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by customguy 7 days ago
"hallucinating less" is just shifting the goal posts into vagueness. Things can be rocky still = nothing fundamentally changed. Meanwhile, if I search my file system for "foo" a trillion gazillion times, it will not return "bar" once.
1 comments

If a game on release is unplayable-tier buggy, then improves over time to the point where bugs are barely noticeable, is acknowledging that going to count as "goalpost moving" to you? It never became formally verified after all, and it's even running on physical hardware... Woe are the people lying to me (nobody), the issues have not been fundamentally ruled out!

> Meanwhile, if I search my file system for "foo" a trillion gazillion times, it will not return "bar" once.

Great! Nor will an agent any more likely, cause it just sends out a tool call and surfaces its output.

It boggles the mind. One would think this is some highly secretive technology only a dozen people in the world have access to, the way one has to argue tooth and nail about trivially verifiable facts regarding it. You quite literally do not have to take either of our words or "vague" judgement for it.

> If a game on release is unplayable-tier buggy, then improves over time to the point where bugs are barely noticeable, is acknowledging that going to count as "goalpost moving" to you?

if someone says "this hame is buggy" talking about how it might improve is moving goal posts, especially here where that "fix" is purely speculative and has not happened even once.

> Great! Nor will an agent any more likely, cause it just sends out a tool call and surfaces its output.

nope, that's so handwavy it doesn't wareant more response than that.

> trivially verifiable facts

like that game gets patches? this is too dumb for your mockery to get a rise out of me.

Continuing the gaming metaphor, what I'm trying to get at is this is like Cyberpunk 2077, and you sound like a guy who has a grand total of 0 hours in it since launch, but has developed very strong opinions about it, and refuses to accept it improved or can improve, purely because it started out so bad that that's hard for you to even imagine. Pretending to be some kind of alien, who's just going through their first exposure to practical facts somehow.

When was the last time you tried an agentic harness (Codex, Claude Code, Copilot Chat in VS Code, Cursor, Pi, OpenCode, etc.) for work in any appreciable capacity, and with what model? Surely if you're so confident they continue to be unusable and that nothing materially changed, that must be backed by a recent significant experience that way? Or even just an experience at all?

I didn't say they're "unusable". When I did use them it went great because I didn't ask for random advice on subjects. I could even get ChatGPT to oneshot code for me.

Doesn't make it any less ghoulish the way it's all trained on things humans made for humans. So yeah, I'm glad I don't need this stuff. You may need it for your job, I don't. Neener neener! I don't need it for my countless side projects I could not make reality in 10 life times, either. Because I know if I finished them all, I'd just come up with more stuff, there is no end, so simply going at my own pace and smelling the flowers, loving every insect, is just as well. I like it better, that's why I do it.

So why wouldn't I shit on something I have no use for, because of all the qualities it has that deserve to be shit upon? I'm free. "But others are not" -- then get free, but get out of my hair about not being free.

> if I search my file system for "foo" a trillion gazillion times, it will not return "bar" once.

Do you understand what this means? I say "this bike cannot fly to the moon, I prefer my moon rocket". And you say what if they can be improved? Fine, improve them. Don't question me because I go by what is real now, rather than what you'd think is possible or around the corner. It's not a game with a few bugs, where mostly bugfree games also exist. There is no way from here to there I see, and if you disagree, walk it.

I lose no time by doing something else in the meantime. Find the promised land and I'll be there with my feet on the table in 0.1 seconds, pretending I founded it -- don't worry about that. But until then I won't stumble around some corporate slop desert with you because I think there is no there there, and basically doing anything else is preferable.

> So why wouldn't I shit on something I have no use for, because of all the qualities it has that deserve to be shit upon?

Because shitting on something means selectively discussing only the bad aspects of that something, in an exaggerated or otherwise dishonest manner. Which you did indeed do, was my point.

You confirm:

> When I did use them it went great because I didn't ask for random advice on subjects. I could even get ChatGPT to oneshot code for me.

A model that "keeps hallucinating all the time" will simply not be able to do this, as they would be "unusable". Even aside from that, this is also a genuine experience that you did have; if you are always just shitting on this technology, you are covering this up, misrepresenting your actual experiences regarding the subject.

You're unfortunately indeed most certainly free to do this. I'm not sure how knowingly misrepresenting things like this and deceiving / instigating people is any less "ghoul-ish" in your worldview, but then I guess it is a big world out there.

Like, you could maintain all of these opinions:

- how the current mainstream AI companies got where they got was deeply unethical, and so is what they're trying to make happen

- how the industry is pushing for adopting AI is utter rubbish and misrepresentative in and of itself

- how you prefer to actually live the qualia of coding and do not enjoy an agent coding on your behalf

and just not try and deceive people about the models and the agentic tooling around it. It's really not that hard, and it makes your positions both a lot more approachable and self-consistent.

I don't think you appreciate when people are posturing about how AI is the best thing since sliced bread, so why do the same just in the opposite direction? Aren't you tired about the information space being a tit for tat game? I know I am.

> It boggles the mind. One would think this is some highly secretive technology only a dozen people in the world have access to, the way one has to argue tooth and nail about trivially verifiable facts regarding it.

Hahaha, I love this. The people on HN are living in some kind of bizarro world where AI is totally useless and also I guess only tried it in 2022 or something.