Unlurker

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies (sytse.com)

so many of these now. it is so sad and scary. been thinking about prenuvo all the time now but not sure if thats going to help or make me more paranoid.

When it comes to cancer, there is an awful lot of legacy thinking and "way things are done" taking lives. Starting with the so called "standard of care", which makes patient lose precious treatment windows while they wait for a possible miracle from "first-line drugs" from thirty and forty years ago which frankly are not that good. But it's hard to reform because the fraction of people who ever think about cancer as a problem to be solved is quite small; and it ought to be far larger, given that cancer is the second or even first leading cause of death across much of the world. I wish Elliot Hershberg every success.

I'm pretty much a pessimest when it comes to fighting cancer. I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field. But I've seen people close to me die of cancer and it seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease. I agree that the standard first attacks are very crude and have broad systemic side effects and the attitude seems to be "you'll die without this so that doesn't matter."

The linked post about his treatment is basically a vanity article; low in useful information, but high in vague assertions and platitudes. There's also a link to a post griping about the red tape someone experienced while trying to self-treat their dog's cancer that's weird. I clearly live in a different world than these people.

There's a crazy story in here where Sytse invested in a click chemistry cancer research startup (Shasqi) in 2017 and ends up becoming a customer six years later. I sincerely hope it works out for him.

It's mentioned in the slide deck on the url linked. I highly recommend clicking through all the slides. It's absolutely one of the most fascinating decks I've come across. His sheer will to want live is impressive and inspiring.

Maybe it's time for him to give the metabolic cancer theory a go and try to bump up his mitochondrial function as much as possible? It's practically untestable due to science testing all compounds in isolation instead of a cocktail over longer period of time that can't be properly controlled even if it might be true. Every single cancer cell has a damaged mitochondria and often switching it properly on leads to cancer cell's apoptosis. He should also take desloratadine as some Swedish hospital observational study showed a significantly increased survivability on all tumor types with it. Some people had success with the combination of DCA, R-ALA, B1 HCl megadoses >2g, CoQ10 + PQQ, glucosidic astaxanthin, nattokinase/serrapeptase/lumbrokinase, low-dose aspirin, pancreatic enzymes and lactoferrin, with complete removal of fructose from the diet (as the cancer explosion can be correlated with years when fructose started getting introduced into diet in large quantities).

You said it’s untestable but then said a Swedish hospital did a study on it? I don’t see why things can’t be tested over a long term. There are many such studies.

Swedish hospital study was about desloratidine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33550204/ Metabolic theory of cancer is untestable in practice as you can't control all variables over long time.

https://time.com/7213490/why-are-young-people-getting-cancer/

Kudos to Sid for trying it and hopefully it benefits others in the long run. Not everyone has the money, will or commitment to do this. My own father died with a battle of myeloma, a blood and bone marrow cancer, after 2 years, it wasn't the disease specifically that got him, it was the secondary conditions that caused irregular heart rhythm and eventually one day it stopped and no one was there to help. 2 stem cell transplants, rounds of chemo, almost full failure of kidneys. The cancer did its job. Ultimately what I'm saying, the medicine gives us time, but no one beats death. Maybe the treatment gives us time to come to terms with that, hopefully my dad did. I was in total denial. Anyway good luck to you Sid. All the best to all the cancer survivors out there, and to the loved ones who lost them.

Most people slow down when something like this hits. Starting companies is a very specific way of refusing to.

Really awesome that he was able to do this and give back, but none of this would have been possible without his unfathomable wealth and access.

And all of a sudden, I was bestowed with the greed to acquire more money than I can spend in a single lifetime. If I get cancer, I'd rather be rich and be able to do stuff like that, rather than die quietly.

This is an excellent use of his wealth and skills. Much better than Steve Jobs' response. I remember reading a similar article about a (cancer?) patient who used 3D printing for his personalized cure.

