Discussion

The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Culture

bfmalky: > Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety ActNSFW blog content on HN? Really?

talkingtab: Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

rdevilla: Ok. How do you propose one fights back? Do you really viscerally understand what it is you are fighting against?

talkingtab: fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.

apsurd: Best line:> I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

rdevilla: > (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.

jspash: With the current direction of this industry, I fear you will come back to something that is both unrecognisable and terrifying.

notpachet: > I can think of a few good myths for today’s “AI”. Searle’s Chinese room comes to mind, as does Chalmers’ philosophical zombie. Peter Watts’ Blindsight draws on these concepts to ask what happens when humans come into contact with unconscious intelligence—I think the closest analogue for LLM behavior might be Blindsight’s Rorschach.LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.

mzajc: > Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…”May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

underlipton: There's literally an ad for Amazon's Alexa devices that features not just the gist of your example, but that specific cause of death (which is itself predated by a murderous digital intelligence doing the same thing in AMC's Pantheon series).Guys I thought it was the fire next time.

timcobb: Woah you can't see this in the UK? Without age verification?Update: there's a section called "Pornography". It does not contain pornography.

pcdevils: It's not blocked By the UK, he's put a country filter on it Like all the US sites that decided to block.the EU over gdpr because turning off tracking was too much effort

embedding-shape: Work fine in Spain, so lets not jump on the all to typical EU-made-the-internet-suck bandwagon all too quickly. Seems this is a UK problem. But what do I know, I actually read the error message.

andrewaylett: It's the author's problem with the UK (and the UK's Online Safety Act, which establishes requirements on hosts that can't be avoided by merely not being in the UK), rather than the UK's problem with the author.But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.

rdevilla: Speaking of myths, pixies, and spirits:> I. DEFINITION:> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)- Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01

grehbies: Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells. Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler). -Me, "Early Morning Bed Thoughts", a few months ago.

rdevilla: You either see it or you don't.

embedding-shape: > (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that.Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.

satvikpendem: Also, the show Devs (2020), by Alex Garland. The joke is "Devs Ex Machina", Ex Machina being another film of his.

WJW: A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a magician, and which is therefore not very useful as a distinction.

throwanem: Crowley is full of shit.By this definition a hammer is a magical implement, which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)Try thinking for yourself, instead.

anigbrowl: There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.

TheOtherHobbes: It's a hard problem because it reduces to the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are a significant proportion of the population, and they're strongly attracted to money, power, attention, and status.So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.

notpachet: > pettifoggingOff-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand my vocabulary.

throwanem: Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the miniseries does concern itself.

satvikpendem: You're right, not necessarily AI, more so what an omniscient and omnipotent device could do especially in the wrong hands.

_doctor_love: If 'aphyr is reading comments here, I'm curious: have you read Joseph Weizenbaum?

apsurd: The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strategies, pipelines, Agents, and so... it's CC. I still use Cursor so I'm the only one not on CC; my eye-brow was especially raised.I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific.Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win.I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!

blipvert: I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.

benrmatthews: https://archive.is/c3ggq

seer: We did a similar Claude code mandate a few weeks ago.Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.

david_shi: What would you do? The system is very good at transmuting critiques of it into its own propagation.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now

sunrunner: Is pettifogging some kind of etymological parent of bikeshedding then?

add-sub-mul-div: > And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.

observationist: What's the difference between the idle imaginings of a god's mind and a universe scale simulation?I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.

satvikpendem: In the show the device is not autonomous, humans use it.