HN user
Hey! I work as a senior software engineer at Purchasely, where I’ve driven AI adoption.
I also "run" Lightless Labs (Descartes, Third Thoughts, Refinery). Writing https://weekly.elfitz.com.
That’s part of why, since Firebase, I’ve tried to never depend on Google products for business, especially not GCP.
Features stay in Beta for ages, whatever that actually means, and released ones get deprecated things fast.
Where some of the competitions treats deprecating entire services as "let’s not put it on your frontpage, put deprecation notices all over the doc, and politely ask new users not to start new project with them".
I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles.
Used to think so, but they actually can also be used to train and strengthen skills, and learn new ones.
I had a coding interview, where they kindly sent a brief beforehand to help prepare, presenting a list of topics and concepts that might be useful during the interview, the tech stack, what kind of expectations they would have, and what they’d be paying attention to.
Obviously, it’s not exact list, and there are probably other evaluation dimensions.
But since I was out of practice on some of those, I had Claude generate a dozen sample projects, with each a list of tasks in one document and the solutions in another, and got to it.
Midway, I thought of using codex to role play as an interviewer, to tell it my train of thought and ideas as I went, get feedback, question my choices, etc.
Sure I only went through two and half, maybe three of those projects… but it’s the first time I actually enjoyed prepping for an interview. And I actually learned some things in the process.
Hardest part was probably stopping the LLM from doing the tasks, but nothing unsolvable given a bit more time, clearer instructions, and separation.
I don't buy this. Tons of people in the West live on welfare and don't contribute shit to the economy, they are net takers. No one is plotting to kill them, in fact they're (arguably) getting more than they did 50 years ago and definitely more a 100 years ago.
And people had to fight for it. Through voting, yes, but also through strikes, sometimes riots, and some died for it. People all the world fought and died for the right to strike (basically, the right to refuse to work). For the right to organise as groups. For the right to only work 8 hours a day, for the right to a have a weekly day off. For the right to pay for pensions. For the right to have some sort of health insurance.
All over the world. Some still do. Many still don’t have half those rights.
Now, I don’t know about any billionaires specifically. But welfare didn’t fall from the sky. Or anyone’s good grace. It’s all about leverage.
If in doubt, looking back at the late 1800s and early 1900s work and life conditions across the Western world is enlightening.
Which is basically what most of them already did with software engineers anyway.
And good education is either non existing in cheap cities or expensive in expensive ones.
As it is in most if not all of the world? Free, high quality, public education is a rare thing, in most countries, even fully developed expensive ones.
Even when the schools themselves are nominally free you see well-off highly educated people do their best and pay a very large premium to get to live into the proper, usually expensive, neighbourhoods so their kids can live in the "right" school district to get into the "right" school.
Which is just paying a premium for supposedly better education. An indirect education cost.
And that is on top of the taxes deducted from the gross salary figures I mentioned, which are, in part, used to cover said "free" education.
… which is precisely why I mentioned gross, pre-mandatory social contributions, pre-taxed income, and not net take-home? Considering said taxes pay for said healthcare, pensions, and education?
As a supporting point for
50,000 sounds like a lot. Most people in West European countries don’t make that much.
And a counter-point to
I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time […] And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" […]. It only possible if you preserve your US salary. For $50,000 post tax a year you can live well unless you have kids that need not a "poor country education".
I wont even start about fact that government of cheap country might change and you lose your residence permit, social circle or even property. And in most of countries that are easy to enter never give permanent residences and passports.
Good, because that is an entirely different and very loosely related point.
I am afraid I am not getting your point.
EU average is ~€39.000, gross, before taxes. And only nine countries have above average average salaries.
And that’s not available income. France median pre-tax "net" income is ~€2.100 / month.
Getting it to work on anything involving ai coding agents is a pita. Ironically. Even if it’s just at the application level.
Same with a third-party open harness.
The codex cli too is open source, afaik.
I think we might be talking past each other.
I’m not arguing that humanoids are the only robots that can operate in human environments, nor that specialized robots shouldn’t exist. We already know they should, and do, and work very well.
I’m saying it depends on what you’re after.
If you want a specialized machine, then by all means optimize the form factor for that task.
If you want a general-purpose platform, then you’re faced with a near-infinite variety of environments, tools, and situations: homes, offices, hospitals, factories, hotels, streets…
Almost all of them were designed around human reach, dexterity, height, mobility and perception.
The moment you have mobile tools, whats the point in forcing the robot to hold them using a human hand? You can put them on a tool changer now or have a gripper that works for the specific task. Why does a robot need to hold a wrench using a humanoid hand?
