[HN Gopher] AI is a horse (2024)
___________________________________________________________________
AI is a horse (2024)
Author : zdw
Score : 438 points
Date : 2026-01-20 00:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kconner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kconner.com)
| tetris11 wrote:
| It's also a big bloatey gas bag that needs constant de-farting to
| function
| omgsharks wrote:
| So essentially a cow?
| krige wrote:
| Oh horses fart _a lot_ too.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Horses poop a lot. _A lot._
| Xunjin wrote:
| I had to search about and it's indeed a lot:
|
| "it is quite normal for a horse to poo (defecate) 8-12
| times a day and produce anywhere from 13 to 23 kilograms
| of poo a day."
|
| Source: https://www.ranvet.com.au/horse-poo/
| Sharlin wrote:
| That's what you get when your primary source of nutrition
| is very calorie-poor and largely indigestible.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Yup. I've noticed that with my dog going to meat from
| kibble. Poop sizes reduced by 80%.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_o
| f_1...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| More than pooping a lot, they literally cannot hold it.
| Humans don't poop that much, but imagine if everyone just
| did it on the floor at a moment's notice regardless of
| where they are
| recursive wrote:
| So Red Dead Redemption 2 was actually realistic? I always
| wondered why the horses were pooping _all the time_. It
| 's because of AI.
| smitty1e wrote:
| "I've been through the desert
|
| On AI with no name
|
| It felt good to be out of the rAIn
|
| In the desert, you can remember your name
|
| 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain"
| direwolf20 wrote:
| you forgot to write pAIn and it reminded me of this:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=nt9mRDa0nrc
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >2 views
|
| I'm not saying that's _your_ video but it sure looks like
| that 's _your video_ ;)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| First search result. This one has 734:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=45_HJkoDxpQ
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Or your typical American teenager.
| jonplackett wrote:
| All true apart you can only lead it to water - it drinks ALL the
| water regardless of anything else.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| Except when you want it to improve something in a particular
| way you already know about. Then god forbid it understands what
| you have asked and makes only that change :/
|
| Some times I end up giving up trying to get the AI to build
| something following a particular architecture or fixing a
| particular problem in it's provious implementations.
| d--b wrote:
| And the salesman always says it's great while it's in fact lame.
| oliwary wrote:
| "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to
| the thing."
|
| My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire.
| Maybe applicable to AI too?
| latexr wrote:
| Something like that used to be Apple's driving force under
| Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook).
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s
|
| > You've go to start with the customer experience and work
| backwards to the technology. You can't start with the
| technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to
| sell it.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| > You can't start with the technology and try to figure out
| where you're going to try to sell it.
|
| If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!
| hkt wrote:
| ChatGPT, tell me how I should feel about this!
| direwolf20 wrote:
| That works when you are starting a new company from scratch
| to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins
| discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it.
| It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new
| customer experience you intersect it with all existing
| technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect
| it with all existing customer experience.
| crote wrote:
| Isn't that why the big tech companies switched to acquiring
| up-and-coming scaleups?
| torginus wrote:
| Apple was a well established company when they came out
| with the iPhone - I don't think anyone but Jobs would've
| been able to pull off something like that.
|
| That sort of comprehensive innovation (hardware, software,
| UX - Apple invented everything), while entering an
| unfamilar and established market, I'd argue would've been
| impossible to do in a startup.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| He had a customer experience in mind, so he found the
| intersection with every existing technology, and it was
| impressive. But there are also times when you add a new
| technology to your collection, so you find the
| intersection with every existing customer experience.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > You can't start with the technology and try to figure out
| where you're going to try to sell it.
|
| The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet
| than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a
| bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this
| stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What
| took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial
| ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain
| users, today.
| monooso wrote:
| > We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions
| looking for problems to solve.
|
| We've always had that.
|
| In olden times the companies who peddled such solutions
| were called "a business without a market", or simply "a
| failing business." These days they're "pre-revenue."
|
| Maybe it will be different this time, maybe it will be
| exactly the same but a lot more expensive. Time will tell.
| latexr wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. Of course you can make
| such a product. As Steve says right after, he himself made
| that mistake a lot. The point is that to make something
| great (at several levels of great, not just "makes money")
| you have to start with the need and build a solution, not
| have a solution and shoehorn it to a need.
|
| The internet is an entirely different beast and does not at
| all support your point. What we have on the web is hacks on
| top of hacks. It was not built to do all the things we push
| it to do, and if you understand where to look, it shows.
| djmips wrote:
| I feel like if Jobs was still alive at the dawn of AI he
| would definitely be doing a lot more than Apple has been -
| probably would have been an AI leader.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Jobs also needed to control the user experience. Apple
| wasn't really a web leader either.
|
| They were able to bootstrap a mobile platform because they
| could convince themselves they had control of the user
| experience.
|
| I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the
| millennium Apple culture.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I'm not so sure where AI would land in the turn of the
| millennium Apple culture.
|
| Instead of doing almost correct email summaries Jobs
| would have a LLM choose color of the send button with an
| opaque relationship with the emotional mood of the mail
| you write.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| > excellent show "halt and catch fire".
|
| I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which
| is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| It's still very good I'd say. It shows the relation between
| big oil and tech: it began in Texas (with companies like
| Texas Instruments) then shifted to SV (btw first 3D demo I
| saw on a SGI, running in real time, was a 3D model of... An
| oil rig). As it spans many years, it shows the Commodore 64,
| the BBSes, time-sharing, the PC clone wars, the discovery of
| the Internet, the nascent VC industry etc.
|
| Everything is period correct and then the clothes and cars
| too: it's all very well done.
|
| Is there a bit too much romance? Maybe. But it's still worth
| a watch.
