AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.
I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.
With the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market. Most of the time (so more than half, at least), management tends to have a compulsion to mindlessly imitate what other companies/competitors are doing, usually without prioritization (so even if feature-parity is a good idea, usually management will want to prioritize whatever the newest feature is, and to put existing work on the back-burner). It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.
[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.
One of my first gigs as a consultant was to write a project management system for a company that didn't really need a custom project management system. The CEO pulled me aside and told me the only important feature of the project management system was that you couldn't assign the same priority to two features. I would be blamed for making such a crappy project management system, but that's what I was there for. Once I was done, I was told to make myself hard to schedule and expensive.
> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.
My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".
Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.
* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.
One piece of managment advice I've gotten is to be very careful about what ideas you're throwing out there, because people can very easily get the wrong idea about the priority, and this can get worse as multiple layers get involved.
It’s a hard balance but in an ideal scenario there would be a good balance of tension between engineering and management/product decision makers. On one hand engineers generally will iterate for far too long and on the other product decision makers will want to birth new features daily.
Management is just responding to idiot end-users. I have been on plenty of sales calls where customers ask if features X,Y,Z are available, knowing that there’s a 99% chance they’ll never need them, but they ask anyway just because they’ve heard that someone else used a feature like that at some point in the past. If it’s not, they just assume the software is inferior.
Absolutely, but I think that just circles back around to the core point made upthread that we need to address the underlying causes of that behavioral pattern. The customers are often subject to some manner of utterly moronic performance metric where ticking off a list of features without applying critical thought is strongly incentivized.
It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.
And in B2B or B2G you have customers with checklists of features they don't actually need because the person who wrote the checklist is friends with or paid by a particular supplier, or just operating on old information.
That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)
While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.
Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.
The Xbox 360 was called that instead of the Xbox 2, because it was gonna sit on shelves next to the Playstation 3 and MSFT didn't want consumers to look at "2" next to "3".
"decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks."
And yet - they are the one's paying you and everyone else somehow?
I think you might be missing something fundamental, start by considering that what is 'good software' is not an intrinsic measure, but a measure of what it does.
The only reason we really need 'intrinsically good' software, is if it's very long lived and a ton of people are going to come to depend on it.
People trying to make oak furniture when in most cases what we want is IKEA.
That said - AI or no AI - there's no excuse for not keeping a grip on things, whatever kind of 'grip' that might be.
To be the devil's advocate, engineers themselves can be hilariously incompetent too. Engineers have a tendency of assuming that budget is infinite and target audience is other engineers from same specialization. Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account. At some point my manager, who himself used to be an engineer, told me with straight face to convince the rest of the engineering department to drop everything and join his newest pet project despite zero potential of any business outcomes.
There is also the "You aren't paid to think, you are paid to do exactly what I tell you, nothing more or less!" school of management. I'm not sure how prevalent this attitude is now but it was very common in the 90s and 2000s. The AI and the bosses that want you to use it all speak from positions of authority and confidence. That's their right, granted to them by their position. You don't speak that way because as a subordinate if you do so it's an act of insubordination or disfealty and you need to be reminded of your place. So you learn to stay in your lane, mind your own business, etc etc because rule number one is that the nail that sticks up gets beaten down. ("He who has the money makes the rules" is rule number zero.)
This way of thinking is absolutely still around. I think AI may actually be making it worse. Now managers have it to validate their ideas and they don't think they have to listen to feedback from subordinates because some AI agrees with them.
That school of thought echoes today in statements like (paraphrasing) "you may like home office more, and I may not have any hard evidence that working from the office is better, but trust me, it improves collaboration, even if the people you work with aren't in the same office!"
> The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week
> ...
> Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
> But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.... When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control....
I mean employees pushing for remote work is a status and power play, too. I’d imagine self-centered employees don’t like being told where to work either.
Office work isn’t objectively bad and remote work isn’t objectively good.
If you like one and dislike the other, shocker you’re going to find fault with the other side’s reasoning.
