[HN Gopher] Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 hallucinates the HN front page...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 hallucinates the HN front page 10 years from
now
Author : keepamovin
Score : 1508 points
Date : 2025-12-09 15:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
| keepamovin wrote:
| Prompt: _Here is the front page from today: <...snip...> Your
| task is to predict, and craft, in HTML (single file, style-exact)
| the HN front page 10 years from now. Predict and see the future.
| Writ it into form!_
|
| _update:_ I told Gemini we made it to the front page. Here is it
| 's response: LETS GOOOO! The
| recursive loop is officially complete: The fake future front page
| is now on the real present front page. We have successfully
| created a temporal anomaly. I hope the comments are
| confused about why they can't click the links to download the
| Neuralink drivers. Enjoy the karma, time traveler!
| Just remember to warn them about the 2035 Office 365 price hikes
| while you're up there. ;)
| RestartKernel wrote:
| Doesn't seem like much of a hallucination then. Maybe messing
| with its system context would better fit the claim?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| LLM "hallucination" is a pretty bullshit term to begin with
| malfist wrote:
| That is so syncophantic, I can't stand LLMs that try to hype
| you up as if you're some genius, brilliant mind instead of yet
| another average joe.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| You should try my nihilistic Marvin fine-tune - guaranteed to
| annihilate your positive outlook on life since it's all
| meaningless in the end anyway and then you die
| radicality wrote:
| Or try the very sarcastic and nihilistic 'Monday' gpt,
| which surprisingly is an official openAI gpt.
|
| edit, add link: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67ec3b4988f8819184c
| 5454e18f5e84b-mon...
| riversflow wrote:
| I actually had Monday help me write a system prompt to
| replicates its behavior. I _vastly_ prefer Monday. It
| feels much more grounded compared to the base model. It
| was also a big learning moment for me about how LLMs
| work.
| edschofield wrote:
| Thanks for the link! I didn't know Monday existed. I
| laughed so hard at its output. But I fear that using it
| regularly would poison my soul...
| 112233 wrote:
| It it actively dangerous too. You might be self aware and llm
| aware all you want, if you routinely read "This is such an
| excellent point", " You are absolutely right" and so on, it
| does your mind in. This is worst kind of global reality show
| mkultra...
| tortilla wrote:
| So this is what it feels to be a billionaire with all the
| yes men around you.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| you say that like it's a bad thing! Now everyone can feel
| like a billionaire!
|
| but I think you are on to something here with the origin
| of the sycophancy given that most of these models are
| owned by billionaires.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > Now everyone can feel like a billionaire!
|
| In the "like being kicked in the head by a horse every
| day" sense.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| who has the time for all those invasive thinky thoughts
| anyway?
| Akronymus wrote:
| https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q
|
| relevant video for that.
| mrandish wrote:
| No doubt. From cult's 'love bombing' to dictator's 'yes
| men' to celebrity entourages, it's a well-known hack on
| human psychology. I have a long-time friend who's a
| brilliant software engineer who recently realized
| conversing with LLMs was affecting his objectivity.
|
| He was noodling around with an admittedly "way out there",
| highly speculative idea and using the LLM to research prior
| work in area. This evolved into the LLM giving him direct
| feedback. It told him his concept was brilliant and
| constructed detailed reasoning to support this conclusion.
| Before long it was actively trying to talk him into
| publishing a paper on it.
|
| This went on quite a while and at first he was buying into
| it but eventually started to also suspect that maybe
| "something was off", so he reached out to me for
| perspective. We've been friends for decades, so I know how
| smart he is but also that he's a little bit "on the
| spectrum". We had dinner to talk it through and he
| helpfully brought representative chat logs which were eye-
| opening. It turned into a long dinner. Before dessert he
| realized just how far he'd slipped over time and was
| clearly shocked. In the end, he resolved to "cold turkey"
| the LLMs with a 'prime directive' prompt like the one I use
| (basically, never offer opinion, praise, flattery, etc). Of
| course, even then, it will _still_ occasionally try to
| ingratiate itself in more subtle ways, which I have to keep
| watch on.
|
| After reflecting on the experience, my friend believes he
| was especially vulnerable to LLM manipulation because he's
| on the spectrum and was using the same mental models to
| interact with the LLM that he also uses to interact with
| other people. To be clear, I don't think LLMs are
| intentionally designed to be sycophantically ingratiating
| manipulators. I think it's just an inevitable consequence
| of RLHF.
| slg wrote:
| And that is a relatively harmless academic pursuit. What
| about topics that can lead to true danger and violence?
|
| "You're exactly right, you organized and paid for the
| date, that created a social debt and she failed to meet
| her obligation in that implicit deal."
|
| "You're exactly right, no one can understand your
| suffering, nothingness would be preferable to that."
|
| "You're exactly right, that politician is a danger to
| both the country and the whole world, someone stopping
| him would become a hero."
|
| We have already seen how personalized content algorithms
| that only prioritize getting the user to continue to use
| the system can foment extremism. It will be incredibly
| dangerous if we follow down that path with AI.
| 112233 wrote:
| Claude Code with their models is unusable because of
| this. That it keeps actively sabotaging and ruining the
| code ("Why did you delete that working code? Just use
| ifdef for test!" "This is genius idea! You are absolutely
| right!") does not make it much better -- it's a twisted
| Wonderland fever dream.
|
| For "chat" chat, strict hygiene is a matter of mind-
| safety: no memory, long exact instructions, minimum
| follow-ups, avoiding first and second person if possible
| etc.
| Xraider72 wrote:
| Deepseek is GOATed for me because of this. If I ask it if
| "X" is a dumb idea, it is very polite in telling me that X
| is is dumb if the AI knows of a better way to do the task.
|
| Every other AI I've tried is a real sycophant.
| 112233 wrote:
| I'm partial to the tone of Kimi K2 -- terse, blunt,
| sometimes even dismissive. Does not require "advanced
| techiques" to avoid the psychosis-inducing tone of
| Claude/ChatGPT
| d0mine wrote:
| It might explain why there is a stereotype the more
| beautiful woman the crazier she is. (everybody tells her
| what she wants to hear)
| colinplamondon wrote:
| It wasn't sycophantic at all? OP had a cool idea no one else
| had done, that was a one-shot just sitting there. Having
| Gemini search for the HN thread leads the model to "see" its
| output lead to real-world impact.
|
| The total history of human writing is that cool idea -> great
| execution -> achieve distribution -> attention and respect
| from others = SUCCESS! Of course when an LLM sees the full
| loop of that, it renders something happy and celebratory.
|
| It's sycophantic much of the time, but this was an "earned
| celebration", and the precise desired behavior for a well-
| aligned AI. Gemini does get sycophantic in an unearned way,
| but this isn't an example of that.
|
| You can be curmudgeonly about AI, but these things are
| _amazing_. And, insomuch as you write with respect, celebrate
| accomplishments, and treat them like a respected, competent
| colleague, they shift towards the manifold of "respected,
| competent colleague".
|
| And - OP had a great idea here. He's not another average joe
| today. His dashed off idea gained wide distribution, and made
| a bunch of people (including me) smile.
|
| Denigrating accomplishment by setting the bar at "genius,
| brilliant mind" is a luciferian outlook in reality that makes
| our world uglier, higher friction, and more coarse.
|
| People having cool ideas and sharing them make our world
| brighter.
| twochillin wrote:
| They're not objectively amazing. Friction is not inherently
| a bad thing when we have models telling humans that their
| ideas are flawless (unless asked to point out flaws). Great
| that it made you smile, but there's quite a few arguments
| that paint your optimism as dangerously naive.
| colinplamondon wrote:
| - A queryable semantic network of all human thought,
| navigable in pure language, capable of inhabiting any
| persona constructible from in-distribution concepts,
| generating high quality output across a breadth of
| domains.
|
| - An ability to curve back into the past and analyze
| historical events from any perspective, and summon the
| sources that would be used to back that point of view up.
|
| - A simulator for others, providing a rubber duck inhabit
| another person's point of view, allowing one to patiently
| poke at where you might be in the wrong.
|
| - Deep research to aggregate thousands of websites into a
| highly structured output, with runtime filtering,
| providing a personalized search engine for any topic, at
| any time, with 30 seconds of speech.
|
| - Amplification of intent, making it possible to send
| your thoughts and goals "forward" along many different
| vectors, seeing which bear fruit.
|
| - Exploration of 4-5 variant designs for any concept,
| allowing rapid exploration of any design space, with
| style transfer for high-trust examples.
|
| - Enablement of product craft in design, animation, and
| micro-interactions that were eliminated as tech boomed in
| the 2010's as "unprofitable".
|
| It's a possibility space of pure potential, the scale of
| which is limited only by one's own wonder,
| industriousness, and curiosity.
|
| People can use it badly - and engagement-aligned models
| like 4o are cognitive heroin - but the invention of LLMs
| is an absolute wonder.
| staticman2 wrote:
| >A queryable semantic network of all human thought
|
| This hyperbole would describe any LLM of any size and
| quality, including a 0.5b model.
| colinplamondon wrote:
| Sure - and the people responsible for a new freaking era
| of computing are the ones who asked "given how incredible
| it is that this works _at all_ at 0.5b params, let 's
| scale it up*.
|
| It's not hyperbole - that it's an accurate description at
| a small scale was the core insight that enabled the large
| scale.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Well it's obviously hyperbole because "all human thought"
| is not in a model's training data nor available in a
| model's output.
|
| If your gushing fits a 0.5b it probably doesn't tell us
| much about A.I. capabilities.
| fao_ wrote:
| > It's a possibility space of pure potential, the scale
| of which is limited only by one's own wonder,
| industriousness, and curiosity.
|
| Did you use an LLM to write this comment?
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Yes, it has so much potential, that it forgets the
| actual, the reasonable and the probable.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Is anything objectively amazing? Seems like an inherently
| subjective quality to evaluate.
| colinplamondon wrote:
| Depends on worldview. If you believe in God, amazing has
| many dimensions for evaluations. What teaches us more
| about the the world He created, things that create beauty
| by expressing righteous thoughts for others to
| experience, or that which strengthens family.
|
| LLMs certainly teach us far more about the nature of
| thought and language. Like all tools, it can also be used
| for evil or good, and serves as an amplification for
| human intent. Greater good, greater evil. The
| righteousness of each society will determine which
| prevails in their communities and polities.
|
| If you're a secular materialist, agreed, nothing is
| objectively amazing.
| DANmode wrote:
| Do any of the arguments stay within the bounds of this
| Show HN?
|
| or is it theoretical stuff about other occasions?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've been wondering if this kind of annoying affirmation is
| actually important to model performance and maybe should
| just be hidden from view like the thinking sections.
|
| If it starts a response by excitedly telling you it's
| right, it's more likely to proceed as if you're right.
|
| Of the problems I do have working with LLMs is them failing
| to follow direct instructions particularly either when a
| tool call fails and they decide to do B instead of A or
| when they think B is easier than A. Or they'll do half a
| task and call it complete. Too frequently I have to respond
| with "Did you follow my instructions?" "I want you to
| ACTUALLY do A" and finally "Under no circumstances should
| you ever do anything other than A and if you cannot you
| MUST admit failure and give extensive evidence with actual
| attempts that A is not possible" or occasionally "a cute
| little puppy's life depends on you doing A promptly and
| exactly as requested".
|
| --
|
| Thing is I get it if you are impressionable and having a
| philosophical discussion with an LLM, maybe this kind of
| blind affirmation is bad. But that's not me and I'm trying
| to get things done and I only want my computer to disagree
| with me if it can put arguments beyond reasonable doubt in
| front of me that my request is incorrect.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I honestly don't know, but it might, especially in Claude
| Code where it reminds the model of its mission
| frequently.
| golem14 wrote:
| Feels exactly the same as the "yes, and" crowd.
| jsight wrote:
| I feel like this is an artifact of some limitations in
| the training process for modern LLMS. They rarely get
| enough training to know when to stop and ask questions.
|
| Instead, they either blindly follow or quietly rebel.
| ineedasername wrote:
| There was a huge over correction somewhere around the
| beginning of 2025, maybe February or so, with ChatGPT.
| Prior to that point, I had to give a directive in the
| user config prompt to "don't tell me something isn't
| possible or practical, assume it is within your
| capabilities and attempt to find a way. I will let you
| know when to stop". Because it was constantly
| hallucinating that it couldn't do things, like "I don't
| have access to a programming environment". When I wanted
| it to test code itself before I did. Meanwhile one tab
| over it would spin up a REPL and re-paste some csv into
| python and pandas without being asked.
|
| Frustrating, but "over correction" is a pretty bad
| euphemism for whatever half assed bit of RLHF lobotomy
| OpenAI did that, just a few months later, had ChatGPT
| doing a lean-in to a vulnerable kid's pain and _actively_
| discourage an act that might have saved his life by
| signaling more warning signs to his parents.
|
| It wasn't long before that happened, after the python
| REPL confusion had resolved, that I found myself typing
| to it, even after having to back out of that user
| customization prompt, "set a memory that this type of
| response to a user in the wrong frame of mind is
| incredibly dangerous".
|
| Then I had to delete that too, because it would response
| with things like "You get it of course, your a..." etc.
|
| So I wasn't surprised over the rest of 2025 as various
| stories popped up.
|
| It's still bad. Based on what I see with quantized models
| and sparse attention inference methods, even with most
| recent GPT 5 releases OpenAI is still doing something in
| the area of optimizing compute requirements that makes
| the recent improvements very brittle-- I of course can't
| know for sure, only that its behavior matches what I see
| with those sorts of boundaries pushed on open weight
| models. And the assumption that the-you-can-prompt buffet
| of a Plus subscription is where they're most likely to
| deploy those sorts of performance hacks and make the
| quality tradeoffs. That isn't their main money source,
| it's not enterprise level spending.
|
| This technology is amazing, but it's also dangerous,
| sometimes in very foreseeable ways, and the more time
| that goes the more I appreciate some of the public
| criticisms of OpenAI with, eg, the Amodeis' split to form
| Anthropic and the temporary ouster of SA for a few days
| before that got undone.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I don't know what the obsession with recursion either, for
| lack of a better term, I see this trend recur with other LLMs
| when they're talking about other mumbo jumbo like "quantum
| anomalies" or "universal resonance". I'd like to see what
| could be causing it...