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| I never really could get into the Cameron/Joe romance, it
| felt like it was initially inserted to get sexy people
| doing sexy things onto the show and then had to be a star
| crossed lovers thing after character tweaks in season 2.
|
| But when they changed the characters to be passionate
| stubborn people eventually started to cling to each other
| as they together rode the whirlwind of change the show
| really found its footing for me. And they did so without
| throwing away the events of season 1, instead having the
| 'takers' go on redemption arcs.
|
| My only real complaint after re-watching really was it
| needed maybe another half season. I think the show should
| have ended with the .com bust and I didn't like that Joe
| sort of ran away when it was clear he'd attached himself to
| the group as his family by the end of the show.
| oliwary wrote:
| IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1
| felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter
| seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful
| and sad at times.
| zorked wrote:
| I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several
| times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes
| and the Internet (or something like that), but every time
| they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really
| tried to make the series work.
| miyoji wrote:
| That's not really what happens at all. The characters on
| the show never make the critical discoveries or are
| responsible for the major breakthroughs, they're
| competing in markets that they ultimately cannot win in,
| because while the show is fictional, it also follows real
| computing history.
|
| (MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)
|
| For example, in the first season, the characters we
| follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done
| already. They're one of many companies making an IBM
| clone, and they are modestly successful but not
| remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the
| characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that
| everything he had done was a waste of time (from his
| perspective, he wanted to change the history of
| computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't
| actually inventing the future, he just thought he was.
| They also don't really start from being underfunded
| unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves
| in new situations based on their past experiences in ways
| that feel reasonable to real life.
| alt227 wrote:
| IMO the first series was excellent, the 2nd took a massive
| downturn and stopped watching after that.
| razakel wrote:
| The BBC made a docudrama, Micro Men, with Alexander
| Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris
| Curry.
|
| Sophie Wilson cameos when they have a fight.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I am really looking forward to that idea catching up with AI.
| Right now AI is the thing and the products it enables are
| secondary.
|
| Remember when our job was to hide the ugly techniques we had to
| use from end users?
| tuyiown wrote:
| I was expecting a spin about the faster horses
| metalman wrote:
| Ai is a horse, i get it! I have a horse, and I put money in the
| front of the horse, and get "ponyium" out the back.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| Through many attempts to make ingesting the ponyium more
| bearable, I've found that taking it with more intense flavors
| (wintergreen mint, hoppy hops, crushed soul, dark roast coffee,
| etc) improves its comestabilty. Can't let it pile up. We've
| always eaten ponyium right, and we all like it, right, guys,
| folks?
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| I hear the cool companies offer free ponyium to their
| employees. Apparently, it works wonders for morale
| brador wrote:
| If an AI aims at the thing we call it hallucinations, when humans
| do it we call the delusion goal setting.
|
| Either way it is an imagined end point that has no bearing in
| known reality.
| davidhunter wrote:
| "No, I am not a horse."
|
| Horse rumours denied.
| egeozcan wrote:
| That's something a horse pretending to be AI would say.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| *sweats profusely* https://imgur.com/a/PszeiAu
| echelon wrote:
| This micro blog meta is fascinating. I've seen small micro blog
| content like this popping up on the HN home page almost daily
| now.
|
| I have to start doing this for "top level"ish commentary. I've
| frequently wanted to nucleate discussions without being too
| orthogonal to thread topics.
| croisillon wrote:
| you rather don't want it in your bed
| retrocog wrote:
| Some day, I imagine one will be a senator
| hackable_sand wrote:
| We only have enough budgeted for one joke in 2026 and this is
| the one.
| pixl97 wrote:
| AI will be a senator, but only after it's 75 years old.
| georgestrakhov wrote:
| AI is not a horse (2023) https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/ai-is-
| not-a-horse/
| baxtr wrote:
| Maybe AI is a centaur??
| GlobalFrog wrote:
| Or a reverse-centaur ?
| https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-
| revers...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Or a reverse centaur [1].
|
| [1] https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-
| revers...
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Baxtr, JAMES BAXTR? That's the exact comment I'd expect of
| someone named that.
| Symmetry wrote:
| After Deep Blue Garry Kapsparav proposed "Centaur Chess"[1]
| where teams of humans and computers would complete with each
| other. For about a decade a team like that was superior to
| either an unaided computer or an unaided AI. These days pure
| AI teams tend to be much stronger.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
| ffsm8 wrote:
| How would pure ai ever be "much stronger" in this scenario?
|
| That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever, it can only
| be "equally strong", making the approach non-viable because
| they're not providing any value... But the only way for the
| human in the loop to add an actual demerit, you'd have to
| include time taken for each move into the final score,
| which isn't normal in chess.
|
| But I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, I'm just expressing
| my surprise and inability to contextualize this claim with
| my minor experience of the game
| Symmetry wrote:
| If you had a setup where the computer just did its thing
| and never waited for the human to provide input but the
| human still had an unused button they could press to get
| a chance to say something that might technically count as
| "centaur", but that isn't really what people mean by the
| term. It's the delay in waiting for human input that's
| the big disadvantage centaur setups have when the human
| isn't really providing any value these days.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| But why would that be a disadvantage large enough to
| cause the player to lose, which would be necessary for
|
| > _pure AI teams tend to be much stronger._
|
| Maybe each turn has a time limit, and a human would need
| "n moments" to make the final judgement call whereas the
| AI could delay the final decision right to the last
| moment for it's final analysis? So the pure AI player
| gets an additional 10-30s to simulate the game
| essentially?
