I assure you that you did not need an LLM to engage in, ahem, risky shenanigans, much before all this AI was ever a thing.

Sincerely, a former engineering student.

(Put another way - extracting for eg meth - or any such "dangerous"/illicit thing is stupidly easy for any engineering graduate who actually paid attention to their coursework. Hell, there are/were forums on one of the biggest red-colored, YC associated social media platforms that would tell you the steps for personal usage of these things.)

I don't doubt it. Bleach + ammonia is something anyone can make.

But I rather suspect there are improvements to be made in the realm that are a lot easier than building a uranium enrichment centrifuge hall under a mountain.

Do note that I'm not condoning lowering the bar. I'm merely pointing out that the bar was already quite low, and the current position of the bar is a small incremental change to anyone who actually knew where the bar truly lay to begin with.

If you're self aware of this, you're probably already ahead of 95% of others in similar shoes.

Did it really? Here in my <large 3rd world country> at least, afaik no one's stopped pirating. The tools to activate may have changed but haven't gone away.

You wouldn't download an LLM for free, would you?

> This is totally lost on me.

Appears to be lossy then ;)

(Sorry, you have to admit that was too easy to not say)

If we're doing hypotheticals, why not both?

Not sure if it directly helps here, but multi gaage railway cars are a thing. Iirc on some European lines, the trains switch their gauge.

Yeah some overnight trains can adjust their gauge on the France/Spain border.

On the China/Mongolia border on the other hand they disassemble the train, lift the train cars up one by one (with passengers inside), switch out the boogies and then reassemble. 3 hour process, you can fully sleep through it and not notice.

Not notice loud banging and violent shaking underneath you? You can sleep through that, with practice, but you will notice it.

It's actually rather quiet from the relatively sound-proof interior, and there is no noticeable shaking.

These aren't American trains.

If it’s taking 3 hours on a passenger train, a 5-10 minute transfer seems vastly more efficient.

Yes, but most people can't sleep through a train transfer

On a night train such as the Transsib that takes several days to get from A to B anyway, being able to sleep through it and not needing to lug your stuff around is usually considered more important.

(Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)

> (Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)

Yeah although you can just stay in bed for this. I've been on the train. The Chinese officials just wake you up, stamp your passport, and off you go to sleep.

Then the Mongolian officials came on, asked me a couple questions to see whether I respected their country, why I was going there, grumbled something unintelligble, stamped my passport and moved on.

Much better than getting in line for 2 hours if you ask me (which is what happened at the Bulgaria/Turkey border and the Georgia/Armenia border when I crossed those)

For day trains as well, more often within Spain than on the border with France.

Tbh I think the microsoft neo (or was it the duo?) was the "best" - have 2 (or more) screens but put them on a hinge. You can get one big screen with whatever panel quality you like (hell, make it a cheap or transflective if you want), or you get a smaller screen if you wish.

There's a reason the Asus Duo is so much cheaper than the ThinkPad Fold X1 and all other OLED "folding" screen devices.

On the topic of older (Claude) models being better... anyone knows anything close to 3.5 (or 3.6) era Sonnet? It was by far the best LLM I had ever asked my doubts too. It actually explained in a human way, not like some AI I need to re read thrice to understand.

(I've used modern Gemini 3.1 pro & claude too. Modern ChatGPT is just as useless, I've never heard a human speak in points. The human brain never encounters that irl.)

This was obviously a conscious choice from the leadership at he frontier labs, and especially OpenAI, considering how 4o turned out.

I don't think they expected the ELIZA effect [0] to explode as much as it did when they started including feedback directly from users into posttraining the next generation, so to be safe they've likely added several regimens of synthetic data ensuring ChatGPT tries to steer away from ELIZA.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

I'd have to see representative examples but there are thousands of models available, obliterated, remixed, distilled, cloned, compressed, and so many more.

I really liked the way copilot was last year, but I switched to deepseek because I don't trust MS.

Grok cracks me up, but I refuse to give elon more money than I'm already forced to by circumstance outside my control and budget.

It is hard to say because there is "affection" memory that it was better than what we had before so it seems it was better.