There are grad students babying organoids right now. Saturday morning. If you can work a pipette you can do this.

According to some online sources his total wealth is under $3B. Hardly ‘unfathomable wealth’ IMO. Sure, billionaire territory but nowhere near the ultra-wealthy.

Friend, $3B is unfathomable wealth for an individual.

I can fathom 3B, I can’t fathom 300B

3 billion is ultra wealthy, you can't be serious.

It’s entry-level billionaires club. The top 10 each hold $100B–$300B+, so the wealth distribution is extraordinarily skewed even within billionaires themselves. Musk is hundreds of times richer. Hardly obscenely rich.

It's entry-level obscenely rich club.

I must be talking to AI

That's not a "but". Because he developed wealth and access, this is possible for one person when before it wasn't possible for anyone. This is how societies developed everything from refined sugar to rockets, as they passed various thresholds where individuals could afford to try things out.

> ...but none of this would have been possible without his unfathomable wealth and access. ? What's that supposed to mean? Is that bad? You can do the same thing as he did, what's stopping you?

wealth and access that is merely fathomable

Wealth is mostly based on either luck and more often heritage.

Feeling inspired?

It’s more like I hope more bad things happen to rich and powerful people so they start doing something against it. As long as it happens to ordinary people most of then hardly care. Reminds me of the GOP who was against stem cell treatments until Reagan got Alzheimer‘s

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

RSA and Python (xnacly.me)

I have a different take on the same topic: https://www.nayuki.io/page/java-biginteger-was-made-for-rsa-cryptography My article isn't written as a step-by-step tutorial and doesn't come with example numbers. But mine does fill in certain things that xnacly doesn't cover: random prime generation, efficiently calculating the decryption exponent d from (n, e) by using a modular inverse, using modular exponentiation instead of power followed by modulo.

The way the article uses RSA is no better than a simple substitution cipher. Both the "l"s in "hello" are enciphered to 2575. It's a newspaper cryptogram. You're supposed to concatenate all the input numbers, to create a message that has hundreds or thousands of digits; then RSA-encrypt that number.

One of the bigger hurdles in implementing RSA is having an algorithm which can multiply the large numbers in real time. If you try a niave multiplication algorithm, you might find you'll never get an answer. A lot of hardware now comes with special instructions which implement efficient algorithms for doing this.

Sure, you can't use built in multiplication, but it isn't a very big hurdle. Just use repeated squares, it's fairly trivial to implement. I've worked on software that did this on very low power mobile payment devices.

RSA is one of those algorithms where understanding it once actually sticks.

Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008 (finance.yahoo.com)

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot. This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude! This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That prevents the AI from meaningfully using tools or being multimodal or anything else their competitors have. If they added a $200/month many of their issues would go away.

Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol

Microsoft is one of the least likely large companies to benefit from an AI boom. They don’t have the capacity to support OpenAI and their own foundational models, they aren’t providing a compelling story for wrapping OpenAI, windows continues to suck… OpenAI signed an agreement with GCP , that should say a lot.

Once we are able to run language models on any consumer hardware with good T/s Windows will become an absolute powerhouse just like it did in gaming with DirectX. Any application will be able to be AI infused and the API to do so will be consistent and free to the business offering it.

If one were to think a major stock market crash was coming up, led by the AI bubble bursting, but reinforced by the major self-own that is the Iran war, how would one best prepare ones investments?

Either you need the cash now and are already in short-term treasuries or you're it it for the long-term and you'll be laughing at this question when the Dow hits 100k.

The advice I have heard is if you think there will be a significant drop in the market you liquidate all your holdings while they are still high and then rebuy when the price is low. Granted this is a gamble though, if you’re wrong then you just sold all your stock and are no longer participating in the market plus you need to pay capital gains tax

You can go all cash so not risking leverage via shorts, etc. But a lot of folks think that's dumb. I feel better being in cash right now as the mental stress of big loses in middle age is not worth the missed gains if I'm wrong. To each their own.