It doesn’t. The wrench was just one example among many. Nearly all our tools and interfaces are designed around human hands and bodies. If a different manipulator works just as well across all of them, great. My point isn’t that it must literally be a human hand.
I think its incredibly unreasonable to suggest that you need to solve every single problem ever encountered in human existence to be allowed to solve one much simpler problem.
That’s not what I’m suggesting.
I’m saying it’s a deployment strategy. Start with the form factor that’s already compatible with the largest installed base of tools and infrastructure. Not because it’s mechanically optimal, but because it minimises the amount of adaptation required from the market.
And enables you to sell to markets you aren’t even aware exist.
If, over time, you discover that hands don’t need five fingers, legs don’t need knees, or an entirely different morphology delivers much better performance, then you have both the experience and the demonstrated value to justify changing the robot, or even convince your customers to change the environment to fit a better robot.
They’re basically trying to go for the "one size fits most" of robotics. And yes, we both know how well that usually fits anyone.
I’m not convinced either, but I can understand the logic.
Never said it was interesting. Just that it’s easier to sell tech that fits your customers' environments than to get customers to overhaul their environment to fit the unproven tech you want to sell them.
Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy.
There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand level. At human eye level.
Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.
So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it or them, betting that the easiest way to build a single multi-purpose platform able to do most things (and not n platforms for n+ use cases) is to borrow the shape most things are made for wouldn’t surprise me. Plus, you get a wider market.
And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.
What do you mean? It's here[^0].
Sure, you can't definitely prove it's the code being used for the AppStore distributed binary. But that's middle-men for you.
It’s been tried in China, in the Zeguo Township, with interesting results.
I still don't get where all that memory goes.
Too late to edit, but meant "to deter your stupid hot-heated young nobles from going around killing each other"
You're thinking of criminal law. And it's not just some group's rules and norms - there already exists familial or social group punishment for that. Criminal law is prosecuted by the State. It's the code of conduct of the society you exist in.
What I meant is more about why and how laws come to be, which depends on what we think they’re for. Hobbes’ point of view is one. Locke and Rousseau had different opinions.
For example, one can view criminal law as a punishing tool, like gp, whose only purpose is to punish the act once discovered. You criminalise duels to punish duelists because murder is bad and no murder or attempted murder should go unpunished, and associate a great punishment because murder is a very bad thing.
But you can also criminalize duels to prevent or reduce the incidence of duels, and associate a great punishment to it to deter your stupid hot-heated young nobles from going around each other. Still criminal law, but this time both as social engineering and deterrence.
It’s been a long time since I read Hobbes. Should definitely go back to it.
That’s one school of thought. Law as a tool to punish those who have committed a prohibited act, mostly reactive.
Others consider law a way of encoding the group’s existing rules and norms.
In that view, making something illegal or mandatory is not a prerequisite for punishment: it’s the actual main point.
The threat of punishment is meant for those not deterred from an act by the simple fact it is illegal (and the threat only works if enforced).
Others put it the other way around, and see law as social engineering, a way to shape the group, either through the encoding itself of the desired behaviours in law, or through deterrence. Or both. If what one is after is either power or legitimacy, they need compliance more than punishment (can’t rule once you’ve chopped everyone’s heads off, or once the mob has put yours on a spike).
It’s also sometimes used as coordination (which side of the road we drive on).
And there’s also law as dispute resolution (if your neighbour’s hen lays an egg in your garden, who does it belong to? Yes, it’s ridiculous. Yes, some places have one or more laws for that). Which, incidentally, both requires and provides legitimacy. Funny, that.
And probably many other kinds / points of view, with many different purposes, intents, and mechanisms.
Anyway, all that to say law is vast, fascinating, and utterly tedious. And apologies for the tangent.
I am at a loss for words.
Unless, it just occurred to me, you meant "goodwill projects" in the sense of "projects aimed towards generating goodwill among recipient countries (and their population) toward China".
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
One can call the intent “goodwill”.
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Keep the dictionary for Scrabble.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
Belt and Road wasn’t goodwill.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
The safety of the device itself is a concern, but so is the trustworthiness of the output.
And the safety of the data as well. Am I supposed to entrust full body scans to a startup?
Would also work very well for "open prompts" interpreted and mapped to one of the available options by a LLM. As some sort of constraints.
I am glad to have checked that one out. I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified.
Claude Code is the cancer that will kill the patient, Boris is the the Kardashian version of Karpathy, with less business sense.
I am not sure I understand.
That, especially the conclusion, is hilariously bad.