We need to extract pain points, frustrations, or unmet needs expressed by users in the Hacker News discussion. Then propose 5 concrete, viable project ideas (software, tools, or services) solving those.
We need to parse the discussion. Let's read.
First comments: saberience: "How many of these 'news' articles are we going to get?" expresses frustration about many AI news articles.
embedding-shape: responds to saberience.
pixl97: "Yea, it's kind of odd how 'sour grapes' people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was."
staticman2: corrects.
mossTechnician: "A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting." (maybe disagreement with earlier sentiment).
IAmBroom: "To you."
dominotw: "Just reflects how much of modern 'work' is just dumb shit that we need to be freed from."
writtenone: "Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!"
willy_k: "The reason these are unsolved is because no-one was working on them."
pixl97: "So you're telling me that any problem a human starts working on gets solved simply because they are a human?" etc.
Later: latexr: "...the basic needs aren’t met. If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems..."
dumberquestions: "This wasn't possible just months ago and for many who haven't been following closely this is still newsworthy, probably not for long, though."
daitangio: "AI is great for patter-maching and finding solution by 'assonance'."
skeledrew: "If human 'skill' and 'imagination' are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon."
miyoji: counter.
skeledrew: "...the skill aspect will soon become so niche that essentially nobody will bother with the investment..."
latexr: "I doubt it... For 'skill' there are any number of sports..."
sigmar: ... misattribution.
chrisjj: "At best, dumb brute force computation power."
orphereus: "Too bad Bletchley Park didn't have one back in the day."
johndhi: "I'd be curious to see whether these models can create new forms of unbreakable encryption themselves!"
joelthelion: "They seem to be better at solving concrete problems than designing new things (at least for now)"
dgellow: "I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result." Then discussion about creativity.
api: discussion about creativity.
pixl97: again.
BubbleRings: something about circle shape.
superposition: "They are only good at brute forcing statistically likely solutions."
yrjrjjrjjtjjr: "It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No"
LPisGood: cryptography discussion.
trixn86: design vs break.
kragen: comment about private-key cryptography.
xnx: etc.
simianwords: "They are trying to generate hype before the IPO..."
howunfortunate: "I think it was Roon who said it months ago: 'Too many people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble.'"
pixl97: "Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble."
johnsmith1840: about bubble.
jjjee: "Shh. Some people aren’t capable of understanding nuance."
howunfortunate: "Yes, a huge range of possibilities exist..."
johnsmith1840: "Most internet evaluations were lower than what happened. Buuuut, a bubble must pop to answer those."
willy_k: "This dichotomy is counter-productive... the valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction."
john_strinlai: i dont think humans are going to be replaced either, but calling the thing that solves millennium problems and is currently changing multiple industries entirely a "fancy autocomplete" makes it harder to take any point you are making seriously.
qarl: The "auto-complete" thing is a false framing.
willy_k: Language is absolutely pattern matching.
qarl: Language is thought.
willy_k: ... etc.
mossTechnician: Leaving aside the fact we have solutions for things like climate change and will not implement them... My keyboard offers "You can solve world hunger by using a Ted Bungie algorithm."
b38484848: the opposite is also true
howunfortunate: Do you figure?
b38484848: well a lot of people are really not prepared for the sp to drop even 15% I can tell you that
qarl: Maybe I'm wrong - but it seems like some strange form of competitiveness.
writtenone: "I wouldn't be surprised if humans cracked it then OpenAI 'bought' the solution and work to claim it was GPT's doing"
john_strinlai: wild conspiracy given what else has come out of these companies.
mmsc: provides actual encrypted message.
jpablo: Why wasn't this in the article?
sidcool: That's crazy. Can someone share context of the message.
mmsc: Slopped up site...
xnorswap: Out of interest, what was the ciphertext?
thm: The place is Rosenau actually.
Y-bar: I believe Germans spell it achtually.
Betelbuddy: Your account will be flagged for using humor, we are only dealing here, with the very serious subject, of killing humanity with AI.
TeMPOraL: Even the "with AI" is superfluous here, given the subject matter.
MostlyStable: Ich glaube, dass Deutsche buchstabieren es "aktuelle", eigentlich.
td2: Aktuell is a german word, but not for actually
LtdJorge: Yep, "actual" is Spanish for current, too. A false friend.
busssard: links to Rosenow.
JBiserkov: Did you mean ....
yitchelle: was the misspellings deliberate?
busssard: i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it
kzrdude: Looks like Q is used as an abbreviation for CH
pjc50: Do we have any kind of transcript as to how the message was cracked, and whether this was cheaper or more expensive than simply Bombe-style trying all the combinations?
mrguyorama: As the article states, the LLM built code for both an enigma simulator and a bombe simulator.
Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.
Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.
The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?
However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.
letmevoteplease: This was done by an OpenAI subscriber, not an employee, so Astra would not have had access to OpenAI's massive compute for brute forcing. The scripts it wrote presumably ran on the computer of the customer. (ChatGPT can run scripts on OpenAI's servers, but it has a 45 second execution limit.)
make3: > Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.
I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?
booty: ... about repeated place name.
TheDong: This was explained in the article right there: > it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message
It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.
