Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | dweinus's commentslogin

> unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant

Lol. Dude, sure the Swiss can vote however they want. But we all see you and can pass judgement on this thinly veiled anti-immigrant nonsense all day long. Respect it I will never.


I'm sure they are very proud of themselves for sneaking racist anti-immigrant policy in under the guise of left wing environmental rhetoric.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Looking at WHO is pushing for change tells you most of what you need to know. Teachers? No. Students? No. Parents? Usually not. Technologists with something to sell? Bingo.

Ah yes, Pascal's mugging.

Ah, so this is The Web I have been hearing so much about!


more precisely, the interwebs


> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”

Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.


It seems bizarre to model the end goal of this research as "grow more birds". Obviously that's not the point


If you're not familiar with the stats on cats killing birds, look it up. It's pretty crazy.


So to make this profitable they need ads revenue from it, right? Imagine for a moment the ways AI can manipulate responses and conversations for marketers, because I guarantee the marketers have already thought about it.


Anthropic was talking about this as a "oh nifty, look at this" back in 2024: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.


“AI safety alignment” implies political bias injection from the very start. “We have to ensure models output text that is in line with the median politics of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors”, etc.

Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”


So much this. I know their point is to show what these models can do, but it just one more example of people shoehorning LLMs in, instead of finding the right tool for the job or caring about performance. They could have even layered AI on top of a recommender.


Probably because we've been told AI is close to AGI and will TAKE OVER THE WORLD.


To be fair they did put up a real demo, but...

... real research in sequential recommender uses transformer models in a few different ways, including fine-tuned LLMs. There is a lot more to using LLMs than "write a prompt for a blisteringly expensive frontier model" but if you looked at what people post to HN you wouldn't know. (Hint: the "prompt engineers" will enjoy being poor, the people who know a little more might keep their jobs a little longer)

Overall it is depressing that poorly done demos get so much play. LinkedIn is flooded with AI slop and slop posts about AI and it's just so awful to see an image that ranks the top 20 books in some order but thinks a Harry Potter book has a cover that looks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e print and uses the cover of The Hobbit for a different book. The idiots who prompt this slop don't notice or don't care and neither do the 50 people who upvoted it and worse if they are Grok fans they think it is better the worse it is, like they'd think the best calculator app only gives 69 and 420 as answers.


No fair, we didn't even get the fun anarchy part before skipping right on to tyrrany!


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: