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What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
2•beardyw•6m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•7m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•9m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
2•surprisetalk•9m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•9m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
2•pseudolus•10m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•10m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•11m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•11m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
3•obscurette•12m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•13m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•17m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•19m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•19m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•20m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
7•derriz•20m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•20m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•21m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•22m ago•0 comments

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•24m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
1•edward•25m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•27m ago•1 comments

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/neutron-scans-reveal-hidden-water-in-famous-martian-meteorite
1•geox•28m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•29m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•31m ago•2 comments

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-delays-mars-plans-to-focus-on-moon-66d5c542
1•BostonFern•32m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu9368
73•jbotz•8mo ago

Comments

th0ma5•8mo ago
Oh I thought this was going to be about the cult like in group signaling of LLM advocates, but this is a thing imagining language patterns as a society instead of language patterns of a society being a bias that the models have.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•8mo ago
This sounds dismissive, but it is interesting in two more obvious ways:

1. The interaction appears to mimic human interaction online ( trendsetter vs follower ) 2. It shows something some of us have been suggesting for a while: pathways for massive online manipulation campaigns

th0ma5•8mo ago
Oh !!
dgfitz•8mo ago
It’s funny how we seem to be on this treadmill of “tech that uses GPUs to crunch data” starting with the Bitcoin thing, moving to NFTs, now LLMs.

Wonder what’s next.

kevindamm•8mo ago
Accelerating the calculations done in probabilistic programming languages.
mjburgess•8mo ago
Any evidence this can be done, research literature-wise?
kevindamm•8mo ago
just a few picks in no particular order

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2945379/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11154

https://lips.cs.princeton.edu/pdfs/liu2024generative.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05440

musicale•8mo ago
The twilight of Moore's law and diminishing returns for CPUs are driving a shift to GPUs and other accelerators. GPUs seem to do well for streaming/throughput type workloads.

What's interesting that Nvidia has managed to ride each of these bubbles so far.

otabdeveloper4•8mo ago
GPUs are incidental here, a dedicated SIMD coprocessor for matrix multiplication would be much better. We'll ditch GPUs eventually.
lostpilot•8mo ago
Crazy - this is saying agents develop their own biases and culture through their engagement with one another even if the individual agents are unbiased.
Animats•8mo ago
That may be reading too much into this behavior. Watch this video of metronomes self-synchronizing.[1] That's a pervasive phenomenon. Anything with similar oscillation frequency and coupling will do this. (Including polling systems with fixed retry intervals.)

Are you sure that's not just this effect?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs

drdaeman•8mo ago
Yes, but aren't cultures essentially the same way - people grouped together getting influenced by each other actions and ending up learning from each other (introducing bias into individual agents), doing things together, appreciating similar stuff, talking in particular ways and so on? AFAIK, "culture" essentially means "stuff that goes in in this particular space and time".
Animats•8mo ago
The article hypothesized leaders and followers. That's not necessary. Drift towards the mean, plus some noise, is sufficient.
lou1306•8mo ago
I briefly worked on synchronized applause (well, a toy discretised cellular automata-like model of such), and the individual agents don't even need to know the mean, or to receive continuous feedback (which is what happens with synchronised metronomes).

As long as they can infer a collective pace from listening to the general loudness in the room, they can do very basic adjustments to their own clapping rhythm=phase and they will get in sync.

And applause is just a stand-in for any locally periodic behaviour with regular signals (claps) which can be aggregated (more claps = louder).

Al-Khwarizmi•8mo ago
They make LLMs play a very abstract game that rewards them points from answering the same as the other, and punishes them from answering differently, and LLMs tend to converge to an answer. From that to "social conventions" there is a long, long stretch. The paper lacks a baseline - wouldn't much simpler (non-LLM) systems also exhibit the same property? Is it that surprising that systems that are clones of each other (because they didn't even try "mixed societies" of different LLMs) agree when you give them points for agreeing?

Maybe I'm missing something but in my view this is pure hype and no substance. And note that I'm far from an LLM skeptic and I wouldn't rule out at all that current LLMs could develop social conventions, but this simulation doesn't really show that convincingly.

amelius•8mo ago
I wonder when we will see LLMs being used to test economic theories.
laughingcurve•8mo ago
Already exists in the current literature
tmpz22•8mo ago
And much of the current writing
falcor84•8mo ago
Interesting, any particular such paper(s) that you'd recommend?
tbrownaw•8mo ago
As obviously silly as this is, could it actually be useful for getting the observed phenomena acknowledged by people who might just tune out is presented with the underlying math that makes it individually?

How much overlap is there between people who think llms are magic and people who don't approve of applying math to groups of people? And how many in the overlap have positions where their opinions have outsized effects?

ggm•8mo ago
So how many systems aside from Grok started to espouse Afrikaaner propaganda, and how many systems aside from Meta started to be holocaust deniers?

or, are the walled gardens working to our advantage here?

otabdeveloper4•8mo ago
These things are trained on 4chan archives among other things, so all you need is a system prompt.