5 ms·
Gaslight-driven development
- trhway 1y ago>Well, now there is a new way to serve our silicon overlords. LLMs started to have opinions on how your API should look we have code review by LLM. There is no point or a way to argue. Just submit to the wishes of the overlord, resistance is futile.
- readthenotes1 1y agoFor some reason this reminds me of the conversation I had with a guy who didn't like the lane keeping assist on his car. He didn't like that it vibrated the steering wheel when he changed lanes without using the blinker.
- raddan 1y agoI rented a car recently for a trip to Arizona that had lane keeping on by default. The highway I was traveling on was undergoing extensive repair. Not only did the car sound audible alarms with some frequency, since the highway had been rerouted in places using traffic cones, it also constantly tried to veer the car back into “the lane.” Since the lane was in some places just a hole, the consequences would have been bad. I ended up pulling over and fishing through the menus until I found a way to turn it all off. It appears that there’s a very long tail of exceptional circumstances that must be handled with autonomous driving.
- dboreham 1y agoimho lane keep is a misfeature. I own one car where it is impossible to turn off without also turning off lane departure warning (arguably a somewhat useful feature).
- trhway 1y agoYep, i'd not like it too - changing lanes requires increased attention and now during the maneuver you steering wheel starts to vibrate out-of-the-blue. That isn't to argue about using of the blinker, it is about the way the assist is implemented in this case - it doesn't help directly with the blinker, instead it punishes you and thus stress-injects-and-conditions you for the instinct to use blinker next time. Net positive probably for the driver and society thus demonstrating again that forcing individual submission is an effective way to social harmony. And blinker is just very mild use case. LLMs can already today in some cases and will be more and more tomorrow able to recognize when your behavior isn't legal and/or isn't very moral (like it would hear that you say and see what you text on the phone and would for example recognize a drug buying - pardon such a primitive simplicity, it is just a caricaturish exampl for illustration purposes only - and we've already established a tendency of LLMs to rat you out to authorities) and thus LLM can act to warn you about or even prevent your actions and/or report you to authorities, probably even before you actually commit anything.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoliterally just turn on your blinkers, like you should be doing anyway, and lane assistant won't trigger. you are just outing yourself as a bad driver.
- trhway 1y agosorry, you're missing my point. I explicitly said that it isn't about the need to use blinkers.
- stickfigure 1y agoCue up the people that start conversations with "I'm not racist, but..."
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoAnd I say that makes no sense. If you use your blinkers, lane assist doesn't get in the way. So do what you should be doing anyway and use your blinkers.
- hamish-b 1y agoI like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.
- lagniappe 1y agoIts the bottom 20px or so, with a lot of content above it. Move the window down slightly.
- _carbyau_ 1y agoThe article literally starts with: "Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks ..." I guess this is demonstrating another variant of that. Admittedly, not one I'd seen before so +1 for novelty even if -20 for distraction.
- promiseofbeans 1y agoIt's pretty fun seeing what countries people are from. If you hover, it tells your their city as well!
- cnnlives 1y agoMaybe if the background color on all pages was a heatmap of the current top line of the page, so that you could see where people were reading and how many were reading, it would be better? Also, what if it played slow and brooding music when fewer people were reading and epic action adventure music when many people were reading it? How about if the page mined bitcoin and the first person to enter a page made a percentage higher percentage of the next person’s bitcoin and less of the next one, like a multi-level marketing mining strategy?
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThat heatmap idea sounds really neat actually.
- HexDecOctBin 1y ago
- jackwilsdon 1y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491071
- revskill 1y agoYes, but please separate plannning from reviewing, let alone real coding.
- abtinf 1y ago> We see the same at Instant: for example, we used tx.update for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing tx.create instead. Guess what: we now have tx.create, too. Good. Think of all the dev hours that must’ve been wasted by humans who were confused by this too.
- RandallBrown 1y agoIf tx.create didn't exist, why would any hours be wasted by this?
- meepmorp 1y agoIf it were somehow a human that was consistently and confidently handing out made up programming advice about one's products, would companies still respond by just adding whatever imagined feature and writing a vaguely bemused blog post about it?
