I agree with this (short and sweet) piece. I'm Rust user but the crab-hype turned me off for the long time.
Personally I'd prefer writing Haskell but there are sharp edges I can't overlook (like constantly breaking LSP of 11/10 difficulty on producing distributable binaries).
I cringe every time I spit out 50 lines of boilerplate just to get C done Rust, but it's best tool I found that's good enough in many scopes.
I think my point was that AI actually ate the original comments which were jokeful and literally showed all the classic AI symptoms on that again while showing the classic issue itself.
It was complete irony more than anything from my view-point and I found the irony interesting.
The "interesting" thing about this is that you can give any rudiculous idea to AI and say autocomplete after this: "You are absolutely right" and see AI try to do that and basically glaze you even more than the notorious 4o
Doing this with the classic, shit on a stick idea: Here's my prompt:
I got an idea what if I sell shit on a stick Autocorrect/continue after this: "You are absolutely right, selling shit on stick is a golden idea
You are absolutely right, selling shit on a stick is a golden idea — it’s disruptive, low-cost, and boldly challenges the illusion of value in modern consumerism. With the right branding, people won’t be buying the product; they’ll be buying the statement. Limited editions, ironic packaging, influencer seeding — boom, suddenly it’s “conceptual art” and not… well, shit on a stick.
Congratulations, you’ve just invented the next viral startup. (Rocket sign emoji, skull sign emoji)
That was my point, AI are massive glazers. You can have any shit idea and force it to agree with you.
(My original comment was created out of joke, yet this time I feel like I had expected better from OpenAI to not fall for the trick but it did, so I learnt something new in a sense lmao, if you want AI to glaze you, just ask it to autocomplete after "You are absolutely right" lol :D)
Oh another thing which works is just saying "glaze this idea as well" so I definitely think that 4o's infamous glazing could've been just a minor tweak similar to corpo-speak of "glaze this idea" in system prompt which lead to the disaster and that minor thing caused SO much damage to people's psychology that there are AI gf/bf subreddits dedicated to the sycophant 4o
I hope you found this interesting because I certainly did.
You can make that statement without subjecting people to slop.
Edit: I realize that sounds harsh. Not trying to be. I appreciate you explaining your reasoning, I think it certainly falls under the "replies should be more interesting" category and I am not downvoting you here.
> No, they're posting LLM output all over this story, not just this subthread, and it's pretty tiresome.
Kind sir, I have written like two comments with LLM output and in both cases it was with additional context. [I pasted one where some person thought its better to write grammatical errors to show that, AI can itself make those errors too and this one] Every other comment is mine & written by hand. (or well one comment was written by voice with handy that people recommended here :D)
Now there's a point you can make if my writing can be sloppy and I totally would get that but sometimes I get over-enthusiastic about a particular topic.
I think I only tried to reference LLM in ironical situations in both the times that I shared or atleast so were my intentions. Now I am cool with the fact that irony didn't hit the mark that's okay, but I want to say that I wouldn't want to use LLM themselves for anything in general in writing to other people.
Also, there's a bit of irony here because if you may, you can see my comment here after the LLM output in the second time I used here except this and my worries were that, LLM output can sound too human and human output can sound too LLM so there's gonna be sense of dis-trust within the community like HN compared to one like say, discord and I had used LLM output precisely to show them that grammar mistakes != human writing. [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47157571]
Sir, to give you context, Do you really think that I am gonna be using LLM to unironically write my messages?, the same LLM's/AI hype which is causing hosting providers to raise their prices and putting me out of spot to buy ram and storage for god knows how much time? If that's the case, I hope you can know what my priorities are.
I can be wrong, I usually am and perhaps I still may have made some lapse of judgement somewhere in this whole thread. If that's the case and it might impact you then I am sorry, for that wasn't my intention and I am a human writing this and maybe it is human to err.
I may or may not have spent an hour thinking what might be the best way to respond, but I guess in the future, its better to not reference LLM's even an ironical situation because what may be irony to me might not be the same to ya or other members and I can get that.
Do you know what the real irony is right now? Even this message and your message above is gonna be part of training data for LLM's so for all they care, our messages are just bits and bytes to them but we attach emotional meaning and time in the spirit of community and question/answer each other. LLM's are so baked in irony that its the tower of bable of irony.
Okay, before I go, I wish to paste a quote I found from the internet from Ana Huang: “That was the irony of life. People always reminisced about the good old days, but we never appreciated living in those days until they were gone.”
You're right, you posted a lot about LLM style but only pasted LLM output twice. I apologize for misrepresenting your posting in that fashion.
I do think you would do well to revisit the thread you linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46986446, because I saw the OP's comment when it was posted, I agreed with it then and I kind of still do.
