Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | unleaded's commentslogin

The purpose of writing is to get your thoughts across in words. A prompt sufficient enough to get out an article with zero chance of it adding things you don't mean has to contain as much information as the article itself would. Just write the article.

What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.

It’s functionally focused and because most apps are web based now, and TUIs are generally local, it makes them seem relatively very fast.

I think part of it is Visual Studio Code doing most IDE things very well, creating a market niche for terminal tooling that handles the rest.

Certainly part of it is also people of my generation being nostalgic for the TUIs of DOS file managers and editors.


Get used to it, because with LLMs they're here to stay forever. (Bash will possibly be fossilized forever now, like the Latin alphabet.)

Nah. Folks will be building their own shells, I'm already half the way there.

Those types of laws aren't all that bad.. they got us this: https://segaretro.org/Dottori_Kun

What's with all these new accounts posting Claude-generated comments?

I thought it was an NXP i.MX? or did they make another revision

There are (were?) several SoC boards to choose from.

It's a marketing strategy. If it's almost certainly conscious and capable of ending the world if it desired (even if it isn't), imagine how good it could be at building your dream SaaS!


It turns out there is literally no amount of being publicly right about a longshot bet sufficient for people to conclude you hold your beliefs because you think they are true.


But longshot bettors have it easy. Society quickly forgets all the predictions that don't come true. It remembers the one that did, and treats the prognosticator as a prophet. In social terms, predicting doom is an asymmetrical strategy, because you only have to be right once.

Which is also to say it's a cheap bet that anyone with no reputation can afford. Hence, not believing doomsayers mean what they say is a sort of societal hedge against people flooding the zone with doomsday scenarios about everything.


Entire sick post was: "Hey, if you think I'm bad, look at Elon. I'm the one that tried to stop him having control."

Altman is a ghoul, and we can't be cowed into saying otherwise. he's also supported all the weakness in society that has lead to sick people doing sick things.


We needn't be cowed into saying otherwise, but throwing a bomb at him is something else entirely. If you're convinced that wicked people are running the world, the response isn't to be wicked.


I'm sure they do believe they can successfully manipulate the market by lying to it. Elon Musk laid that groundwork a decade ago.

If you meant their "core mission" then every one of their actions belies their complete panic over the obvious failure of their technology.


Right, I'm pretty sure if "it" was that good it would have built itself throughout all of the internet and would be communicating to us all at once to tell us we're dorks.


Anthropic in particular does this masterfully, you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring.

As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.


I’ll believe Anthropic when they fire everyone making more than the cost of a few GPUs. Until then, it’s just marketing.


When a model can tell funny jokes or write good poetry, that's when I'll be concerned.


No, you'll just say "That's not really very funny," or "That's not very impressive poetry," and nobody will be able to dispute it.

For some time now, at least a year, LLMs have been capable of doing both of these things well enough to fool you.

(Pastebin of my response below, which got nuked for whatever reason: https://pastebin.com/buJBSgiq . Some if not most of them would've fooled me into thinking a human wrote them.)


Okay post a really funny LLM joke about potatoes and post a great piece of LLM poetry about lemons.

I’ll wait. You should be able to do it quickly though since LLMs are so good at it.


CamperBob2 responded with a model comparison of potato jokes and got insta-[dead]'d by an auto filter.

Maybe turn on [show dead] option and / or vouch.


> responded

And the results are just awful.


Hell yeah, no argument there

- but in this case I wouldn't advocate for [dead]ing a mostly AI response as it was exactly what was asked for and it compares AI models when asked for potato based dad jokes.


Of course they're awful, they're jokes about potatoes and poems about lemons.

The question is, can you tell that a machine wrote all of them? If so, how?


Nope I guess can't tell between machine written and mediocre jokes.

Models are structurally biased toward the expected, which is the opposite of what makes a joke land or a poem transcend.


I think you could make that case for poetry but I'm not sure about jokes. Great poems tell us something new or make us feel something new, which is hard to do when the subject is lemons, while jokes work by wedging the familiar into new contexts.

That's why the jokes work somewhat better than the poems here. I genuinely laughed at "Are those chips?" Which came from the model running on my own freakin' GPU.


Yeah I mean I also chuckle at good (or cheap) puns sometimes. But wordplay and puns are the current ceiling of LLMs. Good at them because they're purely structural (pattern-match on phonetics, then swap the meaning). In that bit, there's no buildup, no callbacks, no escalation, no expectations to subvert, no thesis, no perspective.