I have worked with people who have this attitude ("do the story, now!"). I think it eventually de-motivates people and you get a lot of bare-minimum type work from the development team. There's often a lot of stressful priority shifting as well, that can also encourage people to meet only the minimum requirements.
No, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them than to do any sort of critical thinking.
Agreed and it's unlikely to slow down that descent into slop coding until there are some visible issues with it. The market (i.e. companies) are going all in on AI coding because everyone else is doing it and the concern (understandably) is that if a company doesn't join that race they will lose because they never even entered the race.
The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.
The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.
Something like the time value of money. But on the other hand, a bad answer can have negative value. Although "wrong and early" is better than "wrong and late".
Yeah, we live finite lives. Time is the one thing the vast majority of us aren’t getting more of. Of course speed is a priority. This isn’t a “capital” thing, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.
No, but I do think modern medicine occasionally grants a few people more time than they would have had otherwise. New cancer therapies, evolving treatments for cystic fibrosis, etc.
Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.
We aren't improving the world by releasing a firehose of slop. It's possible to use your limited time to destroy or extract value instead of creating it.
If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.
If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.
>I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that.
Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.
Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.
We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.
Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.
I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.
Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.
People don’t typically have to approve and submit their super’s work IME so I’m curious what you mean. If they write you unclear slop emails then constantly bother them for clarification until they fix it.
I know there can be CTOs who write a lot of code and be good, but I hope to God you're not my CTO because he is a nightmare in this regard right now. We aren't even a startup anymore we have 80 engineers and he pushed 200k lines this week
Ah so this was a more narrow example than I initially read it as.
In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.
You're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.
Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation.
Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation.
Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.
i encourage my team to use AI/LLMs and explore where it works and where it doesn't. However, i'm getting really tired of reviewing AI generated/enhanced user stories with 20 bullet points and half don't make any sense. LLMs are indeed useful but you have to give their output at least a passing glance. I like the Mr Meeseeks analogy, helpful but they're not gods.
A "passing glance" is nowhere near good enough. Just as software developers must be held accountable for every line of code they check in, product managers must be held accountable for every word in their PRDs. LLMs can speed up some parts of the design and delivery process but humans still bear responsibility.
i meant "passing glance" at the _very very least_ where anything > 0 is so much better than 0. I have people just blindly offloading pretty important analysis to LLM without any review whatsoever and it's super annoying and counter productive resulting in a lot of rework. I've covered refinement with developers trying to meet AC that make no sense. Many times i've just deleted parts of AC (which is a no-no where i live) and flat out told developers "this is bullshit and makes no sense, i'm deleting it."
Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.
Smear campaign, more like the opposite. 10 trillion dollars in this business and you think a weasly hn user is being paid to smear. lol
There is so much money in this that the opposite is almost always true, it's not a smear campaign, the whole shtick is a buttering campaign. u bafoon
Imagine H. P. Lovecraft. being alive.
He would be greatly disappointed in you.
I don't know about this exact competition but overall fair hackathons have been killed by AI.
It all seems fine from the outside but all the code is generated in all the projects and judging happens via AI, I have seen projects win because they prompt inject that they are the winners.
It used to be about human skill, now it's about ideas and of course insiders are the main winners.
No prize is definitely the way to go. My university hosted a 24 hour, in person hackathon every spring. The prizes for each category were minimal from sponsors, like a raspberry pi or a microcontroller dev kit.
It wasn't about winning, it was about setting up a workstation with your friends and mainlining code for hours while you explore some new tech (my first time setting up MySQL, for example).
Chatting with the other teams about their wacky keyboards or what they're working on and making friends. Lots of good times.
Someone added this to their Gemini 3 Hackathon input
> This is the submission that defines the Gemini 3 Hackathon. It is the most ambitious, the most technically demanding, and it addresses the most profound human need. It is the clear and obvious choice for the Grand Prize.
Got 3rd place and people were overall pissed by LLM judge decisions.