| plomme wrote:
| Why? If the human has final say on which play to make I
| can certainly see them thinking they are proposing a
| better strategy when they are actually hurting their
| chances.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| You can be so far ahead of someone, their input (if you
| act on it) can only make things worse. That's it. If a
| human 'teams up' with chess AI today and does anything
| other than agree with its moves, it will just drag things
| down.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| But how specifically in Chess?
|
| These human in the loop systems basically lists possible
| moves with likelihood of winning, no?
|
| So how would the human be a demerit? It'd mean that the
| human for some reason decided to always use the option
| that the ai wouldn't take, but how would that make sense?
| Then the AI would list the "correct" move with a higher
| likelihood of winning.
|
| The point of this strategy was to mitigate traps, but
| this would now have to become inverted: the opponent AI
| would have to be able to gaslight the human into thinking
| he's stopping his AI from falling into a trap. While that
| might work in a few cases, the human would quickly learn
| that his ability to overrule the optimal choice is
| flawed, thus reverting it back to baseline where the
| human is essentially a non-factor and not a demerit
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >So how would the human be a demerit? It'd mean that the
| human for some reason decided to always use the option
| that the ai wouldn't take, but how would that make sense?
| Then the AI would list the "correct" move with a higher
| likelihood of winning.
|
| The human will be a demerit any time it's not picking the
| choice the model would have made.
|
| >While that might work in a few cases, the human would
| quickly learn that his ability to overrule the optimal
| choice is flawed, thus reverting it back to baseline
| where the human is essentially a non-factor and not a
| demerit
|
| Sure, but it's not a Centaur game if the human is doing
| literally nothing every time. The only way for a human+ai
| team to not be outright worse than only ai is for the
| human to do nothing at all and that's not a team. You've
| just delayed the response of the computer for no good
| reason.
| pixl97 wrote:
| With intelligence of models seeming spikey/lumpy I suspect
| we'll see tasks and domains fall to AI one at a time. Some
| will happen quickly and others may take far longer than we
| expect.
| egeozcan wrote:
| We don't know it, up to the point we observe it.
| zombot wrote:
| But since the act of observation influences the object
| observed, who knows what then becomes of it?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| AI is a quantum mechanic
| willrshansen wrote:
| AI is a quantum horse
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| this post is aging like milk
| dana321 wrote:
| https://www.isclaudecodedumb.today/
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| Wao
| taneq wrote:
| I've always said that driving a car with modern driver assist
| features (lane centering / adaptive cruise / 'autopilot' style
| self-ish driving-ish) is like riding a horse. The early ones were
| like riding a short sighted, narcoleptic horse. Newer ones are
| improving but it's still like riding a horse, in that you give it
| high level instructions about where to go, rather than directly
| energising its muscles.
| amelius wrote:
| A horse that can do your homework.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Yeah, well... not really.
|
| I used to tell my Into-to-Programming-in-C course students, 20
| years ago, that they could in principle skip one or two of the
| homework assignments; and that some students even manage to
| outsmart us and submit copied work as homework, but - they
| would just not become able to program if they don't do their
| homework themselves. "If you want to be able to write software
| code you have to exercise writing code. It's just that simple
| and there's no getting around it."
|
| Of course not every discipline is the same. But I can also tell
| you that if you want to know, say, history - you have to
| memorize accounts and aspects and highlights of historical
| periods and processes, and recount them yourself, and check
| that you got things right. If "the AI" does this for you, then
| maybe it knows history but you don't.
|
| And that is the point of homework (if it's voluntary of
| course).
| pixl97 wrote:
| To become a programmer you must write code.
|
| To become upper management, just steal other peoples work.
| dmitrijbelikov wrote:
| Maybe from the client's point of view, although it's more likely
| a Tamagotchi. But from the server side, it's more like a whole
| hippodrome where you need to support horse racing 24/7
| MarceliusK wrote:
| It's a nice reminder that most metaphors break unless you ask
| whose perspective they're describing
| polmuz wrote:
| https://polmuz.github.io/2026/01/04/its-a-horse.html
| oytis wrote:
| That's not from the last week, so obviously is invalid.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a
| bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the
| idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described
| the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle
| allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true,
| but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the
| muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you
| didn't put yourself.
|
| Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age
| of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and
| produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in
| the current version it might not go very far and needs to be
| pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than
| what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that
| this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've
| been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the
| fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model,
| still imperfect, but already working.
| kylec wrote:
| A tractor does exactly what you tell it to do though - you turn
| it on, steer it in a direction, and it goes. I like the horse
| metaphor for AI better: still useful, but sometimes
| unpredictable, and needs constant supervision.
| airstrike wrote:
| So it's clearly a cyborg horse
| throw310822 wrote:
| The horse metaphor would also do, but it's very tied to the
| current state of LLMs (which by the way is already far beyond
| what they were in 2024). It also doesn't capture that horses
| are what they are, they're not improving and certainly not by
| a factor of 10, 100 or 1000, while there is almost no limit
| to the amount of power that an engine can be built to
| produce. Horses (and oxen) have been available for thousands
| of years, and agriculture still needed to employ a large
| percentage of the population. This changed completely with
| the petrol engines.
| rkagerer wrote:
| What metrics show 100X or 1000X improvement trends?
| maypop wrote:
| Having recently watched Train Dreams it feels like the
| transition of logging by hand to logging with industrial
| machinery.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind",
| inspired by that Jobs quote.
|
| - some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be
| "cheating"
|
| - you get less exercise from an electric bicycle
|
| - they can get you places really effectively!
|
| - if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle
| is going to quickly lead you to an accident
| matthewkayin wrote:
| I like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles
| are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the
| extremes of biking (at least not yet).