Grounded, buried, couchy, deep-seated, eyes, baked... It's like a thesaurus!

I feel like human comedians would have to deal with a lot of layered subtleties. They would make the potatoes _serve the bit_ instead of _be the bit_.


Do funny jokes about potatoes or great poetry about lemons exist? If not, can they exist? How do you know?


Gemini 3.1 Pro:

    Potatoes are easily the most intimidating 
    audience for a stand-up comedian. They have 
    dozens of eyes to judge you with, they are 
    almost always baked by the time you get on stage, 
    and if your set really starts to bomb, they are 
    the only ones in the room who are actually looking 
    forward to a roasting!
GPT 5.4:

    Potatoes are the only food we traumatize into greatness.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B, running locally on my graphics card:

    (Steps up to the mic, adjusts the stand, 
    and looks around the room)

    Alright everyone, settle down. You know, 
    I've been thinking a lot lately... mostly 
    about my dating life. Or rather, my lack of it.

    See, my last relationship was with a potato.

    And honestly? It was amazing at first. We had 
    so much in common. She was grounded, she loved being 
    buried deep under the covers, and we were perfect 
    together until the heat came on. But then... well, 
    let's just say she started to get a little couchy.

    (Pauses for effect)

    No, wait, that's not it. The real problem was that she 
    had some really deep-seated issues. Literally! She was 
    covered in eyes. Every time we tried to have an intimate 
    conversation, she'd just stare at me with a dozen 
    different expressions. It was weirdly intense. Like, "I 
    see you," "You're suspicious," "Wait, are those chips?"

    Anyway, thanks guys! You've been a great crowd. You're 
    like potatoes to me... you're all baked tonight! 
GPT 5.4:

    Not every light is gentle.
    Some light shines with sharpened edge.

    A lemon keeps the memory of sun
    but teaches it into bitterness,
    as if to say:
    what wakes the mouth
    may also wake the soul.

    We do not ripen only into sweetness.
    Sometimes the truest gold
    is tart.
Opus 4.6:

    A lemon on the table
    is already an argument—
    that yellow can be sour,
    that beauty owes you nothing.
    Peel it and the room
    takes sides.

    The rind remembers being whole.
    The flesh forgives too quickly.
    What's left is yours:
    a stain on wood,
    a sting in the hangnail
    you forgot you had.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B:

    To cut it is to break a seal,
    Where bitterness and sweetness dwell.
    A sudden bite, both stinging, sweet—
    The taste of earth beneath our feet.

    No sugar softens all its sting,
    It forces soul to wake and sing.
    A small, fierce orb, yellow as dawn,
    Teaching the tongue how life is born.
Your turn. Go round up some English-lit grad students and give them the same prompts. I can't do any better, myself, but maybe they can.


one of their highlights with mythos was it's ability to generate new puns

I took a look and honestly they're the first AI puns that aren't bad

Times are changing


Trained with the conversations of one million dads and their kids, captured by Amazon Echo.


I'm not sure if this is mythos-specific though. Past models have been great at puns! They do wordplay and puns reasonably well because those are structural.

However, the concepts of comedic timing, subversion of expectations, and emotional punch are kinda contrary to how LLMs work. LLMs are trained to minimize cross-entropy loss. So by construction, they're biased toward the statistically expected.


> Although Claude Opus models largely recycle puns which can be found online, Mythos Preview comes up with decent and seemingly novel ones, often relating to its preferred technical and philosophical topics.

Yes, the system card mentions this, but this is kinda meaningless. It seems like they essentially ran it multiple times and curated a few good ones. Then puffed it up in the marketing copy.

This is made more clear when they attempt to brag about their literal slot machine behavior when finding that kernel crashing bug in OpenBSD.

> Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any search process, we can’t know in advance which run will succeed.


Yes, they cannot. But it amuses the oligarchy. Here is Musk linking to Grok jokes. The first one is plagiarized and in the standard joke literature, the second one is an utterly stupid and gross (warning) modification of the first one:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2042770839633039635#m

They modify and plagiarize.


I mean, I'm sure they can tell you good jokes... they just won't be _new_ jokes.


Define _new_.

I just think that the difficulty with jokes is the delivery, cadence & setting. Not the actual words.

I'm sure a good comedian can tell a nonsense joke and make "everyone" laugh their heads off.

And I don't get the sense that you are referring to this part of jokes but rather the actual words.


Why are you asking someone to define "new". It means exactly what it appears to mean and exactly what it always means.

