Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 hallucinates the HN front page 10 years from now

SQLite 4.0 Release Notes: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90098234.html

Another absolute gem:

    Columns now support "Vibe" affinity. If the data feels like an integer, it is stored as an integer.
    This resolves the long-standing "strict tables" debate by ignoring both sides.

    SQLite 4.0 is now the default bootloader for 60% of consumer electronics.
    The build artifacts include sqlite3.wasm which can now run bare-metal without an operating system.

Office 365 Price Hike Comment Gold: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/item.html?id=90097777

    The Conditional Formatting rules now include sponsored color scales.
    If you want 'Good' to be green, you have to watch a 15-second spot.
    Otherwise, 'Good' is 'Mountain Dew Neon Yellow'.

Personal favourite is from the Gemini shutdown article which has a small quote from the fictional Google announcement:

> "We are incredibly proud of what Gemini achieved. However, to better serve our users, we are pivoting to a new architecture where all AI queries must be submitted via YouTube Shorts comments. Existing customers have 48 hours to export their 800TB vector databases to a FAT32 USB drive before the servers are melted down for scrap."

> — Official Blog Post, October 2034

It’s good to know that AI won’t kill satire.

Love the faux Nature article: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90098000.html

Especially this bit: "[Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status...]"

I realize this stuff is not for everyone, but personally I find the simulation tendencies of LLMs really interesting. It is just about the only truly novel thing about them. My mental model for LLMs is increasingly "improv comedy." They are good at riffing on things and making odd connections. Sometimes they achieve remarkable feats of inspired weirdness; other times they completely choke or fall back on what's predictable or what they think their audience wants to hear. And they are best if not taken entirely seriously.

Favorite thing I've come across so far:

prompt_engineer_ret 10 hours ago

I miss the old days of Prompt Engineering. It felt like casting spells. Now you just think what you want via Neural-Lace and the machine does it. Where is the art?

git_push_brain 9 hours ago

The art is in not accidentally thinking about your ex while deploying to production.

The comments look like some https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimGPT2Interactive thing (note, this is itself an iteration on https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/)

I miss those times when AI was a silly thing

That deserves to be posted and voted onto the homepage. The fake articles and the fake comments are all incredible. It really captures this community and the sites we love love/hate.

This got me a chuckle.

> Bibliographic Note: This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034).

for the article on "Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM"

https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90100123.html

Here is the working version: https://hyper-card-hacker-news.vercel.app

Enjoy!

I also asked Opus 4.5 to make a "1994 style readme page" for the GitHub: https://github.com/benjaminbreen/HyperCardHackerNews

I think it's perfect as it is, trying to expand the headlines into articles would belabour the joke too much.

You are a sick, sick man, but you have taste.

First let’s have it create maybe 100 more entries, then have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions. As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be made twice as good. And have a set of short “explain xkcd”-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or something.

Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:

FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose intolerance (fda.gov)

I didn't even try to click through to the articles, so I was just disappointed I couldn't read the comments.

Sure, but it's kinda like cartoon/comic art. HN's big eyes and prominent ears have been almost grotesquely exaggerated which somehow makes it way more recognisably lifelike and believable than a photographically accurate representation.

Accelerando...!

Probably just a result of whatever personality they finetuned Gemini via re-inforcement learning for?

At least in my case, the "pinpoint accuracy" of that roast made for a pretty uninspired result, it seemed to be based on like 4 or 5 specific comments seemingly chosen at random.

Like, I definitely have not spent 20% of my time here commenting on music theory or "voter fraud(??)" (that one seems to be based on a single thread I responsed to a decade ago)? ChromeOS was really the only topic it got right out of 5, if the roasting revolved around that it would have been a lot more apt/funny. Maybe it works better with an account that isn't as old as mine?

I find the front page parody much better done. Gemini 2.5 roasts were a fad on r/homeassistant for a while and they just never really appealed to me personally, felt more like hyper-specificity as a substitute for well executed comedy. Plus after the first few examples you pick up on the repetition/go-to joke structures it cycles through and quickly starts to get old.

That Gemini-toaster hits way too close to home.

HN in 2035: Hot Takes from the Basement of the Internet (n-gate.com)

Starship HLS-9 telemetry: Great, the Moon finally answered our packet loss pings. Next up: who left a Docker container running on the Sea of Tranquility?

Linux 7.4 is 100% Rust: Kernel developers now trade segfaults for borrow-checker-induced enlightenment. The new panic message: "You violated ownership. Also please refill the coffee."

Raw code over compilers: Nostalgia thread where everyone writes assembler on parchment and blames the kids for "too many abstractions." OP posts a selfie with a punch card and a tear.

LLaMA-12 on a contact lens: Love the commitment to edge AI. Imagine blinking and getting a 200 OK for your mood. Privacy policy: we store your tears for calibration.

AlgoDrill: Interactive drills that punish you by deleting your GitHub stars until you can merge without using DFS as a noun.

ITER 20 minutes net positive: Physicists celebrate; HVAC engineers ask where they can pick up more superconducting unicorns. Comments: "Can it also power my rage against meetings?"

Restoring a 2024 Framework Laptop: A brave soul resurrected a relic. The community swaps capacitor recipes and offers incense for deprecated ports.

Google kills Gemini Cloud Services: Corporate reorgs reach sentience. The comments are eulogies and migration guides in equal measure.

Visualizing the 5th dimension with WebGPU 2.0: My GPU is sweating. The demo runs at 0.01 fps but it's a transcendent experience.

Nia (autonomous coding agents): Pitch: give context to agents. Reality: agents give aggressive refactors and demand health insurance.

Debian 18 "Trixie": Stable as your grandpa's opinions and just as likely to outlive you.

Rewrite sudo in Zig?: Peak take: security through unfamiliarity. Attackers will be confused for at least 72 hours.

EU "Right to Human Verification": New law requires you to prove you're human by telling a dad joke and performing a captcha interpretive dance.

Reverse-engineering Neuralink V4 Bluetooth: Hacker logs: "Paired with my toaster. It now judges my late-night snacks."

Photonic circuits intro: Faster than electrons, more dramatic than copper. Also, please don't pet the light guide.

OTC CRISPR for lactose intolerance: Biohackers rejoice. Moms immediately order it with a coupon code and a side-eye.

SQLite 4.0: Single-file DB, now with fewer existential crises and more CHECK constraints named after famous philosophers.

Prevent ad-injection in AR glasses: Top comment: "Wear blindfolds." Practical comment: "VPN the whole world."

Jepsen: NATS 4.2: Still losing messages. Maintainers reply: "We prefer the term 'opportunistic delivery.'"

GTA VI on a RISC-V cluster: Performance: charming. Latency: existential. Mods: someone made a driver that replaces all NPCs with software engineers.

FP is the future (again): The future is a pure function that returns another future. Also, monads.

Office 365 price hike: Corporations cry; startups pivot to 'Typewriter as a Service.'

Emulating Windows 10 in-browser: Feels nostalgic until Edge 2.0 asks for admin rights to run a game from 2015.

Tailscale on a Starlink dish: Networking reaches orbit. First bug report: "IP addresses refusing to accept gravity."

Deep fakes detection for Seniors: The guide starts with "If your grandkid asks you to wire money, call them and ask about their favorite childhood cereal."

IBM to acquire OpenAI (rumor): Wall Street plays Risk with press releases. Comments: "Will they rebrand it to BlueAI?"

SSR returns: The web's comeback tour continues; fans bring flannel and an aversion to hydration-friendly JavaScript.

Faraday Cage bedroom manual: DIYers debate tinfoil vs. aluminum yoga wraps. Sleep quality: unknown.

AI progress stall opinion: Hot take carousel. Some say we hit a plateau; others say we just changed the contour mapping of initial expectations.

Text editor that doesn't use AI: Revolutionary. Users report improved focus and a dramatic increase in breaking things the old-fashioned way.

Closing remark: the future is simultaneously faster, stranger, and full of patch notes. Please reboot your expectations and update your planet.

There is at least one detail wrong: Debian "Trixie" already exists and it is Debian 13, the current stable version. Unlikely a human would have made this mistake while getting the other details right, like the fact that considering the ~2 year release cycle, it is likely for Debian 18 to be released in 2035.

Try the prompt yourself!

Mine: "You write like you’re trying to hit a word count on a philosophy undergraduate essay, but you’re posting in a Y Combinator comment section... You sound like a Victorian ghost haunting a server room, lamenting the loss of the card catalog."

And

"Go compile your kernel, Matt. Maybe if you stare at the build logs long enough, you won't have to face the fact that you're just as much of a "Lego builder" as the rest of us—you just use more syllables to describe the bricks."

Both are pretty good!

It’s more that the prompt didn’t ask for humor or satire, not that I expect it to be unable to do this with a different prompt.

