leads to "failure and drop-out rates of 50 to 80%". #2 and #3 might work for organized and motivated students, but graded assignments from other classes will be prioritized by most.
A major goal of experienced programmers is to manage risk, often by reducing unnecessary complexity. LLMs seem to be the exact opposite of this, perhaps soon producing volumes of code noone has time to review.
Should the industry go this way, there very possibly will be some reckoning later with a misaligned model.
That said, there are certainly less risky ways to use LLMs positively in development!
You can read a lot of the newspaper and still finish by the end of breakfast.
It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.
This is what happened with me and BASIC. I had to upgrade to C when my programs became limited by complexity, speed, and difficulties robustly integrating audio.
Yes, likely because people have stopped caring about privacy, or perhaps given up.
To gain a bit of convenience, they are voluntarily sending their emails, credit card statements, calendars, location history, etc. to third parties and giving bots admin-level access to their computers.
This would have been unimaginable decades ago, and it is still dangerous (both individually and collectively ...).
The goal of PhD programs has never been to have every student become a professor. Also, strong STEM PhD students generally don't need much help finding jobs after they graduate. Claiming that PhD students "aren't prepared" for industry careers is simply saying that students lack industry experience (obviously, being students!).
The problem here -- and why universities even do research at all -- is that industry's support of basic science is not very stable. At least when I was in school, industry research generally was more applied and engineering-focused.
This is happening with many popular YouTube creators as well, pivoting from tech tutorials to AI. Kyle Cook made a video showing how engagement has cratered for non-AI stuff, making AI content extremely lucrative [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdTLLlby9E
I guess they updated the way it connects to the remote machine. Perhaps something about my setup wasn't one of their test cases?
I am stuck using an older VSCode. A few versions ago, it stopped connecting to my remote machine.
and 2tb -> 8tb storage is +$3k!
The most important part of math is advancing human understanding. A correct answer by itself is not as important as understanding why it is correct.
I'm constantly surprised how many people are critical of research to understand neural nets, immediately telling me they are black boxes and hopeless to understand. I believe it's a consequence of being portrayed as the opposite of (classically interpretable) linear regression.
Many people additionally have little patience for research when the engineering is moving so quickly. Even many interpretability researchers give up far too soon if research doesn't yield immediately gratifying results.
> Was software made before 2000 better?
At the time of release, yes. They had to ensure the software worked before printing CDs and floppies. Nowadays they release buggy versions that users essentially test for them.
Everyone dislikes pedantically verifying references. However, if you cut corners here then will you also cut corners pedantically verifying research results?
Beyond references, the point of the literature review is to ensure you have read the literature and understand it well enough to accurately summarize it. If you present a literature review, it's likely assumed you did all of this. So at the very least you should be upfront about how an LLM assisted you.
Before LLMs, I've watched in horror as colleagues
immediately copy-paste-ran Stack Overflow solutions in terminal, without even reading them.
LLM agents are basically the same, except now everyone is doing it. They copy-paste-run lots of code without meaningfully reviewing it.
My fear is that some colleagues are getting more skilled at prompting but less skilled at coding and writing. And the prompting skills may not generalize much outside of certain LLMs.
Elon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...
I highly doubt collaborators are thinking less of you for not having more publications! After all, if they are collaborators they've already decided to work with you.
My understanding is you were awarded a PhD but with the minimum number of papers? This sounds completely normal. If you are trying for faculty positions it may appear "thin", but in industry will make you stand out for many jobs. In AI, there are many researchers who don't have a PhD!
It does sound awkward if asked why you didn't write more papers, but you can just discuss some of the challenges you faced in your existing works rather than getting into personal details.
Recently about half of the items sold to me as "New" have arrived used or counterfeit. The sellers have 5-star ratings, despite numerous reviews about receiving used or fake products. Unfortunately, Amazon crosses out these negative reviews and doesn't count them toward the overall seller rating.
The hypothetical you state only matters once you have a game! The biggest risk by far is not AI assets -- it's finishing the game.
So if AI increases your odds of finishing, go for it. Then once you have a game, more people will care about whether it's good than whether you used AI assets. I suspect there will be lots of interest in how you incorporated AI, maybe even moreso than otherwise. You could alternatively use the AI assets as placeholders and intend later to replace them with hand-drawn, if desired.
When I made games, I had zero interest in making assets but wanted to understand every detail about graphics engines. I just grabbed random mediocre assets from online. I would have definitely used AI to make assets but done the coding myself.
A notepad "welcome experience"? How is notepad turning into bloatware?
This happens with every new tech. When websites first appeared, many businesses trusted kids to build their website. The key in applied work is to build a portfolio that shows off your abilities.
The reality is that most people who need services don't know anyone who is traditionally qualified and available. So, a portfolio may convince them to take a chance on a newcomer over an overly expensive firm (that often also just hires newcomers).
Have you tried emailing him? He likely also owns hopding.com, and both domains consistently seem to be at Squarespace. The last commit on his GitHub (Feb 2025) someone commented "Good to see you're still with us :-)", so he may just not update things often.
It's very possibly moreso a cultural issue. COVID caused continuing low attendance, there is currently an anti-education political trend, and AI advancements allow students to be lazy. If parents and peers don't value education, the students won't either.
> Why would someone with GE expect to keep it?
Peaceful protest is protected from retaliation by the First Amendment ...