For me it's not about the capabilities but what they can be used for. Think of all the recent drama between Anthropic and the Department of War. A real wake up call (especially if you are not a US citizen). Proves that AI is essentially a Surveillance and Warfare technology (which justifies the big valuations).
AI automatically analyzes all your social media posts in your life and can generate a pretty accurate profile about you in a second. We have no privacy anymore. Social media sites like Reddit already do that for moderation. Others do for more sinister reasons.
Note that Profiling is illegal in many countries. But laws can't protect us anymore.
Yes, it was always possible to that manually. But with AI it's so easy, fast and accurate to do in large scales. A hacker having access to your computer, reading your mails and messages is one thing. An AI reading and analyzing all your mails, messages and data is something different. Doing this for whole demographics (Cambridge Analytica style) is at another level.
> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics.
On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy.
If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works.
Also with this mindset that we can't understand seemingly complicated things, there would be no advancement in science and technology.
I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering.
Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers.
That's my point. Everything from 1927 is already in plain sight and a part of the current public knowledge. Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges.
> On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy.
People in philosophy and cognitive linguistics do read AI research. Don't get fooled by the publishing dates: although Heidegger's work dates from 1927, the work is contemporary. The same happens with Dreyfus' work. Again, publishing dates don't mean anything here.
Maybe you can clarify why they are outdated.
> If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works.
I would say that people involved in the critique of AI do know how it works. But I've found that is normally the case that people in AI research does not have the framing provided by works in philosophy or cognitive linguistics.
> I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering.
What do you base your claims on? Plenty of philosophers work in humanities, literature, sociology as well as science and engineering. Philosophers not catching up? The critique on automation and AI already dates from the early 20s if not before.
> Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers.
Sorry, but this does not make too much sense. Hinton and LeCun are great in their own fields. But seriously, they are not philosophers, they are inventors.
The First Edition (1995) of the classic textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig talks about the criticisms of Dreyfus quite extensively.
In the second edition (2003) they conclude:
"In sum, many of the issues Dreyfus has focused on-background commonsense knowledge, the qualification problem, uncertainty, learning, compiled forms of decision making, the importance of considering situated agents rather than disembodied inference engines-have by now been incorporated into standard intelligent agent design. In our view, this is evidence of AI's progress, not of its impossibility."
In the 4th edition (2020) Dreyfus reduces to a paragraph and Heidegger is just a reference in a footnote.
I have that book at home and I'll check as soon as I get back from a trip.
When Dreyfus' book appeared in 1972, it received really harsh criticism from the then AI community. Dreyfus actually comments on that criticism in the revised 1992 edition.
I just don't see how Dreyfus critique of AI has been dealt with in modern AI: the critique is aimed at fundamental issues, not at the technical issues.
It is true that the critique written by Dreyfus is based on GOFAI algorithms from the 60s, but it is also true that if you read the book today, you'll find lots of similar situations and a similar way of thinking about the possibilities of AI, as well as the same underlying assumptions.
And as a side note, outdated means that it does not apply anymore, or that is not relevant anymore. Which is different from 'establishing a dialogue' with the text/author, in a way that 'seems' not to be relevant anymore. If you say that Dreyfus' book is outdated just because the 4th edition of Norvig's text only mentions it in a footnote, you are assuming that Norvig and Russell's opinion are definitive. They might be not.
I have authors like Norvig, Russel, LeCun, Minsky and other in the field in high regard. But they are normally not trained in either modern linguistics nor philosophy. Let alone the rest, large amount of researchers in the field. AI research is a complex field, and maybe (in this we could follow Foucault) not even a science. Doing research in an area of study does not turn it into science.
It is precisely philosophy, and even more contemporary philosophy, the discipline that focuses on how we build knowledge, and how we experience the world. Two really important, almost fundamental, topics that directly contribute to how AI is developed as a field of knowledge.
I see people give too much importance to specific engineering design choices of the current generation of LLMs. Tokenizer is not an absolutely essential part of the system. It’s just and adapter for text input/output. It can be eliminated completely and model can use bytes directly.
I think the short story captures this well. Weights (connections) are the essential and philosophically important part. They do the thinking, memory, singing etc.