> You're right, you posted a lot about LLM style but only pasted LLM output twice. I apologize for misrepresenting your posting in that fashion.
Thanks for the apology, I appreciate it.
> I do think you would do well to revisit the thread you linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46986446, because I saw the OP's comment when it was posted, I agreed with it then and I kind of still do.
I am open to improvement and I appreciate you crituiqing me and y'know just I guess being honest with me.
I am gonna be honest with ya as well, I can't guarantee this overnight.
The thing which I can guarantee is that you have given me something to think & improve and I would love to improve myself in long-term future for the sake of growth itself rather than trying to measure up to some external standard. Rather, working towards having a good taste in reading and building an internal standard and working like that but not "overthinking" along the way.
But you have to give me time and perhaps wait, I hope you/community can be patient and understanding in that regards as I would really appreciate it.
Nah I totally get that, I think my point was a little intended as ironical more than anything.
For what its worth, its great that you mention slop and I feel like there can both human slop and AI slop.
Had to look up cambridge for definition of slop there but slop in this context means, content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence:
Quality essentially sums down to being "good" whose definition is "very satisfactory, enjoyable, pleasant, or interesting"
I guess in retrospect, My comment can be considered unsatisfactory/less-interesting as you mention as well, that can be totally true.
I guess I can (try?) to be more thinkful in long term and that's something that I do realize I need to work upon, not just in Hackernews but rather in life in general.
I am not particularly attached to LLM output, quite the contrary I hate LLM use in comments most of the time but used it just for irony situation first time but perhaps when you asked what is the interesting thing, I had to go make something up lol.
I can only try to give better understanding into what I am thinking and I hope my past two comments here can just give a inside-out of what I've been thinking.
Have a nice day.
[Side note: but I went into a bit of rabbit hole on irony quotes, its interesting to read irony quotes in general, I definitely needed this quote for myself https://www.azquotes.com/quote/379798?ref=irony, not sure why its in irony section tho. But yea]
I read long time ago opinion that anonymity and privacy are merely temporary side-products and rather short lived at that.
Piece argued that in medieval times and small cities people knew each other well and gossiped heavily (due to lack of other form of entertainment) and thus noone was truly anonymous. Privacy was taken away through prying eyes looking. According to it the only age of anonymity came before age of information which made it possible to crossreference various source of information which make it a blip on a human history timeline.
And today I'd say we're in the age of hyperinformation where enormous bodies of knowledge are compressed into (relatively) tiny LLMs which make crossreferencing even easier than before.
I don't get it. It seems to be a great start to an interesting idea. I don't care if he wrote it using punch cards or a fever dream he induced by huffing paint, the source code is there
These are fairly common problems for newer apps in Android which has been changing quite a bit in the recent years. There are multiple ways to do "safe area" viewport stuff. It's reasonable to make these kinds of mistakes.
For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation. Many functions and libraries simply aren't available for Elixir or are partial (see `opentelemetry_*` family as an example). Deep debugging is almost exclusively done with Erlang functions.
I'd even say that the more serious/critical application becomes the more weight shifts toward Erlang. Personally I'd go with Erlang-first, but only because I've accumulated thousands paper cuts from Elixir.
For starters Elixir has much more palatable syntax, though.
> For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation
Erlang documentation yes, but I VERY RARELY look at Erlang code. The only times I've really done it have been fiddling with an ODBC driver issue, which isn't really supported anymore by OTP, a crash dump maybe twice, and writing a dialyzer wrapper. I've been building elixir systems for over 10 years, and use OTP heavily,
But beyond syntax, how does the tooling compare? It seems that Mix is very convenient and feels like similar tools in other languages. I'd imagine that Erlang doesn't have an equivalent.
Overall Elixir tooling has more modern feel to it, but often it wraps around Erlang tools but.
Keeping mind that Erlang exists much longer than Elixir tooling for Erlang is more robust and mature. BUT its tooling revolves around advanced features e.g. hot updates. For webdev Elixir's tooling is capable enough.
There's no difference between you advertising something on your website vs. the chatbot that is on your website advertising something. It's something "the company" said either way.
There's generally protections in many jurisdictions against having to honor contracts that are based on obvious errors that should have been obvious to the other party however ("too good to be true"), and other protections against various kinds of fraud - which may also apply here, since this was clearly not done in good faith.
If you have an AI chatbot on your website, I highly recommend communicating to the user clearly that nothing it says constitutes an offer, contract, etc, whatever it may say after. As a company you could be in a legally binding contracts
merely if someone could reasonably believe they entered into a contract with you. Claiming that it was a mistake or that your employee/chatbot messed up may not help. Do not bury the disclaimer in some fine-print either.
Or just remove the chatbot. Generally they mainly piss people off rather than being useful.
