rwhitman

I'm fairly certain it's just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, on an individual basis.

Having doubled down on using mostly Claude (+GPT and Gemini) professionally in strategic consulting work for about 2 1/2 years I can say with certainty that the irrational exuberance of the tech leadership echo chamber towards abdicating management responsibility to Claude, while in the honeymoon period, is going to be regarded as very foolish in hindsight.

I've known Webflow for a while as a business, and even pitched it to large companies like Maersk and Nielsen as a Wordpress alternative. I was on the sales side so it always seemed like a great cloud option that was in the territory of Squarespace but far more control for enterprise development. However...

I recently put my old frontend hat on and opted for Framer to build a new website, seeing if I could sketch it out in GPT + Claude then had it give me instructions to translate to a modern cloud CMS.

While I find Framer, Webflow, etc, significantly more aligned to my brain than say Squarespace or Wix, overall, they are incredibly frustrating and full of tedious little proprietary quirks that drive me goddam insane. You need to learn the interface but still also need an understanding of how breakpoints and CSS positioning work among other things.

The preview website artifact that Claude Design spat out was pretty dang good and was written in simple vanilla semantic HTML/CSS with no dependency overhead. Its a little rough around the edges and clumsy on details but an appropriate starting point for both beginners and enterprise.

A company like webflow has to be looking at this and sweating bullets. Wish the initial reaction to AI-driven threats these days wasn't to gut the company in favor of agents. Yes Claude Code + Claude Design are awesome but none of these products are perfect and they all still have a place to coexist within the market

The uptick in Indeed job listings is not a reliable indicator of job growth. AI has simply made it easier to render JDs and screen candidates at scale. Wouldn't it be expected that software companies would be better at leveraging the tech to create more job listings?

I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment.

Google has become the ouroboros

I feel like there is such a huge opportunity for small niche community social networks right now. The major social networks are such a cesspool of nonsense and brainrot.

Exactly, and main reason I've stopped using GPT for serious work. LLMs start to break down and inject garbage at the end, and usually my prompt is abandoned before the work is complete, and I fix it up manually after.

GPT stores the incomplete chat and treats it as truth in memory. And it's very difficult to get it to un-learn something that's wrong. You have to layer new context on top of the bad information and it can sometimes run with the wrong knowledge even when corrected.

My thinking was that there was an exception handling and the error message was getting muddled into the conversation. But another commenter debunked me.

> “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I loved the beetle article, thanks for that.

They're so well tuned at predicting what you want to hear that even when you know intellectually that they're not sentient, the illusion still tricks your brain.

I've been setting custom instructions on GPT and Claude to instruct them to talk more software-like, because when they relate to you on a personal level, it's hard to remember that it's software.

Wow this is incredible. I saw the emergence of that spiral cult as it formed and was very disturbed by how quickly it proliferated.

I'm glad someone else with more domain knowledge is on top of this, thank you for that brain dump.

I had this theory maybe there was a software exception buried deep down somewhere and it was interpreting the error message as part of the conversation, after it had been stretched too far.

And there was a weird pre-cult post I saw a long time ago where someone had 2 LLMs talk for hours and the conversation just devolved into communicating via unicode symbols eventually repeating long lines of the spiral emoji back and forth to each other (I wish I could find it).

So the assumption I was making is that some sort of error occurred, and it was trying to relay it to the user, but couldn't.

Anyhow your research is well appreciated.

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds).

I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the point where the LLM can retain context. It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?).

If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits.

Claude used to have safeguards against this by warning about using up the context window, but I feel like everyone is in an arms race now, and safeguards are gone - especially for GPT. It can't be great overall for OpenAI, training itself on 2-way hallucinations.

Japan, the Nordics, S. Korea and Central Europe, all countries with a demographic crisis. They need those babies.

I haven't been particularly active on HN in a long time, but I've been tinkering with this manifesto for nearly a year and thought it belonged here.

I've grown a bit frustrated with how much "Magical Computer" thinking has permeated our business culture (amongst the less technical at least). I think the business population needs to see better their tools for what they are - a mirror reflection of human behavior and not magic.

Not looking for a job, but as a parent of a toddler just stopped by to say thank you.