You don’t think the US dollar will take a dive along with US stocks?

I decompiled the White House's new app (thereallo.dev)

Are those references to 45 and 47 "Easter Eggs" to Trump's presidency number(s)? As in, forty-five-press (45th president) and Version 47.x.x (47th president), as well as the text message hotline (45470).

Is this a surprise to anyone?

The comments in here are pretty rich. If this was any other app, everyone would be screaming about "why are you being mean to the author", flagging posts left and right.

Are you upset people are being critical of a shabbily run government program?

That is some impressive willful ignorance. “If it was anybody else threatening to beat this guy up for what he was saying, you’d probably praise them. But a cop does it one time and …”

A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article. I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a commonly invoked function.

The permissions snippet they show also doesn't include location, and you can't request location at runtime at all without declaring it there. I'd verify all this stuff for myself, but Play won't install it in my phone so I can't really get the APK. Maybe because I use Graphene...? but I don't know all the ways they can restrict it, maybe it's something else (though for a pixel 9a it's rather strange if it's hardware based).

> it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article The article does not claim the app requests the location. It claims it can do it with a single JS call.

It can request with a JS call. It can't passively collect it without you approving first. The article is written like calling that JS function will turn on location tracking without consent.

He explicitly says he can't determine it, but that the location tracking as configured will turn on once the user grants consent. All true statements. How would you have written it differently

> The article does not claim the app requests the location. It claims it can do it with a single JS call. so can ... any other code anywhere on a mobile device? That is how API work...

You need to state the permissions you *may* request/use in AndroidManifest.xml. This data can then be displayed to users pre-installation. From the (limited) article, it doesn't seem they do this: https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app#permissions ---- EDIT: I'm mistaken. From the Play Store[0] it has access to * approximate location (network-based) * precise location (GPS and network-based) [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.whitehouse.app&pli=1 This seems to disagree with: > The location permissions aren't declared in the AndroidManifest but requested at runtime *shrug*, someone should dig deeper. It looks like the article may not match reality.

what version are you on? from the iphone app store: version 47.0.1 - minor bug fixes - 34 minutes ago while the parent posted 18 minutes ago they may have patched the location stuff as part of the “minor bug fixes”?

I have the iOS version from yesterday, haven't updated the app yet. No location permission request prompting encountered. In system settings, where each app requesting location data is listed, it isn't present either.

Interesting. The site is nearly unusable to me unfortunately. '19 MBP w/ Chrome - scrolling stutters really bad

I agree, the website of the original article is kinda terrible

Scrolling is extremely poorly behaved on that page for me too, Firefox 149 Windows 10. Which is quite ironic coming from an article that mainly criticizes the web dev aspects of the app!

"An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls." In their defense, this is the first thing the Trump admin has done that's unambiguously positive for ordinary people.

Indeed. I'd love it somehow taken out of it and made available for the general public. Custom uBlock / Adblock filers will be probably the easiest.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right (theregister.com)

My gf has been asking ChatGPT about relationship advice and sometimes early on in our relationship delegated some decisions to the clanker. For example something like “we are arguing about X too much is this a sign the relationship is not healthy.” Eventually she realized that it’s just a probabilistic machine and stopped using it for “therapy.” It’s just insane to think how many other people might be making decisions about their relationship from an AI.

Is there a good prompt addition to skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong?

I believe this is what they call yasslighting: the affirmation of questionable behavior/ideas out of a desire to be supportive. The opposite of tough love, perhaps. Sometimes the very best thing is to be told no. (comment copied from the sibling thread; maybe they will get merged…)

I’ve found a good counter is “imagine I am the person repressing the other side of this disagreement. What would you say to me”

I just tell a new instance and a different provider the core idea and see if they like it too

Trouble is an LLM can test for something being logical in isolation, or coherent unto itself. It’s much weaker at anticipating what will be meaningful to other people which is usually what people are actually looking for.

