I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.
Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.
The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.
I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist. And TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom so they can continue to operate. I bet they even had a convo such as "we'll never tell you what to say," and both sides genuinely believed it.
But this never ends well. Even if there's never a conversation about it, directly, the implication is there.
I don't care about TBPN, specifically. I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently. (And I say this as someone who pays for some media, but not nearly enough. I don't have $10/mo for every outlet that deserves it.)
> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.
I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.
Right, it's simple mathematics. It costs X energy units to raise a human to adulthood, and Y energy units to train a frontier language model. What's so hard about this?
You can unfortunately see this across the media spectrum. There seem to be basically two paths:
1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.
2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.
I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.
TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.
Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?
> Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?
This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.
There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
> There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.
Well yes, but calling them politically independent is a bit of a stretch. A 2024 study found 52% of board members (Rundfunkrat) have a party membership (~2% of the general population is part of a party). [0]
To take one example you mention, the ZDF-Fernsehrat is dominated by party members (33/60).Notably only by the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the SocDems (SPD), with 2 green members and 1 member of the SSW. Neither the left party, nor the far right AfD have any representation, despite accounting for roughly 30% of the national vote. Religious communities have signifigantly more representation (9), than the scientific community (0). [1]
Public media was always a tool to help create and maintain a societal overton window of shared truth and identity, and as such very helpful in keeping Germany united and democratic. There was however also always clearly immoral and untrue directions taken for ideological reasons or political convenience, for example the support of Apartheid South Africa til its fall, and the recent biased coverage of Israel. Many other topics as well, like immigration, covid and the war in Russia, are presented in a way that does not align with significant amounts of the german population: We are currently witnessing this overton window breaking apart completely, in other words, German public media has failed in its primary purpose.
Maybe I'm biased as an American, but if this were to be proposed here, who decides which outlets are blessed with the government money and the corresponding air of legitimacy of being an official public broadcaster?
> The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?
Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.
I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.
I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.
The CPB, the legal entity that the government actually funded (and which in turn supplied some of the funding for PBS/NPR and its stations) had its funding rescinded by Congress (under HR4 last year), and has since shuttered.
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
Reincorporate? You can just do things. Direct a human to take the required meatspace actions as the judiciary to recreate whatever legal entity previously existed, open a bank account, fund it, and start distributing funds.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
In this case, you cannot simply force Congress to appropriate money to a reincorporated CPB -- unless you were to get a second ruling from a judge that the rescission was unconstitutional.
The Trump EO was deemed unconstitutional because he specifically called out that it didn't like the "left-wing propaganda" (his words) in PBS/NPR programming. Congress's rescission is ostensibly for budgetary reasons -- even if we all know in our heart that they were following Trump's orders.
What we can do is elect a Congress that will revive the CPB. Here's hoping.
PBS brings on Brooks Capehart to discuss politics. Having two partisan players from opposite sides of spectrum is a good way to get some balance. The fact that they agree so often on the fundamentals tells me the US is cooked.
Ahem, their reporting on nuclear power was often non-scientific and just plain wrong. In fact anything having to do with the environment was generally pretty poor from a factual and scientific basis. Their reporting on politics was consistently rated as one of the most extreme in the US media.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
This is partially the case in Italy, though it changed over the years.
The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.
The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.
Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.
What does this even mean? Who is being "genuine"? This is far to naive a take for a company thats burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, and constantly striving to set the tone of AI and their own supremacy.
There's no way a popular show like that needs money, they were probably millionaires already with sponsorships. Why are we pretending these people are poor or need help to survive?
I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard.
I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.
I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.
Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js.
I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.
I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.
I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made some contributions to their standard library. But I completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd need an import map just to remap them all to using the same version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr and npm compatibility.
As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths:
- Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc
- that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening.
I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.
Personally I've moved to bun. Its basically identical to node out of the box - almost all nodejs projects just work. But its usually faster. And it can run typescript files directly. And it has a JS bundler & minifier built in. And it can --watch for changes.
