Bukhmanizer

This is just how authoritarian governments operate. It’s not some Machiavellian set of dominos. It’s more of a test of loyalty to The Administration than anything else.

Sure, but let’s not pretend that people treated the statements of these ceos as strategic messaging. People very clearly treated what Altman, Zuck, Amodei etc have been saying as predictions, and it hasn’t been until they’ve been proven wrong that people have started with the counter-narrative.

I recently wrote a tool to help me read AI generated PRs and it’s pretty sad that it’s got to this point.

I would assume at least hackerrank is?

I don’t think the point of a lot of this is to optimize your resume. It’s to show how arbitrary these systems are.

I’d argue most businesses have had their start through yak shaving.

I’ve found that the overuse of AI papers over a lot of problems. Then if things start failing people have no idea where or what to start fixing. I’m very much a destination person, but I’ve been on enough rides which crashed and burned to be cautious about it.

Part of this is definitely cultural and class snobbery. Europeans are seen as being high class. So if you put cream in your Alfredo you are seen as being as ignorant and not knowing any better. Yet any sort of fusion with cultural foods that are viewed as lower class only serves to “elevate” the dishes.

The rule of thumb I have in my head right now is that AI will benefit people with deep specialized knowledge a lot, but people with shallow knowledge or skills can’t build anything that your average SWE with a Claude code subscription can’t replicate in a few hours.

Most LinkedIn influencers, startup bros and consultancies kind of fall into the latter.

I think a lot of the discourse around LLMs fails because of organizational differences.

I work in science, and I’ve recently worked with a couple projects where they generated >20,000 LOC before even understanding what the project was supposed to be doing. All the scientists hated it and it didn’t do anything that it was supposed to. But I still felt like I was being “anti-ai” when criticizing it.

I understand that it’s way better when you deeply understand the problem and field though.

You don’t use pots or pans?

Ovens are a special occasion thing in my house because our oven is huge and I can usually do the same thing in the air fryer, which is just a small convection oven.

For me it’s that usually I can figure out if I’m going to like something way more easily if I’m just clicking through and watching samples of a show. I don’t want to be constrained to a predetermined algorithmic category.

This essay somehow sounds worse than AI slop, like ChatGPT did a line of coke before writing this out.

I use AI everyday for coding. But if someone so obviously puts this little effort into their work that they put out into the world, I don’t think I trust them to do it properly when they’re writing code.

I generally don’t have faith that many consumer boycotts will work, but boy is it ever easy to switch away from openAI.

I’m not sure this is a good thing..

Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.

I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.

One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.

As with most continuous arguments in SWE, it really depends. I used to do a lot of debugging of random (i.e. not written by me) bioinformatics tools and being able to just fire up gdb and get an immediate landscape of what the issues were in the program was just invaluable.

Times when I was more familiar with the program or there were fewer variables to track it was less helpful

I agree that’s kind of what should happen. What seems to have happened is that people have figured out it’s easier to game the system than produce more complicated or technical projects.

You’re right best reserve such observations for small nations like China

Also when you factor in the age of the wedding participants it almost seems like a regression. A couple in their 30s should be able to afford more than a couple in their 20s a generation ago.

I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.

You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.

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As a coincidence there are 3 ShowHNs on the front page right now all with “boat” in their name. Showboat, Rowboat and Paperboat.

This seems absurdly naive to me with the path big tech has taken in the last 5 years. There’s literally infinite upside and almost no downside to constraining the ecosystem for the big players.

You don’t think that eventually Google/OpenAI are going to go to the government and say, “it’s really dangerous to have all these foreign/unreglated models being used everywhere could you please get rid of them?”. Suddenly they have an oligopoly on the market.

Personally in LA I had a Waymo try to take a right as I was driving straight down the street. It almost T-boned me and then honked at me. I don’t know if there has been a change to the algorithm lately to make them more aggressive but it was pretty jarring to see it mess up that badly

Absolutely!

This place is great, but my work had a function here and I walked around with one of our juniors and never have I felt so old. The pure astonishment and confusion when looking at a “floppy disk” aged me instantly.

This is like the sloppiest of AI slop to reach the front page here.

TLDR: Just concatenate over all images and wave away any potential complications from doing that.

It’s weird when the failure modes of AI are similar.

I once solved a Leetcode problem kind of unorthodox and both ChatGPT and Gemini both said it was wrong in the same way. Then I asked both of them to give me a counter example and only Gemini was able to realize the counter example would have actually worked.

When thinking about automation people overindex on their current class biases. For 20 years we heard that robots were going to take over the “burger flipper” jobs. Why was it so easy to think that robots could replace fast food workers? Because they were the lowest rung on the career ladder, so it felt natural that they would be the first ones to get replaced.

Similarly, it’s easy to think that the lowly peons in the engineering world are going to get replaced and we’ll all be doing the job of directors and CEOs in the future, but that doesn’t really make sense to me.

Being able to whip your army of AI employees 3% better than your competitor doesn’t (usually) give any lasting advantage.

What does give an advantage is: specialized deep knowledge, building relationships and trust with users and customers, and having a good sense of design/ux/etc.

Like maybe that’s some of the job of a manager/director/CEO, but not anyone that I’ve worked with.

Lines of code is just phrenology for software development, but a lot of people are very incentivized to believe in phrenology.

I’d rather just read the prompt that this article was generated from.