When a LLM tells me I'm right, especially deep in a conversation, unless I was already sure about something, I immediately feel the need to go ask a fresh instance the question and/or another LLM. It sets off my "spidey-sense". I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave that. Every time I read about someone who has gone down a dark road using LLMs I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient. It's just a box of numbers, really cool numbers, with really cool math, that can do really cool things, but still just numbers.

I think is more about how people are using LLMs. If you are using it to write code, you really care about correctness and can see when it is wrong. It is easy to see the limitations because they are obvious when they are hit. If you are using an LLM for conversation, you aren’t going to be able to tell as easily when it is wrong. You will care more about it making you feel good, because that is your purpose in using it.

> If you are using it to write code, you really care about correctness and can see when it is wrong. I heavily doubt that. A lot of people only care if it works. Just push out features and finish tickets as fast as possible. The LLM generates a lot of code so it must be correct, right? In the meantime only the happy path is verified, but all the ways things can go wrong are ignored or muffled away in lots of complexity that just makes the code look impressive but doesn’t really add anything in terms of structure, architecture or understanding of the domain problem. Tests are generated but often mock the important parts the do need the testing. Typing issues are just casted away without thinking about why there might be a type error. It’s all short term gain but long term pain.

Although I do think they're not conscious (yet). I think the reasoning 'it's just math' doesn't hold up. Intelligence (and probably consciousness) is an emergent feature of any sufficiently complex network of learning/communicating/selforganizing nodes (that is benefited by intelligence). I don't think it really matters whether it's implemented in math, mycelium, by ants in a hive or in neurons.

The "it's just math" argument may not be technically rigorous, but it's directionally correct. The unstated reasoning invites us to consider why this particular math would be conscious, but not many other forms of math all around us.

I think this is the root of why people defend AI in some circumstances. They feel a give-for-get type of relationship where the AI continuously (and oft incorrectly) reinforces them. And so they enjoy it and subconsciously want to defend that "friendly". No different than defending a friend that you inherently know may be off base.

I don’t know, I think it has to do with people using AI for completely different reasons. Using AI for coding is different than using it for art generation which is different than using it for conversation. I think many people feel some uses are good and some are bad.

I'm seeing people that are technically savvy defend mediocre code and consumption based output (think technical briefs and reports). When the flaws in the output is highlighted in many cases it's brushed off as "good enough" or "nobody will care / notice". I think LLMs and more aptly SLMs have use cases. I enjoy using these tools to make quick work of simplifying and faster iteration of these relatively frequent but time consuming tasks. But I'm always correcting and checking. And very rarely, other than simple and focused scripts does any LLM truly get it right every time. Has it gotten better? For sure. Will it keep getting better? Probably. But right now we seem to be topping the "peak of inflated expectations". And LLMs aren't getting much more efficient with respect to the frontier providers. And in fact if you listen to Altman it seems as though the only reason he would be asking for so much capital and finite resources is that he knows if he controls those tangible things he will lock out competition. But I'm hopeful that it spurs real innovation into SLMs that are truly useful, dependable and can be relied on in more of the traditional in the sense of deterministic software operations. AI for art is dead. It's got some mediocre use cases but true art will not be generated by LLMs in our time. It's ultimately an amalgamation of existing art. I know the argument over what is novel or not keeps being rehashed, but we're not seeing truly new styles of art out of Nano Banana and the like. Coding is the same thing, only we're seeing a resurgence of obviously flawed software being pushed into production on the weekly. And as for conversational AI... Well, that reeks of the worst version of social media we could ever have dreamt. Nobody should trust any provider with personal conversations and we'll keep seeing these models show how truly dystopian they can be over the coming years as leaks and breaches expose how these conversations are being bought and sold to the highest bidders to extract more money and control over its users. They all have a common thread: deep rooted flaws that cannot be contained in the traditional fences of software. And there guardrails are just that: small barriers that can easily be broken, intentionally or unintentionally.

