4 ms·

> Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.

by oblio 4mo ago

TeMPOraL 4mo ago
Nature doesn't publish papers about water being wet either.
- sevenseacat 4mo ago
  source: just trust me bro
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    Source: it takes less effort to test this yourself than to write comments about it on Hacker News.
    - sevenseacat 4mo ago
      We did, that's why we're so skeptical of your claim. The burden of proof here is on you, not on us.
- oblio 4mo ago
  What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? We couldn't build any of this stuff (rockets, LLMs, heart medicine) if the foundation was ill defined. I think it's the second time I run into you like this, Temporal. I wish HN had a way to classify you as an "AI booster" or equivalent.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    > What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? Yes. There's a lot of interesting things science has to say about water, very specific claims that took a lot of effort to discover, precisely formulate, and reproduce. We're not talking about those. The whole LLM discussion on HN, as well as in the wider industry, is still stuck at the state where a large (or vocal) group of people refuses to believe water is wet. Yes, there is a similar group that tries to sell water as miracle cure, I'm not denying it - IMO both perspectives are dumb and entirely detached from obvious observational evidence that you can collect for ~free at home in 15 minutes. Example will follow. There exist the equivalent of foundational, detailed studies on LLMs, at every level of rigor imaginable (with a caveat, it's hard to rigorously prove anything useful in software engineering; it's still largely opinion-driven field). But they're not part of the overall "AI hypers/haters" dynamics. > I wish HN had a way to classify you as an "AI booster" or equivalent. You can take any of the LLMs and have it vibecode you a user script in under 5 minutes, than you then can paste into Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey, and voilà, you have me labeled as "AI booster" or filtered out. In fact, let me help you, I'll time it. I opened chatgpt.com in incognito (to emulate being a rando free user), and put the following prompt in: > I need a user script I can paste into Tampermonkey on my Firefox that will clearly label user named TeMPOraL with robot emoji and some silly emoji, so I never forget when reading their HackerNews comments that they're an unapologetic AI booster. Got back this script in under 10 seconds: https://pastebin.com/akEchvHd https://pastebin.com/akEchvHd. Tested it, works out of the box. This is the promised empirical example. It doesn't prove everything, but it proves something, and it took, end-to-end, a total of 1 minute to perform just now. You can collect many such examples over a single day by just trying. People who keep saying AI is useless and a fad and can't do anything useful, obviously never bother with even that. FYI: I'm not an AI booster. I like AI, and I find it useful, but I'm not going out of my way to boost it. I just enjoy this topic, but more importantly - and I remain consistent in this - I point out bullshit that doesn't agree with obvious observable reality. EDIT: try the example yourself, and post whether it works for you too - if it does, it's technically a peer-reviewed, replicated study, but I doubt it'll convince any of the naysayers of anything. EDIT2: I have plenty of negative things to say about LLM capabilities and how irresponsibly people use them, and I do occasionally write about this (mostly at work, these days), but most HN threads on AI are not on this level - not anymore. They used to be more reasonable back in GPT-4 days.
    - oblio 4mo ago
      LLMs are useful. They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful, nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful. The way they are pushed right now will lead to a very hard crash and probably lots of suffering. Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p
      - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
        > They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful Why not? They're a general-purpose technology, in the same category as "software" or "electricity". > nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful They're potentially useful for anything that can be fed into computers (VLMs lifted the "that can be expressed as text" limitation, visual and audio tokens are not a separate category to text tokens anymore). That touches every single job people do in some aspects. Even though LLMs can't do physical work for people, they're still able to help with directing it and teaching it. "Cramming into the throat of every employee on the planet" was already covered by many comments here, and the article itself - it's about forcing the obstinate holdouts to at least try. > Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p No I don't; literally copy-pasted it to Tampermonkey on my Firefox on Android just now, and it works there out-of-the-box too.
        oblio 4mo ago
        LOL, it did work :-) Regarding LLMs, they are pushed too hard and too abusively by business people. Employees are being laid off and replaced with chatbots that don't do the job. Frustrating if support for McDonald's, risky if health insurance support. Also the financials don't make sense. AI companies are money pits. Money is ultimately production. We make X amount of stuff yearly, globally. We can't afford to through away 5% of X yearly on technologies that will probably have a proper return in 5 or 10 years. When we mis-allocate resources on scales like these, people die. Look at Communist centralized planning. For $3-4 trillion we could have solved a LOT of actual global problems. LLMs are fine but they should have matured in the software dev domain for 2-3 more years and then non tech products would have followed.
- summa_tech 4mo ago
  As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists find more or less everything very interesting, even (especially?) things that are supposedly self-evident. You can both make a big splash disproving self-evident things, and much can be learned from it.

> Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.

by oblio 4mo ago

> Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.

TeMPOraL 4mo ago

Nature doesn't publish papers about water being wet either.

sevenseacat 4mo ago
source: just trust me bro
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  Source: it takes less effort to test this yourself than to write comments about it on Hacker News.
  - sevenseacat 4mo ago
    We did, that's why we're so skeptical of your claim. The burden of proof here is on you, not on us.
oblio 4mo ago
What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? We couldn't build any of this stuff (rockets, LLMs, heart medicine) if the foundation was ill defined. I think it's the second time I run into you like this, Temporal. I wish HN had a way to classify you as an "AI booster" or equivalent.
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  > What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? Yes. There's a lot of interesting things science has to say about water, very specific claims that took a lot of effort to discover, precisely formulate, and reproduce. We're not talking about those. The whole LLM discussion on HN, as well as in the wider industry, is still stuck at the state where a large (or vocal) group of people refuses to believe water is wet. Yes, there is a similar group that tries to sell water as miracle cure, I'm not denying it - IMO both perspectives are dumb and entirely detached from obvious observational evidence that you can collect for ~free at home in 15 minutes. Example will follow. There exist the equivalent of foundational, detailed studies on LLMs, at every level of rigor imaginable (with a caveat, it's hard to rigorously prove anything useful in software engineering; it's still largely opinion-driven field). But they're not part of the overall "AI hypers/haters" dynamics. > I wish HN had a way to classify you as an "AI booster" or equivalent. You can take any of the LLMs and have it vibecode you a user script in under 5 minutes, than you then can paste into Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey, and voilà, you have me labeled as "AI booster" or filtered out. In fact, let me help you, I'll time it. I opened chatgpt.com in incognito (to emulate being a rando free user), and put the following prompt in: > I need a user script I can paste into Tampermonkey on my Firefox that will clearly label user named TeMPOraL with robot emoji and some silly emoji, so I never forget when reading their HackerNews comments that they're an unapologetic AI booster. Got back this script in under 10 seconds: https://pastebin.com/akEchvHd https://pastebin.com/akEchvHd. Tested it, works out of the box. This is the promised empirical example. It doesn't prove everything, but it proves something, and it took, end-to-end, a total of 1 minute to perform just now. You can collect many such examples over a single day by just trying. People who keep saying AI is useless and a fad and can't do anything useful, obviously never bother with even that. FYI: I'm not an AI booster. I like AI, and I find it useful, but I'm not going out of my way to boost it. I just enjoy this topic, but more importantly - and I remain consistent in this - I point out bullshit that doesn't agree with obvious observable reality. EDIT: try the example yourself, and post whether it works for you too - if it does, it's technically a peer-reviewed, replicated study, but I doubt it'll convince any of the naysayers of anything. EDIT2: I have plenty of negative things to say about LLM capabilities and how irresponsibly people use them, and I do occasionally write about this (mostly at work, these days), but most HN threads on AI are not on this level - not anymore. They used to be more reasonable back in GPT-4 days.
  - oblio 4mo ago
    LLMs are useful. They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful, nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful. The way they are pushed right now will lead to a very hard crash and probably lots of suffering. Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      > They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful Why not? They're a general-purpose technology, in the same category as "software" or "electricity". > nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful They're potentially useful for anything that can be fed into computers (VLMs lifted the "that can be expressed as text" limitation, visual and audio tokens are not a separate category to text tokens anymore). That touches every single job people do in some aspects. Even though LLMs can't do physical work for people, they're still able to help with directing it and teaching it. "Cramming into the throat of every employee on the planet" was already covered by many comments here, and the article itself - it's about forcing the obstinate holdouts to at least try. > Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p No I don't; literally copy-pasted it to Tampermonkey on my Firefox on Android just now, and it works there out-of-the-box too.
      - oblio 4mo ago
        LOL, it did work :-) Regarding LLMs, they are pushed too hard and too abusively by business people. Employees are being laid off and replaced with chatbots that don't do the job. Frustrating if support for McDonald's, risky if health insurance support. Also the financials don't make sense. AI companies are money pits. Money is ultimately production. We make X amount of stuff yearly, globally. We can't afford to through away 5% of X yearly on technologies that will probably have a proper return in 5 or 10 years. When we mis-allocate resources on scales like these, people die. Look at Communist centralized planning. For $3-4 trillion we could have solved a LOT of actual global problems. LLMs are fine but they should have matured in the software dev domain for 2-3 more years and then non tech products would have followed.
summa_tech 4mo ago
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists find more or less everything very interesting, even (especially?) things that are supposedly self-evident. You can both make a big splash disproving self-evident things, and much can be learned from it.