I hope nodejs copies these features. They're great.
bun is not bad, but for me consistently slower than pnpm for dependency management, and unfortunately I hit a very strange async runtime bug with it, so ended up just going with node
Yes, the technical problem is fundamental. But if Deno managed to be a truly great runtime that solved a lot of people’s gripes with Node and made ES modules etc the price of admission for using it there would have been momentum to create a new module ecosystem.
But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the incentives shift, it just isn’t worth anyone’s while to create new, modern modules when the old ones work well enough.
It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire. But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place in the end.
It wasn't worth recreating packages everytime you needed something that Deno had. If you ended up needing something and there was already something on npm for it, it was easier to just switch back to using node than to adapt/maintain a fork or alternative to an npm package. I think the lack of npm compatibility earlier on led to a lot of churn. Deno would probably be dead if they never improved the npm compatibility, especially considering the rise of bun promising performance improvements like Deno, but with better node compatibility at the time.
Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees.
If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.
Just an historic curiosity: Nero setting Rome on fire is just a legend. At the time, there was a fire every other day due to wooden houses and poor to nonexistent safety. I even heard somewhere that Nero actively tried to help some people escaping from the fire by opening his residence's doors. So the comparison with Nero could still be correct, but for another reason: someone being wrongly blamed.
Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as a VC-funded company, and still is going strong?
In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.
Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).
its so strange to see so many people who will never be handed 5 million dollars to write a vm jumping in front of criticism for one guy that did. sorry but when you become a public figure in this way you should expect to be subjected to a different sort of public scrutiny than, say, a rank and file employee who they pay.
i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.
Well the people who get laid off also have feelings, not sure why we should care more about the ceo's feelings so much that we shouldn't criticize them
I'm not saying that we should care more for the CEO, but that we should have empathy for someone who is, ultimately, an engineer who built something and gave it away for free, watched everyone else around him get rich off the back of his hard work, and then tried to do something worthwhile again and still chose to give it away for free. There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.
Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)
> Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating?
I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.
When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.
A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.
People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
The reverse is true: asshole bosses who do right by workers quietly. Sometimes they're public assholes and privately terrible though. But sometimes (perhaps very rarely) they're openly caring AND do the right thing behind curtains.
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.
This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.
We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.
> We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
> How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.
Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.
Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside.
The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business.
Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster.
Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort.
We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.
This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world.
Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
I will agree with the sentiment that a lot of these companies even pivot from open source because its quite hard to make money from open source in general, and yes the point of hyperscalers taking the same code and selling it as their own service at cheaper rates/ more integratability with other suite of products is also another point.
I'm pretty confused about what your point is at this point. No one can throw rocks at an open source effort, except for ones that cross a certain threshold of capital? I don't buy the argument that it's impossible for any company smaller than Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. to be a bad actor who deserves to be called out. I don't know enough about Deno to make my own judgment on whether they're a bad actor or not, but I don't find your arguments here to be particularly compelling that trying to criticize them is unfair.
The hyper scalers are built on running and offering managed versions of open source software (Linux, reddis, postgres, elastic, java, python, JavaScript/node, docker, kubernetes,etc)
That's cute to think that they're unrelated, but open source is fundamentally about freedom.
The walls around us are constantly being built up and caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more of the commons.
The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel, communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from us.
Open source is just a family of licenses. Nobody is "open source". There is no single entity nor there is a single unified community with shared values behind it. There are just many many projects/applications developped by entitites completely different in nature from the single hobbyist developer to the giant hyperscalers you mention with pretty much everything inbetween with vastly different goals, sizes, profesionalism, funding. And there are many different reasons to choose an open source license, some do it to attract contributions, others for the freedom it offers to the users and developpers, some want to force the license to stay the same, others do not mind if forks are proprietary, some companies will just do that for the optics/marketing and have more featureful version of their product sold under a proprietary license, etc, etc. You can't just put them all under a single "open source" banner and pretend "they" (whoever they are) need to fight against anyone else.
I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."
Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.
Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in languages.
Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.
But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.
How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.
It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.
Your analogy doesn't work here. Going to a restaurant is like using an app store. Installing apks is like cooking at home. Nothing stops you from cooking a meal that will get you sick.
