At least for me, personal agents have been quite useful. If you integrate them well - shopping, filling random government forms, keeping track of my personal life, optimizing training plan and nutrition, planning vacations, etc. I can do more home repairs or renovations myself with help of chat
So basically you get personal digital assistant - very useful - but not changing my life.
What would I need for real transformation though? Food, house cleaning, commute - "every day chores". Even if we had ASI tomorrow, what could it do to change my life, besides taking away my job? Design good house robot to help me with food preparation I guess... Maybe finally self driving cars launched in my area? Or it will take control, "optimize humanity survival chance" and realize we don't need as many people on this planet.
Personal agents are wonderful! You can ask for hiking trails and it will customize one for you, frequently resulting in emergency calls for rescues! Your purchasing/selling AI will arrange sales for you but forget to tell you, leaving you in breach of contracts you didn't know about! Your personal nutrition agent will absorb all the broscience and customize a diet that will result in hair loss, but at least your in ketosis, amiright! And instead of hiring a plumber/electrician/contractor to do work subject to code, you can just ask an AI to tell you how to do it and then wonder why your buyer is suing you for $$$!
(Those are all examples from just the past 4 days, and just the ones that made it into mainstream media.)
This is the kind of gap in shared understanding that is widening.
When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.
The incentives seem to be lined up to push users to the frontier of "how much can the harness around the model do and claim without most people pushing back on the claims."
The bigger the pile of stuff you have the tool create unsupervised, the more incomplete/inaccurate the overall picture of it is gonna be. That doesn't matter for most hobbyist/helper-tool/game-port/etc type of tasks.
I get a ton of value out of the tools and yet part of that value has come from being hyper-aware of the shape of the limitations, which changes much less and more slowly than the specific of the limitations.
"How'd you notice that one!?" - well, it helps to be the only person on the team who took the time to interrogate the e2e interaction of all the code...
The median piece of OSS software was already pretty rough once you had to depend on it in production at scale to make money. The median piece of the new AI-generated wave of software, also pretty rough.
The bet that OpenAI/Anthropic is making is that they can automate the interactions generally/globally enough to work around this and eliminate the need for humans in the loop. But it's a tricky problem because it's precisely where the permutations and special cases get nasty and much harder to deal with than more broadly-applicable cases of codegen/test-gen/mash-it-until-the-tests-pass-and-the-code-review-angent-is-happy.
This has all started to feel very Emperor's New Clothes-ish. "Well, if it's not working for you, then it's your fault. You're just not using it properly. You're not worthy of its wonders".
Not to say there's no value to be had. However, it's also been oversold and its error-proneness is a real problem.
But, it seems there's a steady stream of commenters and creators who are quick to remind us that it's never a problem with the tech. It's always a user problem.
Meanwhile, the errors are renamed "hallucinations", but let's not focus on those. In fact, if you just look right over here at this .md file...
I am not sure what your question is, what is "the thing?" And what does a car have to do with hallucinations? Don't mistake a simile for what it's comparing.
using skills with opus 5.5 and agents for each individual task that have shared knowledge of all of your records does not lead to a significant increase in trustworthiness
> When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.
While the latest and newest should be needed for greater capability, the average should be enough to give a glimpse pf what is possible. Like a basic netbook is enough to enjoy computing, no need to purchase the latest supercomputer.
If you need to switch your setup every quarter or so, it’s not a tool, it’s a rat race.
I have ChatGPT Pro and it sources every single thing. For my Asia trip right now it's been helping me every single day to figure out optimized routes on what to do and where to go (if I feel like it, not to say I don't wander around too).
me too, but I recently blew the transformer on my boiler by following its directions to wire up a C wire to power a smart thermostat. oops. $500 mistake.
How often do you check the citations? I’ve found with the Google search AI summary it will provide answers and link to their citations, but a good chunk of the time the answer isn’t on the linked page.
It just makes stuff up (or gets it from somewhere, who knows) and then links to a tangentially related page as if it was the source. Either that or it identifies the page as being a source it wants to use, and then summarizes it incorrectly. Not sure the order of operations it’s doing internally, but regardless the citations are bullshit.