A tokenizer is roughly and approximately Huffman-coding sequences of input (bytes of English etc) into shorter sequences (list of tokens), as a performance optimization.
As you said, it's not in any way intrinsic to the LLM, though it may be a very necessary optimization on today's hardware.
IMO, we are probably talking about a 6x slow down (for typical english). You would need to be absolutely stupid not to implement some kind of optimisation along these lines.
Slower and maybe a little dumber; But it would work.
My thinking is that for most tasks, a byte-orientated LLM still needs something like the wide "single activation per word" formatting that the tokeniser mostly provides. And it will likely waste its first and last few layers implementing a replacement tokeniser (and would probably do a much better job at it). It would also need to decode and encode unicode at the same time.
My estimate is that it might lose about 10% of its weights to these new tasks. Your 80B parameter model becomes as smart as a 72B parameter model - Measurably dumber, but not drastically so.
I’ve worked in VR for a long time (including visionPro) and my eyesight definitely got worse. The most ironic thing to me is how iPhone has this screen distance warning telling you to move the screen further from your face while Vision Pro is literally an iPhone strapped to your face.
I was told the issue isn’t the physical distance of the screen to your eyes, but the distance of where your eyes are focusing? So in VR if you focus on an object a meter away it shouldn’t strain your eyes as much as a phone screen 10cm away? No idea if this is scientifically proven.
Your eyes are still looking at an object (roughly?) 10cm away from your face: the screens. Your eyes are not adjusting focus. Any focus (or blur) you see in VR is simulated depth.
So yes, the issue is indeed the distance where your eyes are focussing, caused by the fact that they're constantly focussing on something very close to your face.
My optician told me its like stretching your arm while holding something heavy. At first that's no problem. But eventually your muscles will start burning and you can't hold it and even when you relax your arm it still hurts if you held it for too long.
As far as I'm aware there are no VR headsets yet that adjust the live generated depth vision based on the diaphragm of your eyes. That would be wild.
> Your eyes are still looking at an object (roughly?) 10cm away from your face: the screens. Your eyes are not adjusting focus
Technically you can absolutely have something close to your face but focus your eyes far away. If you wear glasses you do that all the time. Just imagine that your glasses are like screens that reproject what's behind them.
You're not totally wrong because there are two components to focusing, one is rotating eyes according to how far is the object and another adjusting each eye's lens. AR/VR can cause them to mismatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence%E2%80%93accommodation...
However the screen imitates focal plane a bit in the distance and THAT's where your eyes are focusing. There's still can be a mismatch because it's a fixed distance, but your eyes are NOT focusing like you strapped a phone to your head which is what you are implying.
(Actually I heard AVP dev guidelines recommend to avoid putting objects too far and too close to keep everything near focal plane probably to miminize the mismatch.)
I want to Ask HN relating to this: What can be the motivation behind this change? Is this the preferred way of using AI coding tools nowadays? I've been using Antigravity mainly because of its tab completions. So I can work in code like in a traditional way and AI assists me. But it was a broken experience and now they are moving away from IDE based tool. The alternative is you write the prompt and it does everything. Is this the standard SW development workflow in 2026?
This is how they want you to use AI-powered apps. The more ambiguity there is between you and the end result, the likelier you are to keep paying them to avoid friction.
The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.
Yes, this is the standard model for the big frontier models. You don't need Gemini or Claude to do tab completions. A modest size local model can do that just fine. If that is all you are using AI tools for you are wasting money subscribing to Google.
It is the new standard. It sounds awful until you try it, and then you can't go back. But you can still use an IDE as well to edit code by hand and review changes that agents have made.
But you are asking logical questions. You are thinking and talking too much for a World citizen in 2026. "Reasoning" is a reserved word for chatbots now, so we humans are not allowed to do that anymore. We can only obey like a bot and pretend all the lies they tell are the truth.
BTW I live in Turkiye where the government banned ALL the adult websites around 2008. Even as an adult you can't access them. This year they are banning VPNs, introduce age controls and ID verification COORDINATED with the rest of the world. Also banning some games, control social media, and basically make it legal to control and track everyone on the internet. What a coincidence that similar attempts are simultaneous in many independent countries.
