Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145740

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.

Bad arguments should be quickly responded to and shown false. Calling them "dogwhistles" doesn't change anyone's opinion.

Once an LLM-based system can be hard-locked to its own ontology, think and evaluate options and make decisions based on it, and update it based on what it learns from encounters with the real world, then I think we'll have made the final great breakthrough AI needs to become generally intelligent and useful.

In terms of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, LLMs currently use only System 1 thinking (equivalent to fast, pattern-matched decisions humans make). You can scale that up to trillions of parameters, but fundamentally it's still fancy scaled-up probabilistic pattern matching. Like humans, fast decisions made by AI here only can be justified/audited in retrospect.

Integrated ontologies would move AI toward what Kahneman calls "System 2 thinking": slow, logical, systematic evaluation that is more auditable.

If you have an LLM or human just start coding up something without nailing down those decisions first, then he/she/it will implicitly make those decisions arbitrarily in the moment (usually based more on pattern-matching than real weighing of alternatives) and the result will be a massive mess.

Ideally for an LLM, you'd hand-write a highly detailed DESIGN.md file to encode those decisions and a suite of test fixtures to enforce them.

"Diversity is our strength" -- what kind of diversity? Within a company, diversity of purpose is not a strength, because you can't have people working at cross-purposes with one another. It's the same for countries, local communities, and families. "Diversity" can easily be used to describe what ultimately is "division", making it contradict the old saying in the USA "United we stand, divided we fall".

Diversity of strengths/weaknesses, personalities, backgrounds (including ethnic), etc. all do make us stronger provided we maintain and prioritize a practical unity in a shared purpose.

Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.

So for numbers we normally work with, no. Maybe with cryptographic operations though.

I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.

so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.

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All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.

I recently reacted angrily in a PR review comment after encountering one for the umpteenth time... that caught me off guard. I didn't know I was capable of that.

If you don't speak English, write it in Hindi and use google translate. That will be much preferable to something written by an LLM.

The LLM-voice revulsion isn't just about particular idiosyncrasies. Another commenter put it well - the "uncanny valley of text".

I'm getting to the point that I almost have a physical feeling of revulsion/nausea when I read something outside an open Claude Code session that is written in an AI voice.

I'm so sick of that voice -- word choice, phrasing, style... it's hard to define and frustrating because it's both pervasive, influential on human writers including myself (I found myself using the phrase "doing a lot of work" in a Slack message about a word someone chose to use :grimace:), and presumably compounding on future LLMs.

I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.

Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?

OrbStack's claim to fame is that all containers run in a single Linux VM, with lots of optimizations on both sides of the VM boundary (including use of a sparse image file for disk storage, which saves a lot of space on the macOS side).

If you run more than 4-5 containers on macOS, the performance and resource usage savings of OrbStack really starts to add up quickly.

Nice summary of a good hacker's viewpoint. All his money, power, and other non-technical signals don't really give him the technical authority to weigh on what really makes a technical difference.

That being said, depending on how good information-sharing is at the company, he might have a valuable perspective. But given that morale is low, it's doubtful that engineers feel free to tell the straight unvarnished truth without fear. And in typical large-company fashion, managers above them likely spin things positively as much as possible.