Now imagine that every restaurant in your city is owned by one of two megacorporations and they really don't want you to have a microwave at home, let alone a stove. They expect that you will get all your food from them. This is where it's going with apps right now.
It works fine for the point that they were making.
Which is that the fact that restaurants have to certify for food safety training and pass regular inspection is perfectly reasonable, and allows those who aren't experts in those areas, or want to continually inspect kitchens to dine out in confidence & conveinience. (or at least vastly reduced risk).
There should be some equivalent, safe, experience in the technology space. Especially given how powerful a tool of liberation it is.
Of course, who controls that, and the ability to turn off those safeguards is important for many many other reasons and... also a question of liberty. And so I think it is a difficult conflict to resolve elegantly.
You could torture the analogy more and say that this is more like saying "it is possible to make bad food and kill yourself at home, so we require everyone to go to a restaurant."
Well, I mean, do you know many houses burn down because someone fell asleep while frying a pork chop? We should just get rid of kitchens at home because it's just not safe.
Oil fires cause immense damage to property and life! I don’t know why stoves are allowed in homes at all. Worse yet, they don’t implement any age verification, so a child can just turn on the burner! It’s crazy!
I thought that was because they emit pollution into the room that was actually (not theoretical) linked to substantially higher risk of the occupants of the home getting asthma?
Because no amount of safeguards put up by the restaurant is going to protect you from getting sick of you decide to empty a bottle of bleach into your meal.
If you want to cook at home, there's no waiting list. There's no popup you have to confirm three times. You buy a stove, which likely lasts you half your life, a fridge, some dishes, pots, pans and so on.
I think it's fine to give people an easy mode. Not everyone cares about cooking (or tech). I just wish companies weren't trying to take the advanced features from the rest of us who do care.
I think it is different for some people because they are passionate and interested in tech.
I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.
I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.
So the solution being proposed by multiple companies, is that the restaurant is now responsible to check your age and gender before they bring you something from the kitchen. Also, now you cannot tell the kitchen to use your toaster as some toasters are built to burn the restaurant down or poison the food.
It still doesn't make sense, we need a better plan.
you expect a restaurant to be safe but there is no guarantee that it is. Many people have had food poisoning and I am sure some have died. It is obvious you don't "get" technology at all. You don't even "get" restaurants.
And I expect to be able to open a restauraunt without surrendering my identity and private information to a huge monopolistic company.
And I expect to buy food without that food being sanctioned by a huge, monopolistic company. Especially if said company has shown itself to be completely subservient to an overbearing, increasingly fascist government.
For me, it's the blur between who makes decisions. I don't love our government making decisions about who lives or dies, but I much prefer decisions to be made by a/ a human b/ one who isn't beholden to shareholders.
"You're attacking the person who's protecting you – idiot. [..] You may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. [..] You may not want to hear that truth, but it's fucking true."
The way Alex Karp views himself is scary; he gives himself (and his company) carte blanche when it comes to morality. He's basically become the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men.
Yes, America needs technology to succeed. But it can't be unchecked.
You're misreading the hesitation about going into places like Iran.
It's not because we think the regime is/was good, but rather because of the completely predictable next 10-50 years of shit we're going to experience as a result.
Regime change is hard and oftentimes has the opposite effect of what you want. For example, see the current Iran regime.
I had this happen yesterday to me, and Claude itself was able to recover it via the other conversations... I just had to tell it that it did the work and to find it in its other conversations.
I considered doing that, but my 80+ files were scattered in over 20 large conversations, It would've been too annoying to keep track of which file was extracted, and probably would have exhausted the context window of a chat in no-time.
soon were gonna be the ones adding random typos and grammer errors just to blend in. i skip apostrophes and mispell words on purpose already. its strange how fast sloppy writing starts feeling natural
I don't know if worse grammar could make a difference aside from removing false negatives (ie. nowadays people with good grammar are questioned if they are LLM's or not) but this itself doesn't mean that worse grammar itself means its written by a human. (This paragraph is written by me, a human, Hi :D)
Honestly, first paragraph sounds more human and sincere for sure.