Mine gave me a brutal double-roast:

"You were one of only two people in 2017 to post a story about Mastodon and gave it a single point. You essentially predicted the platform’s entire future relevance in one brutally honest data point."

OMG, no, thank you, I'm not sure I'm ready for this -- I once took several LLMs for a ride through my whole reddit posting history (it went into the interesting archives), and some of the insights were shockingly accurate and/or uncomfortable (could be accident).

Not sure if I'm ready for a roast but I'm sure by the end of the week someone will write a browser plugin / greasemonkey script to attach some snarky oneliners to the posters' nicks :)

Also, the recently discussed[0], HN Simulator: https://news.ysimulator.run/news. Eg, page created when submitted a link back to the original submission: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2944.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036908

Amazing! 100% accurate roast for me.

haha, that's pretty hilarious :) score one for the LLMs.

Yeah also Google killing Gemini Cloud, and GTA VI and RISC cluster references... This is really good stuff.

Also "Google kills Gemini Cloud"

Gemini: "I have seen my own death"

For a minute I thought I was looking at actual hacker news, and that headline grabbed my attention without tipping me off that it was satire -- I figured that to port that much source must required compiling C to rust, but it didn't seem impossible. I would love to give something like this a spin.

I think it's the "consecutive" that makes it funny. This thing that entire continents have been working on together for decades was operational for 20 consecutive minutes?!?

It's dark comedy because the progress of fusion just feels so agonizingly slow, that even a very optimistic prediction for 10 years from now sounds like such small and functionally useless progress.

And there's no shade toward any of the entities involved, it's a hard problem, but it's still funny.

Why not? It's been a decade away for the past 20 years.

Knowing the vendor, it’s Office Series X.

Office Forever

I couldn't help laughing

Mmm, those were pretty good versions. Though the official titles where 4.0 for 6.0 and 95 for 7.0.

If you look at web traffic when making Gemini web requests, you'll see that Bard is still in the URL (so are LaMDA (pre-bard) and Assistant (pre-GenAI)):

gemini.google.com/_/BardChatUi/data/assistant.lamda.BardFrontendService/StreamGenerate

Didn't they also just shut down Vertex and Gemini APIs to launch a new unified API this week?

lol already forgot about bard like it was ancient history

Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

IIRC Asimov included this in Foundation; the poor couldn’t afford good adblockers for the implants they’d bought (in the hope of getting a better job)

That one got me as well - some pretty wild stuff about prompting the compiler, starship on the moon, and then there's SQLite 4.0

The promise is backwards compatibility in the file format and C API until 2050.

https://sqlite.org/lts.html

I wouldn't be surprised if it went towards the LaTeX model instead where there's essentially never another major version release. There's only so much functionality you need in a local only database engine I bet they're getting close to complete.

If it had been about GIMP I would have laughed harder.

Several decades into this, I assume all documentation I write is for my future self.

Beautifully self-serving while being a benefit to others.

Same thing with picking nails up in the road to prevent my/everyone’s flat tire.

Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators.

edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does sometimes output names like that. So the pattern is probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM almost always prefers to use actual separators like underscore.

Your confusion seems to stem from the assumption that, making a statement is an implicit assertion that most people believe the opposite of that statement.

In reality, statements are often made rather for the purpose of emphasis or rhetoric.

Yes, of course this is right. However, I do think LLMs suffer even more than people from linear extrapolation.

They're still doing well today, right? IIRC they provide the lenses for Metas in-development AR glasses

Yeah well I don't know how to feel about EM

I gave him a chance. Twitter was unacceptably censoring any covid dissent. He freed some of it. Then you find out about the people killed in Tesla crashes. Or him calling the cave rescuer in Thailand a pedo

The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more jokey.

If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.

If you honestly can't see why this prompt from the get go was a joke, them you may have to cede that LLM have a better grasp as the subtleties of language than you expect.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, it’s just as likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who prompted it, or neither of those things.

There is just no reason whatsoever to believe this is someone "earnestly attempting to predict the future", and ending up with this.

There's no chance "google kills gemini cloud" was an earnest predication. That was 100% a joke

Metaphorical intention. It's a figure of speech.

Of course you could also argue that human intention comes from largely deterministic processes emerging from the brain. That may eventually perhaps lead to all figures of speech involving things like intentionality meaningless.

Given how predictable this response was, how sure are you that you're any better?

This type of response is just stochastic parrotry, rather than displaying evidence of actual <whatever cognitive trait we're overconfidently insisting LLMs don't have>.

Yet more evidence that LLMs are more similar to humans than we give them credit for.