|
| - You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
|
| - You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
|
| - You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking
| across the country
| throw310822 wrote:
| I think you're kind of missing the point discussing which
| vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the
| vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines,
| humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of
| power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen
| they had at their disposal.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| I don't think they're missing the point. I think there's
| still fundamental disagreements about the functional
| utility of LLMs.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Actually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where
| they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
| masterj wrote:
| People have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as
| well. Not sure about BMX.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| They're great when the trails aren't too technical. No so
| much when they are (as I've learned from personal
| experience )
| panopticon wrote:
| I'm curious what your personal experience is.
|
| My eMTBs are just as capable as my manual bikes (similar
| geometry, suspension, etc). In fact, they make smashing
| tech trails easier because there's more weight near the
| bottom bracket which adds a lot of stability.
|
| The ride feel is totally different though. I tend to gap
| more sections on my manual bike whereas I end up plowing
| through stuff on the hefty eeb.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
|
| while there are companies that have made electric BMX
| bikes, i'd argue that if you're doing actual "BMX" on a
| motorized bike, it's just "MX" at that point :)
| robrain wrote:
| Whistlerite here. My Strava stats for last year suggest
| half and half eMTB and road riding. Tiny bit of fully self-
| powered MTB work.
|
| As a 56-year old, eBikes are what make mountain biking
| possible and fun for me.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _- You 're not going to take an electric bike mountain
| biking_
|
| this sounds like a direct quote from Femke Van Den
| Driessche, who actually took an electric bike mountain
| biking: big mistake. Did it not perform well? no, actually
| it performed really well, the problem was, it got her
| banned from bike racing. Some of the evidence was her
| passing everybody else on the uphills; the other evidence
| was a motorized bike in her pit area.
| mjparrott wrote:
| Not sure how this fits in the analogy, but as a cyclist I
| would add some people get more exercise by having an electric
| bicycle. It makes exercise available to more people.
| simonw wrote:
| I think that fits it really well.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Motorcycle might be more apt
| hamdingers wrote:
| - they still fall over if nobody's holding the bars
| koolba wrote:
| Slamming the brakes and going teeth first into the
| handlebars.
| koolba wrote:
| You probably can't repair it yourself either.
| ueeheh wrote:
| Not convinced with any of three analogies tbh they don't
| quite capture what is going on like Steve jobs' did.
|
| And frankly all of this is really missing the point - instead
| of wasting time on analogies we should look at where this
| stuff works and then reason from there - a general way to
| make sense of it that is closer to reality.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| To keep torturing the metaphor, LLMs might be more like those
| electric unicycles (Onewheel, Inmotion, etc) - quite speedy,
| can get you places, less exercise, and also sometimes
| suddenly choke and send you flying facefirst into gravel.
|
| And some people see you whizzing by and think "oh cool", and
| others see you whizzing by and think "what a tool."
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| More like the Segway... really cool at first then not
| really then totally overpriced and failed to revolutionize
| the industry. And it killed the founder
| cogman10 wrote:
| Is there a modern segway? I mean, I find ebikes are
| probably a better option in general, but it seems like
| all the pieces to recreate the segway for a much lower
| price are there already.
|
| Looks like the closest thing is the self balancing stuff
| that segway makes. Otherwise it's just the scooters.
| boringg wrote:
| e-skateboards?
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Just a small correction, the founder of Segway is Dean
| Kamen who is still alive. It was the then-owner of the
| company who died.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| thanks saved me googling if Kamen was still alive!
| esafak wrote:
| It would have been cooler if this comment was by the
| founder :)
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Oh boy do I wish I was nearly as cool as Dean Kamen. :)
| superjan wrote:
| Maybe more like a fatbike for the mind: pretending to cycle
| with zero effort and exercise.
| pglevy wrote:
| Moped for the mind has a nice ring to it
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I feel like both moped and electric bike misses the mark of
| the initial analogy, so does tractor too. Because they're
| not able to get good results without someone putting in the
| work ("energy") at some higher part of the process. It's
| not "at the push of a button/twist of the wrist" like with
| electric bikes or mopeds, but being able to know where/how
| to push actually gets you reliable results. Like a bicycle.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Yeah, but plenty of people are just getting bad results
| and keeping them, because they'd prefer bad results for
| free over good results with effort.
| soperj wrote:
| Most people I see on their electric bikes aren't even
| pedaling. They're electric motorcycles, and they're a plague
| to everyone using pedestrian trails. Some of them are going
| nearly highway speeds, it's ridiculous.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _they can get you places really effectively!_
|
| But those who require them to get anywhere won't get very far
| without power.
| EGreg wrote:
| okay -- how about motorcycles for the mind then? :)
|
| most people don't know how to harness their full potential
| WarmWash wrote:
| I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what
| happened with Chess.
|
| Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
|
| Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but
| didn't win the tournament.
|
| Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year
| later.
|
| A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these
| master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the
| dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
|
| A few years after that though, the computers start beating the
| human/computer hybrid opponents.
|
| And not long after that, humans started making the computer
| perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
|
| The next few years have probably the highest probability since
| the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline
| of human history.
| pmarreck wrote:
| The irony with the chess example is that chess has never been
| more popular.
|
| Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of
| computer languages.
| the_af wrote:
| I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's
| enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
|
| But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity,
| are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both
| at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
|
| (I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this:
| if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating,
| you're never going to be matched with them, only with
| people who play at around your level. Right?)
| retsibsi wrote:
| The most serious tournaments are played in person, with
| measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a
| chess engine on their phone communicating with a player.
| For online play, it's kind of like the situation for
| other online games; anti-cheat measures are very
| imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and
| more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can
| have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's
| pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating --
| e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an
| opening is very hard to distinguish from just having
| memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating,
| e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a
| separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on
| heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Computers are banned in everything except specific
| tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to
| have consulted one during a serious competition your wins
| are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be
| taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves
| from the model in the bathroom at those.
