Hacker News

> The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized

This is exactly how we got here though. Technology is not passive. It changes incentives, procedures, ideas and shapes the world. If we don't structurally limit what and how it's used, then we are not in control, no matter what are choices personally are.

The majority of human history has been written by the ruling class of the day. Transparency only seems to follow in the wake of their inevitable fall, usually at great cost in retrospective research via the oft thankless unraveling of threads of truth from their more copious fictions. Much like the machines we construct in our likeness, we too seem to get stuck in endless regressive cycles.

Folks in the "now" have always had a tendency to cling to their fictions as if they were truth for whatever reason; like nationalist exceptionalism, racial superiority, or religions rooted in "othering", etc. Humans seem to have an innate desire to fool themselves and trust in things they should not. Perhaps it's simply a sort of existential coping mechanism of living in a cold, unforgiving reality. We seek the comfort of lies.

Organizing around groups of trust, tends to lead to factionalism and conflicts. Knowing and trusting are sadly very different things in our species.

> Time to organize around groups and collectives that we know we can trust

I’ve had the same thoughts, but if you look deeper, it all circles back to what we already had: (open, transparent) public institutions, society, and government by the people. The foundation wasn't the problem; the environment was.

Along the way, social media noise, engagement-optimisation and Kardashian-style "entertainment news" infecting real news made an attention economy where, no matter how scandalous you are, attention can be minted into dollars. That is what polluted our infosphere and lead to the lack of trust.

Now, nobody trusts these previously mentioned public entities any more - sometimes due to state-actor or ad-tech disinformation, and sometimes for good reason like when the poisoned public allowed these 80s-style telemarketer-style political weirdos and their cronies to take over public administration.

> I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation

Hate to break it to you but it's always been this way, and it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.

> Right now, they are utilized to further the class divide between rich and poor.

Ironically this was the main reason LLMs were introduced in the first place, not to benefit the poor, but to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

Local models and powerful consumer HW and an informed populace that doesn't hate STEM, but that's not good for the shareholder value so you get expensive everything everywhere all at once instead. And if you dare question the mindset of hating on STEM whilst being addicted to its fruits, that just means you're another one of those maximally SV-aligned sociopaths so why bother? Evolve and let the chips fall where they may because I don't see any other options that play out in the idiocracy craving for strong confidently wrong leadership.

Self inflating nipple shaped balloons that generate their own lift without any helium would be an incredible achievement but that doesn't mean it's useful beyond being novel. Chatbots are ultimately just predictive text on steroids, and only complete fools would base their business, or entire economy around it.

Agreed. My only real complaint with this article is it frames needing to argue with a machine as though this is a new, freshly annoying thing. I already do this constantly.

Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on the line who can figure out what's gone wrong and sort it.

The only people benefiting from cutting that down are the scum class (combo of shareholders and executives) and who's shocked, really. Everything is being ruined nearly at all times to benefit the scum class.

It’s not that people are against regulations totally, but that the structure of society is broken. People with wealth, including corporations, can influence and control everything with money. Legislators are easily bribed. Lawsuits are expensive and take years. It’s hard to make anything happen unless you’re already rich or connected.

The real issue is new amendments are needed. But that seems impossible. You need 75% of states ratifying. And that seems impossible today.

What regulations would you suggest?

Can I not shop for other insurance companies? I specifically chose my provider because I know there's an office I can call to talk to my agent or his secretary. The moment I have to interact with a chatbot, I take my business to someone else.

You're misinterpreting the implication. A better phrasing might be:

A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, since all management decisions must have accountability, a computer must never make them.

maybe it means they were never really as smart as you thought?

Not meant to be snarky. It's been two decades now since my first wide-eyed entry into the workforce, moving for new opportunities, meeting new people. it's been great. There's a lot of smart people out there. I also realize that many people I seen as smart had more access to more content then i did. i still appreciated their sharing , it was enlightening to me. But after 20 years, I think back and it's literally quoting things from smart youtube videos. and regurgitating the latest thought leaders.

We all do this, but like you, what's meaningful to me is the chewing, the dissection and synthesis. coming together to share different perspectives and so on. i've had those friends too! it's just not 1:1

Friends don’t send friends AI summaries

You might just overhype this blog.

I read one of his last week? and didn't like it that much. I read this one despite it because its quite high on hn for whatever reason.

I don't think everything is lies and i don't like how he thinks a LLM is just some bullshit machine.

