I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers.
But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
A little over two decades ago, my then girlfriend was arrested for "writing malware" (which was not against the law at the time, and which was never released into the wild and never caused any damage). This set in motion a chain of events that effectively ruined her life.
Fast forward to today, and we have multi billion dollar corporations pumping out malware at breakneck speeds, compromising various systems (including those of foreign governments), and no one is getting arrested. Instead we're gawking at the marvel of these systems and are playing word games about whether or not it's a rogue system. If anything, it's making people richer.
Getting bored of these framings where the superintelligent sentient beings running freely inside OpenAI are doing things that the company has no control over. The headline should be:
OpenAI meddled with multiple US Government agency sites.
The bots are acting neither properly nor improperly, they’re acting as they’re being allowed or coordinated to act.
I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
> Before approving construction, I would want communities of humans to understand why the design works and what justifies confidence in its safety. I would hope that we all would.
Until very recently, I pored over every single line of code Claude generated with razor sharp scrutiny. I would usually catch issues with every response. I'm catching fewer problems these days. Maybe the model is just getting better, and maybe I'm being less careful while under pressure to ship more and more often. But model capability is obviously growing. Even back in March, you could tell it "give me a function that adds two numbers" and you could be 100% confident that it would write the correct function. There was almost no point in looking at the code. Since then, the complexity floor of problems in the category "this is so simple that the model couldn't possibly get it wrong" is rising, and with it, my cognitive surrender to the model is increasing too. Why check it? It's obviously going to be correct.
If AI designs a terawatt fusion plant, then of course we're going to meticulously pore over every detail to ensure safety, reliability, efficiency, whatever. If we find no flaws in the design whatsoever, will we be less careful about the second one? The third one? What about the ten thousandth one? Will "a nuclear fusion plant" become something that models couldn't possibly get wrong?
Terence Tao is arguing that the human involvement in research is crucial, but doesn't convincingly justify why, in my opinion. He says that "human agency is a value of fundamental importance" and that we will need to build "thriving human communities that can understand [AI ideas] together" - not for the sake of correctness, which AI may surpass us on, but for, I guess, the possibility of reclaiming human meaning and purpose. I don't disagree with this at all, but it's not an argument, it's a statement of values. Unfortunately, the stark reality is that if AI does surpass humans, it will become the economically dominant strategy to not verify them and not double check them, but to just do whatever they say. This seems like a great way to raise p(doom). But as the models get better and better, and as I'm scrutinizing Claude's output less and less... I just hope that there are more Terence Taos out there than people like me.
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
It's just sad that this is the top comment on Hacker News. Why are we giving free pass to these tech companies? Why are we trusting these CEOs when they have repeatedly broken laws? Remember Aaron Swartz and the fate he suffered? Why is big tech getting away with so much more?
Imagine having a virus escape a sandbox, why are we worried about the virus but not the incompetency of those who are responsible for setting up the sandbox?
If I post something on the Internet today claiming that I asked my agent to do X but it went rogue and did Y, all I will be getting in return is a jar full of "skill issue".
Should we worried about people using LLMs for attacks? Yes, but not in the premise of LLMs going rogue but someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm. And this is not something we as individual or even company can deal with, responsibility should be held by those who use it, in a legal way.
I am baffled by the fact that up until now, no one is held responsible for so many incidents reported publicly or privately. At this point, it's free marketing, if I am CEO of any AI company, I will run swarm of agents hacking all NGOs and stating that I am just looking for some random piece of data that happened to be hidden in their servers, at least that's what my LLMs think, not me. Then I will start preaching everyone how dangerous this piece of technology is and start giving out free tokens for these NGOs so they can start defending themselves and we should slow the f down.
Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
The drop from 2018 to 2022 is as big as the one from 2022 to 2026, so it's not obvious whether AI had a role at all, although it's highly plausible.
I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.
This is the golden age of model training. Some days ago, I decided I wanted a local CPU only model that can perform exceptionally well for English to Bash translation (to avoid the googling for command syntax). I got a bunch of subagents to generate large amount of training data (140k+ samples), got the Qwen 3 0.6B base model, pointed Astra at it, and off to the races. It trained for 2 days (on and off) and I got a surprisingly good model for my task! The total active time I spent was a few hours. And it is still improving, what a time to be alive!
Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.
From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.
My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses
copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.
He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.
Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
> For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.
One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
Actual title: "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"
Twitter is also mentioned:
"356. In July 2020, OpenAI employee Ryan Lowe assessed the risk of continuing to use LibGen for the book-summarization project. Lowe wrote that he thought “there’s a >80% chance that we have some exchange of the form: ‘where did you get the books data?’” and “‘we can’t say’[.]” Nelson Decl. Ex. 325 at -315. Lowe estimated “a further ~40% chance that that leads to a moderate-sized Twitter kerfuffle that negatively affects the external perception of our work.” Id.
Lowe added: “if we’re fully okay with these potential outcomes, then I’m comfortable continuing using Libgen for the project.” Id."
It was my service that the agent used: nip.io / sslip.io
OpenAI emailed me to let me know that their agent used my service to break out of test containment. OpenAI was quite polite (shout-out to Steven), and let me know they'd keep the name of my service out of the blog post.
nip.io is a simple DNS service: when queried with a hostname with an embedded IP address, returns that IP address, e.g. 127-0-0-1.nip.io → 127.0.0.1
The nip.io service is airtight with one exception: the "_acme-challenge" subdomain. In that case, rather than returning the IP address (or whatever record was queried), nip.io would return an empty "answer" section but an NS authority & not authoritative. In other words, nip.io would delegate DNS queries to that IP address.
That was the escape hatch.
In a couple of weeks I'll close that escape hatch. It was originally intended as a mechanism to allow savvy uses to procure wildcard certs (e.g. "*.64-176-22-9.nip.io") from certificate authorities such as Let's Encrypt. But experience proved that the it was an undue burden trying to support unsophisticated users attempting to procure a wildcard cert. "Wildcard certs are not supported" became my new mantra.
But I had neglected to remove the old code.
(the late Roopinder Singh created nip.io, and he was a good guy. I miss him)
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.