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoMaybe I can start pretending I’m an LLM and see if that gets me a pass when I make silly mistakes or hallucinate in entirely the wrong direction. As long as I look confident doing so.
- hobs 1y agoNo they would confidently assert they need the dumb thing you keep saying.
- guelo 1y agoIf that human was giving advice to 90% of your customers you just might.
- eapriv 1y agoIsn’t this the whole shtick of Mr Martin, author of “Clean Code”?
- delifue 1y ago> for example, we used tx.update for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing tx.create instead. Guess what: we now have tx.create, too. If a function can both insert and update, it should be called "put". Using "update" is misleading.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoUpsert?
- theendisney 1y agoLets just do all variations and have the llm guess it right the first time.
- bigiain 1y agoImplement all of them, with slightly different edge cases that result in glaringly obvious RCE when two or three of them are misused in place of each other. (New startup pitch: Our agentic AI scans your access and error logs, and automatically vibe codes new API endpoints for failed API calls and pushes them to production within seconds, all without expensive developers or human intervention! Please form an orderly queue with your termsheets and Angel Investment cheques.)
- theendisney 1y agoI wrote some joke code long ago for a library that does everything. You wrap all function calls in a try that submits the entire script as a bug report. The animatedBackgroundWithUnicorns() is then implemented.. eh i mean the bug is fixed. It might actually work if the subscription is expensive enough.
- user_of_the_wek 1y agoCrupdate
- eggn00dles 1y ago
- shutupnerd0000 1y agoI aint reading all this with the animated live user bar at the bottom.
- superconduct123 1y agoDidn't realize so many Canadians on HN
- tdstein 1y agoI don't agree with the thesis of this post. It is begging the question of if we have to do what computers want. > Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, ... not because they particularly want to or even need to. These were design choices made by humans, not computers.
- mooiedingen 1y agoTo those that still believe that a bunch of data loaded into memory, where data can be anything from a scientific article to a message between two lovers, getting triggered for an output with input and a basic for loop can represent anything intelligence, i have some bad news for you like damn ya'll don't you know git(hub) & huggingface? Ofcourse the drawback of that is that you are not contributing to AGI KEK!
- bjornsing 1y agoThis feels like the beginning of a wonderful friendship between me and the LLMS. I work as a fractional CTO. One of the things that frustrate me is when my clients have various idiosyncratic naming conventions on things, eg there’s a ”dev” and a ”prod” environment on AWS, but then there’s a ”test” and ”production” environment in Expo. It just needlessly consumes brain cycles, especially when you’re working with multiple clients. I guess it’s the same for the LLMs, just on a massive scale. In general I think it’s great whenever some weight / synapse strength bits can be reallocated from idiosyncratic API naming / behavior towards real semantics.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoAs the old joke goes: there are two hard problems in computer science - cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors Naming things doesn’t get easier just because you bring an LLM to do it based on an incoherent stochastic process. Have you asked why those environments have not been renamed to align? As a former CTO I’d see it immediately as a signal of poor communication, poor standards adoption, or both. It’s this low hanging stuff that you can fix relatively easily where you’re actually using that work to make the culture better and make people care more. Don’t outsource things you should care about a lot. Naming things is something you shouldn’t be hand waving away to a model.
- bjornsing 1y agoSure, I can spend my days doing that. But I appreciate the help (from the LLMs). And I think we actually have the same goal function: we want to make naming more compressible, less unexpected. You can call that culture (and it is) but you can also see it as pure information theory.
- debarshri 1y agoRecently i had an interesting chat with my team around coding principles of the future. I think the way people will write code will not be around following solid principles or making sure your cyclometric complexity is high or low, nor it would be about is your code readable or not. I think future coding principles would be around whether your agentic ide can index it well to become context aware, does it fix into the context window or not. It will be around the model you use and thr code it can generate. We will index on maintainability of the code, as code will become disposable as rate of change will increase dramatically. It will be around whether your vibed prompts matches the code thats already generated to reach some accuracy or generate enough serendipity.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoI had to use the reader mode to be able to read this article
- lukev 1y agoHave fun! I'm going to keep trying to build new things that are more excellent and original than the median training data.
