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Not commenting on Reid specifically but on the other hand I don't understand why we should listen to the Tech CEO's / Founders about their opinions on the tech they are selling.

Why wouldn't you listen to a company on why their product solves the problem you're having?

Since you're not picking up on a social subtext, "we should not listen to them" here means "don't be influenced by them" or "don't take their words as granted". In other words, we should be skeptical, not literally shut them out.

> we should be skeptical, not literally shut them out

To be fair, this isn’t obvious from the top comment. Another comment literally argues for shutting them out [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660630


I see an interesting schism in the discussion - there are two camps here.

One is normative: listen to tech CEO's if you want to predict what will happen.

Another is positive: let CEO's tell you what ought to happen.

What happened here was the original commenter talked about listening to Reid for normative reason but the conversation got derailed into ignoring CEO's for positive statements.

This is something I see often where one talks about what would happen but people barge in to signal their ethics and morals instead.


So, the multinational company is probably better at lying than the average person is at discerning lies.

There’s an argument that the best approach is to totally ignore what the vendor says and listen to trusted experts instead. If you’re buying a car, say, you’re probably not listening to what car manufacturers say. Or, at least, you shouldn’t; you will be mislead. If you happen to be an expert on cars it might be no harm, but otherwise probably best ignore them.


Companies lie.

Yes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to them. You listen to them and you evaluate their claims.

To be truly impartial I don't think you should even evaluate their claims directly. This allows them to focus the comparison on things they care about, not the things you care about. Instead you should decide what problems you need solving, and evaluate solutions to those problems against your own rubric.

It seems to me that the original poster meant "listen" in the sense of "believe," not "listen" in the sense of "hear."

You are correct, I simply mean we should keep in mind that they are also selling something.

If you ask an AWS consultant what the best solution for your problem is, don't be surprised if the answer is AWS.


“Listen” is being used in a non-literal way here, with the meaning “to accept as true”.

Humans lie

Companies exist to influence others.

What do you think anyone talking to the press or commenting on social media is up to?

Every company exists to get money; it is literally their lifeblood.

Not every human on social media or talking to the press is trying to influence others in a survival situation. Go touch grass.


Companies are organisations of people that have a common goal.

Yes to make money so they can provide a roof and food for their families.

But also other goals. To invent. To create. To provide goods and services.

People lie.


As someone who doesn't follow the specifics of how LLMs write, how can you be sure it's an LLM?

I'm asking this genuinely because I've been using stuff like these separators before LLMS - now someone can just say "ahh dismiss the content they used style X it's LLM, it's dogshit".


I am not sure if I would manage to correctly identify every typical phrase, but the one I quoted I am absolutely certain of.

You could try asking an LLM to write some prose about whatever you fancy. Maybe two or three different pieces, and ask it to be extra profound. You will probably see that exact sentence structure above a number of times:

> It’s not [X], it’s [Y]. A bit of [A], the [random adjective] of [B], all weaving together to form [C]. A short sentence. Maybe two. A final, culminating closer, gradually transcending into space.

The words are quite interchangeable, but the you will know it when you see it.


Look for triads and "it's not this, but that". These are dead giveaways. You can also pass it through Pangram which is quite reliable these days.

That's the worst part, I'm never 100% sure, and that uncertainty is so ... disempowering?

Also, I'd rather lead a team of humans that I can interact and talk with in real life instead of a team of bots.

Highly doubt it.

Hm. Nowadays a lot of games look alike. They use some 3D-Engine and most of the work is in the 3D-modelling and writing some interesting scripts.

For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.


I'm sure AI will be used in asset generation but it'll be in deployed similarly as procedural generation of mass assets like trees and npcs.

I don't yet see it used for characters as they quickly become kind of generic / predictable.


Clearly you don't work in game development, this comment put a smile on my face. Although I expected a bit more from hacker news crowd

You overvalue the HN crowd (or undervalue the AI hype-machine) considering you're downvoted and GP is upvoted (Another gamedev here smiling at GP's comment).

Yet another classic unskilled but unaware of it from the hacker news crowd (another professional gamedev here).

It's not hard if you just imagine a slop re-skin of any other GTA of similar game.

Did you miss the sarcasm or has GTA6 become some sort of anomalous memetic agent that makes anyone who tries to work on it not be able to finish it regardless if it's human or AI?

Both probably, I don't usually understand sarcasm in written text unless it's explicitly stated.

someday we will have models that can resolve physics to such degree to predict the future with surgical accuracy and when someone says "maybe models will become advanced enough to create a whole other universe from scratch" you will be there saying "highly doubt it"

This reminds me of a boss I had 20 years ago that said devs were going to be replaced soon.

Maybe he was 20 years early or maybe it's not happening now too.


Please note that I did not imply devs won't exist in my contrived fantasy.

Who do you think will be operating those mythological tools?:)


Someday.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Can't you see there are many people strictly dumber than AI already? And that percentage is rapidly growing?

> There simply won't be jobs for them.

I simply don't agree with the doomer takes. Might be wrong. I'm kinda stupid yet here I am.


True, but not in the way you're thinking.

This is a thought I've had about genAI.

In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some assets than "generating code".

I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".


Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.

Had a "project" course in university for CS. Implemented a working SaaS app for hosting ML models (before AI).

Winner in our category had a powerpoint and a poster, no one even looked at the implementation. I learned something that day.


I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.


I've been told that my career is "cooked" since first Opus.

I'll believe it when I see it.


An egg in the pan takes a minute to cook, that's for sure.


At least they sent the application, that was effort. So it can't be 100% luck right?


I did not say it was all luck. I said if any part of the outcome depends on luck, effort is meaningless when it come to the result. This is not to say that doing nothing is better, I am just being realistic.


But even going with your examples, effort isn't "meaningless", it's insufficient.


I might have misunderstood as english is not my native language but the 100% doesn't sit right with me in the original sentence.

In general I feel people downplay the effects of luck by a lot. My thinking is that the effort is everything but meaningless, in fact it's probably the only thing you can control.


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