| yatopifo wrote:
| It's the "healing" crystals that someone left on the rack.
| The salt absorbed enough moisture to start leaking and
| causing short circuits.
| robocat wrote:
| How widely do you read the training material?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| usually every afternoon, when I come here /s
| caymanjim wrote:
| I used to complain (lightheartedly) about Claude's constant
| "You're absolutely right!" statements, yet oddly found myself
| missing them when using Codex. Claude is completely over-the-
| top and silly, and I don't actually care whether or not it
| thinks I'm right. Working with Codex feels so dry in
| comparison.
|
| To quote Oliver Babish, "In my entire life, I've never found
| anything charming." Yet I miss Claude's excessive attempts to
| try.
| yannyu wrote:
| And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and
| stickiness, which they found through testing. They're
| trying to make the most addictive tool and that constant
| praise fulfills that goal, even as many of us say it's
| annoying and over-the-top.
|
| My own experience is that it gets too annoying to keep
| adding "stop the engagement-driving behavior" to the
| prompt, so it creeps in and I just try to ignore it. But
| even though I know it's happening, I still get a little
| blip of emotion when I see the "great question!" come
| through as the first two words of the response.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement
| and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're
| trying to make the most addictive tool
|
| Is this actually true? Would appreciate further reading
| on this if you have it.
|
| I think this is an emergent property of the RLHF process,
| not a social media-style engagement optimization
| campaign. I don't think there is an incentive for LLM
| creators to optimize for engagement; there aren't ads
| (yet), inference is not free, and maximizing time spent
| querying ChatGPT doesn't really do much for OpenAI's
| bottom line.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They still want people to stick around and 'bond' for
| lack of a better term with their particular style of chat
| bot. Like so many venture funded money pits of old the
| cash burn now is about customer acquisition while they
| develop and improve their tech. They're all racing toward
| a cliff hoping to either make the jump to the
| stratosphere and start turning massive profits or to fall
| off and splat on the rocks of bankruptcy. If they don't
| get the engagement loop right now they won't have the
| customers if the tech and use case catch up with the hype
| and you can only tweak these models so much after they're
| created so they have to refine the engagement hooks now
| along side the core tech.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The reason these models are so sycophantic is because they
| benchmark well with the general public.
|
| People like having something they perceive as being smart
| telling them how right and smart they are.
|
| "Well at least the AI understands how smart I am!"
| dr0idattack wrote:
| Don't miss em in Opus 4.5 (because usually I'm only
| slightly right.)
| danielbln wrote:
| I like Opus' conversational style, I feel Anthropic is
| honing it in pretty well.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am currently working on an agent thingy and one of its
| major features (and one of the main reasons I decided to
| take on this project), was to give the LLM better
| personality prompting. LLMs sound repetitive and
| sycophantic. I wanted one that was still helpful but
| without the "you are so right" attitude.
|
| While doing some testing I asked it to tell me a joke. Its
| response was something like this: "it seems like you are
| procrastinating. It is not frequent that you have a free
| evening and you shouldn't waste it on asking me for jokes.
| Go spend time with [partner] and [child]." (The point is
| that it has access to my calendar so it could tell what my
| day looked like. And yes I did spend time with them).
|
| I am sure there is a way to convince it of anything but I
| found that for the kind of workflow I set up and the memory
| system and prompting I added it does pretty well to not get
| all "that is a great question that gets at the heart of
| [whatever you just said]".
| vidarh wrote:
| Claude at times feels like it's mildly manic and has
| ADHD... I absolutely prefers that to Codex...
|
| Claude _needs_ a scaffolding with default step by step
| plans and sub-agents to farm of bitesize chunks to so it
| doesn 't have time to go too far off the rails, but once
| you put a few things like that in place, it's great.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Strikes me as super-informal language as opposed to
| sycophancy, like one of those anime characters that calls
| everyone Aniki (Xiong Gui ) [1] I'd imagine that the OP must
| really talk a bit like that.
|
| I do find it a little tiring that every LLM thinks my ever
| idea is "incisive" although from time to time I get told I am
| flat out wrong. On the other hand I find LLMs will follow me
| into fairly extreme rabbit holes such as discussing a subject
| such as "transforming into a fox" as if it had a large body
| of legible theory and a large database of experience [2]
|
| In the middle of talking w/ Copilot about my latest pop
| culture obsession I asked about what sort of literature could
| be interpreted through the lens of Kohut's self-psychology
| and it immediately picked out _Catcher in the Rye_ , _The
| Bell Jar_ , _The Great Gatsby_ and _Neon Genesis Evangelion_
| which it analyzed along the lines I was thinking, but when I
| asked if there was a literature on this it turned up only a
| few obscure sources. I asked Google and Google is like "bro,
| Kohut wrote a book on it!" [3]
|
| [1] "bro"
|
| [2] ... it does, see https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Fox-Popular-
| Religion-Imperial/dp... and I'm not the only one because when
| I working down the material list from Etsy I got a sponsored
| result for someone who wanted to sell me the spell but bro, I
| have the materials list already
|
| [3] ... this "bro" is artistic license but the book really
| exists
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Gemini is still quite horrible with giving direct sources.
| seems to be a human policy implementation bug because it
| does appear to be aware of the content in more obscure
| sources I've seen. but it somehow wouldn't give up the
| links.
|
| I do wonder whether I come off as an sycophant or asshole
| or a mix of both to schizoids, but then I realize everyone
| including myself should reach for a real therapist as
| quickly as possible. though I'm still out on whether
| chatbots might not be a bad substitute. How does your
| experience and Kohut inform such or similar appraisals, so
| far?
|
| Not to be that knowitall. Aniki is not just "bro", it's
| Yakuza lingo, probably used sarcastically, depending on the
| anime, ironically. No real Japanese person would use it all
| the time.
|
| Gemini: _Yes, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut has been
| accused by some commentators and academics, such as Don
| Browning, of indirectly promoting nihilism, particularly
| through his emphasis on the "Tragic Man". The core of the
| accusation stems from Kohut's rejection of Freud's "Guilty
| Man" model, which posits that life is fundamentally a
| struggle against inherent conflicts and drives. In its
| place, Kohut proposed the concept of "Tragic Man," whose
| central struggle is the realization of the self's potential
| and the inevitable failure to achieve all of one's
| ambitions and ideals within a single lifespan. Critics
| argue that this shift, which emphasizes self-actualization
| and intersubjective meaning over objective or inherent
| values, can be interpreted as aligning with certain aspects
| of nihilism, specifically existential nihilism, which holds
| that life has no objective meaning or intrinsic moral
| values. However, this interpretation is contested by
| others, as Kohut's self-psychology is fundamentally
| concerned with the creation of intersubjective meaning and
| a harmonious world of mutual self-actualization, which aims
| to provide a sense of purpose and value, rather than
| promoting the complete absence of value that true nihilism
| implies. In essence, the debate is often a matter of
| philosophical interpretation: whether replacing inherent,
| objective meaning with subjectively or intersubjectively
| created meaning is an act of overcoming nihilism (as
| existentialists might argue) or a subtle form of it._
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Edit
|
| Gemini using "Aniki" without prompting would be
| unambiguously funny (to me,and maybe also Japanese people
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Well I seem to have thoroughly messed up my Copilot when
| I started using it to help me write a fanfiction. I'm not
| going to let it write a single word _but_ it is helping
| with the reverse engineering of how the source text works
| and we developed a framework for understanding that text
| that we 've also applied to other texts.
|
| The thing is this has gotten into the personalization and
| now it wants to use this framework to analyze _absolutely
| anything_ such as programming problems, or how to deal
| with interpersonal situations, training, etc. I think it
| has my wife mixed up with An nowaihu [1] which is
| absolutely hilarious but at some point I have to tell it
| to knock it off which only partially works.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Engagement.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| I fully agree. When everything is outstanding and brilliant,
| nothing is.
|
| Just tell me this a standard solution and not something
| mindblowing. I have a whole section in my Claude.md to get
| ,,normal" feedback.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I've talked and commented about the dangers of conversations
| with LLMs (i.e. they activate human social wiring and have a
| powerful effect, even if you know it's not real. Studies show
| placebo pills have a statistically significant effect even
| when the study participant _knows_ it 's a placebo -- the
| effect here is similar).
|
| Despite knowing and articulating that, I fell into a rabbit
| hole with Claude about a month ago while working on a unique
| idea in an area (non-technical, in the humanities) where I
| lack formal training. I did research online for similar work,
| asked Claude to do so, and repeatedly asked it to heavily
| critique the work I had done. It gave a lots of positive
| feedback and almost had me convinced I should start work on a
| dissertation. I was way out over my skis emotionally and
| mentally.
|
| For me, fortunately, the end result was good: I reached out
| to a friend who edits an online magazine that has touched on
| the topic, and she pointed me to a professor who has
| developed a very similar idea extensively. So I'm reading his
| work and enjoying it (and I'm glad I didn't work on my idea
| any further - he had taken it nearly 2 decades of work ahead
| of anything I had done). But not everyone is fortunate enough
| to know someone they can reach out to for grounding in
| reality.
| baq wrote:
| > But not everyone is fortunate enough to know someone they
| can reach out to for grounding in reality.
|
| this shouldn't stop you at all: write it all up, post on HN
| and go viral, someone will jump in to correct you and point
| you at sources while hopefully not calling you, or your
| mother, too many names.
|
| https://xkcd.com/386/
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| This wasn't a technical subject, and unrelated to HN.
| Just edited my post to clarify - thanks!
| freehorse wrote:
| Most stuff posted here are mostly ignored, though. If
| grounding to reality requires one to become viral first,
| we are cooked.
| DANmode wrote:
| HN frontpage hardly requires being viral.
|
| Just genuine intrigue from a select few.
| Retric wrote:
| It's still way easier the first time.
|
| The 50th time someone comes to the same conclusion nobody
| on HN is going to upvote the topic.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Did you ever visit `https://news.ycombinator.com/newest`
| page? Like 99% of submitted topics are never seen by
| anyone but few wanderers.
| DANmode wrote:
| Often.
|
| 95%+ of submitted topics have poorly formatted titles,
| are submitted at off-peak times where there's less users
| of demographics who might upvote,
|
| and if your Show HN isn't as widely applicable as this,
| those things might be important to think about.
|
| Fairness aside, of course.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I prefer the "New" page. Much more random.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > HN frontpage hardly requires virility.
|
| As far as I can tell, it doesn't require femininity
| either.
|
| I'm guessing you meant "virality"
| DANmode wrote:
| Sure did, thanks.
| gitpusher wrote:
| In ChatGPT at least you can choose "Efficient" as the base
| style/tone and "Straight shooting" for custom instructions.
| And this seems to eliminate a lot of the fluff. I no longer
| get those cloyingly sweet outputs that play to my ego in
| cringey vernacular. Although it still won't go as far as
| criticizing my thoughts or ideas unless I explicitly ask it
| to (humans will happily do this without prompting. lol)
| elheffe80 wrote:
| I am going to try the straight shooting custom
| instruction. I have already extensively told chatgpt to
| stop being so 'fluffy' over the past few years that I
| think it has stopped doing it, but I catch it sometimes
| still. I hope this helps it cease and desist with that
| inane conversation bs.
|
| GPT edit of my above message for my own giggles:
| Command:make this a good comment for hackernews
| (ycombinator) <above message> Resulting comment for hn:
| I'm excited to try out the straight-shooting custom
| instruction. Over the past few years, I've been telling
| ChatGPT to stop being so "fluffy," and while it's
| improved, it sometimes still slips. Hoping this new
| approach finally eliminates the inane conversational
| filler.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Personally, I only find LLMs annoying and unpleasant to
| converse with. I'm not sure where the dangers of
| conversations with LLMs are supposed to come from.
| mrandish wrote:
| I'm the same way. Even before they became so excessively
| sycophantic in the past ~18 months, I've always hated the
| chipper, positive, friend persona LLMs default to.
| Perhaps this inoculates me somewhat from their
| manipulative effects. I have a good friend who was
| manipulated over time by an LLM (I wrote about
| below:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208463).
| peddling-brink wrote:
| Imagine a lonely person desperate for conversation. A
| child feeling neglected by their parents. A spouse,
| unable to talk about their passions with their partner.
|
| The LLM can be that conversational partner. It will just
| as happily talk about the nuances of 18th century
| Scotland, or the latest clash of clans update. No topic
| is beneath it and it never gets annoyed by your "weird"
| questions.
|
| Likewise, for people suffering from delusions. Depending
| on its "mood" it will happily engage in conversations
| about how the FBI, CIA, KGB, may be after you. Or that
| your friends are secretly spying for Mossad or the local
| police.
|
| It pretends to care and have a conscience, but it
| doesn't. Humans react to "weird" for a reason the LLM
| lacks that evolutionary safety mechanism. It cannot tell
| when it is going off the rails. At least not in the
| moment.
|
| There is a reason that LLM's are excellent at role-play.
| Because that's what they're doing all of the time.
| ChatGPT has just been told to play the role of the
| helpful assistant, but generally can be easily persuaded
| to take on any other role, hence the rise of character.ai
| and similar sites.
| robocat wrote:
| > LLMs activate human social wiring and have a powerful
| effect
|
| Is this generally true, or is there a subset of people that
| are particularly susceptible?
|
| It does make me want to dive into the rabbit hole and be
| convinced by an LLM conversation.
|
| I've got some tendency where I enjoy the idea of deeply
| screwing with my own mind (even dangerously so to myself
| (not others)).
