I have a browser extension that auto-clicks the Hide button for entries with AI-related terms in the title. Helps surface the interesting stories. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
Interesting. I might've received my first one of these last week, from a legit-looking gmail address. They mentioned a comment I made a month ago and immediately asked for a 20-30 minute call next week. Definitely has the "please do free labor for me" smell to it, so I declined the call but offered to have a conversation over email. No response so far. Dunno.
If you're having daily interactions with people who feel like LLMs, then find a new community to hang out in instead. There's plenty of communities out there that reject LLM content. They're not interested in taking over the world, so they're a little harder to find, but they're out there.
Personally I run in to it in the workplace now constantly. I work with pseudo tech types that we used to call BAs but now glorify as “product”. Now about 95% of their content is made by AI.
Most of the time it’s just material I actually created then they regurgitated through Claude with errors introduced to make it worse.
It definitely isn't. I'm in a half dozen online spaces where no one posts LLM content, either because it's explicitly against the rules or implicitly against the culture, or simply because no one is interested in it.
It’s not just the tech industry. Friends of mine in non-technical fields are seeing more and more of this. If it’s in your workplace, it’s probably in most workplaces that you’re qualified to work in. You don’t "just" walk away from your community and your career.
If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The conversation here is around online communities, so that's what my comment was about. LLMs destroy every aspect of life they touch, and I agree many of those problems aren't really solvable. But online communities at least can be preserved with strong moderation & ejecting users who post LLM-generated content.
What if I told you that there are Amish communities now that are avid users of ChatGPT in their shops? My brother-in-law is a cellphone vendor to such communities. For business purposes, is the excuse for all such technology.
> If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.
The funny thing is that as soon as communities do this and take an anti-LLM stance they get mocked, called luddites, they get told they're living in a word that doesn't exist anymore and that AI is here to stay, stop going against the current.
The Luddites weren't against technology, they were against the inhumane exploitation of workers and dangerous child labor, made that much worse through technology. All Ludd supposedly did was smash a couple frames after being criticized for his output, but the Luddites' grievances were really just the foremost among those that had been simmering among textile workers for as long as there has ever been a textile industry, long before industrial automation was a thing.
As for myself, I certainly don't want a community based on reactionary dogma, but I would certainly prefer to be around people who at least have their eyes open, and are aware of the corrosive effects that AI can have or already does.
The Luddites were about protecting their privileged hereditary position against competition from women and other outsiders. Not unlike the privilege of contemporary software engineers like myself.
A lot of labor unions were about racism and xenophobia too, but they did agitate for better working conditions nonetheless. For sure it's not black and white.
...against competition from women, who of course infamously had never been part of the textile industry? Who knew the Molyneux sisters were the Molyneux brothers all along?
Maybe try to inform yourself about the historical context before popping off? The Luddites were part of a medieval craft guild that was largely hereditary and had never admitted women. They even roughed up female weavers to deter them from employment in the trade.
Of course weaving has largely been a female-dominated craft from time immemorial. That doesn't mean you can just apply stereotypes to a historical situation you apparently know nothing about and pretend you're being both witty and insightful.
Then block those people. Either they're stupid and don't understand the bad incentives that LLMs create in forums, or they do understand and they're malicious.
With every year those communities are becoming increasingly balkanized and building moats as they raise up the drawbridges, assuming they haven’t already atrophied from swapping over to a Facebook group years ago (now discord too, which will hurt in the long run). They are trying to protect their communities but unfortunately it has the very sad secondary effect of making it harder and harder to find them.
I keep seeing hints of these communities existing, here in hn comments. Every time a thread is about communities that are still good, still human etc someone pops up saying these communities exist, but no-one ever mentions what these communities are.
I mean, I get it: one risks eternal-september-ing them as soon as the hn crowd finds out about them, but sometimes it's really frustrating going down a thread hoping to find better indications for these mythical great communities and always coming back empty-handed.
I'm part of a maker community that I really enjoy being a part of. We don't invite random people, but if someone makes something cool, I'll send them an invitation. I think it's this sort of thing that people are referring to when they talk about these communities.
I think they definitionally have to be smallish groups of people who actually know each other at least a little bit, so you can't just fill in a sign-up form and join one, but you can start your own.
I know other communities that I really doubt would appeal to anyone here. However, Lobsters is basically Hacker News, but anti-AI, smaller, and with a (low) barrier to entry.
Yeah. Because we don't want hacker news assholes to find them and destroy them, the way they've been systematically pillaging the rest of the Internet.
Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becoming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. No human would've chosen to write all that tedious detail in their post about something much more interesting. It's bad writing. It's slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in with three columns that contain..." and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
>this one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read
Maybe you're just looking for GPT 3.5 era tells?
Because this one sure screams AI slop loudly and clearly:
"The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half. "
"The graph is the overview, and an overview is easy to shrug at. The pages behind it are not."
"Six people, six relationships, and a subtitle saying nobody typed any of it."
"Below that is the part I find hardest to argue with."
"This is the page's own honest point: the graph points at the face clusters and can name almost none of them (three of the twenty-nine, in the fixture). It does not need to."
"None of this is content. It is all metadata, and it is enough."
I think on the top part he had his self-written summary which gave to the AI to expand, and the second part just had some bullet points or shorter prompt.
I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.
It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/
I was playing home brew games on my psp back in highschool and I think it was an absolute peak time to be a gamer.
Emulators on the psp was incredible too.
Psp would have been a much bigger hit if it had a second joystick. It was such a great console.
Also simply browsing the Internet on the psp was incredible too. This was pre smartphone. This was like right around the time wifi itself became mainstream.
