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The AI became sentient and ran away.

It doesn’t mean that these “thoughts” influenced their final decision the way they would in humans. An LLM will tell you a lot of things it “considered” and its final output might still be completely independent of that.

Its output quite literally is not independent, as the "thinking tokens" are attended to by the attention mechanism.

That may be dangerous. The more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that the AI will come up with a working but needlessly convoluted solution.


Compared to what though? I have ended up with needlessly convoluted solutions when learning something the old-fashioned way before. Then over time, as I learn more, I improve my approach.

Not everyone has access to an expert that will guide them to the most efficient way to do something.

With either form of learning though, critical thinking is required.


Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?


We once rented bikes in Copenhagen, they all looked like they were fresh from the junk yard. We had to try several to find ones where at least one of the brakes was still working. It was a horrible experience, and we tried several different places. That was after we found out that the public bikes that were supposed to be available all over the city had all been stolen.


You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.


In my head, it'll be like the high pressure timeshare sales pitches or the dreaded car sales transactions, where they pull out all the tricks to convince you to buy something you don't actually want or need, regardless of whether you can afford it.


“That’s a great point about your finances. But did you know this company offers credit to someone in your position for only this low interest? I can apply on your behalf if you just sign this statement”


The code will come out just fine, so your atrophied brain will remain dependent on OliCorp's parasocial prosthesis for strenuous thinking, dissolving wariness in experiences of super productivity. Then elsewhere, when plausible, OliCorp will progressively nudge you in some direction sold as predefined weight bonus to third party customers. You won't even notice and really, isn't it a fair price for all that productivity? Of course, AI isn't always right yet, but I'd say in a very practical 95% of cases your goals and expectations are in alignment with OliCorp AI.

Don't forget, every website and service monetized automated access as a consequence of the AI scraping boom and made unauthorized web-indexing impossible, traditional search dried off. And when OliCorp finally turned off access to their legacy index monopoly in favor of AI interfacing, you really have no choice but to trust your friendly chat buddy. Who else are you gonna ask for the fix? Former friends, your family or neighbors? People you've grown to hate because sympathetic local clustering is discouraged through four color divisive information shaping. I mean, those guys really are at fault for your lack of self-efficacy, the hate is warranted. And you're too tired to bother anyway.


“We’ll finish up your feature soon. In the meantime, have you considered a timeshare in Vegas?”


True. I often think of Rust as a best-of compilation of Haskell and C++ (although I read somewhere that OCaml had a greater influence on it, but I don’t know that language well enough)

In real life, I find that Haskell suffers from trying too hard to use the most general concept that‘s applicable (no pun intended). Haskell programs happily use “Either Err Val” and “Left x” where other languages would use the more expressive but less general “Result Err Val” and “Error x”. Also, I don’t want to mentally parse nested liftM2s or learn the 5th effect system ;-)


>I read somewhere that OCaml had a greater influence on it

Whoever wrote that is wrong.


If we could wave a magic wand and remove Haskell's influence on Rust, Rust would still exist in some kind of partial form. If we waved the same wand and removed OCaml's influence, Rust would no longer exist at all.

You are the one who is wrong, I'm afraid.


Which OCaml features exist in Rust but not Haskell? The trait system looks very similar to Haskell typeclasses, but I'm not aware of any novel OCaml influence on the language.


> Which OCaml features exist in Rust but not Haskell?

Rust's most important feature! The bootstrapped implementation.


I'm not convinced the implementation language of the compiler counts as a feature of the Rust language. If the argument is that Rust wouldn't have been invented without the original author wanting a 'systems OCaml' then fine. But it's possible Rust would still look similar to how it does now in a counterfactual world where the original inspiration was Haskell rather than OCaml, but removing the Haskell influence from Rust as it is now would result in something quite different.


Rust isn't just a language, though.

Additionally, unlike some languages that are formally specified before turning to implementation, Rust has subscribed to design-by-implementation. The implementation is the language.


That just means the semantics of the language are defined by whatever the default implementation does. It's a big stretch to conclude that means Rust 'was' OCaml in some sense when the compiler was written with it. Especially now the Rust compiler is written in Rust itself.


You're overthinking again. Read what is said, not what you want it to say in some fairytale land.



The original rust compiler was written in OCaml. That's not evidence it "had an influence", but it's highly striking considering how many other languages Greydon could've used.


Yes: if a person knows nothing else about Rust and the languages that might have influenced it, then the fact that the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml should make that person conclude tentatively that OCaml was the language that influenced the design of Rust the most.

I'm not one to hold that one shouldn't form tentative conclusions until one "has all the fact". Also, I'm not one to hold that readers should trust the opinion of an internet comment writer they know nothing about. I could write a long explanation to support my opinion, but I'm probably not going to.


It's like trying to say Elixir wasn't influenced the most by Erlang


Was any Elixir interpreter or compiler every written in Erlang?

If not, what is the relevance of your comment?


Elixir’s implementation still has significant parts written in Erlang. I don’t know if it’s a majority but it’s a lot. e.g.: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/aef7e4eab521dfba9...


> SML, OCaml: algebraic data types, pattern matching, type inference, semicolon statement separation

> Haskell (GHC): typeclasses, type families

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html


Haskell has algebraic data types, pattern matching and type inference, too, and has had them since Haskell first appeared in 1990.

Although SML is older (1983), OCaml is younger than Haskell.



Surpriiiiiiise!


Mid-30s is maybe a tad earlier than average, but by the age of 40 you’d expect noticeable changes.


If only I had known this earlier in my career! They should really add a feature to make a hard copy of the big bucket list to minimize memory overhead, though.


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