Don't US car makers self certify their cars? The cybertruck is a death trap for pedestrians.

It's also a death trap for its passengers!

Because it's creepy and Orwellian, not to mention hypocritical (MAGA is supposed to hate thought policing). Do you like people telling you what words you can and cannot use?

Okay, so you felt like someone was telling you what words to use. I didn't feel that.

I mean...why not do it? Are you implying it would only have value if someone painstakingly did it by hand?

The endavour doesn't have much value at all except as an experiment how well translating C code to Rust via LLM works (but you don't need an LLM for that either, C2Rust was already a thing).

Also, the C version of Quake compiled to WebAssembly and running in browsers is just as "safe".

But C isn't as nice to work with. Maybe OP just thought it was fun to see it take shape and wanted to share it. Why do any sort of little side project like this at all? Just seems like everyone is judging this too harshly. If an LLM is reasonably good at this sort of thing, and you think it would be cool to see Quake written in Rust running in the browser, I say just do it and have fun and don't be shy about doing show and tell about it.

> But C isn't as nice to work with.

Only in your opinion :)

What about what about people learn and possibly the fun they get during the process?

Sure this project won't save humanity or optimize some KPI pleasing some obscure hierarchy.

Let people have fun, as long as they don't hurt anyone personally I'm fine with it and even I'm happy learning someone had some cool moments.

All commits in the project are from Claude. What's fun or to be learned from that?

It's of course everybody's personal choice, and it's nice for an experiment to figure out what Claude can do. But why go on HN and brag about a project entirely created by Claude when literally everybody else can do the same thing without lifting a finger?

Somebody had to do it and they did it.

I see the result of an LLM port only as a baseline. I would expect any serious developer to rewrite and refactor the code beyond a verbatim translation and to make it more maintainable, readable and robust. In short, to turn it into idiomatic Rust.

If you're not going to do that don't post your results online, just keep it to yourself. Anyone could've done this. Even people without any programming skills.

The definition of "serious" developer is changing. An LLM can already produce maintainable, readable, robust code.

It's getting to the point that LLM produced code is indistinguishable from even the best handwritten code.

There's no value in gatekeeping,the code side of software is becoming increasingly democratised, and the barrier to entry is getting closer to no barrier at all.

> It's getting to the point that LLM produced code is indistinguishable from even the best handwritten code.

I think you should read more code ;)

Yeah when I read comments like this I'm thinking either the commenters did not actually bother reviewing the LLM code or they must have access to much better models than those I'm using (claude). Yesterday I reviewed 1500 lines of code which was reduced to 500 by just asking claude "why do we need this" on well chosen parts of the code 3-4 times, to which it would say things like "I made an optimization, but actually this doesn't pay for itself" then explain how the optimizations would actually make the whole thing slower...

> If you're not going to do that don't post your results online, just keep it to yourself

...I mean...I just don't really know how to respond to that. Who the heck cares if someone posts this online? If you don't like it, just move on. Sheesh. Lookout everyone, this guy doesn't approve of your side project.

Does translating Quake to Rust with an LLM count as any sort of project, let alone a side project?

Does budding a cabinet in a weekend counts as any sort of project, given that you used factory made wooden planks and power tools, instead of starting by slaughtering your horse with your bare hands, so you can make a knife from its bones, and use that to make a saw from its sinews and hair, and use that to fell a tree, and...?

Those who remember the time before a new technology will always have a different world view than those raised with it. Some of us will prefer it, some of us won’t. Eventually no one will remain who remembers. That’s just how humanity works.

This article's argument in a few sentences:

* Silicon valley gave us DraftKings, Polymarket, and crypto.

* Modern business planning and venture capital firms make "bets" based on the expected value of investments, i.e. probability of success.

* LLMs compute a probability distribution on the next token.

Therefore everything that silicon valley does looks like gambling and shame on them. Sad times seeing stuff like this in the paper of record.

I was ready to say "NYT should be shut down but I must admit that the addiction-based mechanisms in tech are causing genuine problems in my life". But tbh sounds like they're just up to their usual luddite dumbassery.

Journalism, papers of record and professional opinion havers can't be replaced soon enough.

And let's be clear, these claims are nonsense.

DraftKings was founded in Boston and funded by Boston and other East Coast VCs.

Polymarket was founded in New York with funding from all over the world.

Crypto wasn't created in any particular place, and crypto companies are probably the least geographically concentrated kind of tech company there is.

Venture capital and modern business planning weren't invented in Silicon Valley, either.

Statistical models have been around for hundreds of years.

This is "not even wrong" territory.

All gambling is probability-based, but not always the other way around. I think it is important to distinguish gambling as a hobby vs risk taking in a crowded market when running a company in the Valley. The article from what I can tell doesn’t really try to separate this, and that is certainly worth lamenting.

I agree. Sports betting and a founder’s decision to invest in an unproven market are both technically about probabilities, but the former is a form of entertainment with a likely negative expected value, whereas the latter is a business endeavor with a positive expected value where someone influence the outcome.

I have less issue with a founder's decision to invest in an unproven market than I do with a VC or PE fund choosing to dole out money to those founders because those investors are convinced that they can win big if they pick the right horse. You're gambling your time and livelihood that you succeed, sure; hopefully you have a solid business plan. But the people around you are gambling (probably with other people's money) that you make them fabulously wealthy.

I mean it’s true but it’s not newsworthy. Everything has been probability based for ever, just now it is so explicit and everyone talks pseudo stats like. Example p hacking, bayesian.