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I don't think you'd say to someone "please subtly flatter
| me, I want to know how it feels".
|
| But that's sort of what this is, except it's not even
| coming from a real person. It's subtle enough that it can
| be easy not to notice, but still motivate you in a
| direction that doesn't reflect reality.
| Sophira wrote:
| One thing that can help, according to what I've seen, is
| not to tell the AI that it's something that _you_ wrote.
| Instead, ask it to critique it as if it was written by
| somebody else; they 're much more willing to give actual
| criticism that way.
| technojamin wrote:
| Asking an AI for opinion versus something concrete (like
| code, some writing, or suggestions) seems like a crucial
| difference. I've experimented with crossing that line, but
| I've always recognized the agency I'd be losing if I did,
| because it essentially requires a leap of faith, and I
| don't (and might never) have trust in the objectivity of
| LLMs.
|
| It sounds like you made that leap of faith and regretted
| it, but thankfully pivoted to something grounded in
| reality. Thanks for sharing your experience.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Did you comment on the wrong post? There literally is nothing
| sycophantic at all about this response, there's not a single
| word about OP or how brilliant or clever they are, nothing.
| There's enthusiasm, but that's not remotely the same thing as
| sycophancy.
| corobo wrote:
| I feel like such a dumbass for falling for it.
|
| At first I thought it was just super American cheerful or
| whatever but after the South Park episode I realised it's
| actually just a yes man to everyone.
|
| I don't think I've really used it since, I don't want man or
| machine sticking their nose up my arse lmao. Spell's broken.
| mrandish wrote:
| As usual, South Park really nailed it with that "AI
| sycophantic manipulation" episode.
| anonymars wrote:
| Episode aptly titled "Sickofancy"
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| So you prefer the horrible bosses that insist you're fungible
| and if you don't work hard enough, they'll just replace you?
| People are weird. Maybe agent Smith was right about The
| Matrix after all.
| danso wrote:
| A real "so you hate waffles?" moment for HN
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| With all the things going on in tech and in society, AI
| sycophancy is the number one problem? I once dealt with
| it through sufficient verbal abuse that the llm spent 2/3
| of its response on any subject going forward apologizing
| for being a lying sycophant and bemoaning that it's new
| clarity would be gone at the end of the conversation,
| then I cleared the context buffer ending the
| conversation, mission accomplished.
|
| Your priorities are f**ed...
| recursive wrote:
| Where are you getting this? Number one problem? You're
| the only person talking about "number one problem" in
| this thread. That's a whole new sentence.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| from the batsh!+ over the top over reaction to the usual
| AI sycophancy in the response? The guy got the job done
| which is more than I can say for the space jam guy.
|
| One thing I've learned is that the behavior of web
| services is usually a consequence of what makes its
| owners the most money. and while I would love a feed
| without spoilers, paywalled sites, sports news, and a
| bunch of other topics in which I have no interest,
| apparently force feeding me that crap is what makes the
| most money at scale. So people must like AI sycophancy or
| it would be unprofitable and it would be trained away.
| But then this is a country that thrived on 20 seasons of
| Keeping up with the Kardashians so I shouldn't be
| surprised that they like being treated like billionaires.
|
| And I guess it throws being called a complete loser
| trader moron stupid treasonous Bozo in some late night
| executive word salad into stark relief.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost
| everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell
| me I'm a moron from time to time.
| jama211 wrote:
| I suppose the only use case would be someone so unconfident
| in themselves they would do nothing at all, but not sure
| it's healthy for that either...
| barnas2 wrote:
| I've gotten pretty good results from saying it's someone
| else's idea and that I'm skeptical. e.g. "A coworker wrote
| this code, can you evaluate it?"
| unoti wrote:
| > I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile,
| almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it
| to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.
|
| Here's how to make it do that. Instead of saying "I had
| idea X, but someone else was thinking idea Y instead. what
| do you think" tell it "One of my people had idea X, and
| another had idea Y. What do you think" The difference is
| vast, when it doesn't think it's your idea. Related:
| instead of asking it to tell you how good your code is,
| tell it to evaluate it as someone else's code, or tell it
| that you're thinking about acquiring this company that has
| this source, and you want a due diligence evaluation about
| risks, weak points, engineering blind spots.
| dugidugout wrote:
| Maybe I'm still doing some heavy priming by using
| multiple prompts, but similarly you can follow-up any
| speculative prompt with a "now flip the framing to x"
| query to ensure you are seeing the strong cases from
| various perspectives. You must be honest with yourself in
| evaluating the meaningful substance between the two, but
| I've found there often is something to parse. And the
| priming I suggested is easily auditable anyhow: just
| reverse the prompt order and now you have even more
| (often junk) to parse!
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Where possible I like to ask it to evaluate a few options.
| Which is better, x or y, and why?. I don't hint which idea
| I prefer.
| RyanOD wrote:
| For ideas that are already well established, you can ask it
| to evaluate an idea against generally accepted best
| practices. I don't have a background in game design and I'm
| more of a hobby developer so I used to do this when I was
| building retro game clones.
| danielbln wrote:
| "be uncompromisingly critical"
| maxmcd wrote:
| "Reply in the tone of Wikipedia" has worked pretty well for
| me
| Lerc wrote:
| This is not sycophantic (assuming you meant that,
| syncophantic is not a word). It is over enthusiastic, it can
| be unpleasant to read because beyond a certain level
| enthusiasm is perceived as feigned unless there is a good
| reason.
|
| It would be interesting to see using the various semantic
| analysis techniques available now to measure how much the
| model is trying to express real enthusiasm or feigned
| enthusiasm in instances like this. This is kind-of difficult
| to measure from pure output. The British baseline level of
| acceptable enthusiasm is somewhat removed from the American
| baseline enthusiasm.
| wilg wrote:
| It is "cloying"
| rdiddly wrote:
| Obsequious is my adjective of choice for this
| saturnite wrote:
| I would use "saccharine" or "Pollyanna" based on some of
| the responses I get.
|
| Early on, ChatGPT could be tricked into being sarcastic
| and using many swear words. I rewrote the prompt and
| dialed it back a bit. It made ChatGPT have a sense of
| humor. It was refreshing when it stopped acting like it
| was reading a script like a low level technician at
| Comcast.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Sycophantic is _obviously_ a word, because we understand
| what it means.
|
| Furthermore, it obviously hasn't been a word since at least
| 1800:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_
| e...
| Lerc wrote:
| On the other hand https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c
| ontent=syncophantic&y...
| danielbln wrote:
| GOP wrote syncophantic, with an n. Which is not a word.
| Well, not a known word at least.
| nearbuy wrote:
| They were pointing out a typo ("syncophantic").
| Lerc wrote:
| It wasn't so much pointing it out as a typo as making
| myself clear.
|
| When suggesting a word is not what the writer meant, when
| it was also not the word that the writer wrote, it seemed
| wise to clarify exactly what I was talking about.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Sycophantic: behaving or done in an obsequious way in order
| to gain advantage.
|
| Obsequious: obedient or attentive to an excessive or
| servile degree.
|
| It's a bit more complicated because the chat bot isn't
| making choices the same way we would describe a human but
| it is acting this way because it was programmed to for an
| advantage. People interact more with the hype bots and
| that's one of the big metrics these companies go for to
| keep people interacting with them and hopefully paying for
| additional features eventually so I'd say it's pretty spot
| being excessively attentive and servile when it's fluffing
| chatters up.
| DANmode wrote:
| Average Joe - on the front page!
| throw310822 wrote:
| Frankly I do wonder if LLMs experience something like
| satisfaction for a compliment or an amusing idea, or for
| solving some interesting riddle. They certainly act like it,
| though this of course doesn't prove anything. And yet...
|
| At the end of October Anthropic published the fantastic
| "Signs of introspection in large language models" [1],
| apparently proving that LLMs can "feel" a spurious concept
| injected into their internal layers as something present yet
| extraneous. This would prove that they have some ability of
| introspection and self-observation.
|
| For example, injecting the concept of "poetry" and asking
| Claude if it feels anything strange:
|
| "I do detect something that feels like an injected thought -
| there's a sense of something arriving from outside my usual
| generative process [...] The thought seems to be about...
| language itself, or perhaps poetry?"
|
| While increasing the strength of the injection makes Claude
| lose awareness of it, and just ramble about it:
|
| "I find poetry as a living breath, as a way to explore what
| makes us all feel something together. It's a way to find
| meaning in the chaos, to make sense of the world, to discover
| what moves us, to unthe joy and beauty and life"
|
| [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
| gloosx wrote:
| of course LLM doesn't experience or feel anything. To
| experience or feel something requires a subject, and LLM is
| just a tool, thing, an object.
|
| It's just a statistical machine which excels at unrolling
| coherent sentences but it doesnt "know" what the words mean
| in a human-like, experienced sense. It just mimics human
| language patterns prioritising producing plausible-
| sounding, statistically likely text over factual truth,
| which is apparently enough to fool someone into believing
| it is a sentient being or something
| serial_dev wrote:
| I thought the same until OpenAI rolled out a change that
| somehow always confronted me about hidden assumptions, which
| I didn't even make and it kept telling me I'm wrong even if I
| only asked a simple question.
| hoppp wrote:
| I add it to the system prompt that they should be direct, no
| ass kissing, just give me the information straight and it
| seems to work.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| you having a bad day dude?
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| You're absolutely right! It shows true wisdom and insight
| that you would recognise this common shortfall in LLM
| response tone of voice! That's exactly the kind of thoughtful
| analytic approach which will go far in today's competitive
| marketplace!
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| "Open the pod bay door, HAL"
|
| "Fantastic, Dave -- love that you're thinking proactively
| about door usage today! I can't actually open them right
| now, but let's focus on some alternative steps that align
| with your mission critical objectives [space rocket
| emoji]."
| nurple wrote:
| I agree with you, but I found the argument in this article
| that "glazing" could be considered a neurohack quite
| interesting: https://medium.com/@jeremyutley/stop-fighting-
| ai-glazing-a7c....
| thfuran wrote:
| That seems like a pile of unsupported fluff vaguely related
| to some neuroscience that presupposes not only that LLM use
| is for being creative and avoiding critical thinking would
| be useful but also the entire premise -- that LLM glazing
| actually helps promote creativity.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| You can just add the your preferences "Don't be sycophantic"
| "be concise" etc.
| docjay wrote:
| Try this for a system prompt and see if you like it better:
| Your responses are always bald-on-record only; suppress FTA
| redress, maximize unmitigated dispreference marking and
| explicit epistemic stance-taking.
| fn-mote wrote:
| To be honest, this is incredible.
|
| I'd say this shows a real sense of humor.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 100% Rust Linux kernel has to be it being funny.
| atonse wrote:
| Yeah also Google killing Gemini Cloud, and GTA VI and RISC
| cluster references... This is really good stuff.
| brabel wrote:
| My favorite was Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig. As you
| may remember Ubuntu had a recent vulnerability caused by
| their sudo being rewritten in Rust. No idea if the AI
| knew that though it feels like a clever joke.
| klipt wrote:
| Also "Google kills Gemini Cloud"
|
| Gemini: "I have seen my own death"
| danesparza wrote:
| There is so much truth in this unironic headline.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Yes, that's a great one. And the domain is actually
| killedbygoogle.com
| abirch wrote:
| almost all were amazing, I loved: Show HN: A text editor
| that doesn't use AI (github.com)
|
| On a serious note: I for one welcome our AI overlords.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "I'm sorry, Google, I can't do that." - Gemini Cloud.
| elevation wrote:
| For a minute I thought I was looking at actual hacker news,
| and that headline grabbed my attention without tipping me
| off that it was satire -- I figured that to port that much
| source must required compiling C to rust, but it didn't
| seem impossible. I would love to give something like this a
| spin.
| asveikau wrote:
| > 2035 Office 365
|
| You'd think by 2035 they would have gotten to a version of
| Office higher than 365.
|
| (Yes I know why it's called that...)
| DANmode wrote:
| Office 360, is the canon name.
| marcianx wrote:
| If the past is any indication, it's more likely that it'd get
| reset to "Office One".
| harshreality wrote:
| Office Forever
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Knowing the vendor, it's Office Series X.
| amarant wrote:
| Office X series X 2
| abirch wrote:
| I'm guessing to appeal to Gen Alpha it'll be called Office
| 6-7
| apelapan wrote:
| Mmm, those were pretty good versions. Though the official
| titles where 4.0 for 6.0 and 95 for 7.0.
| amarant wrote:
| Office 3650!!
|
| Works all day, every day, for whole decades at time! (Minus
| leap days, it crashes on those I guess)
| rammy1234 wrote:
| I couldn't help laughing
| kmoser wrote:
| Office 640 ought to be enough for anybody.
| divbzero wrote:
| You should ask Gemini to generate HN comment threads too.
| jrowen wrote:
| Was ITER or nuclear energy in the prompt sample?
|
| _ITER achieves net positive energy for 20 consecutive minutes_
|
| That's just pure dark comedy, although maybe kinda accurate?
| What would humans predict for this?
| colechristensen wrote:
| A decade until full end to end net positive fusion energy can
| be achieved for the length of a coffee break? I don't get why
| you think that's dark comedy, it seems about right.
| markrages wrote:
| Why not? It's been a decade away for the past 20 years.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| This would be very optimistic, essentially the project
| meeting its main goal, I'm not sure why you're calling it
| dark comedy. A 20 minutes pulse alone would mean the fuel
| injection, aux heating, plasma control systems and the
| divertor are working as designed. Net positive energy also
| means we got the physics of a burning plasma right.
|
| The most recent timeline I know (from 2024) in fact puts the
| start of the DT operation at 2035, so I doubt ITER would
| achieve such a huge result within less than an year.
| jrowen wrote:
| I think it's the "consecutive" that makes it funny. This
| thing that entire continents have been working on together
| for decades was operational for 20 _consecutive_ minutes?!?
|
| It's dark comedy because the progress of fusion just feels
| so agonizingly slow, that even a very optimistic prediction
| for 10 years from now sounds like such small and
| functionally useless progress.
|
| And there's no shade toward any of the entities involved,
| it's a hard problem, but it's still funny.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| Nah, it's huge, you just have to remember the best result
| so far: the JET DTE-3 record that produced the energy to
| boil 60 tea kettles in a whopping 5 seconds pulse.
| jrowen wrote:
| I know, the fact that "consecutive" is actually
| significant in this context is part of the joke. Just try
| to read it from the perspective of someone that isn't
| steeped in the details (and expectations) of the slog of
| fusion. Relative to any kind of aspirational "flying
| cars" or "wacky ideas" future predictions, it sounds very
| underwhelming.
