Not sure if you'd consider this a counterpoint or just proving your point, but in the sea of AI slop there's also a real chance for people to create things that they couldn't before - my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read: https://www.kidhubb.com/play/meteor-dodge-solarscout64
It's not the prettiest but he's able to iterate on it and basically build whatever he can imagine just using claude on his ipad with voice transcription.
But... why? How is prompting an LLM "nerding out"? Before it was "it's not the prettiest, but the kid did it himself", which is cool and educational and just cute. Now it's "it's not the prettiest, and also the kid didn't really do it". Why? Just what for?
Why did people used to make geocities pages back in the day? Kids like to express themselves and being able to make simple games and share them with friends is fun for them. So far it's helping him learn to read (he reads and edits his voice transcriptions before submitting), and teaching him basics like bugs, game mechanics, etc. He iterates on it and adds/ removes things. He probably did several dozen iterations over 2-3 hours.
Posting it publicly is also helping him learn about people - we talked about how no matter what some percent of people won't like it and may even say it's stupid, but that will always happen and it's still worth creating things anyway.
> my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read
Humans learn mastery by doing, not by watching.
I suppose it comes down to whether the most important skill for your kid is to give instructions, or whether it is to actually read and write.
For reference, my kid only just turned 6, and is at the level of reading books without pictures. I'm kinda proud that he reads better, faster and with more retention than kids aged 9, and it didn't come with the ease[1] that "nerding out" on Claude came to your kid.
The question you gotta ask yourself is this: is a skill that takes a 7 year old a day to master really going to make him more valuable than a skill that took a 6 year old 2.5 years to master?
The 6yo who can read can easily do what your kid did, but your kid can't easily do what the 6yo can.
From another PoV: how valuable of a skill do you think "prompting" is when a 7yo who hasn't mastered reading can master it?
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[1] I started a daily routine when he was 3.5 with the DISTAR alphabet. We did the routine every day, whether it was christmas, or his birthday, even on vacation. Same time, every day.
When I wrote this blog post, something like this was in my mind as the type of scenario where I view it as a net positive. I don't have a problem with people building things they want for themselves, the problem starts when people try to share something to the rest of us without having understood why anyone would want to see it first.
I am extremely excited that your kid is able to do this, and even you sharing it now here isn't like "my child's game is the best game ever look at me" it's thoughtful commentary on the post I've written.
Even if you had shared a separate post on HN proper like "LLMs are enabling my child to build earlier and become involved in tech" or something that would have had thought behind it on why its interesting to other people, in considering other people you're acting in good faith.
My overall point isn't that LLMs generating apps are bad it's that we should consider why what I'm showing to someone else would matter to them in the first place, which you did here :)
This is such an awesome example. That it's good enough at getting a gun game to put a smile on my face is icing on the cake. I've played lots of simple flash games in my day and this seven year old's vision made real by an AI is better than a decent number of those.
Which isn't diminishing the authors of that prior work either, those same individuals with these new tools would have been able to do more too.
This is such an awesome example. That it's good enough at getting a gun game to put a smile on my face is icing on the cake. I've played lots of simple flash games in my day and this seven year old's vision made real by an AI is better than a decent number of those.
It's actually helping him learn to read quite a bit - after voice transcription, he reads the post and edits any errors by tapping on the word and changing it. He's been on the cusp of reading on his own and it's the first thing that motivates him enough to do it naturally.
My 7-year-old uses Claude on his iPad to make games. He can barely read but uses voice to describe what he wants. He can read enough to make text edits when voice transcription gets it wrong. It's been pretty cool to see where his imagination takes him, and I wanted a way for him to be able to easily publish and share games he (and others) make, so I made www.kidhubb.com.
Paste HTML, get a live game URL. No accounts (just creator codes), no build tools, single HTML files. Every game's source is viewable and remixable.
I designed the site so AI assistants are first-class visitors. There's a www.kidhubb.com/for-ai page that acts as a living briefing for any AI that visits, along with hidden context blocks on every page. The idea is that a kid's AI should be able to understand the platform just by visiting it, and be able to help them get it published. Try it yourself - just ask your AI to "help me publish a game on https://www.kidhubb.com".