In my humble opinion that serves nothing, it improved gradually, not exponentially up to 4.5

4.6 seems to be a minor step and the latest 2 are pure rubbish

Nah, definitely not ADHD. Wrote that quickly from my phone, which is why it's so scatter brained.

Good if you're sure of it.

Fwiw, I didn't mention it because of your writing style at all, I wrote it because you literally said

> Couldn't sit still.

Also, for anyone curious, drug use and being in prison is much more common amongst adhd folk than the general population. A staggering 25% (approximately) of prison population is ADHD [1], far higher than the general population.

1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301200/

And to whoever downvoted me, I've successfully "diagnosed" (read - identified) multiple friends already. NDs often have decent ND-radars.

Same here, I too feel the same. I don't look as if I am neuro divergent but I am slightly and have radar for others and have begun to tell people, "that person is not late or slow in the mind but that person is simply a neuro divergent and needs to be given chance or looked at differently" lot of neuro divergents have been discriminated against in the past. My one professor used to ask me, "Are you on drugs". No I never have. It's just lack of sleep in college days can otherwise make my lucid brain super foggy

Haha, I can relate. I was once straight up asked if I used cocaine by my caretakers when I was 16. I was simply sleep deprived. And needed sleep bad. My neurodivergence mostly manifests as a sleep problem, in terms of it being a clinical issue. In other areas of life they are simply quirks.

To get the whole discussion of “I have seen this behavior before. I know an addict when I see one”. It was embarrassing. And then to hear “you’re 16 and acting out your puberty”.

Adults are silly sometimes when they are convinced of something, and fucking persistent.

I've had a few people tell me that I definitely have ADHD, even an internal medicine doctor and a neuro radiology friend. But I always change the subject.

Let's say they are correct. What would the solution look like from there?

As an example, and this is only 1% of it, but I have had my utilities turned off several times for not paying bills, while having $400k in the bank.

It took the collapse of my marriage for me to finally do something about the rampant ADHD that has been a feature of my life for 40 years, and yes, part of that collapse was when someone from the gas company showed up to turn off the supply unless I paid the bill right now, which of course I could easily do.

It took me five years to actually get to a point of a) having a diagnosis and b) getting medication. Most of that was due to the perverse way this process works in the UK, where to get a diagnosis of executive dysfunction you have to do a ton of personal admin, after which you’ll be handed another todo list in order to be able to get drugs prescribed.

I’m now on a good dose of drugs and I honestly mourn for the decades of my life I could have been feeling how I do now had I known. They don’t make everything better, it’s still an effort to make myself focus on the things I should be focusing on, but once I am focusing on them I’m able to continue doing so, and I no longer find myself having done no work for the last week because I was putting off a ten minute task I didn’t want to do. Despite spending 12 hours a day with a steady stream of amphetamines being released into my blood stream my blood pressure has dropped significantly since starting the drugs because I’m no longer in a constant state of low grade panic at all the things I’m not doing.

Please, go get a diagnosis (or not, maybe they’re all wrong). Talk to whoever you’re referred to about options, decide whether drugs are something you want to try. Give yourself options at least because it is possible to stop playing life on hard mode.

Cognitive behavioral therapy and, if you want to, medication. Studies have confirmed great results when those two are done together.

If you get your utilities shut off due to ADHD, and that is only 1% of it as you claim, your instinctual coping mechanisms obviously aren't enough to prevent a pretty bad impact on your day-to-day life. As you would seek help for acute medical problems from professionals, you should seek help for chronic mental problems from professionals.

> Let's say they are correct. What would the solution look like from there? Personally after being diagnosed at 36, I started taking concerta occasionally. Mostly once a week to deal with all the things I have a tendency to not do otherwise. It's helped a lot.

And I'm saying this as someone who lost circa 120k in work I never invoiced because of ADHD

There’s both medication (which takes a while to get dosage right but can be extremely helpful for some) and also techniques you can use to help compensate.

Theres a pretty heavy "woo" presence on HN with lots of people who think you can just adopt a bunch of unproven metaphysical nonsense practices and magically delete your adhd (and anyone it doesnt work on just isnt trying hard enough). pay them no mind.