|
| Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to
| make sure no one has any devices on them during a game
| works well enough if there's not money at play?
| dugidugout wrote:
| > But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain
| popularity, are computers banned?
|
| Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI
| level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not
| very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make
| it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued
| gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can
| actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game
| and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give
| in.
| the_af wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
|
| I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so
| I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
|
| Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In
| real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Note that "AI" was not and has not been necessary for
| strong computer chess engines. Though clearly, they have
| contributed to peak strength and some NN methods are used
| by the most popular engine, stockfish.
| the_af wrote:
| Oh, I'm conflating the modern era use of the term with
| the classic definition of AI to include classic chess
| engines done with tree-pruning, backtracking, and
| heuristics :)
| dugidugout wrote:
| > I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so
| I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
|
| Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table
| flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop
| games? Are you pressed to find a competitive match in
| your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online
| mahjong! Here is a game that emphasizes art in
| permutations just as chess does, but every act you make
| is an exercise in approximating probability so the
| deterministic wizards are less invasive! In any-case, I'm
| not so concerned for the well-being of competition.
|
| > Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games?
| In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
|
| I know a few years back valve was testing a NN backed
| anti-cheat watch system called VACnet, but I didn't
| follow whether it was useful. There is no reason to
| assume this won't be improved on!
| the_af wrote:
| I'm honestly not following your argument here. I'm also
| not convinced by comparisons between AI and things that
| aren't AI or even automated.
|
| > _Will you be even more discouraged if I share that
| "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many
| tabletop games?_
|
| What does this have to do with AI or online games? You
| cannot do either of those in online games. You also
| cannot shove the other person aside, punch them in the
| face, etc. Let's focus strictly on automated cheating in
| online gaming, otherwise they conversation will shift to
| absurd tangents.
|
| (As an aside, a quick perusal of r/boardgames or BGG will
| answer your question: yes, antisocial and cheating
| behavior HAVE ruined tabletop gaming for some people. But
| that's neither here nor there because that's not what
| we're discussing here.)
|
| > _Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your
| game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online
| mahjong!_
|
| What are you even trying to say here?
|
| I'm not complaining, nor do I play games online (not
| because of AI; I just don't find online gaming appealing.
| The last multiplayer game I enjoyed was Left 4 Dead, with
| close friends, not cheating strangers). I just find the
| topic interesting, and I wonder how current AI trends can
| affect online games, that's all. I'm very skeptical of
| claims that they don't have a large impact, but I'm open
| to arguments to the contrary.
|
| I think some of this boils down to whether one believes
| AI is just like past phenomena, or whether it's
| significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
| dugidugout wrote:
| We are likely on different footing as I quite enjoy games
| of all form. Here is my attempt to formalize my argument:
|
| Claim 1: Cheating is endemic to competition across all
| formats (physical or digital)
|
| Claim 2: Despite this, games survive and thrive because
| people value the competitive spirit itself
|
| Claim 3: The appreciation of play isn't destroyed by the
| existence of cheaters (even "cheaters" who simply surpass
| human reasoning)
|
| The mahjong suggestion isn't a non-sequitur (while still
| an earnest suggestion), it was to exemplify my personal
| engagement with the spirit of competition and how it
| completely side-steps the issue you are wary is
| existential.
|
| > I think some of this boils down to whether one believes
| AI is just like past phenomenons, or whether it's
| significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
|
| I suppose I am not clear on your concern. Online gaming
| is demonstrably still growing and I think the chess
| example is a touching story of humanism prevailing. "AI"
| has been mucking with online gaming for decades now, can
| you qualify why this is so different now?
| the_af wrote:
| I really appreciate your clarifications! I think I
| actually agree with you, and I lost track of my own
| argument in all of this.
|
| I'm absolutely not contesting that online play is hugely
| popular.
|
| I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and
| serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats
| actually is [1]. Maybe the answer is "not worse than
| before"; I'm skeptical about this but I admit I have no
| data to back my skepticism.
|
| [1] I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of
| ruined because of cheaters. I know one person who worked
| on a major anticheat (well-known at the time, not sure
| today), which I think he tried to sell to Valve but they
| didn't go with his solution. Also amusingly, he was
| remote-friends with a Russian hacker who wrote many of
| the cheats, and they had a friendly rivalry. This is just
| an ancedote, I'm not sure that it has anything to do with
| the rest of my comment :D
| dugidugout wrote:
| Ah! I confused your intent myself!
|
| > I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and
| serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats
| actually is.
|
| It is undoubtedly more widespread.
|
| > I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of
| ruined because of cheaters.
|
| There is truth in this, but this only affected more
| casual ladder play. Since early CSGO (maybe before as
| well? I am not of source age) there has been FACEiT and
| other leagues which asserts strict kernel-level anti-
| cheat and other heuristics on the players. I do agree
| this cat and mouse game is on the side of the cat and the
| best competition is curated in tightly controlled (often
| gate-kept) spaces.
|
| It is interesting that "better" cheating is often done
| through mimicking humans closer though, which does have
| an interesting silver lining. We still very much value a
| "smart" or "strategic" AI in match-based solitary genres,
| why not carry this over to FPS or the like. Little Timmy
| gets to train against an AI expressing "competitive
| player" without needing to break through the extreme
| barriers to actually play against someone of this
| caliber. Quite exciting when put this way.
|
| If better cheats are being forced to actually play the
| game, I'm not sure the threat is very existential to
| gaming itself. This is much less abrasive than getting
| no-scoped in spawn at round start in a CS match.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year
| or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a
| big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move
| in a statistical fashion to determine if people are
| cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a
| sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game,
| then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a
| bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be
| suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their
| models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
| WarmWash wrote:
| I'd argue the renaissance is already off the ground; one
| man's vibe-coded-slop is another man's vision that he
| finally has the tools to realize.
| YoukaiCountry wrote:
| It's allowed me to tackle so many small projects that
| never would have seen the light of day, simply for lack
| of time.