Im jealous you had this experience! I tried to write some game code in highschool but couldn't figure out how to compile it. I think I used a c++ framework with a alligator as a mascot/logo... Started with an A I believe...
Wasn't until XNA in college that I was able to make a proper game.
Now I'm a professional game developer. I chased this field all the way.
Now I think making games for some of the android consoles is kinda the equivalent in that you can carry it around and show it to people. Or the Arduino is fun to make games for too :)
The smart phone is a fun target but the touchscreen really forces you into certain designs. The things that clamp to the phone and add joysticks to it definitely make the smartphone a much much more precise interface
Did you use that quick journal psp blog to spread this game? Remember when one of the jailbreaks was through a corrupted liberty city stories save file? Good times!
Haha, yeah, lots of nostalgia for that little guy. I have completely forgotten the technical details of the toolchain, I just remember it was GCC-based and ran in Cygwin. The games I wrote didn't use any of the hardware rendering of the system. It was all writing pixels directly into the framebuffer because that's what the hello-world sample I had access to did. For how simple the games were relative to the hardware, I frequently ran into performance problems because of this, drawing every single pixel one by one.
I did submit them to a couple of those PSP homebrew blogs and got some feedback from comments sections & such. I even submitted Dyox to a contest and won a flash cart for the GBA, though I never ended up doing much homebrew there. A couple years ago someone cataloging old PSP homebrew games actually uploaded videos of Dyox to YouTube which blew me away (sadly recorded at half-framerate, so the transparency effects don't show in the video because they rendered every-other frame).
I never looked into how the jailbreaks worked. My recollection is I only had to drop a file onto the storage and it would magically hack it for me. I actually never bought or even pirated a single game for the system, I only ever used it for homebrew and emulators and web browsing, hah.
If you're really curious, you can see the blog posts I wrote about the games 20+ years ago:
Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people.
For 50 years, computer security has largely been built on the theory that most targets aren't worth the relatively high effort to compromise, so it's not worth it to spend the money on security. We're now reaching a point where the effort to compromise is dropping close to 0, which means we've got 50 years of insecure software to reckon for.
The advice today is the same as it has ever been, though. Always assume that any networked computer is or may become compromised. Do not do anything critical on a networked computer, because it is or may become compromised. You can still use computers, but assume that a bad actor may take control at any time, and plan for that eventuality.
For example, if you are hooking up a networked computer to your town's water supply system, ask yourself "what would happen if Iran got complete control of this system?" If you're putting your school system's students' mental health data into a networked computer, ask yourself "what would happen if all of this data became public?"
> The advice today is the same as it has ever been, though. Always assume that any networked computer is or may become compromised. Do not do anything critical on a networked computer, because it is or may become compromised.
This is completely unrealistic advice that 0% of people follow.
I agree it's rarely followed. I don't think it's unrealistic. No one needed to connect water infrastructure or student data into the Internet, but we did, and the obvious thing happened.
This is correct; two of my three ZFS implementations are entirely local... the third (public-facing) covers the other twos' "limited usefulness."
Perhaps a vulnerability still exists (for one offline NAS, only): I use dedicated NICs (on each end) to direct-link my online NAS (which is otherwise local network, only, on a separate NIC), for routine backup.
Perhaps this leaves a bridge-LAN vulnerability?
But one is entirely offline, as are all its clients (dumb TVs, mostly).
Your NAS is not critical. The plan if your NAS gets compromised is to say "dang" and wipe it and re-download all your movies or whatever. You can connect that to the internet.
Stuff like your town's water, transportation, and medical infrastructure and employee and student data are critical. Your car's drivetrain and safety features are critical. Your home's HVAC can be critical in certain times of year. These things should not be connected to the Internet.
A better framing is that security has largely been built on theory that most targets aren't worth the effort to target, so security spending is focused on preventing/mitigating untargeted spray-and-pray attacks.
Computer security has largely been built on the “not enough bears” theory.
Every target is worth attacking, but there are not enough bears to eat everybody. Sure, the bears are breeding, but exponential growth does not look threatening until it suddenly is.
I don't think the "breeding rate" was the limiting factor.
It reminds me of a bit from the book Lying For Money [0], where the author notes that you can often find multiple layers of scams attached to other scams, just like meta-parasite in biology.
My new security through obscurity is to collect esoteric modern LLM written software, like this sweet gem of a terminal editor written in fortran: https://shithub.sh/fortrangoingonforty/facsimile
No, I'm afraid you really are stuck in a culture war. As the above poster said, "they" truly has been a gender-neutral singular or plural pronoun for hundreds of years.
For example, someone two blocks down the street is doing something weird. "What are they doing?" is a perfectly grammatically normal reaction to seeing this.
So if someone said "what are they doing?" about someone some distance down the street, you would find that objectionable? I can't really think of a less awkward phrasing. "What is that person doing?" "What is he or she doing?" Those both seem like unnatural ways to phrase the question. What would you say in this scenario?
You may have heard this from Culture War-adjacent content. In reality, this is wrong, and you would struggle to find a real employed academic who agrees with you.
Also, languages aren't dictated by a standards body like C++ is. The rules are written to capture the way the language is actually spoken. If the rules diverge from the language, the rules are actually the thing that is incorrect! This is the difference between "de jure" and "de facto" rules.
Buddy I was literally taught that in my (British) English class, and later seen it used in this context by natives countless times. If anything, using "he/she" is an ugly unpronounceable abomination.
Excited to say we are doing exactly this up here in the Twin Cities. The local transit agency has been planning a bunch of BRT routes and implementing about one every year or two. Often they have dedicated lanes for much of the route, and they typically have wait times around 7-15 minutes depending on time of day. BRT is extremely affordable and efficient and fits quite nicely into legacy car-based infrastructure, too.
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