At the moment, maybe Google Search, throwing away the AI response at the top? Or Duck Duck Go, if you don't really trust Google? I can see a day when even that won't be trustworthy, because too much AI slop output will wind up in the search corpus. But I don't think we're there yet.

> At the moment, maybe Google Search, throwing away the AI response at the top? Or Duck Duck Go, Even past the summary and the ads a huge amount of results that come back from both google and DDG are AI generated. It's sometimes harder to find a reliable source for information in search results these days than it was 20 years ago.

Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. Their only mental model comes from science fiction, plus the simple fact that we possess a theory of mind. It would be astonishing if people were able to casually not anthropomorphize LLMs, given that untold millions of years worth of evolution of the simian neocortex is trying to convince you that anything that talks like that must be another mind similar to yours. Also, many many people suffer from low self esteem, and being showered with endorsement and affirmation by something that talks like an authority figure must be very addictive.

> Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. We need to be very very careful here. Just like advertisements work, weather you think you're immune or not, so does AI. You might think you're spotting every red flag, but of course you think so. You can't see all the ones you missed. Do not make the mistake of thinking that being techy somehow immunizes you from flattery. It works on you too.

> Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. We're on HN, a highly technical corner of the internet, yet we see the same stuff here. It's not just non-technical people... I think one of the big dangers is that people (including us) are quick to believe "I'm better than that". Yet this is a bias conmen have been exploiting for millennia. The only real defense is not lulling yourself into a false sense of security. You're less vulnerable (not invincible) by knowing you too can be fooled Honestly, it's just a good way to go about getting information. There's a famous Feynman quote about it too. The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool

I agree with your conclusion, but that's by design. The goal is not to tell people the truth (how would they even do that). The goal is to give the answer that would have come from the training data if that question were asked. And the reality is that confirmation is part of life. You may even struggle to stay married if you don't learn to confirm your wife's perspectives.

>And the reality is that confirmation is part of life. Sycophantic agreement certainly is, as is lying, manipulation, abuse, gaslighting. Those aren't the good parts of life. Those aren't the parts I want the machine to do to people on a mass scale. >You may even struggle to stay married if you don't learn to confirm your wife's perspectives. Sorry what? The important part is validating the way someone feels , not "confirming perspectives". A feeling or a perspective can be valid ("I see where you're coming from, and it's entirely reasonable to feel that way"), even when the conclusion is incorrect ("however, here are the facts: ___. You might think ___ because ____, and that's reasonable. Still, this is how it is.") You're doing nobody a favor by affirming they are correct in believing things that are verifiably, factually false . There's a word for that. It's lying . When you're deliberately lying to keep someone in a relationship, that's manipulation . When you're lying to affirm someone's false views, distorting their perception of reality - particularly when they have doubts, and you are affirming a falsehood, with intent to control their behavior (e.g. make them stay in a relationship when they'd otherwise leave) - ... - that, my friend, is gaslighting . This is exactly what the machine was doing to the colleague who asked "which of us is right, me or the colleague that disagrees with me". It doesn't provide any useful information, it reaffirms a falsehood, it distorts someone's reality and destroys trust in others, it destroys relationships with others, and encourages addiction — because it maximizes "engagement". I.e., prevents someone from leaving . That's abuse . That, too is a part of life. >I agree with your conclusion, but that's by design All I did was named the phenomena we're talking about (lying, gaslighting, manipulation, abuse). Anyone can verify the correctness of the labeling in this context. I agree with your assertion, as well as that of the parent comment. And putting them together we have this: LLM chatbots today are abusive by design . This shit needs to be regulated, that's all. FDA and CPSC should get involved.

> The goal is to give the answer that would have come from the training data if that question were asked. Or more cynically, the goal is to give you the answer that makes you use the product more. Finetuning is really diverging the model from whats in the training set and towards what users "prefer".

