Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525081

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

The pattern I'm talking about is easily repeatable. Someone says that they used LLMs to do something, people demand to see proof, and no matter what it is a sockpuppet army arrives on cue to insult and snipe. It doesn't matter if it's total shit or really impressive, it's the kneejerk aspect that makes it unsane to actually take the bait.

Meanwhile, everyone in this thread seems to assume that the website Mr. Johnny was talking about having used LLMs to build quickly was the one linked in his profile. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but the river of snark was flowing before anyone had any confirmation of what they were actually supposed to be shitty about.

That's the tip off that you are a member of a pack of bullies, whether you're consciously aware of it or not. If you were actually offering opinions in good faith, you'd clarify the subject before jumping to snark.

We've seen this play out so many times. Nobody working on anything serious is going to volunteer to be a target for your BS.

I sincerely wish that people would stop falling for the "prove you're not hallucinating" trap. If winning was possible - and it's not - there would be no prize but more snark and harassment.

Please go touch some grass.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489307

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

1. I saw it was React

2. Nothing loading, just a page full of spinners

I truly wish React could be launched into the sun.

That's one hungry, hungry hippo!

Significantly too rich for my blood, but nice to have it there the next time I'm debugging a threading or USB protocol bug.

Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement.

Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now.

And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations?

What monopoly? No monopoly here!

I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back.

However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.

If I'm really and truly honest, I still remember this happening quite clearly so consider this my own personal Mandela Effect moment.

However, there's an unforgiveable gap between fans throwing urine bottles around and my claim [that I very clearly remember Liam as the brother who pissed on an audience at Molson Park but can't prove it and now look like a dumbass] so I do sincerely apologize.

The idea that they care if their fans live or die really comes down to whether they could get sponsors on board or not.

The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff.

What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply.

There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.

There were solutions before blockchain, especially in the field of Byzantine fault tolerance. The original Byzantine Generals paper was from 1982, and practical algorithms existed before Bitcoin. For example: PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - published in 1999.

https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/papers/castro-practical...

Blockchain solved a different version of the problem: how can a large, open, permissionless network reach agreement when anyone can join and nobody has a fixed identity?

Classic BFT is like a committee of known people voting, where the system survives some liars.

Blockchain is like letting strangers on the internet vote, but making votes costly enough that cheating becomes economically difficult.

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

Right!?

I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.

Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".

This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".

Feel free to respond to what I actually said, though!

It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.

You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.

Personally, I worry far more about guns in this regard, but I feel you.