Note: AI needs the full url initially so it can actually visit the site and from there it can follow instructions to help you/ your kid publish. It's a new site so just saying "kidhubb" without the full url won't work.
Thanks! The bloat problem is exactly what pushed me toward forgetting-as-a-feature rather than just accumulating everything.
Salience is scored on four dimensions when a memory is first ingested: novelty (how surprising/new), relevance (how useful for future interactions), emotional weight (personal significance), and predictive value (does this change expectations). A Sonnet instance does the scoring, so it adapts to context.
For retention vs forgetting, each memory's strength is calculated dynamically:
Decay rate is 0.015/day, so an unaccessed memory with average salience of 0.3 fades to near-zero in about three weeks. But accessing a memory boosts it (+0.12 per access, capped at 0.5), and consolidated memories get a flat +0.2 bonus. So memories that keep being relevant naturally survive.
The consolidation cycle (modeled on slow-wave sleep) is the other half. It merges redundant memories into stronger single entries, extracts generalized patterns from recurring themes, and prunes anything below threshold. This is what prevents bloat at scale while preserving the signal.
Honestly the balance isn't perfectly tuned yet. The decay rate and consolidation frequency are constants right now. Ideally, they'd adapt based on how the user actually interacts with their memories. That's on the roadmap.
I'm working on a site that basically groups you into a cohort of like-minded Yang supporters and helps you accomplish simple but helpful stuff online. Things like favoriting a tweet seem tiny, but if every yang supporter did it, the difference would be huge. Especially just raising his visibility online since only half of democrats even know who he is.
Open to any and all feedback - getting people on the internet to do anything at all is insanely hard, but could be the best chance we have bots, false info and astroturfing.
Would it be appropriate to ask our users of our startup to and vote for us on here? If they are invested enough in our service and community to do so, it seems like that would be a very positive and useful signal in it's own right. Or would that be considered gaming the votes?
Agreed, I'm surprised the 4x price increase is not mentioned more often. Personally I can understand moving away from a free offering, especially if they're having trouble with spammers, but to quadruple pricing out of the blue? For sites, like mine, built around a huge amount of transactional email (scheduling group gaming sessions and notifying your group by email), a 4x increase is essentially no different than just shutting down. They have their reasons, and now I have mine, to never use a mailchimp product again.
To add more data, I've been successful (generating more than average salary in my area for programmers I think) in creating a small online saas business. I would say it's totally possible, but for me it took a lot longer than I think most people realize (4-5 years) from the beginning, where I had no programming knowledge whatsoever, to where I'm at now. I had to continue working my regular job and slowly transition into it.
Also I have a few other friends with similar bootstrapped businesses, and I can say I've never actually met anyone with true "passive income". I really enjoy the freedom and flexibility I have, but if I stopped working on my business it would eventually shrivel and die. Competition is fierce, and I'm in a commodity type business (basically online marketing/ websites for realtors) with several huge competitors and hundreds of smaller ones, so I'm continually trying to improve the software/ product.
I'm not in it to generate passive income, and I think starting with that goal in mind could be frustrating because as others have said, most passive income preachers secretly do a ton of work (think of how hard tim ferris actually works, every single day). I'd reiterate what others have already said, just treat it like learning to program, realize it's going to take a long time, and steadily improve on it. The goal for me is freedom to do or make what I want, flexibility, financial security, and to have my efforts tied directly to my success.
Agreed. I don't want to sound totally callous, but while this is a dramatic and terrible incident in it's own right, her writing style does seem to be magnifying the drama for maximum effect/ attention, in which case it's a truly difficult problem for AirBnb to solve. Even handing her a big sack of cash/ new apartment (just an example, not recommending that course) would probably just lead to an expose blog post about how they tried to buy her silence. How do you satisfy someone if a large part of what they want is attention? Create a new security policy and name it after her?
It's not the prettiest but he's able to iterate on it and basically build whatever he can imagine just using claude on his ipad with voice transcription.