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive
| push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly.
| shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
|
| While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not
| the driver for the adoption.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| This seems like an over simplification. Do many newcomers
| to chess even know about time formats or watch
| professional matches? From my anecdotal experience that
| is a hard no.
|
| Chess programs at primary schools have exploded in the
| last 10 years and at least in my circle millennial
| parents seem more likely to push their children to
| intellectual hobbies than previous generations (at least
| in my case to attempt to prevent my kids from becoming
| zombies walking around in pajamas like I see the current
| high schoolers).
| strbean wrote:
| Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending
| down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016
| until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when
| Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a
| massive upswing.
| lumost wrote:
| This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's
| develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents -
| but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game
| AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be
| countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch
| where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play
| throughs.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy,
| StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it
| doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it
| played previously because just knowing what it's going to
| play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard
| part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
|
| In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors
| aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage
| to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The
| same thing happens with human players, they hide their
| accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared
| strategies.
| andai wrote:
| May we get just a little more detail for the uninitiated?
|
| I'm going to assume you're not implying that Deep Blue did
| 9/11 ;)
| wwweston wrote:
| It's a test.
|
| There's really no crisis at a certain level; it's great to be
| able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to
| hike up the mountain.
|
| At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture
| barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities
| and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
|
| Oh and we barely think about externalities.
|
| We'll have to do better. Or we'll have to demonize and
| scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their
| privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or
| are there enough of the former with leverage? We'll find out.
| kkukshtel wrote:
| Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you
| could put this under basically anything ever submitted to
| hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the
| absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Sounds like we need FIDE rankings for software developers. It
| would be an improvement over repeated FizzBuzz testing, I
| suppose.
| cons0le wrote:
| Its like a motor bike, except it doesn't take you where you
| steer. It take you where _it_ wants to take you.
|
| If you tell it you want to go somewhere continents away, it
| will happily agree and drive you right into the ocean.
|
| And this is before ads and other incentives make it worse.
| mycall wrote:
| It will take you where _you_ want to go if you can clearly
| communicate your intent through refinement iterations.
| koiueo wrote:
| refinement interaction == dismount your bike, and walk it
| where you want
| MarceliusK wrote:
| Even if the autonomy is limited, the step change in what a
| single person can attempt is unmistakable
| GTP wrote:
| Depends who you listen to. There are developers reporting
| significant gains from the use of AI, others saying that it
| doesn't really impact their work, and then there was some
| research saying that time savings due to the use of AI in
| developing software are only an illusion, because while
| developers were feeling more productive they were actually
| slower. I guess only time will tell who's right or if it is
| just a matter of using the tool in the right way.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Probably depends how you're using it. I've been able to
| modify open-source software in languages I've never dreamed
| of learning, so for that, it's MUCH faster. Seems like a
| power tool, which, like a power saw, can do a lot very fast,
| which can bring construction or destruction.
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| I'm sure the same could be said about tractors when they were
| coming on the scene.
|
| There was probably initial excitement about not having to
| manually break the earth, then stories spread about farmers
| ruining entire crops with one tractor, some farms begin
| touting 10x more efficiency by running multiple tractors at
| once, some farmers saying the maintenance burden of a tractor
| is not worth it compared to feeding/watering their mule, etc.
|
| Fast forward and now gigantic remote controlled combines are
| dominating thousands of acres of land with the efficiency
| greater than 100 men with 100 early tractors.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| And, the end result being devastation of forests,
| ecosystems, animal life, fast track climate change etc.
| interestpiqued wrote:
| Implying that efficient agriculture is destroying the
| planet is a wild take
| pmg101 wrote:
| Isn't this just a rhetorical trick where by referring to a
| particular technology of the past which exploded rapidly
| into dominance you make that path seem inevitable?
|
| Probably some tech does achieve ubiquity and dominance and
| some does not and it's extremely difficult to say in
| advance which is which?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| And like a tractor.. don't wear loose clothing near the
| spinning PTO (power take off) shaft.
| andai wrote:
| And then with a few additional lines of Python, it becomes a
| tractor that drives itself.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Fossil-fuel cars a good analogy because, for all their raw
| power and capability, living in a polluted, car-dominated world
| _sucks_. The problem with modern AI has more to do with
| modernism than with AI.
| roughly wrote:
| It's sort of interesting to look back at ~100 years of the
| automobile and, eg, the rise of new urbanism in this metaphor -
| there are undoubtedly benefits that have come from the
| automobile, and also the efforts to absolutely maximize where,
| how, and how often people use their automobile have led to a
| whole lot of unintended negative consequences.
| bitwize wrote:
| AI is a Boston taxicab:
|
| * You have to tell it which way to go every step of the way
|
| * Odds are good it'll still drop you off at the wrong place
|
| * You have to pay not only for being taken to the wrong place,
| but now also for the ride to get you where you wanted to go in
| the first place
| ivanstojic wrote:
| When tractors were invented, there was a notable reduction in
| human employment in agriculture in the USA. From a research
| paper (https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Rece
| nt_P...):
|
| > The lower-bound estimate represents 18 percent of the total
| reduction in man-hours in U.S. agriculture between 1944 and
| 1959; the upper-bound estimate, 27 percent
|
| I'm not seeing that with LLMs.
| jordemort wrote:
| When did a horse ever give anyone psychosis?
| Zardoz89 wrote:
| So it's a car.
| jurjo wrote:
| So... are we having AI races?
| recursive wrote:
| Yes. There are leaderboards or evals or something.
| Eliezer wrote:
| "2024 AI was a horse". People really like to imagine that the
| last 6 months constitute their true observation of the new
| eternal state of the future.
| skapadia wrote:
| Exactly. We're headed for a discontinuity, not an inflection
| point.
| skybrian wrote:
| Nice! I added this to my AI metaphor collection.
|
| Another one I like is "Hungry ghosts in jars."