This is the classic Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in action. Seems to happen pretty frequently when one read the New York Times

Yeah I wish we would focus on concrete risks like job displacement and disinformation. The apocalyptic stuff feels either misguided or like some kind of weird, toxic, reverse psychology marketing by OpenAI and Anthropic. I wish we would just move on from it.

And the folks from podcastistan are never clear on the details of how human extinction would happen exactly. It's always something like, "Well, how do humans regard chickens? AI is way smarter therefore it wants to conquer and control us." An ASML lithography machine is also way better at making chips, but we don't consider it a threat.

Do you want to conquer and control chickens? I don't, I have better things to do. But chickens are tasty and help us get to our poorly-understood goals faster. (Oh and btw notice we didn't make them go extinct, quite the opposite. There are more chickens than ever before. Still I wouldn't want to end up living my life like a modern chicken)

A sufficiently intelligent AI will have multiple ways to pose risk to humanity at large. For example an oopsie at a wetlab - very contagious virus with initially mild symptoms which kills its hosts only after they already had time to spread it further. But I would have to become super intelligent myself to give you precise blueprint for such a virus -- which is kind of the point

Also -- ASML lithography machine is only good at making chips. I can't believe you compared it to AI that can generalize across variety of tasks

> The apocalyptic stuff feels either misguided or like some kind of weird, toxic, reverse psychology marketing by OpenAI and Anthropic. I wish we would just move on from it.

If you for a second put yourself into the shoes of a person who thinks "the apocalyptic stuff" has even a 5% chance of literally happening in the real world, you might see how you wouldn't agree to move on from it.

Yes, it would be correct not to pursue a technology that has that chance of wiping out the world. But where are the people who are suggesting these probabilities getting their numbers? I personally can't imagine where, and I'm an engineer with a specific technical interest in LLMs. And I haven't heard one clear description of the methodologies used to calculate these chances.

The much more likely explanation to me is that people are just spitballing, either because they've watched too much sci-fi, or they have some weird counterintuitive agenda (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI trying to position themselves as the amazing, trustworthy keepers of this dangerous technology before their IPOs).

> But where are the people who are suggesting these probabilities getting their numbers? I personally can't imagine where, and I'm an engineer with a specific technical interest in LLMs. And I haven't heard one clear description of the methodologies used to calculate these chances.

All there really is is arguments from theory (most notably, the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence). It's not like we have a spare universe to conduct experimental research on the likelihood of human extinction. That said, the 5-10% range is not some specific person's wild guess, it's the median wild guess of a poll of AI experts: https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/

> or they have some weird counterintuitive agenda (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI trying to position themselves as the amazing, trustworthy keepers of this dangerous technology before their IPOs).

They are not "trying to position themselves" that way - back when those companies were founded, the people who did it were already convinced they were trying to make the ("inevitable") development of AI go better. It's not some novel galaxy-brained marketing strategy, it's just what they thought the whole time.

I think what the parent poster is trying to convey, is that let's say the apocalyptic stuff has a 5% chance as you say, but the non-apocalyptic stuff (social-economic chaos, total centralization of power, eradication of social mobility, total information/trust collapse) might have a good 95% chance as we are seeing it starting to unfold already.

But the discourse is dominated by paper clip experiment discussions and not let's say by the fact that new grads have an unprecedented difficult time getting jobs. Unsurprisingly one of those is a sexy hypothetical beneficial to power and the other one is not.

Multiple problems can be important, pointing a different one out doesn't invalid or take away from another one.

I'm a bit concerned that a government chatbot like this would include a user-feedback signal like thumbs up/down. I think this could be gamed by bad actors to promote/demote specific types of content in the training data, assuming they use those signals in some sort of post training. Hopefully they're accounting for that.

You can combine it with a topic classifier and get the satisfaction rate for each topic. That's pretty useful for finding problem areas.

... unless it doesn't really even do anything and is just a placebo.

AI-generated writing does not bother me, unless it is intended as prose writing, where the flow communicates as much as the specific facts that are described. For technical writing, I usually just scan for important information anyway, and in that sense the only thing that bothers me about AI-generated writing is if it's too verbose and obscures the important information by leaning ineffectively on jargon and high-minded verbiage. I find that Claude Opus is very guilty of this, whereas GPT 5.6 variants are not.

>the only thing that bothers me about AI-generated writing is if it's too verbose and obscures the important information by leaning ineffectively on jargon and high-minded verbiage

But so many READMEs and design docs are degraded to this level by uncritical/unmonitored use of Claude. You make it sound like it’s an exception, not a rule.

In my experience, that brain damage inducing Claude-style technical writing is everywhere. It sucks not only because of its verbosity, but because it includes completely pointless tidbits extracted from random extended LLM sessions, with no attempt to prune redundant or gratuitous details.

Can we please make it so that AI CEOs are smart enough not to optimize everything according to the focus group that is their shareholders? Seems like we could solve the enshittification problem with this if we play our cards right.

Unless humanity can figure out a way to make a binding international agreement to pace development, it doesn't seem practical to expect US frontier labs to do it.

It's fairly obvious that the frontier labs are proposing that only "paced" providers would have access to the US market - and by extension the G7 market. They don't mind splitting market share between the three of them, they do mind open models destroying the "frontier lab" operating model.

Even if all GCR models were banned, anyone with access to 20k-1MM GPUs can throw their hat in the ring to make a new frontier open model.

But that doesn’t matter a lot when some nation state is using their own AI to hack US assets, right? How, exactly, would a lockdown or slowdown prevent that?

If history has shown one thing it’s that China often capitalizes very well on these types of measures.