Its also waaaay to early to even understand were this is going. We as humans have never had that much compute and used it this particular way. It could literlay be the road to a utopia or dystopia. But its very crazy to experience it.

His article series feels so negative and dismissive, that i'm not taking anything from it.

There is so much more research, money and compute behind this AI topic right now, every week or two weeks something relevant better/new comes out of this. From 2d, 3d models, new LLM versions, smaller LLms, faster inferencing (Nvidias Nemotron), we don't know how this will continue.

And the weird thing is that he clearly knows plenty about LLMs but it feels so negative dismissive, hard to put a finger to it.

Just need your own LLMs to exhaust them. The future seems like it will be owned by whoever can automate with LLMs in whatever problem domain there is.

My agent will be in touch with yours, I guess.

... is there any reason why I shouldn't be visiting Aphyr's site directly?

I wonder if there's also less of a stigma and sense of wrongdoing about tricking an LLM versus tricking an employee

We intuitively know that an employee will be punished and may get fired if we trick them. Many of us won't try to trick human employees as a result, because we would feel bad if they had bad consequences as a result of our trickery

There is likely no such hesitation around tricking LLMs. I know I personally wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Mostly because any computerized customer service process is annoying so anything I can do to limit my time dealing with it is a win in my books

> In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue. Idk where we fall on the scale of “effectiveness” vs our peers, but I do read more people’s stories of Small Claims that are positive than negative. But I’ve never used this. I suspect it would be difficult to press a claim against a random large “company” just based on how slippery their identities even are. “Oh, Apple Inc. isn’t responsible for that, it’s a different subsidiary based in Ireland for tax reasons. Go serve them.” I think most people would have to be out more money (maybe more than the S.C. limit?) before being motivated to engage with the chronically overextended legal system, sadly.

Also, if the effective tools do exist, count on American companies using the American bribery-based political system to change the laws to dull those tools or to eliminate them.

Again, if you live in some consumer-friendly country good for you, I’m just saying how it plays out in this one society. I’ll stipulate that it’s all our fault blah blah blah.

Full quote:

> People are very excited about “agentic commerce”. Agentic commerce means handing your credit card to a Large Language Model, giving it access to the Internet, telling it to buy something, and calling it in a loop until something exciting happens.

I think you're confusing this for the other side of things. The article talks about how some people already use OpenClaw and the variations, give them access to bunch of stuff including cards to purchase things (sometimes virtual and limited cards), I think that's what the article talks about when they say "agentic commerce".

Obviously a intentional simplification in the language the author uses, but I think it gets the point across at least.

Millions of users, and you think exactly zero of them will hand over their credit card info?

>(for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know)

As the author said:

>I suspect that like the job market, everyone will wind up paying massive “AI” companies to manage the drudgery they created.

> Yes, everything will get worse. But everything will also get better.

That is not known. Things could easily just get worse, and IMO that is far more likely. Every civilisation has collapsed, ours is clearly in decline, and AI could likely accelerate that decline.

I'm not exactly seeing the progress here. AI helps us write some software a bit faster? Doesn't seem revolutionary to me. Is it having any significant impact on peoples lives other than the various economic forces? I'm not seeing it.

> Yeah, because you voted with your dollars

In our system? No. In crony capitalism the companies who win do it through manipulating the political system. And when the government inflates the currency and destroys people buying power they simply cannot afford to "vote with their dollars". This is hilariously naive.

A lot of this has been going on for a long time and I've been sensitive to it. LLMs may not be solely responsible but they're a massive escalation.

In a capitalist world, the company that does decide to screw people over gets rich and the one that doesn't goes out of business.

It would be great if people chose not to do business with the former, but many simply do not care. They may think only other people get screwed. They may not take the time to think about it, especially if the company spends a ton of money obfuscating their misbehavior. Quite a few actively defend the right of companies to screw them.

Technology multiplies that like a lever. We weren't prepared for capitalism before LLMs and we're massively under-prepared now.

Ill-thought out logic.

The company that deployed the LLM is lying to you. The people who made that decision are the ones who are culpable.

We both agree that it’s terrible.

I think it’s important to have an enforcement mechanism to force companies to do what they are responsible for doing. An Anti-Kafka Law, so to speak.

>LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human.

Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.

> My mum actually told me that she talked to some AI.

You have no argument here. Make an argument then we can talk. Right now it’s going in circles.