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Posted by __rito__ 12/10/2025

Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight(karpathy.bearblog.dev)
Related from yesterday: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632
686 points | 270 commentspage 7
mvdtnz 12/10/2025|
Do we need more AI slop on the front page?
gaigalas 12/10/2025||
I am not sure if we need a karma precog analogue.

It does seem better than just upvotes and downvotes though.

collinmcnulty 12/10/2025||
> But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good.

I cannot believe this is just put out there unexamined of any level of "maybe we shouldn't help this happen". This is complete moral abdication. And to be clear, being "good" is no defense. Being good often means being unaligned with the powerful, so being good is often the very thing that puts you in danger.

doctoboggan 12/10/2025||
I've had the same though as Karpathy over the past couple of months/years. I don't think it's good, exciting, or something to celebrate, but I also have no idea how to prevent it.

I would read his "Best to be good." as a warning or reminder that everything you do or say online will be collected and analyzed by an "intelligence". You can't count on hiding amongst the mass of online noise. Imagine if someone were to collect everything you've written or uploaded to the internet and compiled it into a long document. What sort of story would that tell about who you are? What would a clever person (or LLM) be able to do with that document?

If you have any ideas on how to stop everyone from building the torment nexus, I am willing to listen.

karpathy 12/10/2025|||
Thank you
collinmcnulty 12/10/2025||||
This is my plan at least

1. Don't build the Torment Nexus yourself. Don't work for them and don't give them your money.

2. When people you know say they're taking a new job to work at Torment Nexus, act like that's super weird, like they said they're going to work for the Sinaloa cartel. Treat rich people working on the Torment Nexus like it's cringe to quote them.

3. Get hostile to bots. Poison the data. Use AdNauseum and Anubis.

4. Give your non-tech friends the vague sense that this stuff is bad. Some might want to listen more, but most just take their sense of what's cool and good from people they trust in the area.

Teever 12/10/2025|||
Do you have any suggestions on how to interact online with people who work at Torment Nexus?
magic_hamster 12/10/2025|||
This seems to me like a form of social engineering, or to some extent, being a bit insufferable. And, rest assured it will not result in anything useful. The only result of this is that you will alienate your friends and colleagues if they work for an employer you don't like.
tensor 12/10/2025||||
I think we need to stop focusing only on the AI aspect of this. Yes, it's an important component to the sort of mass surveillance system you're describing, but it's not the only component. The internet, advertising, privacy, all of these are integral to this outcome.

While I don't have a general solution, I do believe that the solution will need to be multi-faceted and address multiple aspects of the technologies enabling this. My first step would be for society to re-evaluate and shift its views towards information, both locally and internationally.

For example, if you proposed to get rid of all physical borders between countries, everyone would likely be aghast. Obviously there are too many disagreements and conflicting value sets between countries for this to happen. Yet in the west we think nothing have having no digital information borders, despite the fact that the lack of them in part enables this data collection and other issues such as election interference. Yes, erecting firewalls is extremely unpalatable to people in the west, but is almost certainly part of the solution on the national level. Countries like China long ago realized this, though they also use firewalls as a means of control, not just protection (it doesn't have to be this way).

But within countries we also need to shift away from a default position of "I have the right to say whatever I want so therefore I should" and into one of "I'm not putting anything online unless I'm willing to have my employer, parents, literally everyone, read it." Also, we need to systematically attack and dismantle the advertising industry. That industry is one of the single biggest driving factors behind the extreme systematic collection and correlation of data on people. Advertising needs to switch to a "you come to me" approach not a "I'm coming to you" approach.

flir 12/10/2025|||
That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun.

Don't know why that just popped into my head.

consumer451 12/10/2025|||
It's nice that the LLM-enabled panopticon still cannot find this very recent related media, [0] but my silly mind can. It is actually an interesting commentary from a non-tech point of view. This is how the rest of the world feels:

Anyway, back to work trying to make my millions using Opus and such.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1pj5bg9/al_companies...

thatguy0900 12/10/2025|||
Well the companies that facilitate this have found themselves in a position where if they go down they take the US economy with them, so the maybe this shouldn't happen thing is a moot point. At least we know this stuff is in stable, secure hands though, like how the palantir ceo does recorded interviews while obviously blasted out of his mind on drugs.
cootsnuck 12/10/2025|||
To be clear...prior to this recent explosive interest in LLMs, this was already true. Snowden was over 10 years ago.

We can't start clutching our pearls now as if programmatic mass surveillance hasn't been running on all cylinders for over 20 years.

Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely care about this, everyone should. I'm just saying any vague gestures at imminent privacy-doom thanks to LLMs is liable to be doing some big favors of inadvertently sanitizing the history of prior (and still) egregious privacy offenders.

I'm just suggesting more "Yes and" and less "pearl clutching" is all.

panarky 12/10/2025||
Who, exactly, is the "we" who you see "pearl clutching" instead of "yes and-ing"?
Teever 12/10/2025||
The time for discussion and action on this was over a 15 years ago when Snowden and the NSA with their Utah data centre was a big story.

Governments around the world have profiles on people and spiders that quietly amass the data that continuously updates those profiles.

It's just a matter of time before hardware improves and we see another holocaust scale purge facilitated by robots.

Surveillance capitalism won.

Uptrenda 12/11/2025||
dude, please do this for every year until today. This idea is actually amazing. If you need more money for API credits im sure people here could help donate.
siliconc0w 12/10/2025||
Random Bets for 2035:

* Nvidia GPUs will see heavy competition and most chat-like use-cases switching to cheaper models and inference-specific-silicon but will be still used on the high end for critical applications and frontier science

* Most Software and UIs will be primarily AI-generated. There will be no 'App Stores' as we know them.

* ICE Cars will become niche and will be largely been replaced with EVs, Solar will be widely deployed and will be the dominate source of power

* Climate Change will be widely recognized due to escalating consequences and there will be lots of efforts in mitigations (e.g, Climate Engineering, Climate-resistant crops, etc).

pu_pe 12/10/2025||
The infamous Dropbox comment might turn out to be right in 10 more years, when LLMs might just build an entire application from scratch for you.
rafaelmn 12/10/2025|||
I'd take the other side for most of these - Nvidia one is too vague (some could argue it's already seeing "heavy competition" from Google and other players in the space) but something more concrete - I doubt they will fall below 50% market share.
xattt 12/10/2025||
You’re about 20 days short or 345 days late for this HN tradition. ;)
huflungdung 12/11/2025||
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throwaway984393 12/11/2025||
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artur44 12/10/2025|
Interesting experiment. Using modern LLMs to retroactively grade decade-old HN discussions is a clever way to measure how well our collective predictions age. It’s impressive how little time and compute it now takes to analyze something that would’ve required days of manual reading. My only caution is that hindsight grading can overvalue outcomes instead of reasoning — good reasoning can still lead to wrong predictions. But as a tool for calibrating forecasting and identifying real signal in discussions, this is a very cool direction.