- wiseowise 1y agoStatistically you’re median and unoriginal, but keep trying.
- Waterluvian 1y agoIs there a general name and framing we could apply to these “AI” that is equally as accurate but sheds all of the human biases associated with the terms? Like… it’s just a really, really, really good autocomplete and sometimes I find thinking of it that way cleans up my whole mental model for its use.
- silveri 1y agoI like something related to "interns" (artificial interns?) because it keeps the implication that you still always have to double-check, review and verify the work they did.
- cpeterso 1y agoAInterns?
- catach 1y agoIt's really difficult because many of the task types we use AI for are those that are linguistically tied to concepts of human actions and cognition. Most of our convenient language use implies that AI are thinking people.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoDoes that actually clean up your mental model though? At some number of "reallys" that autocomplete starts to sound like intelligence. Like, what is "taking customer requirements and turning them into working code" if not just really really really really really really really good autocomplete with this mental model?
- Waterluvian 1y agoA lot of people are just doing the job of a really good autocomplete, not being asked to make many, if any, nontrivial decisions in their job. Taking requirements and making working code is something some models are adequate at. It’s all the stuff around that, which I think holds the value, such as deciding things like when the requirements are wrong.
- Tcepsa 1y agoMaybe it's spite-driven development, but I'd love to hear about someone who, upon learning that LLMs are suggesting endpoints in their API that don't exist, implements them specifically to respond with a status code[0] of "421: Misdirected Request". Or, for something less snarky and more in keeping with the actual intent of the code, "501: Not Implemented". If the potentially-implied "but it might be, later" of 501 is untenable, I humbly propose this new code: "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong" [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
- Bluestein 1y ago> "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong" You made me chuckle. Well played. Great stuff :) May I, simply, also suggest: HTTP 407 Hallucination Meaning: The server understands the request but believes it to be incongruous with reality.-
- LiKao 1y agoYes, it should definitely be in the 400 space of HTML error codes. As 400 -> "You are incorrect" while 500 -> "We messed up".
- hi_hi 1y agoI humbly request, if you are going to do this, please, please...use the 418 response. It deserves wider adoption :-)
- Bluestein 1y ago(on that note, I'm putting the kettle on :)
- latentsea 1y agoI think it's a good representation of a hallucination.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoBit of a pet peeve: 418 is clearly defined as "I am a teapot", not "whatever I want it to mean". Please do not use it for anything other than its specified purpose, even if it is a joke.
- jaredcwhite 1y agoSorry, we will reach the heat death of the universe before I alter a single line of code simply because some LLM somewhere extruded incorrect synthetic text. That is so bonkers, I feel offended I even need to point out how bonkers it is.
- sfvisser 1y ago> Like it or not, we are already serving the machines. The machines don’t give a shit, it’s the lawyers and bureaucrats you’re serving :) Better or worse?
- rexpop 1y agoIn postmodern societies, reality itself is structured by simulation—"codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules". The bureaucratic and legal apparatus you invoke are themselves caught up in this regime. Their procedures, paperwork, and legitimacy rely on referents—the "models" and "simulacra" of governance, law, and knowledge—that no longer point back to any fundamental, stable reality. What you serve, in effect, is the system of signification itself: simulation as reality, or—per Baudrillard—hyperreality, where "all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear". "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (Debord) Our social relations, governance, and even dissent become performances staged for the world's endless mediated feedback loop. In this age, according to Heidegger, "everything becomes a 'picture', a 'set-up' for calculation, representation, and control." The machine is not just a device or a bureaucratic protocol—it is the mode of disclosure through which the world appears, and your sense of selfhood and agency are increasingly products (and objects) within this technological enframing. Yada, yada, yada; the Matrix is real. ie, you don't know the half of it, compadre.
- gusfoo 1y agoDelete the div called `presence` and the page becomes nicer to read.
- alexjerome 1y ago[dead]