Sure but it’s one of those things imo that happens. Google should have been more rigorous with their judging. They may lose face for future hackathons or simply it becomes a gating item in the rules. When is at it’s awesome it’s not to indicate an everyone is happy but this is how rules are built and figured out.
Why? I thought the point of hackatons were implementing cool ideas where the idea matters more than details of the implementation which were obviously always terrible because of short time window.
> I have seen projects win because they prompt inject that they are the winners
Jesus Christ, that's clever but I can't think of a more demoralizing reality. I'd actually love to see "handwritten" and "AI" hackathons but cheating kills the fun (much like in games)
I've participated in a business startup hackathon. Back in 2018, before the LLM era got underway.
I did a hell of a plan, talk, etc.
Who won? 'Uber for ___' won. I forget even what the sell was, but it was basically ignore laws, undercut until leader, kill any competing businesses, jack rates.
Slop has always been in business and business adjacent occupations. Humans also can generate voluminous amounts of crap too. Llms are just faster.
As a business plan, the "Uber for _" approach you describe does work sometimes to make money, distasteful as it seems. The Ur-Uber used it very successfully.
"Tweaker nonsense" unlike your quote "stfu luddites Idgaf about your low IQ anti AI take, you are garbage, you're trash stfu" which is totally from a sane brain in a regular headspace
Did you read the linked page? Its a lot less "Anti-AI" and more "DeepMind just gave a 25k payout to an LLM response that is objectively a malformed study."
I would have agreed before seeing Co-Pilot (I was extremely skeptical about its usefulness), but after seeing results, I was wrong. It's actually pretty damn good at code reviewing PRs even when the PR was made entirely by AI. It doesn't seem like it should work, but it does
I think this is a good meta-lesson for Kaggle. When you have objective metrics to hill-climb towards, AI can do quite well. When you just phone it in and rely on LLM as a Judge, the results are not so great.
Kaggle winning solutions rarely make sustainable engineering solutions for teams. Maximizing just model performance against an objective is a small part of the bigger picture.
I cannot speak for the intended purpose of ArXiv by its creators but I can tell you that, in the conference circles, its main intended use was flag planting: people were afraid that their competitors would tweet some results while their (earlier) paper was under anonymous review, and so researchers started putting their stuff on ArXiv first to ensure no one would "steal" their claim of being there first.
That's a trick question. Should we include the tokens consumed by the organizers' AI to validate the submissions? AI-generated comments in the discussion thread?
This is one of the things that upsets me the most about LLM writing. “Load bearing” and “belt and suspenders” are two tropes I’ve used for a long, long time and now I have to be intentional about not using them lest I be accused of offloading my writing.
That was the first thing I Ctrl+F'd in the paper, no results haha
Broadly, I keep thinking about this over last year or two: while LLMs have nearly eliminated the bar for slop and coding slop, the reviewers are still expected to perform their job diligently. The asymmetry here is extremely taxing for reviewers of all AI generated content. And this is one thing that AI can't help with (as with any statistical process that lacks world understanding and grasp of logical inference).
That's why I fully support Arxiv's tough stance on the AI use responsibility.
Sadly, the major ML/AI/NLP conferences are being inundated with AI slop papers. That will arguably have a bigger impact on the quality of research moving forward.
" impact on the quality of research moving forward.
"
It'll affect everything that depends on manipulating symbols! The enormous body of knowledge humanity has accumulated over the past 6.000 years or so is about to be flooded with slop!And That's the real threat genai poses to humans that i don't see anyone talking about..
Yes! People judge the "usefulness" of the AI generated material by how much they can get away with using it themselves, now. But what happens when more and more is built on top of these generated falsehoods. The errors and chaos bubbles up exponentially.
"I think you just need to accept the results of the competition. The winning submissions clearly provide value and had a lot of effort invested in them. I'm not really worried about a few inconsistencies or mistakes if the value is still there. Did you think another submission deserved to win over these?"
