> Oh, you mean like removing scores of covid videos from real doctors and scientists which were deemed to be misinformation
The credentials don't matter, the actual content does. And if it's misinformation, then yes, you can be a quadruple doctor, it's still misinformation.
In France, there was a real doctor, epidemiologist, who became famous because he was pushing a cure for Covid. He did some underground, barely legal, medical trials on his own, and proclaimed victory and that the "big bad government doesn't want you to know!". Well, the actual proper study finished, found there is basically no difference, and his solution wasn't adopted. He didn't get deplatformed fully, but he was definitely marginalised and fell in the "disinformation" category. Nonetheless, he continued spouting his version that was proven wrong. And years later, he's still wrong.
Fun fact about him: he's in the top 10 of scientists with the most retracted papers, for inaccuracies.
A good first step would be to distrust each and every individual. This excludes every blog, every non-peer-reviewed paper, every self-published book, pretty much every YouTube channel and so on. This isn't to say you can't find a nugget of truth somewhere in there, but you shouldn't trust yourself to be able to differentiate between that nugget of truth and everything surrounding it.
Even most well-intentioned and best-credentialed individuals have blind spots that only a different pair of eyes can spot through rigorous editing. Rigorous editing only happens in serious organizations, so a good first step would be to ignore every publication that doesn't at the very least have an easy-to-find impressum with a publicly-listed editor-in-chief.
The next step would be to never blame the people listed as writers, but their editors. For example, if a shitty article makes it way to a Nature journal, it's the editor that is responsible for letting it through. Good editorial team is what builds up the reputation of a publication, people below them (that do most of the work) are largely irrelevant.
To go back to this example, you should ignore this guy's shitty study before it's published by a professional journal. Even if it got published in a serious journal, that doesn't guarantee it's The Truth, only that it has passed some level of scrutiny it wouldn't have otherwise.
Like for example website uptime, no editorial team is capable of claiming 100% of the works that passed through their hands is The Truth, so then you need to look at how transparently they're dealing with mistakes (AKA retractions), and so on.
Separating credentialed but bad faith covid grift from evolving legitimate medical advice based on the best information available at the time did not require anything but common sense and freedom from control by demagoguery.
And when I'm nice and relaxed, my common sense is fully operational. I'm pretty good at researching medical topics that do not affect me! However, as soon as it's both relevant to me, and urgent, I become extremely incapable of distinguishing truthful information from blatant malpractice. At this point, I default to extreme scepticism, and generally do nothing about the urgent medical problem.
This is called disinformation that will get you killed, so yeah, probably not good to have on youtube.
- After saying he was attacked for claiming that natural immunity from infection would be "stronger" than the vaccine, Johnson threw in a new argument. The vaccine "has been proven to have negative efficacy," he said. -
Claude Code in the desktop app seems to do this? It's crazy to watch. It sets of these huge swarms of worker readers under master task headings, that go off and explore the code base and compile huge reports and todo lists, then another system behind the scenes seems to be compiling everything to large master schemas/plans. I create helper files and then have a devops chat, a front end chat, an architecture chat and a security chat, and once each it done it's work it automatically writes to a log and the others pick up the log (it seems to have a system reminder process build in that can push updates from other chats into other chats. It's really wild to watch it work, and it's very intuitive and fun to use. I've not tried CLI claude code only claude code in the desktop app, but desktop app sftp to a droplet with ssh for it to use the terminal is a very very interesting experience, it can seem to just go for hours building, fixing, checking it's own work, loading it's work in the browser, doing more work etc all on it's own - it's how I built this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724896 in 3 days.
I added tests to an old project a few days ago. I spent a while to carefully spec everything out, and there was a lot of tedious work. Aiming for 70% coverage meant that a few thousand unit tests were needed.
I wrote up a technical plan with Claude code and I was about to set it to work when I thought, hang on, this would be very easy to split into separate work, let's try this subagent thing.
So I asked Claude to split it up into non- overlapping pieces and send out as many agents as it could to work on each piece.
I expected 3 or 4. It sent out 26 subagents. Drudge work that I estimate would have optimistically taken me several months was done in about 20 minutes. Crazy.
Of course it still did take me a couple of days to go through everything and feel confident that the tests were doing their job properly. Asking Claude to review separate sections carefully helped a lot there too. I'm pretty confident that the tests I ended up with were as good as what I would have written.
I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released.
Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.
I wrote before about my embarrassing time with ChatGPT during a period (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767601) - I decided to go back through those old 4o chats with 5.2 pro extended thinking, the reply was pretty funny because it first slightly ridiculed me, heh - but what it showed was: basically I would say "what 5 research papers from any area of science talk to these ideas" and it would find 1 and invent 4 if it didn't know 4 others, and not tell me, and then I'd keep working with it and it would invent what it thought might be in the papers long the way, making up new papers in it's own work to cite to make it's own work valid, lol. Anyway, I'm a moron, sure, and no real harm came of it for me, just still slightly shook I let that happen to me.
Just to clarify, you didn't actually look up the publications it was citing? For example, you just stayed in ChatGPT web and used the resources it provided there? Not ridiculing you of course, but am just curious. The last paper I wrote a couple months back I had GPT search out the publications for me, but I would always open a new tab and retrieve the actual publication.
I didn't because I wasn't really doing anything serious to my mind, I think? basically felt like watching an episode of pbs spacetime, I think the difference is it's more like playing a video game while thinking you're watching an episode of spacetime, if that makes sense? I don't use chatgpt for me real work that much, and I'm not a scientist, so it was for me just mucking around, it pushed me slightly over a line into "I was just playing but now this seems real", it didn't occur to me to go back through and check all the papers, I guess because quite a lot of chatting had happened since then and, I dunno, I just didn't think to? Not sure that makes much sense. This was also over a year ago, during the time they had the gpt4o sycophancy mode that made the news, and it wasn't backed by webserch, so I took for granted what was in it's training data. No good excuse I'm afraid. tldr: poor critical thinking skills on my part there! :)
Shameless plug for the thing I built: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672734 - meepr, basically not algo driven (except the hashtags are curated), no recommendations etc, if you wanna "grow" on it, you need to tell your friends like the good old days. It's just run by me, not planning on having it run by anyone else, if people like it I'll add a subscription to cover the server cost. (check out the retro theme!! :))
Surely it must have digested plenty of walkthroughs for any game?
A linear puzzle game like that I would just expect the ai to fly through first time, considering it has probably read 30 years of guides and walkthroughs.
Moravec's paradox likely comes in to play, what's easy is hard and vice versa.
The puzzles would probably be easy. Myst's puzzles are basically IQ tests, and LLMs ace traditional IQ tests: https://trackingai.org/home
On the other hand, navigating the environment, I think the models may fail spectacularly. From what we've seen from Claude Plays Pokemon, it would get in weird loops and try to interact with non-interactive elements of the environment.
QuakeNet in the 90s, I don't know what to say, thank you? It was high school for me, like, I got through high school, got into computers in high school, have great memories of that time: because of QuakeNet in the 90s. hackernews community is the closest things I've felt to that since then, but it's pretty hard to beat QuakenNet in the 90s.
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