And no, children have not been really protected in Turkiye since 2008.
Grab a SIM-card from Bulgaria with roaming enabled. Internet is routed through the Bulgarian ISP even when you are in Turkiye. Full internet access, no VPN required.
Until the three representatives from Bulgaria and the ones from the other EU countries win out lobbying for ChatControl and expand it to VPNControl too.
You must be an American? Only Americans act like they get to define what the rest of the world calls places. It’s Gulf of Mexico. Only a country of idiots would call it gulf of America.
Do you see anyone making Koreans call it Sea of Japan? Americans can call it whatever they want as long as Americans never try to lecture others what it is called. Deal?
Oops, someone forgot languages evolve! Otherwise you must use Turkye, one of the Middle English spellings.
The United Nations agreed to their request, it’s a minor thing to let people spell it the way that was requested. You don’t have to, but others can. Languages evolve.
Twitter/X is a company, it calls itself whatever it wants, and is likely registered somewhere under a specific name. Okay, people don’t call it X, the same way people pronounce IKEA weirdly or refer to vacuums as hoovers.
Language is a malleable, artificial construct. What’s your point? That some people are stuck in their ways? Because the comment I was responding to was appalled that someone dares use the modern spelling for a country.
I have never heard someone call Belarus White Russia, notably any of the Belarusians or Russians I know. I have no idea why someone would do that. Of all the hills to die on...
It's pretty arrogant for a foreigner to tell me how to spell his county name in my own language, which doesn't even have those letters in an alphabet. All while adding -stan suffix to my country name in their language.
The name "Turkey" has been in the English language for many centuries. It's a bit of a tall order to suddenly demand that everyone start using a different name for the country. Imagine if England suddenly demanded that everyone call them Aengelande.
The government decided to do this because they're embarrassed that a bird has the same name as the country. Ironically, the bird is named after the country.
Without me getting into the specific issue, that's false. Languages evolve by how they are used, regardless whether who uses them is native speaker or not. All languages who have been at some time used "universally" in larger regions evolved reflecting that reality.
This is a genuinely dumb take and you should feel foolish for even thinking it.
Incase you dont, consider the concept of telling an Austrian that German is a foreign language for them. If this concept confuses you, I can get wikipedia links.
Thank you for telling me how I should feel! I will take it to heart and next time I'm in any doubt over how I am feeling I'll ask myself "how would LAC-Tech expect me to feel right now?" and change my feelings accordingly.
Funnily enough, on the HN zeal to prove you wrong about this, posters who dont know know about this topic dont actually realize Turkey dont give a damn about the Anglicanized name outside diplomatic context
As a human, in the photo of that sandwich I see 4 slices of bread and 4 slices of cheese (distributed unevenly). I have no idea about the weight of the bread, flour type or its sugar content. I don't know the type of the cheese, dimensions of the slices or total amount of cheese inside the bread. I don't know if there is butter or anything else inside. I can guess the size of the plate as a size reference but I can't be sure. Human or AI, it's an ill-posed problem. There can be widely different estimates which can be equally plausible.
There is a parameter in LLMs called temperature that controls creativity/randomness. If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic. I think some LLMs expose this as a tunable parameter.
> "Thirteen food photographs were each submitted 495–561 times to four LLM vision APIs (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) using an identical structured prompt adapted from the iAPS automated insulin delivery system (26,904 total queries, temperature 0.01)"
They're next word predictors. They explicitly add in randomness at various stages of the transformer itself, otherwise it'd be too obvious it's not actually intelligent and just a next word predictor
Or see this simple and fun site: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
AI automatically analyzes all your social media posts in your life and can generate a pretty accurate profile about you in a second. We have no privacy anymore. Social media sites like Reddit already do that for moderation. Others do for more sinister reasons.
Note that Profiling is illegal in many countries. But laws can't protect us anymore.
Yes, it was always possible to that manually. But with AI it's so easy, fast and accurate to do in large scales. A hacker having access to your computer, reading your mails and messages is one thing. An AI reading and analyzing all your mails, messages and data is something different. Doing this for whole demographics (Cambridge Analytica style) is at another level.
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