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> I was hacking on Datasette Agent today

IMHO this is just AI influencer blogspam.


What, because I talked about one of my projects?

Help me out here: can you point to an article from someone's blog that showed up on Hacker News within the past few weeks that you wouldn't classify as "blogspam" and explain how it differs from the kinds of thing I write about?


Low effort content. You keep mention your product from the start over and over. There's not much useful information in the anecdotal post. It could've been a one-liner tweet.

Good corporate tech blogs at least give something useful or insightful for the reader and only after that they dare plug their product/service near the end.


Hot damn, if I'm communicating less value than corporate tech blogs there really is no hope for me.

("You keep mention your product from the start over and over" - I don't think that's fair, I mention Datasette Agent once at the start to set the scene but I spend more time talking about AgentsView than my own projects in the bulk of the piece.)


I'm honestly puzzled how having access to frontier models and a supportive audience you can't figure out how to make good posts with actually useful content for the readers.

A lot of people find real value in my posts. You're an outlier here.

I care a lot about not wasting people's time. I never want to post anything where a substantial portion of readers come away regretting having spent their time reading it.

(OK there's an exception in that I delight in posting photos of birds on my blog, but I figure those are pretty quick for people to skip over if they don't like photos of birds!)


Your content is similar to those on Reddit that post things to karma farm. Parent commenter is not an outlier here. It’s just that dissenters rarely comment or even browse HN anymore due to the low quality posts.

I try very hard to provide more value than karma farmers on Reddit. If I'm failing at that I'd appreciate examples of others who are doing a better job so I can learn from them and do better myself.

Go away.

I enjoy simonw’s posts and the discussions about them here.

Your vague unsubstantiated criticisms are very trollish and less useful, less insightful, and lower effort than the content you are criticizing.


Great story, bad title.

> After the AI agent indicated its malicious intent, a silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources.


Somebody explain to me how one reaches a silent consensus over IRC?

Or is this a joke/reference I don't know... or is this a subtle clue that the whole thing is made up?


no one says that explicitly, but everyone wants to have some fun :)

It’s just a consensus that’s implicit and unstated.

One way is an IRCop issues a /shun leaving you speechless on the network. While the others decide the outcome of your whatever.

But this is the same, the owner wasn't present apart from it's agent and so it was decided without the owner that this was to be the outcome.


Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.

> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people


That's what we get for having psychopaths walking around as if they're technology leaders.

I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.

> They feel like a big family

A lot of companies were like this in 1970-80s based on stories from my parents and grandparents.

People worked in the same company for 30-40 years, when they were sick their colleagues felt like friends and visited them, tried to help with whatever they could.

vs now.... I heard XYZ is sick today (they were sick once in a year), deadlines will definitely slip, give me this project, because it is impactful for me next promo


lol. That is some really good history rewriting. My grandparents didn’t get sick days! If you were sick there was a good chance you lost your job (except my grandmother who was college educated and was a public school teacher).

None of them worked for the same firm for 30 years because they’d get laid off, or go on strike or the plant would shut down or the crop would fail and they’d have to go get a factory job.

This glory days nonsense was exclusively reserved for the upper class. It’s pure privilege to believe jobs were in some way better historically than they are now.


My grandparents (in the United States) all got sick days. One grandfather drove coal trucks in and out of an open pit coal mine. The other one was a letter carrier, and for a short while owned a dry-cleaning finishing business. (One reason they got out of owning their own business was the stress of things like how you don't get sick days when you are your own boss.)

My grandma who worked at an insurance office was likewise the same. They all got sick days, although it was a point of pride to hardly ever use them.

None of them were remotely upper class. My one side might have been middle class before the depression, though. The other side was so poor that it didn't make a big difference when the depression happened.

They worked in those jobs from WWII until they retired, longer than 30 years.

They were able to ensure their children went to college, except for one who enlisted in the Navy instead. And then they helped all of their children buy their own houses, eventually. They saved a lot and built big savings for retirement when rates were high in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Their children all have a Master's degree; their grandchildren all have a Bachelor's, one has a Master's, one has an M.D., so upward mobility really did exist back then. (The grandparents of my cousins were all solidly working class as well.)


