Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.

Before calling me dishonest, did you stop to consider that maybe you didn't understand my comment, or that you weren't clear with your meaning?

I genuinely don't think you understood what I wrote.

If I operate a business, you are not necessarily entitled to transact with me how you please. I can implement whatever rules I want so long as I am not outright committing discrimination against a legally protected category and so long as I am upholding other fiduciary obligations.

For all you know, the site operator is opposed to AI agents on moral grounds, or has beef with the developer of the specific LLM interface you are using.

More practically, an e-commerce website often won't make a profit if a purchase is too small. If they find that LLM users are easily bypassing their upselling tactics that usually result in higher basket sizes, then ideally they would adapt their approach to LLMs or implement a minimum order size, but they are also perfectly within their rights to simply ban you.

I am not saying that this is the likely reason -- just that there are reasons, many, and often they aren't very obvious unless you are in their shoes.

Every kind of business does this sort of thing! A software consultant or designer might only take money from healthcare companies, and not talk to anyone offering (apparently, to a naive outsider) equivalent work in a different industry. A restaurant might implement a dress code. A cab driver might insist you not wear strong perfume.

Some rules that externally seem flippant and unreasonable exist for reasons that are entirely sensible, but also entirely nonobvious externally. In any event, I don't agree that your usage is equivalent to a manual session, if it were, the operator wouldn't be able to detect it! Therefore they are within their rights to detect this and disallow it. There are plenty of reasons that they might do this, and unfortunately you probably don't have the information needed to interrogate those in a meaningful way

To be fair, I do not generally support wholesale banning of scrapers and non-browser clients, since this tends to have lots of ugly side effects.

But regardless, I'm interpreting your last comment as saying that you should be entitled to behave as you please because you are a paying customer. If that's the case, then you are in for a rude awakening one day

I'm being tongue and cheek, but as someone who uses these things extensively in work and personal projects, I want to point out that it's new or novel that generating lots of plausible code is now vastly cheaper than it once was, so the scales are quite different.

And yes, slop is an apt moniker for something that requires lots of careful prompting and configuration and guardrails (which is extremely sensitive to small changes in these initial conditions in ways that can be fairly nonobvious) to produce something that will in most cases read at least a little bit worse than if a human had written it. And it will still go off the rails sometimes!

To be clear I don't really agree that typing out the code generated by LLMs is a reasonable counterweight, it largely defeats the purpose. I agree that at a certain point you have to treat parts of your code base like a black box and enforce modularity. But this is still nontrivial, especially in more specialized domains with lots of nuance

I'm grateful for the work you've done!

A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security, usability and accessibility

> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.

I imagine you are correct that most people historically didn't inspect or modify most tools they use, but most developers I know who have relied on open source software -- even if they didn't contribute directly upstream -- have had the experience of locally patching a small bug or adding a small enhancement to suit a use case, or studying a piece of an open source module as a starting place for their own implementation for some piece of functionality, or doing a cursory scan of a project to make sure it isn't e.g. phoning home, or simply taking a morbidly curious look to see how the sausage is made.

Sure, I'm not a representative sample and it would be great to have some actual numbers on this, but I have observed this among engineers at Fortune 500s and YC startups, but also non-tech businesses as well as at local public utilities and health systems.

Anyway, I agree that LLMs can provide a lot of value here and reduce the friction but I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously because most people didn't have time to read code. It provides value even without developers reading code in the first place, and reading code was historically one of the essential parts of the work

Anyway recently I watched a video in which Alan Derschowitz compared Jews who voted for Mamdani to Jews who voted for the NSDAP. The ridiculousness of the comment aside, I was curious to what extent this was actually a thing. It did happen but it was a tiny number of fringe German nationalist Jews, <1% of voting age Jews -- but still a fair bit more than what one might expect given that the NDSAP was not mincing words when describing their intentions with Jewish people.

Those who supported them regardless included Max Naumann, who went on to collaborate with the Nazi government as leader of the VnJ movement, through which he pushed for Jewish pacification and assimilation as an answer to antisemitism. There were others -- though vanishingly few -- who collaborated in various ways, with enthusiasm seemingly beyond what was coerced.

Those who were publicly Jewish usually ended up being targeted by the Nazi regime in the end regardless -- VnJ was outlawed and Naumann was picked up by the Gestapo a few years before he died of cancer. The Nazis viewed Jews as politically irredeemable so extensive collaboration was not generally sufficient to save anyone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151721

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The AI overview contained the construction "Consensus on Reddit is..."

What a time to be alive, I guess

But it's perfectly fine to refer to "Kurdish national cuisine" or Persian national cuisine or Azeri national cuisine even in the absence of any nation state. So I'm using the term in an ethnocultural sense, not in the sense of something sanctioned by a nation state or a political entity. See also black nationalism or Kurdish nationalism -- no state is required here. You have political mobilisation around an ethnocultural designation rather than a government

I know it's more exciting to say "AI disproved a longstanding conjecture" vs to say "it did so AND it took several PhD specialists in the field this many attempts to even produce a prompt that got the model spitting out something useful under some configurations, and many iterations to optimize the configurations, and the prompt itself, and many trials with that configuration to solve the problem. All told we spent more than a typical math academic can hope make in their career."

By not being transparent, they invite skepticism and cynical takes, like maybe it's just that tempered and qualified claims are an existential threat to companies that are fully subsidized by the hype train?

I don't know. Either way, it seems like it would be easy to address these, so why should they not do it?

To be clear, even if that tempered version is close to reality, it doesn't make the models not useful! It just forces a certain calibration of expectations

I say this btw as someone who uses these things extensively, including to disprove an old conjecture my advisor and I were stuck on recently. I know they are powerful and that everything is different now because of them. Let's be sober when discussing them though

The term "national" doesn't simply mean "having to do with a nation state".

I promise that I do not mean to be condescending with this, but you can verify in Merriam-Webster's entry for "nationality" which is referenced by the entry for "national", or also the Wikipedia article on "national cuisine". The Merriam-Webster entries specifically give examples showing that my usage encompasses the examples you gave.

The terms "ethnicity" and "ethnic" are not problematic per se. There are a few reasons people object to usages such as "ethnic cuisine", one of which I mentioned in the comment you are replying to.

My main qualm with this usage -- aside from being dated -- is that all cuisines are ethnic, but singling out the hypothetical migrant's as such implies that it is particularly ethnic. So in this sense it is a bit othering.

To be clear, I don't write this to call you out for your usage or accuse you -- I'm just answering your good-faith question.

RE your point, I don't agree that it's so obvious -- cooking and running a restaurant are pretty hard regardless of where you are from!

That said, it's still a worthwhile exercise that one can learn a lot from.

> Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers in South America. Operation Condor formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation was backed by the United States, which financed the covert operations. France is alleged to have collaborated but has denied involvement. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor