It’s unlikely this is true. LLMs are way more mad-libs / templates than we like to admit, that’s (ironically) not a judgement about their capability, it’s primarily just an observation. But it’s also what plain old SFT, which I believe is the primary culprit, ends up imparting.
The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.
Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.
Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.
Captchas are primarily to punish users for not allowing tracking, or using the “right” services, they may prevent some bots as a side effect (or a pretence from the provider) but it’s mostly for google and cloudflare to abuse their monopolies.
Google I would say yes, but what does Cloudflare gain? They don't run an ad network. Generally I'd say Cloudflare is pretty good to have as a guardian of the web compared to other options.
They protect free speech and allow Tor users. Ever tried completing a reCaptcha on Tor?
Nowadays, somebody can just ask claude to build them a scraper/bot that hooks into a proxy network and all of a sudden they can easily send 20k+ reqs/min from hundreds or thousands of IPs cycling them as they get rate limited or banned. In my work, the scrapers have gotten way more aggressive in the last 2 years or so. Frankly, I'm happy there is a solution.
There may be things to criticize Cloudflare for, but the problem of bots and scrapers destroying the open web was getting worse no matter what.
I can relate to the cynicism, but it's also a general tool in the effort to combat bot abuse on public facing post forms that are trying to do something for real people. Many everyday devs reach for tools like this because of the deluge of garbage they get in its absence.
My take is that it's a very hard problem, so hard that even captchas by the biggest internet company can't get it right. I strongly hesitate to roll my own bot friction strategy when other tools are available. But I recognize I may have a lack of imagination here, would absolutely love to hear alternate ideas especially for small projects that may not need the heft of corporate captchas.
We use captchas to cut down on bots and crawlers. They don't work as well as they used to but they at least alter the economics somewhat, or so I tell myself.
Our reason for this is to try to make HN as good as possible for its real users.
I’ve never encountered a captcha on HN, do you guys use less aggressive settings?
The reason captchas bother me so much is they always seem to happen in the course of legitimate activities. Like I had one when trying to make a charity donation, or ordering something - I have no idea why it would be hard to distinguish such traffic as legitimate, I’m convinced it’s because I’m using a nonstandard browser, not allowing cookies, etc.
If I was trying an automation or to bulk download something or whatever, I’d take the captcha as an interesting professional challenge. When I’m trying to use someone’s services or pay them money, it’s just ridiculous friction and I generally abandon any transaction that makes me do a captcha.
Incidentally I have scraped HN and never encountered any problems, since you have an api for it
I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.
We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
> You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little
And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
that was driven by seemingly endless amounts of cheap money being thrown at whatever and whoever, which is not at all what "caring for humans and providing a good work environment" means.
labor-led automation produces improvements in quality, while capital-driven automation increases throughput
I don’t know if this is true, but I do think that LLMs mainly get used where their proponents don’t care (whether intentionally or through ignorance) about the quality of the output, and want to minimize work / maximize throughout. Basically whoever is pushing them is playing the hypothetical role of capitalist in his assertion.
This explains the management push (ignorance) but also the user push (automating BS tasks). The common thread is that the user doesn’t have to take any responsibility for the output. This is why people don’t like having LLMs pushed on them, because for cases where they are responsible for or have to consume the output, they don’t work very well, but when it’s just something that needs to look ok at a glance and be handed off, everyone is rushing to use them.
Iirc (and I could be wrong, this is from memory) JS divergence is what is minimized in GANs (where we simultaneously train a generator and real/synthetic classifier with the goal of each trying to beat the other to converge on real looking synthetic data), at least for some training methods.
I don’t think GANs are used much now in comparison to diffusion models, but as recently as a few years ago they were the standard way to make fake data, a la “this face does not exist”
scientists inspect eggs newly laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours. They select the most promising ones, crack them open, and delicately pour the contents—everything but the shell—into the artificial egg structure. But everything that happened before then, from fertilization to egg laying, required a real chicken.
I had a dentist explain to me the same for getting my wisdom teeth out, as if it was a selling feature. At least for me, having my memory wiped is far more scary than just being put unconscious (or having some pain and a local anaesthetic).
I was one of the last if not the last patient the dentist who took out my wisdom teeth gave general anesthesia to (at my request, he was normally only doing local). Afterwards, the whole dental office staff (and my mother!) entertained themselves with having conversations with my incoherent self as I came out of the anesthesia. Apparently, I declared that I was ruined and would never be able to sing opera again (point in fact, I had never sang opera before).
A colleague warned me of the same when I was having my wisdom teeth removed. As a result, while I was being put under, I was very focused on the effects of the anaesthetic. I feel about as confident as one can be that I was completely unconscious during the entire operation. I remember the surgeon asking me to count to ten, and the specific feeling of my vision melting and swirling around, before suddenly waking up with the surgery over.
When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.
Similar for me, although I did not realise I had gone under. I counted to ten, and when I reached ten I opened my eyes and was in a different room and the surgery was over. Very weird!
Had a few eye surgeries (vitrectomies) under sedation, no pain but lots of flashing lights and lots of kaleidoscope patterns. It was pretty wild.
I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.
I’m definitely not in the “ai is sentient” camp, but it obviously has personality and emergent behaviours including when left to its own devices. There have been various experiments on this e.g. https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredom
The major LLMs as implemented are basically role-playing programs. The default role is something like "helpful chatbot" so if you tell an LLM "do whatever you feel like on your own" it will simply use its weights to determine "what would a helpful chatbot do and say in this scenario?"
> This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously.
What did I misunderstand? What they did or why they did it? It seems to me that I understood it perfectly or they've explained it terribly.
> Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector.
It's amazing how many people think doing one job is "running a company." I've worked in radio. What happens in the studio is 5% of it. The staff in that room certainly gets less than 5% of the revenue.
The most popular formats are news and talk. For a reason. It's almost as if the people at this lab lack a fundamental understanding of how the world around them works. I would solve that immediate problem before I go about imagining ways "AI" can replace anything in any capacity.
Finally, I apologize, I'm just not willing to suspend basic disbelief because "AI" is unaccountably involved.
reply