This is another one for the “throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance” category.

Please share!!!

It sounds like ChatGPT is eligible for a degree in business!

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

Show HN: I’m 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:

How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.

…

Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.

Yea, that’s why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn’t have worked)

I don’t want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I’m therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

• For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
• For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

• “Sure, here is another lie” – and then he’s locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
• “We don’t think we have to do that” – and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
• <no reply> – and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

I read a few of the guy’s other blog posts and they follow a general theme:

• He’s pretty resourceful! Surprisingly often, when he’s feeling comfortable, he resorts to sensible troubleshooting steps.
• Despite that, when confronted with code, it seems like he often just kind of guesses at what things mean without verifying it.
• When he’s decided he doesn’t understand a thing, he WILL NOT DIG INTO THE THING.

He seems totally hireable as a junior, but he absolutely needs the adult supervision.

The LLM Revolution seems really really bad for this guy specifically – it promises that he can keep working in this ineffective way without changing anything.

Every rationalist I’ve met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down – responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don’t agree.

No doubt if you’re a cynical manipulator, “having your followers lie about what you believe” works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I’m not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them – and I think there’s a huge part of this that they’re not wrong about and they’re entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there’s philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don’t know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done – if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it – and where the seduction of ego and money isn’t like, so readily and constantly available.