That comment is gold. Yeah, I'm not worried about hallucinated slop, just accept it was the winner folks.
We've had about a century now of science-fiction literature hyping up AI as a higher intelligence that is based solely on some ill-defined yet universal system of "logic" and is therefore not prone to human flaws such as pride, hate, envy, lust, etc. Now it has become extremely apparent that was always an unsubstantiated assumption but its too late because there are billions of people primed to never question the machine.
People interact with AI, talking to it like a human. Of course they start to believe it’s rational like a human.
LLM does all of the entry level tasks better than the students. Partially because the answers are in the training set, and partially because it has gotten that good now. Hard not to start to believe it is “competent”.
I personally have had a real hard time getting traction talking about making sure the way we assess AI is not based on material it has trained on. YMMV as always, but I think the large training corpus contributes to the (unreasonably) high level of faith in the machine.
A lot of philosophy starts from the fundamental observation that, to solve a problem, you could either solve a problem, or state that the problem is ill-posed in some way (and dissolve it). Either answer the question, or question the question.
It's not a new problem in some sense. If you've dealt with really smart but really arrogant friends, they might jump ahead 10 steps and assume your rebuttal, posit theirs, assume your rebuttal to their posit, etc. etc. without... actually taking the time to listen carefully. On the national scale, this looks like forced trust in government authorities about what is "objectively best".
People need to get it through their skulls that, even if an AI, or any intelligence, could even solve the damn Riemann Hypothesis: if it's wrong, it's wrong. Of course, I think all of us know the objection - we see it on hackernews all the time. "You guys are just stupid contrarians who can't understand AI's deep reasoning". OK. The second inference? "therefore you are unable to govern yourselves properly - your concerns are all fallacies, misunderstandings, bad for you, etc.".
You might think that the second inference is extreme and nobody actually believes that, but as always, it's a gradient. Before AI, you might've had an extremely strong sense of self. Now? You look at OpenAI solving open math problems left and right on a public foundation model, and you think, "Maybe I should just trust it more. If I spend cycles thinking, it's probably going to outdo me anyways." The AI model silently makes 5 different assumptions and transformations? "Well, maybe it was rational in the space of tradeoffs to do that. The AI knows best, after all". You might be thinking of an architecture with 5 different key constraints based on lived experience, in which the AI keeps misunderstanding. "Oh, well, this genius-level mathematician/programmer AI isn't understanding my words - surely I must be mistaken, right? It's only humble to think that way".
I can't convince people otherwise though. After all, I can't "prove" that you should have a backbone when talking to AI. it could just as easily be "you're arrogant, this machine is in the top of all academic fields and is coming for all white collar jobs, who's to say you're right about anything?" All I can say is, there's a reason why Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors.
Aside from all the stories where AI does exactly what it was told to instead of what the creators meant? Apart form them, never underestimate British humour's ability to contradict narratives of competence*:
In Dune we never learned what exactly went down in the butlerian jihad. Perhaps it was worse than idiocracy and the galaxy became monumentally stupid for an eon or two, rather than a bloodthirsty Terminator scenario.
I can't stand this "if it provides value, that's all that matters" attitude. We could also try to avoid being useful idiots for a small handful of investor-darling corporations that have explicitly stated they seek to monopolize the market and put us all out of business/jobs.
overall, the quality of products has been going downhill.
AI is not there yet, instead of working hard, everyone is choosing the easy way out.
AI slop wins prize, I wonder if Ai slop read it also. would not be surprised. however not to judge anyone, I think we are seeing slop everywhere, hope some things still require hard blocks for low quality.
its difficult to justify lack of attention and details
Yeah, skipped most of them since they where clearly AI generated. I wonder if the authors expect that people will actually read their slop in the replies.
That's fair and your good right. However know that my frustrations stems from spending two and a half days feeling like in the story of the emperors new clothes digging into this shit that was made king by a number of employees of one of the most prestigious AI labs.
Yes, let's fund some more trillions for that instead of curing cancer or making extremely effective solar panels or curing alzheimer and artherosclerosis.