Also adding better "context" into the discussion, than the usual claims/punchlines of marketing-speak.
Maybe it's not exactly the grammar itself but also overall structuring of the idea/thought into the process. The regular output sounds much more like marketing-piece or news-coverage than an individual anyway. I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
> I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
If I understand you correctly, then Yes I completely agree, but my worry is that this can also be "emulated" as shown by my comment by Models already available to us. My question is, technically there's nothing to stop new accounts from using say Kimi and to have a system prompt meant to not sound AI and I feel like it can be effective.
If that's the case, doesn't that raise the question of what we can detect as AI or not (which was my point), the grand parent comment suggests that they use intentionally bad human writing sometimes to not be detected as AI but what I am saying is that AI can do that thing too, so is intentionally bad writing itself a good indicator of being human?
And a bigger question is if bad writing isn't an indicator, then what is?
Or if there can even be an good indicator (if say the bot is cautious)? If there isn't, can we be sure if the comments we read are AI or not
Essentially the dead-internet-theory. I feel like most websites have bots but we know that they are bots and they still don't care but we are also in this misguided trust that if we see some comments which don't feel like obvious bots, then they must be humans.
My question is, what if that can be wrong? It feels to me definitely possible with current Tech/Models like say Kimi for example, Doesn't this lead to some big trust issues within the fabric of internet itself?
Personally, I don't feel like the whole website's AI but there are chances of some sneaky action happening at distance type of new accounts for sure which can be LLM's and we can be none the wiser.
All the same time that real accounts are gonna get questioned if they are LLM or not if they are new (my account is almost 2 years old fwiw and I got questioned by people esentially if this account is AI or not)
But what this does do however, is make people definitely lose a bit of trust between each other and definitely a little cautious towards each message that they read.
(This comment's a little too conspiratorial for my liking but I can't help but shake this feeling sometimes)
It just is all so weird for me sometimes, Idk but I guess that there's still an intuition between whose human and not and actually the HN link/article iteslf shows that most people who deploy AI on HN in newer accounts use standard models without much care which is the reason why em-dashes get detected and maybe are good detector for sometime/some-people and this could make the original OP's comment of intentionally having bad grammar to sound more human make sense too because em-dashes do have more probability of sounding AI than not :/
It's just this very weird situation and I am not sure how to explain where depending on from whatever situation you look at, you can be right.
You can try to hurt your grammar to sound more human and that would still be right
and you can try to be the way you are because you think that models can already have intentionally bad grammar too/capable of it and to have bad grammar isn't a benchmark itself for AI/not so you are gonna keep using good grammar and you are gonna be right too.
It's sort of like a paradox and I don't have any answers :/ Perhaps my suggestion right now feels to me to not overthink about it.
Because if both situations are right, then do whatever imo. Just be human yourself and then you can back down this statement with well truth that you are human even if you get called AI.
So I guess, TLDR: Speak good grammar or not intentionally, just write human and that's enough or that should be enough I guess.
Hey Chase! Congrats on everything you, Grace, Thomas and the rest of the team built. I know it wasn't always what you expected it to be from the inside, but from the outside nobody saw that. They just saw something amazing. Your Startup School talk is my favorite ever, and I'm lucky I got to work with you all those years ago. You built something incredible, and helped a lot of people.
It wasn't until I read your comment that I was able to pinpoint why the mental exhaustion feels familiar. It's the same kind (though not degree) of exhaustion as formal methods / proofs.
Except without the reward of an intellectual high afterwards.
I feel this too. I suspect its a byproduct of all the context switching I find myself doing when I'm using an LLM to help write software. Within a 10 minute window, I'll read code, debug a problem, prompt, discuss the design, test something, do some design work myself and so on.
When I'm just programming, I spend a lot more time working through a single idea, or a single function. Its much less tiring.
In my experience it's because you switch from writing code to reviewing code someone else wrote. Which is massively more difficult than writing code yourself.
I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.
Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.
The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.
tl;dr = it's for gamblers
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