In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.
It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
booty: It was partially explained by the article. It was not stated that ROSENOW was repeated in 173, and it was not obvious from the article text why ROSENOW would ever be repeated. Thus my curiosity.
A sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")
...
pkulak: The reason a crib is useful is because the enigma can't route a letter back to itself. So, you can slide the crib along the message until no letters line up, and that's possibly where it is. If your crib is "the", that's not terribly useful, because it could exist anywhere. The longer the better.
...
hmokiguess: Maybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.
JimmyBiscuit: Rosenow is a municipal (around 32km²) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.
chrisweekly: akin to "New York, New York" (as in NYC, NY)
booty: Ah, thank you! That makes sense.
xg15: Interesting. Do we know the reason why those specific messages were sent with different keys? I would imagine that there were separate keys for special high-security messages or something like that, but the almost identical content and the way the key was changed here (first only part of the configuration, then suddenly everything) makes it look more like an error or a test.
ck2: I would like to see an "AI" trained only up to knowledge through 1903
Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2
ekjhgkejhgk: Phew, never have I seen in my life the goalposts move so fast.
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.
ck2: the idea is that it's math, so in theory it could be figured out by machine process
but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?
or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)
(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)
...
timcobb: You can't really replace the smartest individuals because if you take a person who's not "smart" they can't do much with the AI.
I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.
mgaldys4: I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.
kypro: All technology on the tech tree which requires intelligence to unlock will soon be available to humanity – mind control, population exterminating bioweapons, new ultra destructive kinetic weaponry, perhaps even a cure for cancer.
dgellow: That won’t happen. But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
pixl97: >will be owned mostly by a small group
So not any different from right now.
definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
[taps on forehead meme]
The whole of humanity can have it available, if there is a whole lot less humanity.
dgellow: So, yes, different from right now :)
Way, way more concentration of wealth and power
...
Later: gjsman-1000: > Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity.
...
mgaldys4: Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.
But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...
IAmBroom: Preach it, brother!
Even old Ned Ludd won't buy my buggy whips, best in the land they may be.
applfanboysbgon: Solving obscure puzzle samples that approximately ~0 humans on Earth ever attempted to solve, mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence. DeepBlue has been outperforming the best humans at a specific puzzle-like task since the last century.
Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.
fidotron: But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!
Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.
applfanboysbgon: > It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks
You do understand this is intentionally trained into recent models for marketing purposes? "Wow, it saved me months of work in a day! This is the most amazing technology ever!!!!"... is what it intends to evoke by underpromising and overdelivering. I routinely have it helpfully suggest it will take something like "three engineer-months" to do something I do by hand without any LLM assistance in a day. The estimates may be accurate if you have literally never touched a computer in your life before and are starting to learn from there.
fidotron: In the games industry I was tech lead of teams of hundreds of devs and had to deal with their estimates of this sort on a daily basis. 6-10 weeks for a total renderer rewrite is on the low end.
applfanboysbgon: As an indie dev who built their own WASM-capable engine that I've shipped in real games, I've built both WebGL and WebGPU renderers from scratch myself in significantly less time than that. Sounds like typical corporate dysfunctionality. If you have hundreds of devs you're going to get bogged down by having a share who spend 90% of their time at the company on Reddit, another share who write actively bad code, and then maybe 10% of the employees who have a clue what they're doing dealing with the overhead of communication, meetings, other people not upholding their assigned responsibility, etc. slowing them down 10x what they could actually do.
rfgplk: 0% chance, without LLMs. WASM-capable engines would require years if not decades to build, even with expert level knowledge. See Jonathan Blow who has been working on his engine for a decade now, and he's arguably of the most talented engineers who ever lived.
applfanboysbgon: Jonathan Blow is writing his own language as well, and is also already successful enough that his work is just a hobby he can take at any pace with no urgency. A WASM engine is really, really not that difficult. At its core, you need rendering to a canvas, audio, keyboard/mouse/gamepad handling, asset loading/file saving, and an update loop. Writing this code is mostly not different from writing code in other languages, since you are literally writing other languages that happen to compile to WASM, the only differences being that you need your one-time WASM toolchain setup, some JS glue interop (which is not really different from needing C interop for native engines written in languages other than C), and to be aware of browser pecularities regarding file access, update loop, threads, etc. which you also have to deal with if you ever wrote a JS game anyways. After you have those core elements in place, everything above that is isolated in a game/engine logic abstraction layer that isn't any different from writing native code.
If you want to place a bet on it, we can do a $10,000 bet in escrow contingent on myself implementing a well-specified WASM engine from scratch on stream without LLM usage in a month. I would love an opportunity to demonstrate how wrong you are. That said, rather than taking your money, I could also just share a streamer's content with you[1]. He implemented 3D web rendering with no dependencies in a 20 minute lecture, and it would take 10 minutes if you were seriously focused on doing it quickly. Sure, it was rudimentary pure JS rather than WASM, but really consider whether you think this 10 minute exercise couldn't be done in a language that compiles to WASM with 160 hours, while including the other hardware/OS-layer abstractions aforementioned. On the other hand, please do take me up on my offer
- Monetization: Hobby