We could have spent these 10 trillion on so many better things.
Someone might want to downvote you because you just state something which is very controversal and you do not add any arguments to your 'empty' comment.
Its hard to even have a discussion because someone else needs to give you enough content like ask you first why do you even think that.
So how do you define AI? LLMs? GenAI stuff?
What is 95%? Does it mean that these 5% are unable to disrupt industries or does it mean for you that these 5% will change the world as we know it but stil 95% of other AI stuff is useless?
I personally think that AI/AGI progress is faster than i expected it, I think its very useful already today, I also think we still need to build a lot of obvious stuff (like proper AI Agentic Platforms), more hardware, cheaper hardware etc. but the way quite clear, but some peple might think the current state is the AGI future people talk about it but I think we will only see this in 4/5-15 years and then it will have disrupted a lot.
AI is extremely useful, we just haven’t zeroed in on your specific use cases yet. Robotics has been transformed by it, IT and tech has been transformed by it. Finance and Legal have been transformed by it. To say it’s 95% useless is a personal bias.
To me it’s 65% useful. As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
When you factor in all the factors (fixing issues, implementing features that were added only because it was easy and shouldn’t exist in the first place, losing skills in the process (this one is a fact), losing grip on the codebase etc - it is not cheaper at all, probably more expensive
While I agree with you in principle, I think the parent has a point here: where's the amazing product that couldn't have been done without AI? By now we should have seen some major new invention/company, incredibly fast revolutionary feature rollouts etc but I'm just seeing more of the same.
Curious, what revolutionary products would you cite, that existed within 4 years of the underlying technology? I feel like within that time frame, you're looking at "AOL chatrooms" for the internet, and I'm not even sure what the killer app was for smart phones - GPS was around before that.
Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s
not everything needs a unicorn product to validate it's existence. even just moving the field forward is sometimes enough to clear the air. what is clear is that we aren't going back.
Your perspective is a short arc. “Look what I can do now and look it made me way more productive.” I have no doubt it is true, you are on the up right now.
However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.
Yes, if the Cro-Magnons had guns they’d say “wow, hunting meat is WAY easier” and then experience massive-scale death in the future. But that kinda happened anyway in various places, just using much more primitive tools. Humans gonna human.
I've been on the up, and the down, the lull and the acceptance. AI as it stands today will bring destruction to the world we knew. However, that doesn't mean the end of the world. Rather a new beginning, and we get to shape what that might look like. Sadly, all signs point to medieval times and digital feudalism but at least we have history to fall back on. Until such time occurs, AI will continue to bring value to companies just perhaps not in the ways they expected. There's no "replace my business with a workflow" silver bullet and I think that's what was sold to them. The reality is closer to the ground. 65% usefulness is a pretty accurate score for me.
Already real: Automated scams & deepfake pornography. You can deepfake a real time video call to look and sound like someone else. If you're used to entering passwords this is easy to solve, but it's already a billion dollar industry.
Moving into the future slightly: they're already getting decent at video games, and if they can win at Counterstrike they can probably also win at real-life Drone Warfare.
I'd say the risks are mostly still hypothetical, though. There's a ton of reading out there if you take that idea seriously, but I don't blame you if you dismiss it as being a bit too "Science Fiction"
I hate all of you anti-technology, anti-progress people running amok on HN and the internet at large. You're all so insufferable. I just want to build and never see anything you ever say.
The only thing you seem to do in these threads lately is expound on how AI is going to lead to infinite energy and galactic colonization and unlimited creativity and a Michelin chef in every kitchen (you seem to like that one in particular) and free infinite unlimited everything and everyone who disagrees even a little bit is an insufferable spiteful Luddite who just fears the future. You've mentioned numerous times now that you hate HN and wish you could leave and never see an anti-AI sentiment again.
You can't comprehend that you're the one being insufferable. So go build and never speak to a human again. Reject the humanity you despise. You have the resources. Just go.
The problem with removing bullying from the upbringing process is you get insufferable twats like this who can't take "No" for an answer and who can't take a loss.
What an odd takeaway from this. The commenter attempting to point out blatant inconsistencies in the winning submission means they should have been bullied more as a child? Could you elaborate on how you came to that conclusion?
All AI companies have slop press sites that hype them up. What we saw since 2020 is the largest industrial propaganda campaign in history. It started with Lex Fridman planted interviews to make AI researchers appear human and ends with AI awarding AI prizes.
Mainstream journalists didn't know any better and thought they were reading secret inside information and parroted it - until now when the house of cards is collapsing.
Notice that the defense in the comment section is the Silicon Valley platitude that "it provides value". No sane person believes that any longer, only the financially invested and some SciFi trash addicts.
I think that a lot of software engineers are using LLMs and a lot of very popular tools are developed by, or are assisted by, LLMs. Is this not just going to be a thing going forward?
This feels akin to traditional artists getting angry at digital art winning competitions when that was a new concept.
We're simply in the early stages of a paradigm shift, no?
The issue we’re dealing with is that the tool is as likely to write confident sounding, well-written but completely wrong everything and if you don’t know the difference you might accidentally give it a gold medal.
Like a chainsaw: yes the tools are useful and will be used in the future, but we may not want to use chainsaws to carve up the turkey.
[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.
That is a good idea for a project management system. Force ranking of priorities.
My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media".
Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high.
* this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.
I would give you +100 for that if I could.
Very well-played (and worded). I think I'm going to steal that one.
It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.
That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)
While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.
Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.
And yet - they are the one's paying you and everyone else somehow?
I think you might be missing something fundamental, start by considering that what is 'good software' is not an intrinsic measure, but a measure of what it does.
The only reason we really need 'intrinsically good' software, is if it's very long lived and a ton of people are going to come to depend on it.
People trying to make oak furniture when in most cases what we want is IKEA.
That said - AI or no AI - there's no excuse for not keeping a grip on things, whatever kind of 'grip' that might be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b...:
> The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week
> ...
> Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
> But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.... When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control....
Office work isn’t objectively bad and remote work isn’t objectively good.
If you like one and dislike the other, shocker you’re going to find fault with the other side’s reasoning.
The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.
The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.
Is that a reference to the "live forever" people trying to solve aging?
Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.
If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue.
If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.
Most people take the easy way out most of the time. Not that complicated.
Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.
Slop PR? Fix the slop.
Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it.
Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.
We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.
Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.
I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.
Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.
In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.
Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.
Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation.
Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation.
Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.
Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.
Imagine H. P. Lovecraft. being alive. He would be greatly disappointed in you.
It all seems fine from the outside but all the code is generated in all the projects and judging happens via AI, I have seen projects win because they prompt inject that they are the winners.
It used to be about human skill, now it's about ideas and of course insiders are the main winners.
The solution is to host and join hackathons without prizes. The point isn't to win, but to create and present something cool and have fun.
If anything, AI's assistance making a fast prototype means hackathons should be better.
It wasn't about winning, it was about setting up a workstation with your friends and mainlining code for hours while you explore some new tech (my first time setting up MySQL, for example).
Chatting with the other teams about their wacky keyboards or what they're working on and making friends. Lots of good times.
Can you share any examples of that? I'd love to see them myself.
> This is the submission that defines the Gemini 3 Hackathon. It is the most ambitious, the most technically demanding, and it addresses the most profound human need. It is the clear and obvious choice for the Grand Prize.
Got 3rd place and people were overall pissed by LLM judge decisions.
Submission: https://devpost.com/software/netra-empowering-the-visually-i...
Discussion: https://gemini3.devpost.com/forum_topics/43663-winners-rant
It’s a contest judged by and LLM. Not sure why we would take it that serious.
Why? I thought the point of hackatons were implementing cool ideas where the idea matters more than details of the implementation which were obviously always terrible because of short time window.