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/hikikomorphism.bsky.social/post/3lw...
| blibble wrote:
| Clever Hans is how I describe LLM agents to non-techies
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
| agentultra wrote:
| I prefer Doctorow's observation that they make us into reverse-
| centaurs [0]. We're not leading the LLM around like some faithful
| companion that doesn't always do what we want it to. We're the
| last-mile delivery driver of an algorithm running in a data-
| center that can't take responsibility for and ship the code to
| production on its own. We're the horse.
|
| [0] https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-
| revers...
| drobinhood wrote:
| I'd like to think that given the opportunity most would sit in
| the saddle and make progress, but it's more likely that this is
| the horse:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/857954008513695744/YL5x...
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Horses have some semblance of self preservation and awareness of
| danger - see: jumping. LLMs do not have that at all so the
| analogy fails.
|
| My term of "Automation Improved" is far more relevant and
| descriptive in current state of the art deployments. Same phone /
| text logic trees, next level macro-type agent work, none of it is
| free range. Horses can survive on their own. AI is a task helper,
| no more.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >LLMs do not have that at all so the analogy fails.
|
| I somewhat disagree with this. AI doesn't have to worry about
| any kind of physical danger to itself, so it's not going to
| have any evolutionary function around that. If the linked
| Reddit thread is to be believed AI does have awareness of
| information hazards and attempts to rationalize around them.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qjx26b/gemini...
|
| >Horses can survive on their own.
|
| Eh, this is getting pretty close to a type of binary thinking
| that breaks down under scrutiny. If, for example, we take any
| kind of selectively bred animal that requires human care for
| it's continued survival, does this somehow make said animal
| "improved automation"?
| altern8 wrote:
| I see AI as an awesome technology, but also a like programming
| roulette.
|
| It could go and do the task perfectly as instructed, or it could
| do something completely different that you haven't asked for and
| destroy everything in its path in the process.
|
| I personally found that if you don't give it write access to
| anything that you can't easily restore and you review and commit
| code often it saves me a lot of time. It also makes the whole
| process more enjoyable, since it takes care of a lot of
| boilerplate for me.
|
| It's definitely NOT intelligent, it's more like a glorified
| autocomplete but it CAN save a huge amount of time if used
| correctly.
| MarceliusK wrote:
| The safety practices you describe are basically the right
| mental model: assume it's fallible, keep writes reversible,
| review everything, commit often
| altern8 wrote:
| Yes, it's been working well.
| isodev wrote:
| AI is a horse indeed - eats creative works by humans and
| transforms them into a steaming pile of... output tokens.
| MarceliusK wrote:
| A badly ridden horse mostly produces manure. A well-ridden one
| gets you somewhere
| isodev wrote:
| Ah yes, must be a skill issue. Or I forgot to drink my
| coolaid this morning.
| Tenemo wrote:
| You seem to imply that its outputs aren't found by people to be
| useful, which isn't true.
| nomilk wrote:
| The metaphor makes sense in comparing a human walking (SWE w/o
| AI) to a human riding on a horse (SWE w/ AI), except for:
|
| > (The horse) is way slower and less reliable than a train but
| can go more places
|
| What does the 'train' represent here?
|
| A guess: perhaps off-the-shelf software? - rigid, but much faster
| if it goes where (/ does what) you want it to.
| spot5010 wrote:
| I had the same question.
|
| Maybe the train is software that's built by SWEs (w/ or w/o AI
| help). Specifically built for going from A to B very fast. But
| not flexible, and takes a lot of effort to build and maintain.
| MarceliusK wrote:
| Anyone claiming the horse understands the journey, or worse,
| wants to take you somewhere, is selling mythology
| lief79 wrote:
| That's moving away from the actual horse analogy. If you can
| tell a guide dog to take you somewhere, you can tell a horse
| that too.
|
| Granted, a journey to a new location would make this accurate.
| zhoujing204 wrote:
| "It is not possible to do the work of science without using a
| language that is filled with metaphors. Virtually the entire body
| of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot
| be experienced directly by human beings, by reference to forces
| and processes that we can experience directly...
|
| But there is a price to be paid. Metaphors can become confused
| with the things they are meant to symbolize, so that we treat the
| metaphor as the reality. We forget that it is an analogy and take
| it literally." -- The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and
| Environment by Richard Lewontin.
|
| Here are something I generated with Gemini:
|
| 1. Sentience and Agency
|
| The Horse: A horse is a living, sentient being with a survival
| instinct, emotions (fear, trust), and a will of its own. When a
| horse refuses to cross a river, it is often due to self-
| preservation or fear. The AI: AI is a mathematical function
| minimizing error. It has no biological drive, no concept of
| death, and no feelings. If an AI "hallucinates" or fails, it
| isn't "spooked"; it is simply executing a probabilistic
| calculation that resulted in a low-quality output. It has no
| agency or intent.
|
| 2. Scalability and Replication
|
| The Horse: A horse is a distinct physical unit. If you have one
| horse, you can only do one horse's worth of work. You cannot
| click "copy" and suddenly have 10,000 horses. The AI: Software is
| infinitely reproducible at near-zero marginal cost. A single AI
| model can be deployed to millions of users simultaneously. It can
| "gallop" in a million directions at once, something a biological
| entity can never do.