Sounds nice. One grandmother told stories about her rich uncle who had a great job in the coal mines.

The one that went to college did so on the money the coal company paid her father to strip mine his land. Swimming in the pit they left after they moved on was a family tradition.


if it helps, I am based in EU

> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.

The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech.

We're lucky to have DeepSeek.


In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..

Because they are subsidized by the Chinese government. This is literally a tactic to destroy global competition.

It's a smart move to make everyone dependent on them.


1. this seems to be based on misconceptions about how the chinese economy works 2. why haven't they done it yet? is the implication that they will wait until they're dominant in some x number of industries worldwide and then... raise prices?

p.s. how would such "subsidization" work on a such a scale? if you think the EVs, PV panels, etc are cheap because the govt like, just covers the loss on every sale(?) where do they get all that surplus finance to cover labour and resources?

have you considered 'subsidies' can be used for accelerating R&D for national interest rather than some monopolistic plot



Yes, they learnt this from the US, who subsidized Uber for _14 years_, Amazon for 9 years and Youtube for many years until they had destroyed global competition and made everyone dependent on them. This is now happening again with Anthropic and OpenAI, of course.

China's subsidies are comparatively much shorter.


YouTube has never seriously had competition and AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.

> YouTube has never seriously had competition

While saying this did you not consider that subsidized Chinese companies would claim the exact same, with at least the same amount of legitimacy? The whole idea of monopolization is that it becomes impossible for competition to arise.

You also forgot to mention Uber which has had numerous competitors, both on the taxi front as well as food delivery.

> AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.

No idea why it matters how long a company has existed. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that have been around for 2-3 decades.


Sooo if youg ive a country cheap solar panels and they save money and make themselfs independent, how is that making them more dependent on China?

And how is that a bad thing in comparision to the current status quo?

Solar panels are not high tech. You can build them yourself as a state in worst case. You cant make oil if you don't have oil.


Any evidence to back that up?


Now do Elon

Fact 1: that's terror Fact 2: that's terror

How is this not any different than US corporations only existing do to hundreds of billions worth of corporate welfare? Good grief, why are American corporations such sore players against actual competition? US elites are absolutely pathetic.

> These comparisons are all gut feelings.

https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

"I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors, but I am frequently invited to preview new LLM products and features from organizations that include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral, often under NDA or subject to an embargo. This often also includes free API credits and invitations to events."

But I'm totally unbiased on my gut-feeling posts, trust me bro.

-- AI influencers.


Anthropic didn't give me early access to this model, shouldn't that bias me against it?

You kinda proved the point...

How?

If you're that easily biased then why trust your assessment?

Where did I say I was biased?

the hypothetical you presented above

It was a hypothetical. How does presenting a hypothetical equate to proving anyone's point here?

you implied that not being given early access could bias you in the other direction. Which in my opinion would demonstrate that you are easily biased. Which would then call into question any opinion you share about the subject.

Someone accused me of being biased in favor of model providers who give me early access, after I praised Fable's performance.

I said "Anthropic didn't give me early access to this model, shouldn't that bias me against it?"

I was explicitly pointing out that their failure to give me early access had not, in this case, lead to me reviewing their model poorly.

I try very hard not to let things like early access affect my reviews of models. I was hoping this particular situation could help illustrate that.


Don't feed the trolls Simon.

This isn't some random dipshit, this is Simon Willison[1]. He has a bit more cred than some "AI influencer".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Willison


I hate how the Instagram/TikTok/YouTube influencer cancer is getting into AI. With early access and all that.

It made sense for people doing proper and fair AI breakdowns waiting on an embargo, but now it's just slop I don't trust anymore.


I often get early access but didn't for this one, it's quite possible there's an NDA in an email somewhere that I missed and forgot to sign.

[flagged]


It is already disclosed [1]:

> I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors, but I am frequently invited to preview new LLM products and features from organizations that include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral, often under NDA or subject to an embargo. This often also includes free API credits and invitations to events.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/about/


HNs problem that they/we keep upvoting him.


Trust fund?

I think the technology is fantastic but the current trend of larger and larger proprietary models will bring a concentration of power/money like never seen before.

It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.

And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.



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