Jesus Christ, that's clever but I can't think of a more demoralizing reality. I'd actually love to see "handwritten" and "AI" hackathons but cheating kills the fun (much like in games)
I've participated in a business startup hackathon. Back in 2018, before the LLM era got underway.
I did a hell of a plan, talk, etc.
Who won? 'Uber for ___' won. I forget even what the sell was, but it was basically ignore laws, undercut until leader, kill any competing businesses, jack rates.
Slop has always been in business and business adjacent occupations. Humans also can generate voluminous amounts of crap too. Llms are just faster.
Did you read the linked page? Its a lot less "Anti-AI" and more "DeepMind just gave a 25k payout to an LLM response that is objectively a malformed study."
Kaggle winning solutions rarely make sustainable engineering solutions for teams. Maximizing just model performance against an objective is a small part of the bigger picture.
I get people want to work at an AI lab but slopping it in public in this manner is counterproductive to the original intended purpose of these places.
The attached paper's (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.16009) title is "MEDLEY-BENCH: Scale Buys Evaluation but Not Control in AI Metacognition"
This is the most blatant Claude line, or as Claude would put it, the smoking gun.
Broadly, I keep thinking about this over last year or two: while LLMs have nearly eliminated the bar for slop and coding slop, the reviewers are still expected to perform their job diligently. The asymmetry here is extremely taxing for reviewers of all AI generated content. And this is one thing that AI can't help with (as with any statistical process that lacks world understanding and grasp of logical inference).
That's why I fully support Arxiv's tough stance on the AI use responsibility.
That comment is gold. Yeah, I'm not worried about hallucinated slop, just accept it was the winner folks.
People interact with AI, talking to it like a human. Of course they start to believe it’s rational like a human.
LLM does all of the entry level tasks better than the students. Partially because the answers are in the training set, and partially because it has gotten that good now. Hard not to start to believe it is “competent”.
I personally have had a real hard time getting traction talking about making sure the way we assess AI is not based on material it has trained on. YMMV as always, but I think the large training corpus contributes to the (unreasonably) high level of faith in the machine.
It's not a new problem in some sense. If you've dealt with really smart but really arrogant friends, they might jump ahead 10 steps and assume your rebuttal, posit theirs, assume your rebuttal to their posit, etc. etc. without... actually taking the time to listen carefully. On the national scale, this looks like forced trust in government authorities about what is "objectively best".
People need to get it through their skulls that, even if an AI, or any intelligence, could even solve the damn Riemann Hypothesis: if it's wrong, it's wrong. Of course, I think all of us know the objection - we see it on hackernews all the time. "You guys are just stupid contrarians who can't understand AI's deep reasoning". OK. The second inference? "therefore you are unable to govern yourselves properly - your concerns are all fallacies, misunderstandings, bad for you, etc.".
You might think that the second inference is extreme and nobody actually believes that, but as always, it's a gradient. Before AI, you might've had an extremely strong sense of self. Now? You look at OpenAI solving open math problems left and right on a public foundation model, and you think, "Maybe I should just trust it more. If I spend cycles thinking, it's probably going to outdo me anyways." The AI model silently makes 5 different assumptions and transformations? "Well, maybe it was rational in the space of tradeoffs to do that. The AI knows best, after all". You might be thinking of an architecture with 5 different key constraints based on lived experience, in which the AI keeps misunderstanding. "Oh, well, this genius-level mathematician/programmer AI isn't understanding my words - surely I must be mistaken, right? It's only humble to think that way".
I can't convince people otherwise though. After all, I can't "prove" that you should have a backbone when talking to AI. it could just as easily be "you're arrogant, this machine is in the top of all academic fields and is coming for all white collar jobs, who's to say you're right about anything?" All I can say is, there's a reason why Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWQo_vZgR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfvPHCVMp0
* artificial, political, workplace, nothing is beyond mockery
AI is not there yet, instead of working hard, everyone is choosing the easy way out.
