alt Hacker News> Ask your agent which TV, router, or synth to get, and it will lean toward the one it can change, because that’s the one it can fix later.
I have not found this to be true. I like the rest of the article and the principle behind it but the title is not backed up at all
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I believe the author is not stating how it works at the moment, but how he expects it to work in the future. "it will" is unfortunately ambiguous.
I believe there will be two kinds of people. People who want to have a device that just works and people who want to Play with a device. The latter will probably steer their LLM in the direction of hackable devices and the rest will just follow general buyer recommendations, probably through an LLM. That will create an ecosystem arround these hackable devices. In general the conclusion won't hold, but for a few hackers it might.
Yeah that's not at all how llms work. It will just recommend what is in its training set. Now maybe open source hw means it is part of the training set, but it depends on how the model is trained whether it uses that in product recommendations. This will likely be pay to play for commercial llm providers soon.
Agreed. I love the optimism of the author, but people who'd update firmware on their e.g. tv, even if it were a simple ask to a future omniscient LLM, are vanishingly few. As well, when control of firmware and data is a massive part of your ROI, manufacturers will fight changes tooth and legal nail. We need to distinguish between the world we wished we lived in (and here I'll 172.2% agree with author and fellow HackerNewsers), vs the one we actually live in - where most people are apathetic to most things. Even going to the setting menu and unchecking "destroy my privacy with massive data sucking" is too much for most people (including my intelligent and educated significant other, despite more than a decade of attempts :).
The mwave fm1 already targets a particularly nerdy, tinkering crowd in a very niche segment. No way Samsung and Sony relinquish their grip on TV, fridge or washing machine firmware :-(. I suspect instead the arms race between manufacturers trying to lock up and control their system, and hackers trying to breach it, will simply move up one level until it resembles Neuromancer AIs fighting that much more :).
And for a really cynical take - given LLMS will recommend the way they've been trained to recommend, how much longer until organic LLM agent recommendations are sponsored at the training and system prompt and harness levels?
Edit / update : not to mention, I think there are already more than 200 firwmares available for the fm1. How long until one or more of them is malicious or just bricks your device, giving most people reason to not dabble, and manufacturers the obvious scapegoat double down on "security".
It does if you bias it that way. If the memory is full of IoT RE projects, home automation, and whatnot, you'll no doubt see remarks "since you value openness" or "because of your DIY attitude".
But yeah, I doubt LLMs tend to lean so with a blank context. Not in my experience either.