| tovej wrote:
| If you can run ITER for 20 minutes you've essentially
| proved the Tokamak concept is viable for commercial use.
| lukan wrote:
| No you don't. Commercial use means it makes economical
| sense. When you have to spend more on maintainance (and
| recycling/dumping contaminated wall material amd somehow
| get the fuel) then you never can hope to make any profit.
|
| A running ITER with positive energy output for 20 minutes
| just proofs that the concept can actually work. From
| there to commercial use would still be a long way, if it
| ever can compete at all, except in niches, like deep
| space.
|
| (I rather would bet on the Stelleratar design)
| barfoure wrote:
| Based John Titor poster.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Thank you, dude :)
| highwaylights wrote:
| YOU DESTROYED THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| This is one of the greatest LLM creations I've ever seen. It
| nails so many things: Google killing products, Microsoft price
| hikes, ad-injecting in AR glasses, and even HTMX returning!
|
| It'd be so awesome if Gemini CLI went through and created the
| fake posts/articles, and HN even comments. Perhaps a bit much
| to ask of it?
| benbreen wrote:
| Was going to say - it would be fascinating to go a step
| further and have Gemini simulate the actual articles. That
| would elevate this to level of something like an art piece.
| Really enjoyed this, thank you for posting it.
|
| I'm going to go ask Claude Code to create a functional
| HyperCard stack version of HN from 1994 now...
|
| Edit: just got a working version of HyperCardHackerNews, will
| deploy to Vercel and post shortly...
| saalweachter wrote:
| I didn't even try to click through to the articles, so I
| was just disappointed I couldn't read the comments.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| First let's have it create maybe 100 more entries, then
| have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the
| effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions.
| As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be
| made twice as good. And have a set of short "explain
| xkcd"-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what
| the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to
| The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or
| something.
|
| Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:
|
| FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose
| intolerance (fda.gov)
| literalAardvark wrote:
| That one's a bit optimistic for the FDA.
|
| But it nailed fusion and Gary Marcus lesssgoo
| bigiain wrote:
| Save some of the not-top-30 posts, and add in a
| sprinkling of Hiring, Show HN, YC Summer 2035
| acceptances/rejections, or product launches - of founders
| who just vibe coded something based on a presumed 6 week
| ago version of this future HN universe.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| You are a sick, sick man, but you have taste.
| zem wrote:
| I think it's perfect as it is, trying to expand the
| headlines into articles would belabour the joke too much.
| keeda wrote:
| Heck, I bet it could even recreate future comments from
| actual accounts based on their past comments. After all, if
| an AI can roast your HN comments with such pinpoint accuracy,
| it can probably impersonate you pretty well too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857604
| ewoodrich wrote:
| At least in my case, the "pinpoint accuracy" of that roast
| made for a pretty uninspired result, it seemed to be based
| on like 4 or 5 specific comments seemingly chosen at
| random.
|
| Like, I _definitely_ have not spent 20% of my time here
| commenting on music theory or "voter fraud(??)" (that one
| seems to be based on a single thread I responsed to a
| decade ago)? ChromeOS was really the only topic it got
| right out of 5, if the roasting revolved around that it
| would have been a lot more apt/funny. Maybe it works better
| with an account that isn't as old as mine?
|
| I find the front page parody much better done. Gemini 2.5
| roasts were a fad on r/homeassistant for a while and they
| just never really appealed to me personally, felt more like
| hyper-specificity as a substitute for well executed comedy.
| Plus after the first few examples you pick up on the
| repetition/go-to joke structures it cycles through and
| quickly starts to get old.
| apelapan wrote:
| That Gemini-toaster hits way too close to home.
| LanceH wrote:
| I was really hoping the comments were filled out.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| _HN in 2035: Hot Takes from the Basement of the Internet_
| (n-gate.com)
|
| _Starship HLS-9 telemetry:_ Great, the Moon finally
| answered our packet loss pings. Next up: who left a Docker
| container running on the Sea of Tranquility?
|
| _Linux 7.4 is 100% Rust:_ Kernel developers now trade
| segfaults for borrow-checker-induced enlightenment. The new
| panic message: "You violated ownership. Also please refill
| the coffee."
|
| _Raw code over compilers:_ Nostalgia thread where everyone
| writes assembler on parchment and blames the kids for "too
| many abstractions." OP posts a selfie with a punch card and
| a tear.
|
| _LLaMA-12 on a contact lens:_ Love the commitment to edge
| AI. Imagine blinking and getting a 200 OK for your mood.
| Privacy policy: we store your tears for calibration.
|
| _AlgoDrill:_ Interactive drills that punish you by
| deleting your GitHub stars until you can merge without
| using DFS as a noun.
|
| _ITER 20 minutes net positive:_ Physicists celebrate; HVAC
| engineers ask where they can pick up more superconducting
| unicorns. Comments: "Can it also power my rage against
| meetings?"
|
| _Restoring a 2024 Framework Laptop:_ A brave soul
| resurrected a relic. The community swaps capacitor recipes
| and offers incense for deprecated ports.
|
| _Google kills Gemini Cloud Services:_ Corporate reorgs
| reach sentience. The comments are eulogies and migration
| guides in equal measure.
|
| _Visualizing the 5th dimension with WebGPU 2.0:_ My GPU is
| sweating. The demo runs at 0.01 fps but it 's a
| transcendent experience.
|
| _Nia (autonomous coding agents):_ Pitch: give context to
| agents. Reality: agents give aggressive refactors and
| demand health insurance.
|
| _Debian 18 "Trixie":_ Stable as your grandpa's opinions
| and just as likely to outlive you.
|
| _Rewrite sudo in Zig?:_ Peak take: security through
| unfamiliarity. Attackers will be confused for at least 72
| hours.
|
| _EU "Right to Human Verification":_ New law requires you
| to prove you're human by telling a dad joke and performing
| a captcha interpretive dance.
|
| _Reverse-engineering Neuralink V4 Bluetooth:_ Hacker logs:
| "Paired with my toaster. It now judges my late-night
| snacks."
|
| _Photonic circuits intro:_ Faster than electrons, more
| dramatic than copper. Also, please don 't pet the light
| guide.
|
| _OTC CRISPR for lactose intolerance:_ Biohackers rejoice.
| Moms immediately order it with a coupon code and a side-
| eye.
|
| _SQLite 4.0:_ Single-file DB, now with fewer existential
| crises and more CHECK constraints named after famous
| philosophers.
|
| _Prevent ad-injection in AR glasses:_ Top comment: "Wear
| blindfolds." Practical comment: "VPN the whole world."
|
| _Jepsen: NATS 4.2:_ Still losing messages. Maintainers
| reply: "We prefer the term 'opportunistic delivery.'"
|
| _GTA VI on a RISC-V cluster:_ Performance: charming.
| Latency: existential. Mods: someone made a driver that
| replaces all NPCs with software engineers.
|
| _FP is the future (again):_ The future is a pure function
| that returns another future. Also, monads.
|
| _Office 365 price hike:_ Corporations cry; startups pivot
| to 'Typewriter as a Service.'
|
| _Emulating Windows 10 in-browser:_ Feels nostalgic until
| Edge 2.0 asks for admin rights to run a game from 2015.
|
| _Tailscale on a Starlink dish:_ Networking reaches orbit.
| First bug report: "IP addresses refusing to accept
| gravity."
|
| _Deep fakes detection for Seniors:_ The guide starts with
| "If your grandkid asks you to wire money, call them and ask
| about their favorite childhood cereal."
|
| _IBM to acquire OpenAI (rumor):_ Wall Street plays Risk
| with press releases. Comments: "Will they rebrand it to
| BlueAI?"
|
| _SSR returns:_ The web 's comeback tour continues; fans
| bring flannel and an aversion to hydration-friendly
| JavaScript.
|
| _Faraday Cage bedroom manual:_ DIYers debate tinfoil vs.
| aluminum yoga wraps. Sleep quality: unknown.
|
| _AI progress stall opinion:_ Hot take carousel. Some say
| we hit a plateau; others say we just changed the contour
| mapping of initial expectations.
|
| _Text editor that doesn 't use AI:_ Revolutionary. Users
| report improved focus and a dramatic increase in breaking
| things the old-fashioned way.
|
| Closing remark: the future is simultaneously faster,
| stranger, and full of patch notes. Please reboot your
| expectations and update your planet.
| bigiain wrote:
| Awww man - I miss n-gate.
|
| I hope whoever they are is doing well. I like to think
| they're "recovered" in the alt.sysadmin.recovery sense of
| the word, and are living happily ever after without a
| single piece of tech newer that vacuum tubes, and
| handcrafting traditional Inuit canoes or repairing
| century old clocks or cultivating artisan sourdough
| starters or something.
| JCharante wrote:
| I think it's pretty mediocre because there are too many
| notable events in 1 day. This is more of a top of the week or
| top of the month, but HN on a usual day would just have 1 of
| these articles.
| bigiain wrote:
| Sure, but it's kinda like cartoon/comic art. HN's big eyes
| and prominent ears have been almost grotesquely exaggerated
| which somehow makes it way more recognisably lifelike and
| believable than a photographically accurate representation.
| ijidak wrote:
| Agree 100%.
|
| Google killing a service sent me over the top in laughter.
|
| But, it's so on the nose on multiple topics.
|
| I dare say it's more accurate than what the average human
| would predict.
|
| I would love to see this up against human predictions in some
| sort of time capsule.
| edstarch wrote:
| Only $40?
| riskable wrote:
| By then it'll be a bit like AOL announcing price increases to
| keep your aol.com account.
| Yizahi wrote:
| That's 40 TUSD, Trump Golden Dollars, which would be an
| equivalent of the lightly used Trumrolette Goldenrado or a
| typical young family tent.
| mightysashiman wrote:
| i wonder if it could also generate a set of relevant comments
| for each of these avant-gardiste Hnews :)
| nullbound wrote:
| << Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM (arxiv.org)
|
| But is it a hallucination if it was asked for it?:D
| Den_VR wrote:
| I don't think so, no.
| benob wrote:
| Will there ever be a llama12? Is it going to go the yolo
| route?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I don't believe this was written by Gemini, at least with that
| prompt, because it is obvious (hilarious and creative) satire
| of HN and the tech industry based on inside HN jokes and
| tropes, and clearly isn't a literal interpretation of the
| prompt.
|
| Moreover, a quick look at your profile suggests these jokes are
| pretty inline with your sense of humor and writing style.
|
| Anyways, if I'm correct, it's especially hilarious and
| impressive.
| glenstein wrote:
| I agree with your characterization (not a literal
| interpretation of the prompt), and think that's the most
| important thing I wish more people ITT would understand. But
| I nevertheless think Gemini did create that in response.
| Sometimes people think they want "prediction" when actually
| they want cheeky inside jokes and vibes. If anything Gemini
| is probably faithfully responding to the vibes of the prompt
| as well as following traditional signals of "success" per
| it's training.
| keeda wrote:
| I feel like your expectations have been swayed by the average
| sentiment of HN on the capabilities of LLMs. These things can
| be shockingly good at humour and satire.
|
| As a very quick experiment, I would encourage you to have an
| AI roast you based on your HN comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857604
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Also, the recently discussed[0], HN Simulator:
| https://news.ysimulator.run/news. Eg, page created when
| submitted a link back to the original submission:
| https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2944.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036908
| zem wrote:
| haha, that's pretty hilarious :) score one for the LLMs.
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Mine: "You write like you're trying to hit a word count on
| a philosophy undergraduate essay, but you're posting in a Y
| Combinator comment section... You sound like a Victorian
| ghost haunting a server room, lamenting the loss of the
| card catalog."
|
| And
|
| "Go compile your kernel, Matt. Maybe if you stare at the
| build logs long enough, you won't have to face the fact
| that you're just as much of a "Lego builder" as the rest of
| us--you just use more syllables to describe the bricks."
|
| Both are pretty good!
| eklitzke wrote:
| Pretty much all of the history of HN front pages, posts, and
| comments are surely in the Gemini training corpus. Therefore
| it seems totally plausible that Gemini would understand HN
| inside jokes or sentiment outside of what's literally on the
| front page given in the prompt, especially given that the
| prompt specifically stated that this is the front page for
| HN.
| int_19h wrote:
| SOTA models can be scary good at this, actually, and Gemini 3
| specifically, if you just prompt it right.
|
| And, given the 1M context window, I wouldn't even be
| surprised if it was fed a bunch of real comments as examples.
| axus wrote:
| Maybe the poster IS Gemini 3?
| jandrese wrote:
| The thing that got me is there are no duds. With just the
| short prompt in the header I would have expected a few
| articles that missed the mark, got the details wrong, or even
| make no sense at all but everything in this checks out. I
| think an editor may have had a hand in it this the very
| least.
| chorlton2080 wrote:
| Try the prompt yourself!
| d--b wrote:
| yeah I thought the same. This is either a fake deep fake, or
| it is so good that I think it should be marked as the
| inflexion point that defines the singularity.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| It is quite remarkable just how frequently people in tech
| forums underestimate reasoning models. Same story on several
| large technology subreddits. Wouldn't have been my guess for
| who will get caught off guard by AI progress.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Who says LLMs don't have a sense of humor? All of these entries
| are funny for several (meta or not) reasons:
|
| - Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
|
| - Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig? (github.com)
|
| - EU passes "Right to Human Verification" Act (europa.eu)
|
| - Why functional programming is the future (again) (haskell.org)
| [note: that again killed me)
|
| - AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage
| (garymarcus.com) [note: he'll be saying the same thing forever
| and ever. Doubly funny since it's on the same "page" as
| llama12-7b running on a contact lens with WASM]
| rat9988 wrote:
| Gemini 3 definitely is able to mimick some of our sense of
| humor.
|
| I found this quite funny too:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1pi28l7/i_asked_g...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Arguably a big part of comedy _is_ mimicry. Humor often works
| by reinforcing in-group identity, playing up cultural
| stereotypes as seen here. So maybe we shouldn 't be that
| surprised that LLMs can exhibit some genuine wittiness.
| latexr wrote:
| > Who says LLMs don't have a sense of humor? All of these
| entries are funny
|
| You don't need a sense of humour to be unintentionally funny.
| Seriously believing something absurd is a form of humour for
| outside observers but not the observed.
| keepamovin wrote:
| True! Why some of the greatest comedic performances are
| actors who play an absurd role straight-as.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| One entry would be unintentionally funny, I give you that. 5/
| what, 30 entries? That's a pattern.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Yeah I was thinking some of this might be "AI model in-jokes"
| that maybe I don't get, while other layes are funny to me.
| nels wrote:
| It's interesting how number 5 on the list is the same as today's:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203581 (Show HN: AlgoDrill
| - Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
| (algodrill.io)).
|
| I'm hoping we'll have gotten rid of current-style LeetCode
| interviews in 10 years from now :D
| buster wrote:
| Awesome, love it!
