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Yeah it seems harmless in isolation, but I'm pretty sure that lacking a norm against it it is one of the ways you end up with Reddit. And because HN doesn't have an actual anti-humour rule, in the best case it lets the funnier and more creative stuff through while punishing the obvious one-liners and boilerplate jokes that everyone would be clamouring to make first on a Reddit thread. (I don't want to be rude, but the thing where someone writes stereotypical AI speak in an ironic context has been done a billion times and doesn't need to be done again, unless it comes with an interesting twist or unusually sharp execution.)

> I don't want to be rude, but the thing where someone writes stereotypical AI speak in an ironic context has been done a billion times and doesn't need to be done again

Yeah. As the person who triggered this subthread by not detecting the attempt at "humor", the last thing we need is a version of Poe's Law for AI slop.


> Before you did this, was literally every hour of your waking time spend thinking about LLMs?

They said "writing and thinking without LLMs", not "not thinking about LLMs". I think they're talking about setting aside time for fairly focused thought/work.


> If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.

I'm not just trying to be snarky, but I have no idea how to read this without taking the implication that humans are advanced, yet dumb, search algorithms.


A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true.

An LLM will happily say X and behaves in contradiction to X. Because it does not reason. Its behavior is not derived from things that it claim (or appears) to know.


> A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true.

That is literally not true and why we talk about "stated vs revealed preference" and such.


Obviously, we only considering about a honest human here.

Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.


I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.

When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.


> So no, ”very often works on depression” is not a characterization I would use.

I'm (genuinely) sorry about your friend, and I don't deny that it's worth sharing these anecdotes. But a single anecdote comes nowhere near refuting the claim that ECT very often works on depression.

The current state of scientific knowledge seems to be that it does very often "work", at least as a fast-acting short-term treatment for very severe depression.


> but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves"

Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.


I think there is a shortage of would-be leaders like that though, that's the problem. Or at least would be leaders that gained any real traction. The only other one in the past decade was Bernie.

Unfortunately for the past 3 elections, it essentially came down to the obviously untrustworthy "outsider" vs the ultimate establishment candidate. For a lot of people, it's as simple as that.


What other candidates were doing this? How many of them had wall-to-wall 24/7 free exposure on every cable news channel for a whole campaign season?


The article explicitly says that the author looked at the diffs; it distinguishes this from "sitting down and actually reading the code", which they didn't do. So when plastic041 says the author spent 7 months vibe coding "without ever looking at source code", it's not unreasonable for dewey to assume that "looking at source code", in this context, actually means something stronger and excludes just looking at the diffs.


Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.

It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."

This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)


On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.

Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.

Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).


This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.


It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".

retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.

This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.


> And how do you define pain and pleasure?

They're not reducible, but I don't know if that means we don't have definitions; we can describe them well enough that most people (who aren't p-zombies or playing the sceptical philosopher role) know pretty well what we mean. All of our definitions have to bottom out somewhere...

> Do insects feel pain?

Nobody (except the insects) can know for sure. Our inability to know whether X is true doesn't imply X is meaningless, though.


But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?


> But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?

In the comment that started this subthread, qsera was responding to someone who said "Imo we don't even have a definition of [consciousness]". If qsera meant that we can measure consciousness in terms of pleasure and pain, then of course I agree that they were just pushing the problem back a step. But I don't think that's what they meant.


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