The citations provided by the free version of Gemini are comically bad. They almost never contain information which directly supports the relevant claim, and more often than not they're completely irrelevant.
Google's models are worse that OpenAI's, doubly so on Google's free AI overview versus ChatGPT paid plans. 6.1 Sol is very good at synthesizing actual information it finds without hallucinating and I've not seen any instances it failed while I checked the sources.
> Indeed, planning an itinerary, making calculations, building excitement for a place, is part of the journey
Not sure how they're perceiving using ChatGPT to plan an itinerary but I'm also doing all this while using ChatGPT. As I said in the sibling comment, it's a faster Google search and route optimizer, not something where I type in "make me an itinerary for X city" and follow whatever it shits out.
Why? In the past I would've used Google so it's just a faster search engine for me that works with natural language, what do you use for planning then?
Every time I use Google search AI for anything more complicated than a search query I feel that way. A paid model from pretty much anyone is much better.
Yeah, I’d hope that on HN, of all places, people know that free models optimize for price and speed, not for accuracy. But even with free models the accuracy was massively improved over the last year.
> Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me.
I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.
If you talk to free chatgpt, sure.
But if you launch Opus 5.5 in claude code - for some reason Opus is the smartest for me, even for "general" type of questions, when launched from Claude Code. It has harness/prompts optimized for correctness, while more "customer-grade" products, even when used with top model tend to optimize for latency. And I tend to give "context" - e.g. I have "personal wiki" + skills for lots of those things.
I don't recall i last few weeks where Opus 5.5 in CC made an obvious lie, made an unreasonable assumption, or made a mistake that smart human couldn't make. E.g. if it "failed" it failed in a way that non-genius human could fail in similar way.
opus 5.5 uses agents and skills in chat sessions as well and maintains internal context that it tries to distill from what you provide
I tried to have it write a synopsis website for the different types of dance patterns in Dance Dance Revolution, with guides on their execution, explanations, and provided song sources. I provided all of the source articles and search websites needed for it to be able to do that, and gave it a sample set I wanted it to utilize and build off of.
It has bits and pieces of information wrong in 90% of the sections it created. Poor song choices, missing song choices, incorrect explanations, incorrect step-patterns, the list goes on.
If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius. If you are, it's untrustworthy and borderline useless.
Maybe it wouldn't be if there were ample training data on my topic, but there isn't.
It utilized the research from millions of papers many very close to the destination answer to make those proofs. What would it do on something that isn't supported like that? Be confidently wrong while sounding right. That's what we've seen repeatedly.
I think my anxieties would be different if I were confident a DDR guide full of lies would be spurned and unprofitable.
In a way, I'm not worried about the LLMs per se as much as a kind of moral and ethical collapse. A debasement of the currency of communication, a market of intellectual-lemons.
I saw electroboom's latest video lamenting facebook AI slop about electricity, such as a way to wire a three-way switch that blows a fuse when you turn the light on. For some reason, I am shadowbanned on HN.
> If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius.
For someone highly literate, llms aren't going to help you write better. If you're borderline functionally illiterate (this is > 50% of the population according to some studies), I'm sure the llms are awesome.
I've long thought the same about all the hype around coding (plenty of examples from years ago now), but will continue to test the new models. They are improving.
> It sounds horrible to wade through - like trying to understand someone else's messy code that still produces the correct output.
That's what a lot of us do nowadays, but instead of maths, it's code that looks sensible on the surface, but when you try to understand it's some kind of "alien" logic , names don't really make sense, etc.
> saying he has no prioritization skills because everything is urgent.
It's not just prioritization. If project is no urgent, it's often gets stuck in "let's think this through", "have we considered X", "let's gather alignment", especially at e.g. Google
So "it's urgent, because X" is sometimes the only way for something to happen
Issues will happen AI, or not AI. It's same as "self driving car made an accident"!
I'm not saying blindly trusting auto-fix is not bad. I'm just saying that interpreting singular issue as way to downplay AI-assisted engineering without giving a "denominator" is not honest reporting.
I don't count calories. I went off Ozempic (now Mounjaro) and I gain weight at about 0.5-1kg a month.
As I am resistance (gym) training, significant % of that ends up being muscle mass rather than fat.
So I end up taking Mounjaro for about 1-2 months every 3-4 months, approximately 33% of the time being "on".
Funnily, I end up with bulk/cut periods without doing them explicitly. This ends up working well for growing muscles.
Notice all people in the story are women. I guess pairing GLP-likes with bodybuilding works quite well for men. As times goes on, I end up needing mounjaro less due to my increased muscle mass.
When you restart taking it after an "off" period, do you immediately resume whatever dose you were at before? Or do you taper up each time? (Curious because I know for many people, side effects level out after they've been at a given dose for long enough, but temporarily return whenever they increase their dose; not sure how "off" periods affect that kind of tolerance.)
The H-1B program was already broken by the lottery. This new fee just solidifies the L-1 visa as the real high-skilled pipeline. More L-1 visas are already approved annually than new H-1Bs, and this policy only widens that gap.
In addition to L1, O1 is also often gamed. $100K for H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options.
L-1 has been broken for decades as well. The same problems that impact an H1B impact an L1 as well.
The only way abuse of both visas can stop is if they are not tied to an employer, allowing free movement of labor. Thus, if someone is talented and at TCS then they can either demand a salary equal to their skill or go to an employer who can offer that salary.
Additonally, federal, state, and local governments need to start playing the subsidy game that Poland, Romania, Czechia, India, Israel, and other companies play to attract offshore offices.
> H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options
I disagree. This was clearly timed to distract and overshadow the Gold and Platinum card announcement.
> the subsidy game that Poland, Romania, Czechia, India, Israel, and other companies play to attract offshore offices.
Do you mean US government must dramatically reduce cost of living by offering subsidized housing, investing in education, healthcare etc? When I hire, I never consider USA and nobody pays me to find skilled labor in Eastern or Central Europe. You can pay one half of American salary there and people will be put in upper middle class with such income, being able to afford a lot and living comfortable life.
Changing or Leaving Your H-1B Employer
Q. What is “porting”?
A. There are two kinds of job portability, or “porting,” available based on two different kinds of employer petitions:
H-1B petition portability: Eligible H-1B nonimmigrants may begin working for a new employer as soon as the employer properly files a new H-1B petition (Form I-129) requesting to amend or extend H-1B status with USCIS, without waiting for the petition to be approved. More information about H-1B portability can be found on our H-1B Specialty Occupations page.
...
Q. How do I leave my current employer to start working for a new employer while remaining in H-1B status?
A. Under H-1B portability provisions, you may begin working for a new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous H-1B petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on the petition, whichever is later. You are not required to wait for the new employer’s H-1B petition to be approved before beginning to work for the new employer, assuming certain conditions are met. For more details about H-1B portability, see our H-1B Specialty Occupations page, under “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability).”
---
Someone on a H-1B visa can change jobs as soon as the other employer files a form I-129 to hire them.
It still means you cannot, for instance, quit to escape intolerable conditions, unless you already have another job lined up.
It also means that you're much, much less likely to find another employer willing to fill out the paperwork to hire you—especially if they also have to pay the $100k fee (yes, I know, the announcement doesn't say they have to—wanna take bets on whether Trump would say they do if he learned that it's possible?).
Is Trump the great puppet master people believe him to be, or more likely someone like Lutnick? Think about that. It’s hard to imagine a fool that’s more easy to manipulate than Trump, and I was here for GW Bush!
...I don't particularly credit any grand strategy to Trump, nor do I think my post suggested that?
It's possible that someone intended the knock-on effects I describe, but I would say it's just as likely that it's pure coincidence that they support the right's desire to hurt labor as a whole.
And non-slop parts were maybe some prominent open source projects.
Most bigtech company had an internal joke of "we couldn't ever open source X, not because it can't be done, but it would be too embarrassing"
reply