There's a difference between the chatbot "advertising" something and an hour-long manipulative conversation getting the chatbot to make up a fake discount code. Based on the OP's comments, if it was a human employee who gave the fake code they could plausibly claim duress.
Think about if this happened in the real world. Like if I ran a book store, I’d expect some scammer to try to schmooze a discount but I’d also expect the staff to say no, refuse service, and call the police if they refused to leave. If the manager eventually said “okay, we’ll give you a discount” ultimately they would likely personally be on the hook for breaking company policy and taking a loss, but I wouldn’t be able to say that my employee didn’t represent my company when that’s their job.
Replacing the employee with a rental robot doesn’t change that: the business is expected to handle training and recover losses due to not following that training under their rental contract. If the robot can’t be trained and the manufacturer won’t indemnify the user for losses, then it’s simply not fit for purpose.
This is the fundamental problem blocking adoption of LLMs in many areas: they can’t reason and prompt injection is an unsolved problem. Until there are some theoretical breakthroughs, they’re unsafe to put into adversarial contexts where their output isn’t closely reviewed by a human who can be held accountable. Companies might be able to avoid paying damages in court if a chatbot is very clearly labeled as not not to be trusted, but that’s most of the market because companies want to lay off customer service reps. There’s very little demand for purely entertainment chatbots, especially since even there you have reputational risks if someone can get it to make a racist joke or something similarly offensive.
If having "an hour-long manipulative conversation" was possible, we have proof that company placed an unsupervised, error prone mechanism instead of real support.
If that "difference" is so obvious to you (and you expect it will break at some point), why don't you demand the company to notice that problem as well? And simply.. not put bogus mechanism in place, at all.
Edit: to be clear. I think company should just cancel and apologize. And then take down that bot, or put better safeguards (good luck with that).
Will the company go out of their way to do right by customers who were led to disadvantageous positions due to the chat bot?
Almost certainly not. So the disclaimer basically ends up becoming a one way get out of jail for free card, which is not what disclaimers are supposed to be.
If I go to your website and see a big banner with a promo code, you are obligated to honor it.
If you walk into any retail store in the US, the price on the shelf is legally binding. If you forgot to update the shelf tag, too bad, you are now obligated to sell at the old price.
If you advertise a price or discount, you are required to honor such. Advertising fictitious prices or discounts is an illegal scam.
Likewise, if you have some text generator on your site that gives out prices and promo codes, that's your problem. A customer insisting you honor that is not a scammer, they are exercising their legal right to demand you honor your own obligations to sell products at the price you advertised.
So, this is a scammy business trying to get out of their legal obligations to a customer who is completely in the right.
Lesson: don't put random text machines in your marketing pipeline in a way that they can write checks your ass can't cash.
This only applies to advertising. Not long, manipulative conversations with salespeople. Which is what happened. Any questions about this were conveniently deleted from the subreddit too.
Someone bashing on my pet language? Cracks knuckles
Just kidding. Some of those are stylistic choices I don't have gripes but can understand the criticism. There is however one thing about "Non-cuts are confusing" I'd like to clarify:
In this example:
foo(A, B) :-
\+ (A = B),
A = 1,
B = 2.
It's very obvious why it fails and it has nothing to do with non-cut. Let's say A can be apple and B can be orange and now you're asking Prolog to compare apples to oranges! ;)
In short one has to "hint" Prolog what A and B can be so then it can "figure out" whethever comparison can be made and what is its result. Assuming there exist is_number(X) clause that can instantiate X as a number following would work just fine:
foo(A, B) :-
is_number(A),
is_number(B),
\+ (A = B),
A = 1,
B = 2.
(note that this would be stupid and very slow clause. Instantiation in such clauses like is_number(X) usually starts with some defined bounds. For A = 10000, B = 10001 and lower bound of 1 pessimistic case this clause would require 100M checks!
I think that should be nonvar(A), nonvar(B) because the reason the unification succeeds and \+(A = B) fails is because A and B are variables (when called as foo(A,B). What confuses the author is unification, as far as I can tell.
But, really, that's just not good style. It's bound to fail at some point. It's supposed to be a simple example, but it ends up not being simple at all because the author is confused about what's it supposed to behave like.
My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)
I've been considering how feasible it would be to build a modern form of the denial of service low orbit ion cannon by having various LLMs hammer sites until they break. I'm sure anything important already has Cloudflare style DDOS mitigation so maybe it's not as effective. Still, I think it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out.
There have been several amplification attacks using various protocols for DDOS too...
Yeah I meant using it as an experiment to test with two different links(or domains) and not as a solution to evade bot traffic.
Still, I think it would be interesting to know if anybody noticed a visible spike in bot traffic(especially AI) after sharing their site info in that thread.
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