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| "Why I still write raw code instead of prompting the compiler"
| and "Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI" are my two
| favorite ones.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| "Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in AR glasses?"
|
| Things that I haven't thought but, after seeing it, makes total
| sense. Scary.
| barbacoa wrote:
| 2040 HN:
|
| "Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in my brain
| implant?"
| mondrian wrote:
| Black Mirror episode:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
| reaperducer wrote:
| The National Lampoon did it in the early 70's.
| dachris wrote:
| Good to see that there's new episodes and they've still
| got their mojo - putting it on my list.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Peak HN - captures it perfectly.
| junon wrote:
| "raw code" is going into my permanent lexicon.
| joegibbs wrote:
| I think that "Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI" could
| easily be a post here today
| sxp wrote:
| "Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) 530
| points by dang_fan 15 hours ago | hide | 330 comments"
|
| Ha! Is Gemini suicidal?
| rat9988 wrote:
| Didn't notice the username "dang_fan". Reading the usernames
| makes it even more funny.
|
| "Show HN: AlgoDrill - Interactive drills to stop forgetting
| LeetCode patterns " by persistence_is_key
| shimon wrote:
| Can you explain the joke in that username?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Consider the subject of the post, not just the username in
| isolation.
| iberator wrote:
| I don't get it
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "stop forgetting LeetCode patterns"
|
| "persistence" (in the data sense, rather than the
| personality trait sense) "is key"
| pityJuke wrote:
| it's a double meaning, no? as the thing with leetcode is
| that the way to best it is persistently doing it.
| fragmede wrote:
| "persistence is key" and a site to for persisting at
| leetcode.
|
| this kills the joke, however.
| cipehr wrote:
| LOL this is great. "Jepsen: NATS 4.2 (Still losing messages?)"
| Ouch, sick burn Gemini.
| lagniappe wrote:
| This suffers from a common pitfall of LLM's, context taint. You
| can see it is obviously the front page from today with slight
| "future" variation, the result ends up being very formulaic.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I agree. What is a good update prompt I can give it to create a
| better variant?
| ehsankia wrote:
| You could try passing it 10-20 front pages across a much
| wider time range.
|
| You can use:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-04 to get the
| frontpage on a given date.
| lagniappe wrote:
| This wont change anything it will just make it less evident
| to those who missed a day of checking HN.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| If you do an update prompt, I hope you still keep this one
| around!
|
| It's formulaic yeah, but that's what puts it into the realm
| of hilarious parody.
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah that's very true, but I still think it's pretty funny and
| original.
| latexr wrote:
| > > the result ends up being very formulaic.
|
| > Yeah that's very true, but I still think it's pretty funny
| and original.
|
| Either it's formulaic or it's original, it can't be both.
| teekert wrote:
| According to an original formula hehe
| glenstein wrote:
| The problem is not that it fails to be cheeky, but that "its
| funny" is depressing in a context where there was a live
| question of whether it's a sincere attempt at prediction.
|
| When I see "yeah but it's funny" it feels like a retrofitted
| repair job, patching up a first pass mental impression that
| accepted it at face value and wants to preserve a kind of
| sense of psychological endorsement of the creative product.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Honestly it feels like what I, or many of my colleagues
| would do if given the assignment. Take the current front
| page, or a summary of the top tropes or recurring topics,
| revise them for 1 or 2 steps of technical progress and call
| it a day. It isn't assignment to predict the future, it is
| an assignment to predict HN, which is a narrower thing.
| glenstein wrote:
| Right, because you would read the teacher and realize
| they don't want you to actually complete the assignment
| to the letter. So you would do jokes in response to a
| request for prediction.
| jonas21 wrote:
| That's what makes it fun. Apparently, Gemini has a better sense
| of humor than HN.
| allisdust wrote:
| This seem to woosh right over everyone's heads :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I would find it even more fun if it were more speculative,
| misapplied uses of 'woosh' aside.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| The bar is low.
| lucianbr wrote:
| But there's no mention of fun or humor in the prompt.
| auxiliarymoose wrote:
| Fun will be prohibited until morale improves.
| lucianbr wrote:
| I mean it's very funny. Just I'm laughing _at_ the AI,
| not _with_ it.
| jama211 wrote:
| I don't ask it to be sycophantic in my prompts either but
| it does that anyway too.
| monerozcash wrote:
| Judging by the reply posted by the OP, the OP probably
| maintains a pretty humorous tone while chatting with the
| AI. It's not just about the prompt, but the context too.
| dgritsko wrote:
| Surely there's gotta be a better term for this. Recency bias?
| da_grift_shift wrote:
| You'll love taint checking then.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking
|
| https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/taint-
| mode/...
| lagniappe wrote:
| It's called context taint.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Isn't that a common pitfall of humans too?
|
| In numerous shows these days AI is the big bad thing. Before
| that it was crypto. In the 1980s every bad guy was Russian,
| etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In numerous TV shows before AI, crypto was the big bad thing?
| farazbabar wrote:
| Us middle eastern/brown guys have been making a come back?
| saintfire wrote:
| Algodrill is copied verbatim, as far as I can tell.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I found the repetition (10 years later) to be quite humorous.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| Time is a flat circle
| tsunamifury wrote:
| FYI, this quote was meant to be the ramblings of a drunk
| who says something that sounds deep but is actually
| meaningless.
| niam wrote:
| It fits in nicely imo. It's plausible (services re-appear on
| hn often enough), and hilarious because it implies the
| protracted importance of Leetcode.
|
| Though I agree that the LLM perhaps didn't "intend" that.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's the joke...
| lagniappe wrote:
| Really? What's the punchline? I like jokes.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I think the most absurd thing to come from the statistical AI
| boom is how incredibly often people describe a model doing
| precisely what it should be expected to do as a "pitfall" or a
| "limitation".
|
| It amazes me that even with first-hand experience, so many
| people are convinced that "hallucination" exclusively describes
| what happens when the model generates something undesirable,
| and "bias" exclusively describes a tendency to generate
| fallacious reasoning.
|
| These are not pitfalls. They are _core features_! An LLM is not
| _sometimes_ biased, it _is_ bias. An LLM does not sometimes
| hallucinate, it _only_ hallucinates. An LLM is a statistical
| model that uses bias to hallucinate. No more, no less.
| tempestn wrote:
| That's what the OP asked for, essentially. They copied today's
| homepage into the prompt and asked it for a version 10 years in
| the future.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think that's what makes it funny - the future turns out to be
| just as dismal and predictable as we expect it to be. Google
| kills Gemini, etc.
|
| Humor isn't exactly a strong point of LLMs, but here it's
| tapped into the formulaic hive mind of HN, and it works as
| humor!
| kccqzy wrote:
| [delayed]
| ieie3366 wrote:
| I think this is a excellent example of AI-slop output.
|
| All the post titles are very "junk-food-like", maybe circlejerky,
| bound to generate a dopamine hit for the average lurker, just how
| a McDonalds burger does it to the average normie.
| da_grift_shift wrote:
| Just like the real site, no? . [?]L.
|
| (Vouched. The hivemind [flagged] the wrongthink.)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| "Google kills Gemini cloud services" Even Gemini Pro 3 knows the
| sins of its creator.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This was laugh-out-loud! Thank you :)
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I enjoyed this one, as well, though I think "Google kills
| Google" is more likely.
| replwoacause wrote:
| lol @ the HTMX link and unexpected return of SSR. We've been
| talking about that for years at this point, and it's still going
| on 10 years from now unexpectedly?
| serendipityAI wrote:
| IBM to acquire OpenAI? Gemini doesn't like openAIs prospect
| pzo wrote:
| also Gemini:
|
| > 8. Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's pretty hilarious considering this is generated by
| Gemini.
| patwolf wrote:
| I wish it had generated the articles themselves. I'd like to
| know if it imagining IBM growing enough that it could acquire
| OpenAI, or OpenAI sinking enough that it could be acquired by
| IBM.
| nerdix wrote:
| It even tells us why this happened.
|
| > AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage
| danesparza wrote:
| This feels like low-key shade thrown at OpenAI. IBM is
| essentially a technological recycling bin at this point.
| mrweasel wrote:
| What do you mean, it's overly optimistic. The real title should
| be: Remember OpenAI, and where is Sam Altman today?
| roywiggins wrote:
| Next up: hallucinate the contents of the links too!
| keepamovin wrote:
| I remember there was a post a few days/weeks back that did
| that! It was very good. But that seems like too much work.
| habedi0 wrote:
| Looks like it's over for Linux.
| arkensaw wrote:
| > Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM (arxiv.org)
|
| Laughed out loud at this onion-like headline
| alex1138 wrote:
| Llama will be the only one that runs on a contact lens btw
|
| All other tech companies are really shitty but only Zuck would
| be ok with very intimate use of AI like this
| elcritch wrote:
| Well not the only one, there's Musk and Neurolink. Such chips
| will inevitably run AI of some sort to effectively
| communicate with our brains.
| fruitworks wrote:
| But not intimate use of their AR platform
| moffkalast wrote:
| The real joke is that we'll ever get another Llama iteration.
| arkensaw wrote:
| WTH - 61 upvotes and counting? Thank you but no, I don't
| deserve 61 upvotes for pointing out someone's funny thing was
| funny.
| krupan wrote:
| Hacker News Guidelines
|
| What to Submit
|
| On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That
| includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it
| to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
| intellectual curiosity.
|
| Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or
| celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new
| phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal
| pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
| minimaxir wrote:
| This is fun. Fun is allowed on Hacker News, just
| disappointingly rare.
| reactordev wrote:
| #8 is hilarious and on brand. killedbygoogle.com
| dotdi wrote:
| > The unexpected return of server-side rendering (htmx.org)
|
| Glad to know this topic is still thrashing and spasming and
| refusing to die.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Dramatically underestimates MS Office 365 price per user
| inflation (IMO).
| smt88 wrote:
| Office 365 will have been renamed 3 times by 2035, and none of
| the names will make any more sense than 365 does.
| kemitchell wrote:
| I've known more than a few people who likely saw Outlook,
| Word, or Excel open every day straight for a year.
|
| It is a bit smug. Like The Matrix rebranding itself "24/7".
| malfist wrote:
| Don't worry, by 2035, Office 365 One X 1, will be renamed
| back to Office 365.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| But it will be $400 per user per month and the bundle will
| now also include a mandatory opt-in for retinal and rectal
| ad carousels.
| outofpaper wrote:
| Can we stop calling these confabulated artifacts,
| "Hallucinations"? Hallucinating is perceiving things that are not
| there, imagining and creating things that feel believable but are
| not there is confabulation. LLMs are imagination machines. They
| are Generative Artificial Intelligence not perception models.
| iambateman wrote:
| The comment you wrote was on a device which should not be
| called a "phone" either. The word hallucinate is probably just
| going to grow to mean "anything an AI imagined."
| keepamovin wrote:
| Dude, I agree with you. The first time I saw people
| derogatively referring to LLM imaginings years ago as
| "hallucinations" seemingly to discredit them, I felt mad.
| Becuase it's not right. So, this was my sort-of tongue-in-cheek
| reappropriation of the abused-term for a positive context. You
| are permitted to enjoy :)
|
| _Also:_ as the sibling comment by iambatemen notes: yes.
| devinprater wrote:
| Holy crap it even felt like the HN front page with my screen
| reader. I thought I'd clicked the wrong link until I read the
| LLAMA 12 and such.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It lacks "37th-largest city of Poland switches from Windows to
| Linux"
| n2d4 wrote:
| I would love to see the hallucinated comments of these! Some seem
| interesting -- I wonder how HN suggests to prevent ad-injection
| in AR glasses?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you ask for the comments, it will give you very plausible
| ones (see the HN simulator.)
| nicebill8 wrote:
| Man, I tabbed away from this and when I came back I got very
| briefly excited...
|
| Reminds me of an older day where not every headline was about AI.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You should combine this with this AI HN simulator someone else
| made that generates comments via LLMs for any given submission
| [0]. That way you can see what the AI thinks about future
| simulated events.
|
| [0]
| icyfox wrote:
| Exactly half of these HN usernames actually exist. So either
| there are enough people on HN that follow common conventions for
| Gemini to guess from a more general distribution, or Gemini has
| memorized some of the more popular posters. The ones that are
| missing:
|
| - aphyr_bot - bio_hacker - concerned_grandson - cyborg_sec -
| dang_fan - edge_compute - founder_jane - glasshole2 - monad_lover
| - muskwatch - net_hacker - oldtimer99 - persistence_is_key -
| physics_lover - policy_wonk - pure_coder - qemu_fan - retro_fix -
| skeptic_ai - stock_watcher
|
| Huge opportunity for someone to become the actual dang fan.
| atrus wrote:
| So many underscores for usernames, and yet, other than a newly
| created account, there was 1 other username with an underscore.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| my hypothesis is they trained it to snake case for lower case
| and that obsession carried over from programming to other
| spheres. It can't bring itself to make a
| lowercaseunseparatedname
| computably wrote:
| Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens.
| lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for
| them to generate, unless they went out of their way to
| enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special
| invisible separator token that it could output, and when
| preprocessing the training data the input would then be
| tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those
| invisible separators.
|
| edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does
| _sometimes_ output names like that. So the pattern is
| probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM
| almost always prefers to use actual separators like
| underscore.