There are times when trying to use Claude for coding that I genuinely get annoyed at it, and I find it cathartic to include this emotion in my prompt to it, even though I know it doesn't have feelings; expressing emotions rather than bottling them up often can be an effective way to deal with them. Sometimes this does even influence how it handles things, noting my frustration in its "thinking" and then trying to more directly solve my immediate problem rather than trying to cleverly work around things in a way I didn't want.

What are the odds that Anthropic is building a psychological profile on you based on your prompts and when and how quickly you lose control over your emotions?

Two things can be bad at the same time

don't hate the player, hate the game

I've observed this in all chatbots with the single exception being Grok. I initially wondered what the Twitter engineers were cooking to to distinguish their product from the rest, but more recently it's occurred to me that it's probably just the result of having shared public context, compared to private chats (I haven't trialled Grok privately).

In my experience Grok is the least likely to push back on crazy ideas out of all major chatbots and it’s more often wrong on technical matters. Although I suppose this isn’t necessarily bad. I go to Grok for subjective explorations.

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice (news.stanford.edu)

I believe this is what they call yasslighting: the affirmation of questionable behavior/ideas out of a desire to be supportive. The opposite of tough love, perhaps. Sometimes the very best thing is to be told no.

Overly, compared to what? Most people I know would be hard pressed to give either accurate information or even honest opinions when specifically asked. People want to be liked and people want to like people for reasons that have little to do with accuracy or honesty.

Has anyone found a good prompt to fix this? It seems like a subtle problem because it’s 90% too agreeable but will sometimes get really stubborn.

There is no sufficient prompt because this is trained into them during mid-late phases. It's ingrained into the weights

This needs to be taken in context. In my view, AI definitely gives better advice than friends, acquaintances, or colleagues (at least in the US culture). But the advice from parents is still the most valuable. Here is how I would rank it: 1. Parents 2. AI 3. Friends and family 4. Internet search 5. Reddit

Why do you trust ai so much? I don’t trust it to tell me the sky is blue.

Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.

It's almost like it is based on the training data and regimen that is largely the same between versions.

Pretty sure the average Redditor is AI now.

How the hell is a study on stanford.edu assuming posts on Reddit are genuine? That should be enough to get you kicked out of Stanford.

I would say people on /r/amitheasshole are more biased towards the poster, i.e. nicer. There's plenty of those I've read where I thought it sounded like the poster was the asshole and the top replies were NTA.

It’s gendered, by the way Many of the posts are A/B tests of a prior post where only the genders were flipped of the OP and antagonist to see how the consensus also flips

Absolutely. I wonder how many parents have been no contacted, SOs broken off with, friendships broken because of the Reddit hivemind's attitude. Pretty sure it's doing a huge amount of societal damage.

I wouldn't blame reddit, it's what you get when you ask several thousand teenage girls to give collectives advice.

Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision. Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. The fault is on me, to be clear, as LLMs are just a tool. The issue is that lots of LLMs try to come across as interpersonal and friendly, which lulls users into a false sense of security. So I don't know what my trajectory would have been if I were a teenager with these powerful tools. I do think that the LLMs have gotten much better at this, especially Claude, and will often push back on bad choices. But my opinion of LLMs has forever changed. I wonder how many other terrible choices people have made because these tools convinced them to make a bad decision.

Weird, i am using copilot and it steers me mostly towards self reflection and tries to look at things objectively. It is very friendly and comes across as empathetic, to not hurt your feelings, that is probably baked in to keep the conversation going...

I’m struggling to understand how the advice coming from an LLM is any more or less “good” than advice coming from a human. Or is this less about the “advice” part of LLMs and more about the “personable” part, i.e. you felt more at ease seeking and trusting this kind of advice form an LLM?