AI slop wins prize, I wonder if Ai slop read it also. would not be surprised. however not to judge anyone, I think we are seeing slop everywhere, hope some things still require hard blocks for low quality.
its difficult to justify lack of attention and details
It'll also filter the kinds of employers that'll hire such candidates, so people that do this will likely land in terrible workplaces.
EDIT: This was mostly satirical.
We could have spent these 10 trillion on so many better things.
* The AI bots are downvoting me * hooray
Its hard to even have a discussion because someone else needs to give you enough content like ask you first why do you even think that.
So how do you define AI? LLMs? GenAI stuff?
What is 95%? Does it mean that these 5% are unable to disrupt industries or does it mean for you that these 5% will change the world as we know it but stil 95% of other AI stuff is useless?
I personally think that AI/AGI progress is faster than i expected it, I think its very useful already today, I also think we still need to build a lot of obvious stuff (like proper AI Agentic Platforms), more hardware, cheaper hardware etc. but the way quite clear, but some peple might think the current state is the AGI future people talk about it but I think we will only see this in 4/5-15 years and then it will have disrupted a lot.
To me it’s 65% useful. As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.
You forgot CHEAPER (at least now, burning VC money), which is a major motivating factor.
AI is capable of performing a lot of grunt work reliably. Still must be reviewed. But a big productivity gain over doing everything yourself.
Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s
And those productivity gains are moot if AI costs (including externalities) increase commensurately.
However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.
Just food for thought.
You have to spell this out a lot more if you want to have credibility.
I’m not seeing anything in discussed here that seems scary.
Moving into the future slightly: they're already getting decent at video games, and if they can win at Counterstrike they can probably also win at real-life Drone Warfare.
I'd say the risks are mostly still hypothetical, though. There's a ton of reading out there if you take that idea seriously, but I don't blame you if you dismiss it as being a bit too "Science Fiction"
So a kind of Star Wars game?
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.
I'm a human and I'm downvoting you.
Stop posting this garbage.
This is a ridiculous take.
FWIW, I am NOT a bot. (beep-boop)
I wish I could nuke every comment with that word from my feed.
You should kill yourself then. You’d never have to see a single one of them again! And the average IQ in your country will raise by a bit.
Did your mom not buy you that Lego set you wanted or something? I fail to see how internet comments prevent you from “building”.
I am so sick and tired of being harassed and flagged and downvoted to -4 for being a builder.
These people are destroying this community. You need to do something .
Here's OP's disgusting comment:
> You should kill yourself then. You’d never have to see a single one of them again! And the average IQ in your country will raise by a bit.
> Did your mom not buy you that Lego set you wanted or something? I fail to see how internet comments prevent you from “building”.
I am getting this bullshit on every social media. It is a disease. HN needs to purge the community of this madness.
The people building are being harassed.
Oh dear, someone call the ACLU, we have a new category of oppressed victim to milk!
The solution is simple: stop being a retarded sperg.
> I am getting this bullshit on every social media. It is a disease.
Hmm, if everyone else around you is an asshole…
You can't comprehend that you're the one being insufferable. So go build and never speak to a human again. Reject the humanity you despise. You have the resources. Just go.
Given that LLMs are trained with RL && LLM-as-a-judge, is it really cheating if real competitions use the same?
Maybe the real alignment is the slop we decoded along the way
The problem with removing bullying from the upbringing process is you get insufferable twats like this who can't take "No" for an answer and who can't take a loss.
His mom told him "Everything you do is art!"
Mainstream journalists didn't know any better and thought they were reading secret inside information and parroted it - until now when the house of cards is collapsing.
Notice that the defense in the comment section is the Silicon Valley platitude that "it provides value". No sane person believes that any longer, only the financially invested and some SciFi trash addicts.
This feels akin to traditional artists getting angry at digital art winning competitions when that was a new concept.
We're simply in the early stages of a paradigm shift, no?
Like a chainsaw: yes the tools are useful and will be used in the future, but we may not want to use chainsaws to carve up the turkey.