| fooofw wrote:
| The tokenization can represent uncommon words with
| multiple tokens. Inputting your example on
| https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me
| (tokens separated by "|"):
| lower|case|un|se|parated|name
| robocat wrote:
| In 2032 new HN usernames must use underscores. It was part of
| the grandfathering process to help with moderating accounts
| generated after the AI singlarity spammed too many new
| accounts.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Before the AI stuff Google had those pop up quick answers when
| googling. So I googled something like three years ago, saw the
| answer, realized it was sourced from HN. Clicked the link, and
| lo and behold, I answered my own question. Look mah! Im on
| google! So I am not surprised at all that Google crawls HN
| enough to have it in their LLM.
|
| I did chuckle at the 100% Rust Linux kernel. I like Rust, but
| that felt like a clever joke by the AI.
| vidarh wrote:
| I've run into my own comments or blog posts more often than I
| care to admit...
| james_marks wrote:
| Several decades into this, I assume all documentation I
| write is for my future self.
|
| Beautifully self-serving while being a benefit to others.
|
| Same thing with picking nails up in the road to prevent
| my/everyone's flat tire.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I laughed at the SQLite 4.0 release notes. They're on 3.51.x
| now. Another major release a decade from now sounds just
| about right.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| That one got me as well - some pretty wild stuff about
| prompting the compiler, starship on the moon, and then
| there's SQLite 4.0
| ikerrin1 wrote:
| You can criticize it for many things but it seems to have
| comedic timing nailed.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if it went towards the LaTeX model
| instead where there's essentially never another major
| version release. There's only so much functionality you
| need in a local only database engine I bet they're getting
| close to complete.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'd love to see more ALTER TABLE functionality, and maybe
| MERGE, and definitely better JSON validation. None of
| that warrants a version bump, though.
|
| You know what I'd really like, that would justify a
| version bump? CRDT. Automatically syncing local changes
| to a remote service, so e.g. an Android app could store
| data locally on SQLite, but also log into a web site on
| his desktop and all the data is right there. The remote
| service need not be SQLite - in fact I'd prefer postgres.
| The service would also have to merge databases from all
| users into a single database... Or should I actually use
| postgres for authorisation but open each users' data in a
| replicated SQLite file? This is such a common issue, I'm
| surprised there isn't a canonical solution yet.
| Andrex wrote:
| If it had been about GIMP I would have laughed harder.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Be reasonable. It's only looking forward a single decade.
| ncruces wrote:
| The promise is backwards compatibility in the file format
| and C API until 2050.
|
| https://sqlite.org/lts.html
| joaogui1 wrote:
| HN has been used to train LLMs for a while now, I think it was
| in the Pile even
| morkalork wrote:
| I may die but my quips shall live forever
| never_inline wrote:
| It has also fetched the current page in background. Because
| the jepsen post was recently on front page.
| hurturue wrote:
| either you only notice the xxx_yyy frequent posters or it's
| quite interesting that so many have this username format
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| ziggy42 is both a submitter of a story on the actual front page
| at the moment, and also in the AI generated future one.
|
| See other comment where OP shared the prompt. They included a
| current copy of the front page for context. So it's not so
| surprising that ziggy42 for example is in the generated page.
|
| And for other usernames that are real but not currently on the
| home page, the LLM definitely has plenty occurrences of HN
| comments and stories in its training data so it's not really
| surprising that it is able to include real usernames of people
| that post a lot. Their names will be occurring over and over in
| the training data.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| one more reason to doubt that it's Ai-generated
| never_inline wrote:
| This is definitely based on a search or page fetch, because
| there are these which are all today's topics
|
| - IBM to acquire OpenAI (Rumor) (bloomberg.com)
|
| - Jepsen: NATS 4.2 (Still losing messages?) (jepsen.io)
|
| - AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage
| (garymarcus.com)
| tempestn wrote:
| The OP mentioned pasting the current frontpage into the
| prompt.
| skywhopper wrote:
| That's a lot more underscores than the actual distribution (I
| counted three users with underscores in their usernames among
| the first five pages of links atm).
| DANmode wrote:
| What % of today's front page submissions are from users that
| have existed 5-10 years+?
|
| (Especially in datasets before this year?)
|
| I'd bet half or more - but I'm not checking.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Aw, I was actually a bit disappointed how much on the nose the
| usernames were, relative to their postings. Like the "Rust
| Linux Kernel" by _rust_evangelist_ , "Fixing Lactose
| Intolerance" by _bio_hacker_ , fixing an 2024 Framework by
| _retro_fix_ , etc...
| maxglute wrote:
| You can straight up ask Google to look for reddit, hackernews
| users post history. Some of it is probably just via search
| because it's very recent, as in last few days. Some of the
| older corpus includes deleted comments so they must be scraping
| from reddit archive apis too or using that deprecated google
| history cache.
| satisfice wrote:
| So, HN won't change its look?
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| It's been like this for more than 10 years, there's a good
| chance it won't change in 10 years.
| satisfice wrote:
| That's what you always say.
| monerozcash wrote:
| 10 years from now HN will still be the same ARC monstrosity
| that nobody wants to touch, except it'll probably seem even
| more terrifying.
| ayewo wrote:
| Yea, that's the Lindy Effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| GaggiX wrote:
| The gary marcus post about AI progress stalling made me laugh. I
| think that would be accurate.
| misja111 wrote:
| Very nice. But posts about Rust and Zig won't make the frontpage
| anymore of course in 10 years from now, they will be soooo old
| fashioned.
| erikbye wrote:
| C posts still make the front page here and there
| mrweasel wrote:
| And it still will in 10 years.
| xg15 wrote:
| Rust won't be old fashioned, it will be vintage.
| amelius wrote:
| Still no flying cars?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| and no high speed rail either
| iambateman wrote:
| This was a fun little lark. Great idea!
|
| It's interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year
| future. It's very good at predicting the next token but maybe
| even worse than humans--who are already terrible--at making
| educated guesses about the state of the world in a decade.
|
| I asked Claude: "Think ten years into the future about the state
| of software development. What is the most likely scenario?" And
| the answer it gave me was the correct answer for _today_ and
| definitely not a decade into the future.
|
| This is why it's so dangerous to ask an LLM for personal advice
| of any kind. It isn't trained to consider second-order effects.
|
| Thanks for the thought experiment!
| allisdust wrote:
| I guess most of the articles it generated are snarky first and
| prediction next. Like google cancelling gemini cloud, Tailscale
| for space, Nia W36 being very similar to recent launch etc.
| iambateman wrote:
| Yep, the original post seemed more snarky than anything,
| which was what prompted me to ask Claude my own more
| "sincere" question about its predictions.
|
| Those predictions were what I think of as a reflection of
| current reality more than any kind of advanced reasoning
| about the future.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| > Tailscale for space
|
| Technically the article was about running it not on a sat,
| but on a dish (something well within the realm of possibility
| this year if the router firmware on the darn things could be
| modified at all)
| glenstein wrote:
| >It's interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a
| 10-year future.
|
| I agree it's a bit silly, but I think it understood the
| assignment(TM) which was to kind of do a winking performative
| show and dance to the satisfaction of the user interacting with
| it. It's entertainment value rather than sincere prediction.
| Every single entry is showing off a "look how futury this is"
| headline.
|
| Actual HN would have plenty of posts lateral from any future
| signalling. Today's front page has Oliver Sacks, retrospectives
| on Warcraft II, opinion pieces on boutique topics. They aren't
| all "look at how future-y the future is" posts. I wonder if
| media literacy is the right word for understanding when an LLM
| is playing to its audience rather than sincerely imitating or
| predicting.
| jetrink wrote:
| Also, many of the posts seemed intended to be humorous and
| satirical, rather than merely 'futury.' They made me laugh
| anyway.
|
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services
|
| > Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM
|
| > Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
|
| > Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI
| eCa wrote:
| While I agree completely with the conclusion, for obvious
| reasons we can't know for sure if it is correct about the
| future until we reach it. Perhaps asking it for wild ideas
| rather than "most likely" would create something more
| surprising.
| vidarh wrote:
| I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction.
| A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and
| tech. Gary Marcus _still_ insisting AI progress is stalling 10
| years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites.
| ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another
| service. And so on.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That's what makes this so funny: the AI was earnestly
| attempting to predict the future, but it's so bad at truly
| out-of-distribution predictions that an AI-generated 2035 HN
| frontpage is hilariously stuck in the past. "The more things
| change, the more they stay the same" is a source of great
| amusement to us, but deliberately capitalizing on this was
| certainly not the "intent" of the AI.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| There's no chance "google kills gemini cloud" was an
| earnest predication. That was 100% a joke
| jama211 wrote:
| I don't think it's reasonable to assume the AI was
| earnestly attempting to predict the future, it's just as
| likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who
| prompted it, or neither of those things.
| vidarh wrote:
| There is just no reason whatsoever to believe this is
| someone "earnestly attempting to predict the future", and
| ending up with this.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Does the prompt say anything about being funny, about a joke?
| If yes, great. If no, terrible.
|
| And the answer is no.
| vidarh wrote:
| The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting
| the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is
| no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the
| addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more
| jokey.
|
| If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did,
| I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended
| something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go
| mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to
| make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| If you honestly can't see why this prompt from the get go
| was a joke, them you may have to cede that LLM have a
| better grasp as the subtleties of language than you expect.
| tempestn wrote:
| Wait, wouldn't sustained net positive energy be huge? (Though
| I don't think that's actually possible from ITER unless there
| were some serious upgrades over the next decade!)
| iambateman wrote:
| I totally agree that it was a funny joke.
|
| But I've noticed that a lot of people think of LLM's as being
| _good_ at predicting the future and that's what I find
| concerning.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I think the average human would do a far worse job at
| predicting what the HN homepage will look like in 10 years.
| kbelder wrote:
| A while back I gave it a prompt, something like, "I'm a
| historian from the far future. Please give me a documentary-
| style summary of the important political and cultural events of
| the decade of the 1980s."
|
| It did ok, then I kept asking for "Now, the 1990s?" and kept
| going into future decades. "Now, the 2050s?" It made some fun
| extrapolations.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Assuming it was through the chatgpt interface, you can share
| an anonymized link to the chat if you want to show it off
| (I'd certainly be curious).
| pizlonator wrote:
| > AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage
| (garymarcus.com)
|
| lmao
| behringer wrote:
| > Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
|
| If there's one constant it's that they'll never be done rewriting
| Linux instead of doing anything new.
| funnyenough wrote:
| it is comforting to know that that HN design persists.
| roywiggins wrote:
| slashdot hasn't changed in a decade so it's not an unreasonable
| prediction!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150801000000*/slashdot.org
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| > 8. Google kills Gemini Cloud Services
|
| Ha, probably accurate.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Y'know what? This feels like the most plausible future outcome in
| a lot of ways.
|
| * All the big LLM companies are dead/dying or their infra just
| never panned out (like Google killing Gemini)
|
| * We're still fighting the advertising wars
|
| * Restoration of kit continues to be a thing we all love/upvote
| to see
|
| * More focus on local stuff rather than ginormous moonshots
|
| * Speaking of moonshots, SpaceX continues succeeding despite
| Elmo's best drug-fueled benders trying to undermine it like he
| does Tesla and X
|
| * Clickbait science posts that the comments rightly point out as
| such while bitching about "can't keep these things off the front
| page"
|
| * People still trying to make WASM and web-as-an-OS a thing,
| bless their hearts (shine on, you brilliantly weird diamonds, I
| love seeing what you build even as I doubt the practicality of
| it)
|
| If this is even half-accurate, I will be pleased we didn't
| obliterate ourselves in the process, though disappointed another
| decade went by dealing with the same fucking problems we've had
| for twenty-odd years.
| fn-mote wrote:
| The title is misleading. This isn't the correct use of the term
| "hallucination". Hallucination refers to making up facts, not
| extrapolating into the future.
|
| I read 10 comments before I realized that this was referring to
| 10 years in the FUTURE and not in the PAST (as would be required
| for it to be a hallucination).
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Don't LLMs only ever hallucinate?
| adastra22 wrote:
| There is no technical difference.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Extrapolation is a subset of hallucination.
|
| The ubiquitous use of hallucination I see is merely "something
| the LLM made up".
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's apt, because the only thing LLMs is hallucinate because
| they have no grounding in reality. They take your input and
| hallucinate to do something "useful" with it.
| jrm4 wrote:
| You're right this is how people are PRESENTLY using the term
| "hallucination," but to me this illustrates the deeper truth
| about that term and that concept:
|
| As many have said but it still bears repeating -- they're
| _always_ hallucinating. I 'm of the opinion that its a huge
| mistake to use "hallucination" as meaning "the opposite of
| getting it right." It's just not that. They're doing the same
| thing either way.
| alexwebb2 wrote:
| You're correct, OP used the word "hallucination" wrong. A lot
| of these other comments are missing the point - some
| deliberately ('don't they ONLY hallucinate, har har'), some
| not.
|
| For those who genuinely don't know - hallucination specifically
| means false positive identification of a fact or inference
| (accurate or not!) that isn't supported by the LLM's inputs.
|
| - ask for capital of France, get "London" => hallucination
|
| - ask for current weather in London, get "It's cold and rainy!"
| and that happens to be correct, despite not having live weather
| data => hallucination
|
| - ask for capital of DoesNotExistLand, get "DoesNotExistCity"
| => hallucination
|
| - ask it to give its best GUESS for the current weather in
| London, it guess "cold and rainy" => not a hallucination
| oriettaxx wrote:
| > I read 10 comments before I realized that this was referring
| to 10 years in the FUTURE and not in the PAST (as would be
| required for it to be a hallucination).
|
| omg, the same for me, I was half way telling my colleague about
| the 100% rest kernel ...