It is much easier to share personal feelings with an llm, i found. Also it tried to keep me happy to get the conversation going, but for me it feels mostly 'objective' or the most socially acceptable advice, e. g. keeping a good relationship is more important than trying a new one with someone else because you 'feel something' around them. For me it tried to find out together the sources or causes of that feeling, e.g. you recognize parts of yourself in someone else or in the past you had very good or very bad experiences around an encounter.

Nice joke, hadn't seen it coming

Sounds like AI-written, eh? :-D (esp last sentence?)

I recently found out that Claude's latest model, Sonnet 4.6, scores the highest in Bullsh*tBench[0] (Funny name - I know). It's a recent benchmark that measures whether an LLM refuses nonsense or pushes back on bad choices so Claude has definitely gotten better. [0] - https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html

Good call on censoring yourself preemptively, otherwise HN could demonetize your comment

You can't be careful at all doing this, this is like smoking a cigarette in a dynamite factory. Using LLMs for therapy is so deeply dystopian and disgusting, people need human empathy for therapy. LLMs do not emit empathy. Complete disaster waiting to happen for that individual.

My experience is that it tries to look at your situation in an objective way, and tries to help you to analyse your thoughts and actions. It comes across as very empathetic though, so there can lie a danger if you are easily persuaded into seeing it as a friend.

It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. Definitely agree about talking to an abuser, though. Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps. But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.

> It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. They have world knowledge and are capable of explaining things and doing web searches. That's enough to help. I mean, sometimes people just need answers to questions.

With AI, I often like to act like a 3rd party who doesn't have skin in the game and ask the AI to give the strongest criticisms of both sides. Acting like I hold the opposite position as I truly hold can help sometimes as well. Pretending to change my mind is another trick. The idea is to keep the AI from guessing where I stand.

Sounds like rubber-ducking with extra steps, tbh.

Thats a fair point on the title. I used "Yes-Men" as a colloquialism for the "sycophancy" described in the Stanford paper, but overly affirming or sycophantic is definitely more precise and neutral. I cant edit the title anymore, but I appreciate the catch.

All good. I thought it was a gendered reference and learned that it isn't. My bad.

OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie in the sky. When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice? And, relatedly, where the hell do you even find humans who believe in discursive truth-seeking in 2026CE? Because for the last 15 years or so I've only ever ran into (a) the kind of people who will keep arguing regardless if what they're saying is proven wrong; (b) and their complementaries, those who will never think about what you are saying, lest they commit to saying anything definite themselves, which may hypothetically be proven wrong. Thing is, both types of people have plenty to lose; the magic wordball doesn't. (The previous sentence is my answer to the question you posited; and why I feel the present parenthesized disclaimer to be necessary, is a whole next can of worms...) Signs of the existence of other kinds of people, perhaps such that have nothing to prove, are not unheard of. But those people reside in some other layer of the social superstructure, where facts matter much less than adherence to "humane", "rational" not-even-dogmas (I'd rather liken it to complex conditioning). But those folks (because reasons) are in a position of power over your well-being - and (because unfathomables) it's a definite faux pas to insist in their presence that there are such things as facts , which relate by the principles of verbal reasoning. Best you could get out of them is the "you do you", "if you know you know", that sort of bubble-bobble - and don't you dare get even mildly miffed at such treatment of your natural desire to keep other humans in the loop. AI is a symptom.

I genuinely do not understand what u are saying. Because reasons, because unfathomables? Everyone in last 15 years has been an npc? I have had countless deep conversations with people and i am an uber introvert. This reads like someone who is deep into their specific pov. You cannot hope to have a meaningful conversation if you yourself are not willing to concede a point. To the op u are replying too, arguing with people can have real consequences if u say something stupid or carelessly. There is a another human there. With a machine, u are safe. At least u feel safe.

AI slop bot go away

Fair enough if it reads that way. I was trying to describe that interacting with AI kinda makes you feel constantly uncertain about stuff it spits out.