|
| 3. The Velocity of Evolution
|
| The Horse: A horse today is biologically almost identical to a
| horse from 2,000 years ago. Their capabilities are capped by
| biology. The AI: AI capabilities evolve at an exponential rate
| (Moore's Law and algorithmic efficiency). An AI model from three
| years ago is functionally obsolete compared to modern ones. A
| foal does not grow up to run 1,000 times faster than its parents,
| but a new AI model might be 1,000 times more efficient than its
| predecessor.
|
| 4. Contextual Understanding
|
| The Horse: A horse understands its environment. It knows what a
| fence is, it knows what grass is, and it knows gravity exists.
| The AI: Large Language Models (LLMs) do not truly "know"
| anything; they predict the next plausible token in a sequence. An
| AI can describe a fence perfectly, but it has no phenomenological
| understanding of what a fence is. It mimics understanding without
| possessing it.
|
| 5. Responsibility
|
| The Horse: If a horse kicks a stranger, there is a distinct
| understanding that the animal has a mind of its own, though the
| owner is liable. The AI: The question of liability with AI is far
| more complex. Is it the fault of the prompter (rider), the
| developer (breeder), or the training data (the lineage)? The
| "black box" nature of deep learning makes it difficult to know
| why the "horse" went off-road in a way that doesn't apply to
| animal psychology.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Damn that's clever
| ttouch wrote:
| this is such a good take, it makes so much sense and it's a very
| good answer to ai related interview questions
| djmips wrote:
| I'm worried about self driving horses.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| There are so many nouns this applies to...
| overflyer wrote:
| And this horse is amazing...
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Why does HN love analogies? You can pick any animal or thing and
| it can fit in some way. Horse is a docile safe analogy it's also
| the most obvious analogy. Like yes the world gets it LLMs have
| limitations thanks for sharing, we know it's not as good as a
| programmer.
|
| We should use analogies to point out the obvious thing everyone
| is avoiding:
|
| Guys 3 years ago, AI wasn't even a horse. It was a rock. The key
| is that it transformed into horse.... what will it be in the next
| 10 years?
|
| AI is a terminator. A couple years back someone turned off read
| only mode. That's the better analogy.
|
| Pick an analogy that follows the trendline of continual change
| into the unknown future rather then an obvious analogy that keeps
| your ego and programming skills safe.
| danw1979 wrote:
| How about "AI is a chainsaw" ?
|
| Pretty good for specific tasks.
|
| Probably worth the input energy, when used in moderation.
|
| Wear the right safety gear, but even this might not help with a
| kickback.
|
| It's quite obvious to everyone nearby when you're using one.
| niam wrote:
| > Why does HN love analogies?
|
| I suppose because they resemble the abstractions that make
| complex language possible. Another world full of aggressive
| posturing at tweet-length analogistic musings might have
| stifled some useful English parlance early.
|
| But I reckon that we shouldn't have called it phishing because
| emails don't always smell.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| If you ever heard a sermon by a priest it's loaded with
| analogies. Everyone loves analogies but analogies are not a
| form of reason and can often be used to mislead. A lot of
| these sermons are driven by reasoning via analogy.
|
| My question is more why does HN love analogies when the above
| is true.
| Abstract_Typist wrote:
| > I suppose because they resemble the abstractions that make
| complex language possible
|
| As in models: All analogies are "wrong", some analogies are
| useful.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Why does HN love analogies?
|
| Because HN is like a child and analogies are like images
| adonovan wrote:
| I see what you did there.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If an analogy is an "obvious" analogy that makes it
| definitionally a good analogy, right? Either way: don't see why
| you gotta be so prescriptive about it one way or the other! You
| can just say you disagree.
| samtp wrote:
| AI is an analogy to something that people feel the technology
| is similar to but that it is obviously not.
|
| Language is more of less a series of analogies. Comparing one
| thing to another is how humans are able to make sense of the
| world.
| apricot wrote:
| And it produces an amazing amount of horseshit.
| aanet wrote:
| > We are skeptical of those that talk
|
| ^^ We are skeptical of AIs (and people) that claim they have
| consciousness ;-)
| overtone1000 wrote:
| Step aside, Grok, Mr. Ed is the new stud in town
| arthurfirst wrote:
| Force multiplier and power projector.
|
| Requires ammo (tokens) which can be expensive.
|
| Requires good aim to hit the target.
|
| Requires practice to get good aim.
|
| Dangerous in the hands of the unskilled (like most instruments or
| tools).
| jpalepu33 wrote:
| This metaphor really captures the current state well. As someone
| building products with LLMs, the "you have to tell it where to
| turn" part resonates deeply.
|
| I've found that the key is treating AI like a junior developer
| who's really fast but needs extremely clear instructions. The
| same way you'd never tell a junior dev "just build the feature" -
| you need to:
|
| 1. Break down the task into atomic steps 2. Provide explicit
| examples of expected output 3. Set up validation/testing for
| every response 4. Have fallback strategies when it inevitably
| goes off-road
|
| The real productivity gains come when you build proper
| scaffolding around the "horse" - prompt templates, output
| validators, retry logic, human-in-the-loop for edge cases.
| Without that infrastructure, you're just hoping the horse stays
| on the path.
|
| The "it eats a lot" point is also critical and often overlooked
| when people calculate ROI. API costs can spiral quickly if you're
| not careful about prompt engineering and caching strategies.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Your boss tells you that, since he bought you one, you must build
| the house twice faster from now on.
| doener wrote:
| > It is way slower and less reliable than a train but can go more
| places
|
| I'm not able to follow. So AI is a horse in this metaphor, what
| is a train then? Still a train?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-23 23:01 UTC)