The worst is Reddit these days.

I pretty much never even went there for technical topics at all, just funny memes and such, but one day recently I started seeing crazy AI hype stories getting posted, and sadly I made a huge mistake and I clicked on one once, and now it’s all I get.

Endless posts from subs like r/agi, r/singularity, as well as the various product specific subs (for Claude, OpenAI, etc). These aren’t even links to external articles, these are supposedly personal accounts of someone being blown away by what the latest release of this or that model or tool can do. Every single one of these posts boils down to some irritating “game over for software engineers” hype fest, sometimes with skeptical comments calling out the clearly AI-generated text and overblown claims, sometimes not. Usually comments pointing out flaws in whatever’s being hyped are just dismissed with a hand wave about how the flaw may have been true at one time, but the latest and greatest version has no such flaws and is truly miraculous, even if it’s just a minor update for that week. It’s always the same pattern.

There’s clearly a lot of astroturfing going on.

> There’s clearly a lot of astroturfing going on.

Yeah I think so too. I even see it here on HN

I'm just tuning it all out. The big test is just installing the damn thing and seeing what it can do. There's 0 barrier to trying it

Lo and behold, here’s a concrete example I stumbled across just a few seconds after opening Reddit again (really gotta stop doing that):

https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/s/Y52yB6Fg3A

Completely in the same boat as you, the constant bombardment on Reddit is getting really detrimental to my wellbeing at this point lol

>There’s clearly a lot of astroturfing going on.

Reddit is like 90% astroturfing, trolls, and bots.

The in-progress community notes are a shit show too.

I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.

For reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos.

[1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gb_IkGVK7WvsTAXfMvQU...

I've seen them. The issue I think is that if you've got any political opinion before watching, you'll see something different. This thread is literally inside the comments about that!

If you're a total outsider and think both sides in the US sound like absolute crazy people, I would assume you can more easily see the crazy by everyone involved. Or maybe that's just another type of bias? I don't know...

To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.

If you believe all that, which I assume the woman in the car did, why did she push the gas pedal? If the ICE agents wanted to shoot someone as you say, doesn't that logically also imply that the woman in the car wanted to be shot at? The logic goes both ways.

Of course, consequences matter, hopefully the ICE agent is prosecuted, fired, and jailed.

OpenAI has over 5,000 employees. In addition to their headcount, they are now the highest valued private company in the world.

They're going to have some leverage.

I doubt OpenAI has to try very hard to convince state politicians, especially to the point of bullying. It's usually the complete opposite where they throw money at you to stay.

Imagine if California managed to scare away the hottest company in the world and all the tax revenue it brings...

It was a comment revealing his attitude towards what would soon become his customers in a globally-impactful business over which he has sole control. It’s more relevant than ever today.

"Let every 40-year-old be measured by the shittiest thing they said when they were 19"

In most cases those comments weren’t about the service they still running at 40. His comment was also him self-reporting that he shouldn’t be trusted with user data, when his whole business revolves around user data. If it was some off color joke in poor taste, I wouldn’t care so much.

Even if he said something in his role as CEO of Facebook?

"Young people are just smarter" and so on...

He's an entirely different person now. There is no one under the age of 45 on the planet who would say "you know, yeah, I'm fundamentally the same person I was 22 years ago."

I'm not saying he's a better person. Just different. Judge him by what he says and does now, which is no better.

I feel that I fundamentally am the same person. More experienced, of course. Less naive and idealistic. But my sense of right and wrong? Pretty much the same.

Yes, that's exactly my point.

Here's the neat thing. If someone is an asshole at 45, you don't need to reach back to when they were 22 to find evidence of them being an asshole.

The things Donald Trump says are sufficiently untethered from reality that whether a given statement is truth or lie could be used as a pseudorandom number generator, so I don't know if that statement counts for or against my claim.

I don't disagree with your point, but nothing is absolute. In this case, he's essentially done a tremendously good job of showing us since then that, no, we can't trust him. He's more than lived up to his words.

Wow. The 2019 novel “The Last Astronaut” hypothesized about a fictional interstellar object coming into the solar system, called “2I” in the novel for short, but back here in real life, we’re already up to 3I.

tbf, Omuamua was given denomination 1I in 2017 - so it's not "reality coincided with imaginary naming", but simply "book followed real life"

Agree, as someone who has spent way too much time studying the way motion picture film looks up close, this isn’t very realistic looking. It’s really just a form of dithering.

Video codecs use a lot of tricks based on human perception, perhaps it's much closer to the real thing when in motion vs a still image?

Forget the film grain, give us film lint and film hair!

“Poaching”? It’s called the free market.

Capitalists always hate capitalism when it comes to employees getting paid what they are worth. If the market will bear it, he should embrace it and stop whining.

> I’ve been feeling pretty good about my benchmark! It should stay useful for a long time... provided none of the big AI labs catch on.

> And then I saw this in the Google I/O keynote a few weeks ago, in a blink and you’ll miss it moment! There’s a pelican riding a bicycle! They’re on to me. I’m going to have to switch to something else.

Yeah this touches on an issue that makes it very difficult to have a discussion in public about AI capabilities. Any specific test you talk about, no matter how small … if the big companies get wind of it, it will be RLHF’d away, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Just refer to the old “count the ‘r’s in strawberry” canard for one example.

Honestly, if my stupid pelican riding a bicycle benchmark becomes influential enough that AI labs waste their time optimizing for it and produce really beautiful pelican illustrations I will consider that a huge personal win.

"personal" doing a lot of work there :-)

(And I'd be envious of your impact, of course)

Just tried that canard on GPT-4o and it failed:

"The word "strawberry" contains 2 letter r’s."

I tried

strawberry -> DeepSeek, GeminiPro and ChatGPT4o all correctly said three

strawberrry -> DeepSeek, GeminiPro and ChatGPT4o all correctly said four

stawberrry -> DeepSeek, GeminiPro all correctly said three

ChatGPT4o even in a new Chat, incorrectly said the word "stawberrry" contains 4 letter "r" characters. Even provided this useful breakdown to let me know :-)

Breakdown: stawberrry → s, t, a, w, b, e, r, r, r, y → 4 r's

And then asked if I meant "strawberry" instead and said because that one has 2 r's....

This is why things like the ARC Prize are better ways of approaching this: https://arcprize.org

Well, ARC-1 did not end well for the competitors of tech giants and it’s very unclear that ARC-2 won’t follow the same trajectory.

This doesn’t make ARC a bad benchmark. Tech giants will have a significant advantage in any benchmark they are interested in, _especially_ if the benchmark correlates with true general intelligence.

You push sha512 hashes of things in a githup repo and a short sentence:

x8 version: still shit . . x15 version: we are closing, but overall a shit experience :D

this way they won't know what to improve upon. of course they can buy access. ;P

when they finally solve your problem you can reveal what was the benchmark.

They’re probably going to come out at some point and say it was all just an act.

market manipulation?

This is a fantastic comment and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t what they’re going to come up with as a result of this partnership but I expect that it will be utterly lacking in the qualities you describe. You really put your finger on it.