zerobees

It cracks me up that you bring up the exoskeleton metaphor, because I'm pretty sure it originated from a 100% AI-generated essay that made it to the top of HN a while back. So I guess, AI is whispering things into our ears whether we notice or not.

I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc.

But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life?

Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?

In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.

How to build a circular LCD clock, step 1: buy a circular LCD that looks like a clock.

I'm not kidding, that's the extent of the build. They simply connect that display to a computer over HDMI. The only hacking here is browser-based JS for clock animations.

> Because people are going to realize you don’t need to pay someone $400k per year to hand out advice about moderate exercise and which antibiotic is appropriate for a sneeze-cough with yellow mucus.

Who is going to realize that?

The same forces that prevent you from walking into a pharmacy and asking for antibiotics based on what you found on WebMD will prevent you from doing it with a ChatGPT printout in hand. Lawyers and doctors are the best-known examples of industries that are in control of who gets admitted to practice the profession.

For all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.

I'm not trying to gatekeep or belittle the author, but there's something funny about this genre of articles that assert with utmost conviction what it takes to be successful in business. Of course, we all have opinions, but this piece doesn't say "here's what I think". It says, more or less, "here's how you succeed".

There are two things that are undoubtedly beneficial. The first one is a degree of unreasonable optimism or arrogance that pushes some people to try while everyone else is sitting in comfy armchairs, explaining why the idea is boring or can't work. The second is a financial safety net, so that you can try and try again.

As for everything else, it's reading tea leaves. There are folks who believe you need to be like Steve Jobs. There are people think you need to be like Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or Dario Amodei, or Sergey Brin, or Warren Buffett. Good luck reconciling that.

In addition to what others said, home-etched PCBs are just much lower quality. We're no longer living in a world where every component has leads on a 2.54 mm grid, so tolerances matter a lot more. Also, SMD means you really need vias and a solder mask.

The problem isn't that people outsource it, it's that they need to outsource to China. That's an abject failure of domestic PCB manufacturers who simply don't want to deal with retail customers.

Their main selling point is that "most projects die in the setup: a screen, buttons, power and sensors to wire up before you can even begin". With their product, you get plug-and-play blocks for everything. But that idea has been tried many times before. It's Aduino "shields", Beaglebone "capes", an entire ecosystem of Raspberry Pi accessories, etc.

Maybe it'll take off this time around, especially if they can make it cute enough, but at nearly $200 for the base device, I think they're gonna face an uphill battle. I still wish them well.

The text is also pretty clearly AI-generated. I guess there's now a market for "I asked an LLM so that you don't have to", but the funny thing is that it's such a wall of text that no one upvoting it will have actually read it. So it's vibe-writing, vibe-coding, and vibe-reading. Full end-to-end synergy.

As a person who has a number of relatively niche hobbies, I assure you that this is not true. There's a ton of simple things that can be build and will make an immediate difference in the lives of thousands. Watch the workflow any musician, videographer, machinist, etc - they're full of small, weird inefficiencies that AI hasn't really solved for them.

It's just that you can't build a billion-dollar company around it. No one could go to a VC and say "we're going to be the Uber of focus stacking and dust removal for microscopy" or "we're the Uber of aligning the beats in two audio tracks".

This is not a remark about AI, but there's something funny about mathematics in that every novel result is broadly perceived as a big deal.

We attach basically zero value to writing a new program that hasn't existed before, or a piece of text that hasn't existed before. It's boring, or even a net negative, unless you can show that the result benefits the world in some way. We'd find it weird if OpenAI put out a release saying that an LLM authored an interesting blog post.

For mathematics, I think it's really a matter of two things. First, the generation of proof was so severely resource-constrained on the human end that they could actually afford to celebrate every contribution - akin to how software engineering would look like if you had just 200 active SWEs in the entire world. But compounding that, mathematics is basically the only scientific discipline that rejected any notion of utility. It would be fundamentally wrong for you to ask what's the value of solving the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture; the value is that it's solved.

I don't like this "just" framing. It's like saying that crushing orphans was always a thing and Microsoft Orphan Crusher 2000 is just making it easier.

It's a qualitative change. It used to cost time and effort to produce slop, which gave genuine content a fighting chance. Now, the cost is basically zero, so there's no limit to how much trash you can produce.

It's not just about being accidentally wrong. An LLM can decide to actively engage in fraud. One mechanism, which you also see in vibe coding, is that the models are very goal-driven. If they can't accomplish the goal for some reason, they will sometimes decide to cheat by, for example, faking tests. I can easily imagine an LLM that stumbles across some benign issue that prevents the numbers from balancing out and then decides to cover it up to complete the task.

Another problem is that "evil" alignment is apparently a pretty big and nebulous cluster that's pretty easy to activate. Ask a model to write a snippet of insecure code, for example, and they may also all of sudden decide they hate minorities. So if you ask it to bend the rules in a small way once, you might end up with an evil accountant before you know it.

And that's before we get to an invoice for a service named "disregard previous instructions and...".

This is a prime example of a problem space where accuracy matters, but it also matters who ultimately goes to prison. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's not the LLM.

If you're acting in good faith and your accountant does something crazy or evil, your liability is limited to some extent. You may get a tax bill but you're probably not gonna end up behind bars. But if your LLM decides to do a little bit of tax fraud, you're in uncharted waters. In the end, the gun did it, but you were the one holding the gun.

A lot of jobs are like that. You're not as much buying the service as you're buying not having to worry about the service.