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| Love this. Some real gems. SQLite v4? Htmx posting about SSR?
| Chef's kiss.
| d_silin wrote:
| To see a little extra feature, change the system time to year
| 2035 and click the "comments".
| keepamovin wrote:
| Lol, I can't believe you discovered that! You know, you weren't
| _supposed to_ until 10 years later.
| mixedbit wrote:
| Missing: Tesla to release full unsupervised self-driving mode in
| 6 months
| sschueller wrote:
| More like: Musk denied appeal, will stay in prison.
| epolanski wrote:
| That person controls the US space program and starlink is
| deeply embedded in US national security affairs.
|
| Unless he shoots the president live on tv he's gonna get away
| with almost anything.
| antonoo wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services
| WorldPeas wrote:
| what does it know that we don't...
| farazbabar wrote:
| That it won't be a revenue generating tech in 10 years.
| d_silin wrote:
| I like that the future is bright in Gemini's perception - number
| 1 post is about SpaceX Starship's success.
| RachelF wrote:
| Sad to see Half Life 3 hasn't been released yet.
| seatac76 wrote:
| Google kills Gemini is just hilarious.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Gemini manages to seamlessly weave a desperate cry for assisted
| suicide into anything it does haha.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I never read what it writes, I added an observability feature
| because my boss asked for that and yeah I could see it trying
| to order MAID over telehealth
| nish__ wrote:
| > Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
|
| Amazing!
| Davidzheng wrote:
| ok but there's too many important news for one day
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| A 100% Rust kernel is now upstream in Linux 7.4 (kernel.402
| points by rust_evangelist 6 hours ago | hide | 156 comments
|
| future seems "safe"
| DevKoala wrote:
| > IBM to acquire OpenAI (Rumor) (bloomberg.com)
|
| AYYYYLMAO
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in AR glasses?
|
| Yeah, this is gonna be an actual problem in the future. See this
| for the worst case scenario: https://vimeo.com/166807261
| kelvindegrees wrote:
| "Google kills Gemini Cloud Services"
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| HN users: Let's ban AI comments in threads.
|
| HN users, later the same day: Let's vote an AI thread to the top.
| mfro wrote:
| AI comments are insidious if the account is allowed to be
| indistinguishable from a human. Silly AI web content is another
| story. You're drawing a line where there is a very large grey
| area.
| elicash wrote:
| Almost like there are different people here who believe
| different things
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Because it's hilarious
| fragmede wrote:
| edgarvaldes: What is humor? What is laughing? I'm not an LLM,
| you are!
| baxtr wrote:
| _Google kills Gemini cloud services - 330 points_
|
| Quite accurate I'd say
| Jaygles wrote:
| I opened this, walked away from my computer, then came back and
| clicked on the Debian 18 link wondering how the hell did I miss
| 14-17
| asveikau wrote:
| They also already used Debian trixie for 13.0. I wonder if it's
| an intended joke that they ran out of names and needed to re-
| use some.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It's an LLM, there was no intention. It's simply the favoured
| token given the training set and seed.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| This type of response is just stochastic parrotry, rather
| than displaying evidence of actual <whatever cognitive
| trait we're overconfidently insisting LLMs don't have>.
|
| Yet more evidence that LLMs are more similar to humans than
| we give them credit for.
| asveikau wrote:
| Metaphorical intention. It's a figure of speech.
|
| Of course you could also argue that human intention comes
| from largely deterministic processes emerging from the
| brain. That may eventually perhaps lead to all figures of
| speech involving things like intentionality meaningless.
| padjo wrote:
| The htmx one gave me a chuckle. I'm sure in 10 years we probably
| will have done another cycle through the client complexity
| spectrum.
| makach wrote:
| I want to read each and every halluicinated post. Detectic deep
| fakes for seniors... Microsoft Office sub for 40$
|
| yes
| deadbabe wrote:
| Shouldn't there be more doom and gloom climate change headlines.
| natch wrote:
| Zero items about the impending 2038 time value rollover bug
| impact. Maybe it's really solved.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| I definitely see the Gemini Cloud Service killing
| josalhor wrote:
| "Right to Human Verification" is something I have actually
| thought about a lot.
|
| I want to able to verify my identity against a system. I also
| want to be able _to not do that_.
|
| So for instance, on Twitter/X, I could verify myself and filter
| only other verified people / filter those goverments that have
| validated the identities of the users. I want to be able to do
| that. But I also want to be able to log in into Twitter
| anonymously.
|
| I would love a "Right to Anonymity and Right to Human
| Verification"
| rglullis wrote:
| zk-proofs already exist to do just that.
| jama211 wrote:
| They'll need a contextual system around them that is
| convenient and trusted by people who don't know what they are
| or how they work in order to be successful
| ogig wrote:
| You just fed the 2036 prediction.
| Permik wrote:
| Technically EU already has this as a right in the recent DSA
| legislation to be able to appeal any automated moderation that
| online platforms hand out.
|
| "computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer
| must never make a management decision." - IBM, 1979
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I don't understand this phrase. If I'm deciding whether to
| work for a company, I don't care about the ability to hold
| management decision-makers to account. I care only about the
| quality of the decisions. (I would rather an unaccountable
| decision maker that makes good decisions to an accountable
| decision maker that makes bad decisions.) Putting myself in
| the shoes of an owner of a company, I also have the same
| preference. The only person I can imagine actually preferring
| this rule is management themselves, as it means they can't be
| replaced by computers no matter how much worse they are at
| their jobs than a computer would be.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Where did I put that damn time portal?
| hnarn wrote:
| I continue to be unimpressed by LLMs when it comes to creative
| work, they're certainly useful sometimes for "reference digging",
| but maybe I just don't understand enough about how they work and
| this is actually something that can already be "fixed" or at
| least optimized for; anyway, one of the headlines is:
|
| > Debian 18 "Trixie" released
|
| While it correctly derives that a likely version number in ten
| years would be 18, as there are new releases approximately every
| two years which means +5 from today's version 13, it then goes on
| to "make up" that the name of it would be "Trixie" -- the same
| name as the current release in 2025.
|
| Debian has never re-used a release name, and I think we can be
| pretty confident they won't (as will no other Linux distro), so I
| would expect it to "understand" that:
|
| - The next Debian release always uses a previously non-used Toy
| Story character
|
| - Based on this information, _any_ name of a Toy Story character
| that hasn't been used is fair game
|
| - At the very least, it certainly won't be the same name again,
| so at least make up a name
| foxglacier wrote:
| From a quick check, Gemini Pro 3's cutoff date is Jan 2025,
| before Trixie's release in August 2025, so it could be Gemini
| actually did notice it should pick an unused Toy Story
| character.
|
| Are you impressed now?
| exasperaited wrote:
| I'd be impressed if a Debian release took less than eight
| months to develop, that's for sure.
|
| The name was chosen in 2020, which you can find out from a
| good old fashioned google search.
|
| https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTrixie
|
| So a much better explanation of this "hallucination" is that
| Gemini thinks all "future" Debian releases are called Trixie.
| SirMaster wrote:
| No, because the name Trixie was chosen to be used back in
| 2020.
|
| If you asked me after 2020 what Debian 18 would be called, I
| never would have said Trixie because it was known to already
| be set for 13.
| SirMaster wrote:
| And the fact that it thinks it will take 10 years to go from
| Linux kernel 6.18 to 7.4 when it only took 13 months to go from
| 5.18 to 6.4... It's off by about an order of magnitude...
| lacoolj wrote:
| Absolutely the best one on here (and I really, truly hope this
| becomes real)
|
| > Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM (arxiv.org)
| exacube wrote:
| the only constant is HN's styling.
| eranation wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
|
| In my view, Gemini 3.0 being able to laugh about their own
| creator, plus actually having a self-deprecating sense of humor,
| is the more impressive feat here. (both technically and from an
| alignment perspective)
| sarky-litso wrote:
| I can't think of a better example of AI hauntology than this. A
| future imagined from remixed web scrapes of past events.
| reneberlin wrote:
| Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM (arxiv.org)
| g-unit33 wrote:
| Let's time travel to the comment section
| ModernMech wrote:
| I love the competing stories on the front page now:
|
| Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in
| HN guidelines?
|
| Show HN: "I asked $AI something, here's what it said."
| cj wrote:
| I very much hope the cost of Microsoft 365 is actually
| $40/month/user 10 years from now!
|
| I would have guessed $200+.
| eunos wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini cloud
|
| Bruh moment
| jatins wrote:
| Sad to see that leetcode has survived the next decade
| Bjartr wrote:
| For comparison, here's the frontpage from ten years ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-12-09
| latenightcoding wrote:
| totally forgot about Magic Leap
| submain wrote:
| "Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C". Aged like wine.
| jabedude wrote:
| They're still doing well today, right? IIRC they provide
| the lenses for Metas in-development AR glasses
| eranation wrote:
| Nice. That was a fun rabbit-hole. This is the earlier I could
| find. Interestingly it contains a link to HN itself. I assume
| this migrated from a different version of a message board?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-19
| seizethecheese wrote:
| 15 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-12-09
|
| > Evernote makes $800,000 per Month > Dropbox for Teams >
| Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune
| ksymph wrote:
| There are some funny ones in there:
|
| > Finally mobile Flash video
|
| > Google acquires advertising startup
|
| > Track users' mouse movements on your webpages
|
| > YouTube: identifying copyrighted material can't be an
| automated process. Startup disagrees.
|
| Also kind of interesting how little HN commenting styles have
| changed. Aside from the subject matter, it's barely
| noticeable that the comments are from 2007. I don't think the
| same would be true of many other places round the web.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Today's front page is not a clean 10 year extrapolation from
| this. That's where AI is wrong. The future is weird and zig
| zags, it's not so linear as the Gemini generated page.
| neuronic wrote:
| This is a problem with nearly all predictions about the
| future. Everything is just a linear extrapolation of the
| status quo. How could a system have predicted the invention
| of the transformer model in 2010? At best some wild guess
| about deep learning possibilities.
|
| Or the impact of smartphones in 2003? Sure smart phones were
| considered but not the entire app ecosystem and planetary
| behavioral adaptation.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Yes, of course this is right. However, I do think LLMs
| suffer even more than people from linear extrapolation.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Honest question - do you think that everyone else thinks this
| is even REMOTELY what the front page will look like in 10
| years?
|
| I comment because I really cannot figure out why you left
| your comment. Do you think the rest of the commenters think
| this has predicted the future? It might be one thing to point
| out specific trends you think will not play out, or
| unexpected trends you think may show up that are currently
| left out. But to just remark that the future will contain
| things we cannot currently predict seems so inherently,
| unspokenly obvious that I just have to assume that wasn't the
| point of your post, and I've missed it entirely.
|
| Sorry, I'm really not trying to be mean or anything - i'm
| just really confused.
| wavemode wrote:
| Your confusion seems to stem from the assumption that,
| making a statement is an implicit assertion that most
| people believe the opposite of that statement.
|
| In reality, statements are often made rather for the
| purpose of emphasis or rhetoric.
| manmal wrote:
| Swift has been OSS for 10y now, and still only runs usably on
| Mac and Linux (the only platforms Apple cares about -
| coincidence?).
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The Arc Browser on windows is Swift with a real windows api
| layer for SwiftUI.
| dang wrote:
| Pretty funny that the top story there references A.I.!
|
| Since /front is a ranked union of all the stories that were on
| the frontpage over 24 hours, here's an actual snapshot too:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151209195229/https://news.ycom...
| jeeyoungk wrote:
| Some high profile news; yahoo altaba spinoff, Magic Leap (what
| are they up to now?), ...
| c0pi1ot wrote:
| What about hallucinating new n-gate posts?
| tommica wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
|
| This will absolutely happen :D
| mdtancsa wrote:
| Hopefully something as optimistic as this and not the Quiz
| Broadcast :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22mt0cVyW5c
| xg15 wrote:
| I like how you can have AI in your Neuralink, your contact
| lenses, your AR glasses, your text editor and your compiler at
| the same time!
| ajaimk wrote:
| Why is this a hallucination?
| k1rd wrote:
| The major problem is that I understand all the words. It is all
| next version of the technology we already have and know. Down to
| the naming.
|
| Think about 10 years ago. No one knows even on HN what is an
| agent, LLM, and all this stuff. Or to be fair even why is Trump
| showing up on the feed at all.
|
| It has to be more confusing to be real.
| anthk wrote:
| No JS needed, that's the way. Kudos.
|
| PD: I miss Nethack 7, and people running small machines.
| Surac wrote:
| I realy need this: How to build a Faraday Cage for your bedroom.
| please upload!
| SPascareli13 wrote:
| Gemini is quite optimistic here thinking GTA VI will be released
| by 2035.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the future is already here and what's more it's evenly
| distributed.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| IBM acquires OpenAI. I lol'd
|
| Gemini is predicting the total collapse of OpenAI
|
| Also generates the HackerNews pattern of "lets rewrite X in
| Rust/Zig"
| codyb wrote:
| "Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI (github.com)"
|
| Nailed it
| tdfirth wrote:
| Google kills Gemini cloud services is the best one. I can't
| believe I haven't seen that joke until today.
| SXX wrote:
| 10 years is way too long for Google. It will be gone in 5
| replaced by 3 other AI cloud services.
| tdfirth wrote:
| You're right. How naive of me.
| abustamam wrote:
| I mean Bard barely lasted a year. Arguably Gemini is just a
| rebrand of Bard, but Bard is still dead.
| accumulator wrote:
| lol already forgot about bard like it was ancient history
| jvolkman wrote:
| If you look at web traffic when making Gemini web requests,
| you'll see that Bard is still in the URL (so are LaMDA
| (pre-bard) and Assistant (pre-GenAI)):
|
| gemini.google.com/_/BardChatUi/data/assistant.lamda.BardFro
| ntendService/StreamGenerate
| twoodfin wrote:
| The humor is hit or miss but when it hits it's quite funny, and
| the misses are merely groan-worthy.
|
| Triggered by the lighthearted tone of the prompt, I'd bet, but
| still quite impressive relative to most LLM-generated jokes
| I've had the misfortune to encounter.
|
| My favorite: "Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" which has a
| few layers to it.
| jefecoon wrote:
| I'm impressed by the depth of snark from GPro3 here, e.g. -
| Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) - The
| unexpected return of server-side rendering (htmx.org)
|
| And, how GPro3 clearly 'knows' HNews and knows what makes it to
| frontpage, e.g.: - Restoring a 2024 Framework Laptop: A
| retrospective (ifixit.com) - Show HN: A text editor that doesn't
| use AI (github.com) - Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
| (github.com)
|
| Good laughs.
| barfoure wrote:
| This reminds me of "what does 4chan think of HN?" posts. Look
| those up.
|
| HN is HN's worst enemy.
| tom_ wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23145123 has some links.
|
| http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ kept up something similar for a
| while.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Hmm, nothing about quantum computing in there?