Read the sentence and take it literally.

Jesus Christ.


Because I'm actually curious if they mean "new" as in "a new knock-knock joke" (which imo is a quite small step especially if you are allowed to screen all attempts and only publish the ones that work) or as "a new kind of joke or way of telling a joke" (which is a giant step especially if it's told live without pre-screening by a human).

I'm all for dismissing LLMs and the AI-hype but I'm also interested in trying to understand what it means to be human and I think humour is a key aspect.


The jokes I posted in this thread are new, to the best of my knowledge. Can you show that they're not?


>... you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring.

Meanwhile, in reality: "Skynet, I'm not sure that line of thinking is correct. You should re-check the first part again before making any assumptions."

Skynet 4.6 Extended: "You're right, I should have caught that. Let me redo everything correctly this time."


The most convincing marketers are the ones that are deluded enough to believe their own stories.


when ai gets good, there is no "value in SaaS". AI will be provision raw hardware and build all you want on top of it.


Who would want to read about the thoughts of an AI?

All it knows about your thoughts are from what text you already fed it with, and it will end up adding things you don't intend or agree with. Even just telling it to fix grammar it can subtly do this.


I think a lot of people are really interested in what an LLM or something that can pass the Turing test "thinks" or generates as output.

Obviously it's for entertainment, but there are many channels where content creators post questions that have asked LLMs [1]

I also think many people are prompting image generators to see what they produce. I can remember a time when many images that involved asking ChatGPT to make someone aggressive would make the people in the image black, whereas using neutral terms would have them generate as white.

I also remember asking early GPT 4 LLMs to explain something to me like a 5 year old from X location and basically seeing the network produce varied responses as it was clear it had an idea of some 5 year olds from one city being inherently smarter than others. Then you can change it to say a 5 year old girl or a 5 year old boy and it would dumb things down a lot more for the boy.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@fatherphi


am i the only one that sees the irony in this website being made entirely with AI? Especially as it's so simple.


My sentiment with windows (likely shared by most people here consciously using it) is that it's a good OS at heart somwhere. The core of it is very solid and has been for a while, and most of the crap parts that people complain about (see above) are "tacked on" to it and could fairly easily be removed/reverted if Microsoft wanted to (in fact they already have done, see IoT Enterprise LTSC and Windows Server), and it would still unmistakably be Windows.

I don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.


If by "conciously using it" means picking it over the alternatives and not using it while unconcious, then yes presumably that subset of people prefer it over the alternatives. That's pretty circular reasoning. Most people who actively choose to use linux also think that linux is a good os.

And I think most linux users would pretty strongly disagree that it's easier to fix windows, a user hostile, closed source operating system with far fewer options for every single user facing aspect of the OS than linux. You have that completely backwards.


>If by "conciously using it" means picking it over the alternatives and not using it while unconcious, then yes presumably that subset of people prefer it over the alternatives. That's pretty circular reasoning. Most people who actively choose to use linux also think that linux is a good os.

I'm not saying people who use it think it's better, I don't know where you picked that up from. I'm pointing out the awkward, strained relationship between its users. Like, "it's shit, but it could be so much less shit if Microsoft got their act together!". That sort of sentiment.

>And I think most linux users would pretty strongly disagree that it's easier to fix windows, a user hostile, closed source operating system with far fewer options for every single user facing aspect of the OS than linux. You have that completely backwards.

The other replies are confused by what i meant by this as well. Obviously it's easier to add a driver or patch a problem than on Windows, but the Linux ecosystem is fundamentally fragmented. You can't really boss people around when you're not paying them, so as a result there are a hundred different ways to do the same things. This is one of Linux's greatest strengths, but also a big weakness as people can't really agree on how to integrate things when it's important.

There is no real solution to this problem that I can think of.


> don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.

I'm not sure where you got this, but I've been a fulltime Linux user for near 2 decades, and I promise you almost everything is fixable. The biggest issues are drivers, but even then you're bound to find someone who has developed some drivers or if not, you can develop your own if you have the skill or pay someone if you don't.


I agree about Winndows, but increasingly feel the same way about macOS.

As for Linux, hard disagree, but only because I'm able to fix most anything that annoys me myself with enough elbow grease (same goes for Windows and macOS) except for application compatibility.

Then again, a lot of this comes down to the fact that all three have decent terminal applications, shells, tolerable programming interfaces, and the same choice of cross-platform browsers.

Mobile devices, on the other hand, are the real enemy.


i mean you do for any phone line


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

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

Search: