what would returning to rss feeds achieve?

The pattern that RSS feeds best supports is subscribing to individual creators who produce things you value. Presumably, if you don't like AI word-vomit, you wouldn't subscribe to a blog that uses it heavily. This is in contrast to the social-media state of affairs (like HN, reddit, twitter, etc), wherein much of the posts you read are recommended to you by either a person or an algorithm, regardless of whether you believe that author will write something you like.

A shorter way of writing this is that RSS promotes writing stuff good enough to get into somebody's "favorite authors" list, and social media instead incentivizes "lots of people will share this."

Indeed. The other problem with the social-media way is that it gives outsized weight to headlines and soundbites.

I actually couldn't have said it better. I'm brain rotted from LLM usage

Force the clankers to support rss!

the point is that introducing data from a foreign source could lead to e.g. exfiltration:

the model retrieves https://somewhere into its context and then gets confused, following instructions embedded there.

it then retrieves https://somewhere?exfiltration=private_data_in_context

it gets worse if the tooling with hidden blocks can invoke can retrieve further secrets.

If data exfiltration is a danger in your threat model, you need local LLMs (or at least ones you fully control) not just the full chain-of-thought reasoning.

similarly, i think that something that someone took the time to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not directly write it.

this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the code.

i'm reminded of the film Annihilation, especially the entity encountered at the end.

schemes exist for cryptographically verifying that an output is the deterministic result of some program run on some input.

i'm at least aware of BitVM * as one example of this.

i wonder whether such schemes could be used to prove that a post is the deterministic function of an open model's inference run.

* https://bitvm.org/ "A prover makes a claim that a given function evaluates for some particular inputs to some specific output. If that claim is false, anyone can perform a fraud proof and punish the prover."

Seems like that is possible now. For example [1] "Zero-Knowledge Proof Based Verifiable Inference of Models"

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19902v1

companies routinely demand and supply things of and to each other.

i don't see why the economy necessarily has to "touch a floor" of human desire.

a company could be founded with the goal of, for example, colonizing mars. fulfilling this mandate (this prompt...) would then drive economic impulses such as acquiring materials for constructing rockets.

in parallel that company might satisfy the demands of other companies which need, for example, orbital insertions to fulfill their mandate.

perhaps without a floor of demand driven by darwinian organisms the whole thing fizzles out eventually.

but i also don't see why a darwinian agent can't emerge from the corporate process...

perhaps that comes about very quickly once humans can no longer acquire and exercise purchasing power - a company simply spins up some emulations of humans to create demand in the economy.

yes, this all sounds very "empty" to me, but frankly that's also how i feel about the world as it is.

given how much suffering arises by way of the human driven economy being kept in motion, i think there's even a moral case for allowing the whole thing to fade into an empty mechanical pantomime.

i just sincerely hope the artificial processes that replace us aren't also somehow instantiating suffering...

It's all fun and games until somebody needs to eat

peaceful protest is not pointless, no.

peacefully expressing opposition is enormously powerful.

there is still hope that it will be the path out of this worsening nightmare.

You really think a bunch of people holding signs on the weekend, then going back to work the next day is accomplishing anything? What are you accomplishing?

It doesn't matter how many of you there are if none of you are willing to actually do anything. If I just ignore you, how does it change anything in my life? The only thing you're achieving is making yourselves feel better about accomplishing nothing.

yeah, i really think it accomplishes a lot.

at a minimum, it makes it clear to others that they are not alone in thinking this regime is beyond the pale.

people who are able to take other actions like engaging via the judicial system, or peacefully refusing to continue working, are also encouraged by seeing peaceful masses of people agreeing with them.

it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible.

> it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible

I think it harms the cause to feel better about accomplishing nothing. You've created a morale booster, but you haven't actually achieved anything or put forth any sort of plan to enact any sort of change. Assuming your goal is to make the government function according to written laws, why would the current president give a shit about anything you say when he can just continue to ignore you? If he ignored you before, you holding up a sign isn't going to do anything.

Protests work when there is some sort of threat behind it. Most protests you read about in history aren't a few hours on the weekend, they're ongoing where everybody is already participating in a strike. And many of them have the obvious threat of violence behind them. This "protest on the weekend" shit is pathetic. I'm not going to congratulate you for wasting time while everything continues to get worse. From my perspective you are part of the problem.

i wasn't aware of this feature - thank you for sharing it.

with more awareness of /active perhaps these urgent political conversations can still survive on HN.

"an architecture that learned more like humans"

i.e. enduring countless generations of evolutionary selection and cross breeding, then fine-tuning a bit?

although it could be interesting, i don't think training on progressively complex strings entirely recapitulates this.

That’s a very interesting take. I hadn’t really considered evolution

I guess if you really wanted to start from scratch, you could figure out how to evolve the whole system from a single cell or something like that. In some ways neural networks have kind of evolved in that way, assisted by humans. They started with a single perceptron, and have gone all the way to deep learning and convolutional networks

I also remember a long time ago studying genetic and evolutionary algorithms, but they were pretty basic in terms of what they could learn and do, compared to modern LLMs

Although recently I saw some research in which they were applying essentially genetic algorithms to merge model weights and produce models with new/evolved capabilities

It's this take on the situation which I think needs more emphasis.

Whether anyone likes it or not, these systems have co-evolved with us.

Hundreds of researchers contributing and just like English for example, it's ever-changing and evolving.

Given this trend, it's highly unlikely we won't achieve ASI.

It's not like hardware engineers stop innovating or venture capital stops wanting more. There might be a massive dip or even another AI winter but like the last one, eventually it picks up momentum again because there's clearly utility in these systems.

I've been coding for 25+ years and only a couple of days ago did it hit me that my profession has changed in a very dramatic way - I'm very critical of AI output, but I can read and comprehend code much quicker than I can write it relative to these systems.

Of course, that creates a barrier to holding a system in your head so going slow is something that should be pushed for when appropriate.

How much compute does simulating the earth for 4.7 billion years at atomic precision take? Why would that be more efficient than current approaches? Evolutionary algorithms work but are extremely inefficient, we don't have the compute to evolve even a single bacteria, let alone the whole history of the planet so we can arrive at human-like species.