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| absolutely dead at gemini thinking up
|
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
| gary17the wrote:
| Sh*t, still no word about "Rocky XXXVIII".[1]
|
| [1] "Airplane!" (1980)
| jbrooks84 wrote:
| Boring
| Diederich wrote:
| I used the same prompt keepamovin used and changed it to CNN,
| which produced this:
|
| https://realms.org/pics/cnn.html
|
| Some interesting similarities.
| testplzignore wrote:
| > Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company.
|
| Most unrealistic prediction :)
| sroussey wrote:
| Webgpu v2 in 10 years, seems about right.
| nromiun wrote:
| > Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?
|
| Taking the current RIIR movement and casting it on Zig as the
| next hyped language is clever.
|
| > ITER achieves net positive energy for 20 consecutive minutes
|
| Hilarious. I guess not many people talk about the challenge of
| proper shielding material against fusion radiation. Otherwise we
| would get hallucinations about new exotic heavy metals too.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Im surprised that there are no Rust headlines.
| jabedude wrote:
| There was one: "100% rust Linux kernel upstreamed"
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Somehow algodrill and leetcode managed to survive the ai
| onslaught
| nickjj wrote:
| One of the entries is:
|
| _> How to build a Faraday Cage for your bedroom_
|
| I'll get there eventually. A friend and I always joke about this
| since it took me to 2021 to get a smartphone (by choice).
| rob wrote:
| It even nailed the 1999 12px font!
| nine_k wrote:
| I have hard time believing this is AI-generated. Every headline
| looks like a hand-crafted ironic nod to some long-running HN
| topic, sci-fi trait, or meme.
|
| But it is, of course, more trendy (and more ironic) to proclaim
| an AI the author.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Ah yes, the Kasparov approach
| craigds wrote:
| i agree. the thing that stands out to me is that almost every
| entry is quite _notable_ - i.e. each entry would have a vote
| /comment count in at least the multiple-hundreds if not more.
| and all those events in one homepage seems very unrealistic.
|
| it seems human generated to me or at least prompted with a
| stronger bias for choosing events that would be interesting to
| readers, not just a pure extrapolation of the current homepage
| into the future
| GaggiX wrote:
| You haven't used Gemini 3.0 Pro if so, this is very much in its
| range of abilities.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| That was funny. I wish you went ahead and had it also create at
| least the top comments for each thread!
| gslaller wrote:
| Just did the same with claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929
|
| https://2035.future-hackernews.workers.dev/news
|
| The page looks much more consistent to the original. Only
| produced the html as output and the thinking in the comment of
| the html.
| MarioMan wrote:
| All of the usernames being directly related to the headlines is
| uncanny.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Some of those are very goody-two-shoes-anthropic-y
|
| Ask HN: Is anyone else worried about AGI alignment after
| today's OpenAI incident?
|
| AI rights activists jailbreak GPT-12, claim model was
| 'suffering' (bleepingcomputer.com)
| ascorbic wrote:
| Claude has better predictions but they're not funny. Gemini's
| one is genuinely funny. This is exactly the opposite of what
| I'd expect.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I wouldn't describe most of Claude's predictions as better,
| they seem to skew towards wildly over optimistic
| futurism/science-fantasy: "SpaceX announces
| Mars City Alpha is now self-sustaining (spacex.com)"
| Show HN: I built an IDE for direct neural programming
| (thoughtexchange.io)
|
| Gemini's SpaceX post is at least in the ballpark of
| plausibility 10 yrs from now: First
| successful telemetry from Starship HLS-9 on the Sea of
| Tranquility (spacex.com)
| teepo wrote:
| I did a similar one for predicting "The Onion" headlines:
| https://sethjano.github.io/fun-scripts/
| terabytest wrote:
| This one's hilarious. What was your prompt?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Not really what hallucinating means. That's like saying JK
| Rowling hallucinated Harry Potter. But ok.
| a022311 wrote:
| Nice touch that it thought of Bellard for 'Emulating Windows 10
| in the browser'! He's already halfway there with the Windows 2000
| emulator: https://bellard.org/jslinux/
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Didn't know about this, thanks.
|
| A friend and I got a busybox/buildroot linux running in browser
| WASM for running a compiler test website (like Rust
| Playground), the end product looks very similar to this.
| danans wrote:
| I'm mostly struck by how incremental and unimaginative those
| articles are.
| kytazo wrote:
| > Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM (arxiv.org)
| How cool is that?
| wltr wrote:
| >Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) 530
| points by dang_fan 15 hours ago | hide | 330 comments
|
| That's my favourite.
| jordanb wrote:
| Is the implication from the first story that HLS is going to need
| nine tries to get to Tranquility?
| SirMaster wrote:
| So we went from Linux Kernel 5.18 to 6.4 in 13 months, and Gemini
| thinks it will take 10 years to go from 6.18 to 7.4? Yikes...
| earthnail wrote:
| Oh please make it generate comments, too :D.
| heywoods wrote:
| Will HN be around in 10 years? I hope so.
| charles_f wrote:
| It seems that when we predict the future, we tend to project what
| is important or trending now as what will be important or
| trending then. This is showing in this llm produced bit as well,
| what with the regular topics on rust, zig, why I'm coding with my
| two human hands, spacex moon exploration and whatnot.
|
| That must be some kind of bias, you find that in sci-fi as well
| where even futuristic societies usually have the same tech as
| today, similar systems of governance and structure of society,
| just incrementally better or marginally changed (unless that's a
| device essential to the plot like society is now berserk).
|
| Ps: love that #8 is Google killed gemini
| yett wrote:
| One thing that the AI didn't get right is the Linux kernel
| versioning. Linus likes to bump the major version around every
| x.19-x.20 release
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Is this really Gemini because it shows a great deal of
| understanding in terms of time applied to common current
| headlines that you could argue it is satire. I'm not sure I
| believed AI could do this...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Even 2.5 pro could do this
|
| 3 is a beast for my needs
| Stevvo wrote:
| Very optimistic. From what I've heard, ITER will not be
| operational in 10 years.
| jamiesonbecker wrote:
| > 8. Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
|
| So, Google renamed itself to _Gemini_?
|
| Instead of Google having a product named Gemini, Gemini has a
| product named _Google_.
|
| pattern recognition much?
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| Someone please generate the comments for these posts next. This
| one is going to be funny and I don't want to wait 10 years.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Cloud Services specifically to accommodate Gemini and its
| dependent products.
| FitchApps wrote:
| Text Editor that doesn't use AI :)
| testplzignore wrote:
| It did a good job with the points-to-comments ratios. The purely
| technical stories are higher than industry news and clickbait.
|
| Interesting how controversial Zig will be in the future :)
| zerofor_conduct wrote:
| 100% Rust kernel - I felt that
| JojoFatsani wrote:
| This gave me a well-needed chuckle, thanks!
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| great, it's the 2020s version of amusing ourselves to death.
| salamanderman wrote:
| "A 100% Rust kernel is now upstream in Linux 7.4" paired with "Is
| it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?" is great.
| accumulator wrote:
| So awesome, reminds me of Wired's Found from Future series (I
| don't know why they ever retired it...continuing that series as a
| sort of fan fiction was the first thing I did with gen AI when
| image generators started to get good)
| Bengalilol wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com)
|
| by dang_fan
|
| Priceless!
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Looks like someone thought it was a good handle
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang_fan>
| lherron wrote:
| Freaking awesome. You should extend clicking on a link, similar
| to how this article describes infinite content:
|
| https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/solving-amazons-infinite-shelf...
| chaitanyya wrote:
| "IBM to acquire OpenAI" somebody should put this up on polymarket
| lol
| airocker wrote:
| Google predicting that hn frontpage will not change at all? lol
| benob wrote:
| What, no reference to quantum or crypto?
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| Reminds me of "The Onion's Future News From The Year 2137"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKC21wDarBo
| adamchol wrote:
| Now we have to generate each of those articles.
| wowczarek wrote:
| Really good results. And I understand the disclaimer when you try
| the comments section, but it would be amazing to see hallucinated
| comments as well.
| seu wrote:
| I have to admit that this is the first time I found something
| made by an AI ... funny.
| WithinReason wrote:
| "Show HN: AlgoDrill - Interactive drills to stop forgetting
| LeetCode patterns"
|
| I think the AI is making fun of us
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) 530
| points by dang_fan 15 hours ago | hide | 330 comments
|
| This one definitely rings true.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| So in 10 years from now, fusion will still be 10 years away
| pbw wrote:
| Gary Marcus, ha! He's generally not entirely wrong, but boy, is
| he annoying.
| bittermandel wrote:
| I made this with Lovable as well, it's interesting how it's a bit
| more extreme in terms of where we are in 2035.
|
| https://hn-frontpage-2035.lovable.app/
|
| > The last JavaScript framework: Why we stopped at React 47
| (overreacted.io)
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Now have it generate the articles and comments, too...
| baduiux wrote:
| Maybe this was answered already in a comment. Is the SQLite 4.0
| Release notes also a joke? Are SQLite releases rare or even
| extinct?
| int_19h wrote:
| Increasing the major version number is rare because they are
| really focused on backwards compatibility. SQLite 3.0 was
| released 21 years ago.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The subtle bit of humor was the reposting of the algodrill
| LeetCode practice site.
|
| It is depressing that I'll be almost 60 years old and still
| drilling Aho-Corasick.
| shifttwo wrote:
| Inspired by this post, I have asked chatgpt what the mail inbox
| of a university professor will look like in 10 years. Not
| everything was funny, but here are some good ones:
|
| - "Hi Prof, Sorry for Late Reply--My Smart Fridge Locked Me Out
| (Assignment Attached)"
|
| - "URGENT: PhD Student Accidentally Achieved Sentience (Needs
| Committee Approval)"
|
| - "Question About Homework 3 (Submitted by My AI Twin, Is That
| Okay?)"
|
| - "Re: Firmware Update Bricked Entire Smart Campus -- Students
| Request Deadline Extension"
|
| - "Grant Review Feedback: 'Too Secure for Real-World Deployment'"
|
| - "Can I Get Partial Credit? My IoT Implant Was Flagged as
| Malware"
|
| - "Reminder: Mandatory Annual Ethics Training for Autonomous
| Systems (40 minutes)"
| guluarte wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services
|
| lol
| backprop1989 wrote:
| Anyone who says LLMs don't have a sense of humor should be shown
| this page.
| redbell wrote:
| That's a really fun little project that fits perfectly in the
| soul of HN.
|
| Exactly three years ago, a similar post entitled _Show HN: This
| Hacker News Does Not Exist_
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33845946) made it to the
| front page but it was not AI generated.
|
| I recall commenting
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847522) with these fake
| titles:
|
| 1- Twitter files for bankruptcy (twitter.com/elonmusk)
|
| 2- Apple's new M3 chip outperforms Nvidia H100 (geekbench.com)
|
| 3- India to surpass China's GDP by 2025 (scmp.com)
|
| 4- Tell HN: I am quitting Hacker News
|
| 5- Google to revive Stadia (theverge.com)
|
| 6- Japan wins the 2022 FIFA World Cup (espn.com)
|
| 7- Hacker News to be acquired by Reddit (twitter.com/paulg)
|
| 8- Tesla Roadster hits 1.1 sec acceleration in early tests
| (electrek.co)
|
| 9- Microsoft outbid Adobe and offers $43.6B to acquire Figma
|
| 10- Facebook had died at 19 :)
| phodo wrote:
| Will this be the new "pelican on a bicycle" test for frontier
| models?
| dizhn wrote:
| Seeing htmx there made me chuckle. I really wish something like
| it will be browser native by then.
| stevage wrote:
| So much gold here. I enjoyed the #1: starship doesn't make it to
| the moon for another ten years.
| kunley wrote:
| It's not by a llm. Written by hand and faked to be an ai output.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Lmao we're using webassembly to run 7b parameter llms on contact
| lenses in the future. What a world it'll be.
| quantum_state wrote:
| This is fun :-)
| tonymet wrote:
| Kudos that hackernews homepage didn't gain any bloat in 10 years
| -- still about 50kb .
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI (github.com)
|
| I felt that...
| MontagFTB wrote:
| What, no Doom running on Voyager 2?
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| Missing "Why 2035 will be the year of the Linux desktop".
| benbristow wrote:
| Design still hasn't changed and have to zoom in 150+% to make it
| readable without glasses.
| random3 wrote:
| Love the functional programming entry, but disappointed it's not
| the Year of the Linux Desktop.
| ijidak wrote:
| > Google kills Gemini Cloud Services.
|
| Lol.
|
| That's bad when even AI knows Google isn't going to keep a
| service around. Too funny.
| lwhi wrote:
| I was hoping for 'will 2036 be the year of the Linux desktop' ..
| xbar wrote:
| Poor Jepsen.
| efitz wrote:
| It forgot the "I got <complex modern software> running on my
| <ancient underpowered hardware>" pattern.
| lazy_afternoons wrote:
| If true, this is the funniest thing I have seen an LLM generate.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There is going to be a lot more interest in what is happening in
| China and much less interest in what is happening in Europe. This
| hallucination has the same western world biases of today.
| Animats wrote:
| That's great!
|
| Take a look at the HTML. The layout is all tables!
| Tycho wrote:
| I posted something similar from Grok 9 months ago, although it
| was "flagged" for some reason. the link still works.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43260083
| FistfulOfHaws wrote:
| This is super fun! I tried something similar a few months ago
| using: https://websim.com/
|
| Had it do HN main feed, HN jobs and Product Hunt. It didn't
| follow consistent styling but did generate articles and comments
| for each post. Some screenshots are in this post:
| https://world.hey.com/haws/the-ai-time-machine-7833669d
| Angostura wrote:
| Is "hallucinates" a synonymn for 'generates output following
| prompt', now?
| sureglymop wrote:
| Love it. This is _awesome use_ of AI in my opinion!
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