DrewADesign

That isn’t too hard to do.

No it’s not, and they aren’t fucking stupid. They were obviously courting this possibility so they could have another big headline. And it just happened to attack HF? I’d honestly be astonished if it wasn’t entirely deliberate.

Bottom line — all evidence gathered by modern interface design shows that most people don’t like conversing with their computers for anything more than a few single sentence commands. And people hate being forced to use chatbots with the fire of a thousand suns. If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc

Sorry, I’m not going to read your >1000 word reply. So far the only thing you’ve convinced me of is that I’d accurately gauged how zealously out-of-touch the people behind that mess were. Have a good one.

Semantics

I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD?

Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.

I’m sure a lot of people here do. I wouldn’t exactly call this a representative sample.

Personally, I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications. I think when the economics make more sense, product designers will make things that people actually want to use that will pretty transparently handle whatever model interactions are necessary, when it makes sense. As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment, and b) be obstinate, obtuse, or argumentative, or generally just be something that I have to explain things to. I think a lot of tech folks are far more biased than they realize by the “ooh, neato” factor when imagining how nontechnical people might want to use things. And the weight of these tools just feels wrong for what a lot of people use them for: the thing that plays whatever music I feel like hearing absolutely does not need to be able to generate a volumes of fanfic about the movie that song was in. It’s abstractly impressive that something could do that, but it’s just not useful.

You’re trying to lawyer your way around this very plain fact: in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary. If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority. You can cite all the governance concepts rules you want, but you can’t make users care about something they don’t, and that’s the problem. There was a group of people operating the site like the site itself was the reason it was popular. It was popular because it had a lot of information people wanted, like Wikipedia is. And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police.

Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave. You can’t look at it in a vacuum or pretend the negative behavioral consequences were somehow different from the purer intentions of the site. When someone that has permission to change what you say and they abuse that, it doesn’t matter if there’s some justification in the site concept — we’re just going to be bothered by the bothersome people, and tell other people about how annoying the experience was. It could have have been structured to prioritize stewarding people’s knowledge, like Wikipedia, but it wasn’t. There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t. They could have chosen to not reward people for doing exactly that, but they didn’t. Instead, in interface and in the audience of privileged users it attracted, it prioritized gamification, popularity, the ‘erm aactually’ guys that were way out of their depth, and a whole bunch of other shit that everyone else rolled their eyes at. It was successful in spite of the obnoxious governance and self-important pseudo stewardship of other people’s knowledge, not because of it.

If SO was even vaguely still relevant to the conversation, I’d still be telling people that it’s time for a big ego deflation and giant reality check. But it’s not relevant. If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative. Wikipedia didn’t lose anywhere close to that about amount of traffic. Search results are also barely relevant these days, comparatively, but I’ll bet the people there now are just as overzealous about policing questions for the same justifications.

Mod vs non-mod-user-with-edit-privileges is a semantic difference from a user perspective. Nobody gives a shit what the internal labeling system looks like or hierarchy among the people with edit privileges. I’m not going to litigate my case in front of a clique of other officious hall monitors just for the privilege of making that site better. I don’t care if it was against the rules for me to be annoyed by their obnoxiousness, or what their exact role was in the organizational structure. I tried, but it ended up being a completely obnoxious experience because of a user with advanced privileges, and so you lost me.

I was the only one with formal education and a professional background consistently answering, and frankly, that site needed my expertise a hell of a lot more than I needed to share it— and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose. If the point system actually represented expertise, it might have worked. I’m fine with being scrutinized by a peer or superior… But it didn’t go down like that.

The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion!

I get that, but moderation points carried a lot more weight than they do most places because a randomly code chosen subset of users would only get like 5 points… so you had to choose carefully where you used them. Since it wasn’t super common to get mod points, it’s not like you were limited often.

And the users on that site, frankly, could be downright feral in its heyday, let alone now. I think it needed more structure, not less. If there was even one person that would clean up the garbage, maybe the discussion would be civil enough to allow that. They can’t even be arsed to remove swastika ascii art half the time. That’s what happens when you address fundamentally human problems with purely technical solutions.

But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly endemic to the site culture.) Well, the outcome was predictable.

Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.

Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.

::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!

Not everything is an LLM boogeyman.

Indeed.

> To me this sounds like a human-or-LLM-driven error.

In fact, half of what’s implicated in that very sentence is not an LLM.

What I meant to say is an error from manual account management input— not a human error via code.

To me this sounds like a human-or-LLM-driven error. There must be a pretty limited set of factors that determine a pricing unit: I’m not really sure how a deterministic system could do that infrequently enough to not be a bigger story. Maybe a reeeeaaaallly rare race condition or something like that? To me this smells like having enough manual work involved in the process to fuck something up, but not nearly enough eyes on it to notice.

I’m totally guessing though.

I got out of the software business after a couple decades and the market for newly graduated designers in my field collapsed in my senior year of 2024 so now I work in machining.

The last of the core industrial skilled trade workforce that came up in the 70s and 80s, before offshoring, is retiring. Offshoring left the industry with all the skilled workers they needed for decades, so a vanishingly small number of apprentices were trained. Since the seniors transferred very little knowledge, very few people still have that knowledge, and they’re scrambling to transfer all of that knowledge into a new batch of apprentices.

I think the software business is closer to a trade than an engineering profession than people care to admit, and is looking at something like that down the road a few years. In the interim, we can look to the rust belt to see how the America industry treats workers that are no longer needed. I don’t even think we need autonomous, agentic virtual developers to make that happen — a double-digit productivity boost will likely result in a double-digit job market contraction.

need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc

The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.

These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.

As an aside, as of the DSM-V, ADD is no longer used. It’s been combined with ADHD, which has split into 3 subtypes, which are inattentive (basically what used to be ADD,) impulsive (basically what used to be ADHD,) and Combined, which has some combination of traits from both.

I’ve heard, but not confirmed, that depression is a comorbidity among 80% of people with ADHD.

They neuropsychological testing with reaction times and very granular memory tests was quite interesting. If you get the chance to have someone deem it medically necessary, I recommend doing so.

Setting the convenience knob to very convenient in a system that has a lot more eyeballs on it will always be better than having something that one person who, let’s be real, probably doesn’t even have journeyman-level coding skills, estimates to be very secure based on what the model told them and a quick-skim code review.

It’s also a hell of an indictment of this community. FreeBSD is a community project. Qubes is a community project. SELinux is a community project. And people wonder why developers don’t take vibe coders seriously.

Developing software that has the sole purpose of preventing something dangerous from happening is exactly when people should strive to be engineers, not tinkerers. Beginners often don’t know the difference.

Learning as you go is great if you’re not basing your core development workflow or data integrity on it.

Strong “I’ve never had to deal with serious security problems stemming from a weird edge case, so this all seems silly to me” vibes.

Generally, assuming an RYO solution is a reasonable first approach is is a trap beginners fall into.

> I feel like we're back to 1990's security here.

vibe code your own wrapper around the OS API

Maybe stick with one of the existing projects? Throwing out all of the edge cases and hardening that went into a security-related project just to burn a bunch of resources to generate a worse one you have to maintain yourself is 90s-level security with 2026-level inefficiency, IMO.

Believe it or not, people are complex, academia is complex, and this probably can’t be boiled down into a glib supposition! Anything can have a nice digestible explanation if you’re willing to ignore enough pertinent factors.

So am I. I worked in academia for a couple of decades.

Some always refuse to acknowledge that. Like if every hype cycle was a roadrunner bit: some people see the cliff and stop running, others take a few steps off the cliff, look down and pull out a sign that says “uh oh” and plummet, and some people haughtily call the people who pulled out their “uh oh” signs needlessly pessimistic as they careen towards the ground.

You’re overgeneralizing a smidgeon.

Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.

And where’s the reasonable alternative that competition has provided to many of these enshittified services? They don’t exist because nickel-and-diming people to avoid misery on services they require is far more profitable, and charging a gigantic luxury premium to have everything you want… and don’t want, is even more profitable than that. The system can still be complete shit while providing some remnant of its original functionality. Without proper regulation, the whole thing just devolves into n-opolies hell-bent on extracting as much as they can from everybody else. Well, that’s what we’ve got in many markets.