SupremumLimit

I took a brief look at the code for one of the projects (https://github.com/emollick/concord/) he breathlessly praises and says "a software engineer would iron out the remaining potential bugs that I could not find quickly". The code looks like an unmaintainable mess.

Other commenters have pointed out that his isochrone map contains a lot of nonsense as well.

So the most charitable interpretation here is that this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia.

This is a severely outdated view. Based on current policies, we're heading for something like 2.6 degrees of warming which I think is somewhere between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. It's still bad but nowhere close to RCP8.5 so your comment is indeed unhelpful doomerism. (RCP scenarios themselves are outdated and have been replaced by "socio-economic pathways" - SSP).

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/

It used to be that they included a bunch of software to make their hardware more useful. But I guess they couldn't resist squeezing out a bit more revenue through enshittification. The profit motive is ultimately too strong. Ads on the lock screen and in the dock next?

I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.

I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.

Really? This just proves the point of the grandparent comment. I can think of at least three types of activities off the top of my head: sports (granted, not all of them, but definitely true for my sport - squash), music (playing an instrument in a group setting), and volunteering. I also know people who are in a bridge club with people twice their age.

There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.

Could you give some examples of where it's saving you a lot of time? My main time sinks are dishes, laundry, and cleaning. Is it helping out with any of those?

Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...

Indeed. I’m holding on to my 24” Dell P2415Q that I got like 10 years ago because it’s the perfect size for my desk and there just isn’t anything in that size to replace it with.

How’s it going so far? Greenhouse gas emissions only keep rising. There’s no basis to rate humanity’s chances positively based on actual evidence to date, even despite all the positive developments in renewable energy generation and storage.

The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?

Not sure how you haven't noticed, but climate change is already affecting precipitation and drought patterns, it exacerbates heatwaves, cold snaps, and flooding, it affects harvests, disrupts ecosystems etc. etc. Reducing warming is an urgent matter.

It isn’t just intuitive enough, it’s more intuitive and precise than the ICE setup. It’s safer too, as the car starts braking before I even reach the brake pedal in an emergency braking situation.

I dislike going back to the ICE setup.

How can you assert that it will evaluate everyone equally when biases are a well documented deficiency of various flavours of AI?

I've just published https://nohypeai.dev to share what I've learned about the state of LLM agents for software development and help people who are just catching up orient themselves.

It was also important to me to provide a non-hyped, balanced view (hence the name), including pointing people to realistic assessments of the effectiveness of these tools and highlighting the risks and concerns.

The case the article tries to make doesn’t stack up for me.

What you get when it becomes easier to generate code/applications is a whole lot more code and a whole lot more noise to deal with. Sure, some of it is going to be well crafted – but a lot of it will not be.

It’s like the mobile app stores. Once these new platforms became available, everyone had a go at building an app. A small portion of them are great examples of craftsmanship – but there is an ocean of badly designed, badly implemented, trivial, and copycat apps out there as well. And once you have this type of abundance, it creates a whole new class of problems for the users but potentially also developers.

The other thing is, it really doesn’t align with the priorities of most companies. I’m extremely skeptical that any of them will suddenly go: “Right, enough of cutting corners and tech debt, we can really sort that out with AI.”

No, instead they will simply direct extra capacity towards new features, new products, and trying to get more market share. Complexity will spiral, all the cut corners and tech debt will still be there, and the end result will be that things will be even further down the hole.

Yeah, to bring up Bosch as an example of good UI is… an interesting choice. Their +/- time buttons operate like they were specifically designed to infuriate the user, for example.

It's an interesting review but I really dislike this type of techno-utopian determinism: "When models inevitably improve..." Says who? How is it inevitable? What if they've actually reached their limits by now?

Your comment follows two persistent HN tropes: (1) ignoring the article, which deals precisely with why the cost of production matters, and (2) steadfastly refusing to recognise that quantity has a quality of its own - in this case a monumental reduction in production cost clearly leads to a tectonic reshaping of the information landscape.

It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark patterns ahoy.

It is a serious mistake to think that technology can remove bureaucracy. Indeed, technology by its nature makes bureaucracy a lot more rigid. Bureaucracy is about homogenising processes and erasing individual differences, and software reinforces these properties because it allows even less human input or deviation from the process. (That isn't true of all software, just software that is intended to somehow deal with large numbers of people uniformly.)

I like considering _why_ the government is like that. I would suggest that the suspicion, disdain (evident in your comment) and outright hatred of government (particularly from sections of the political and capitalist classes, particularly in the US) are all large drivers of the extreme risk aversion and resulting inefficiency of government agencies that develops over time.

That is, there is nothing inherent about it beyond the inevitable inefficiency of all large organisations, the government was shaped to be like that by external pressures.

Viewed in that light, your favourable assessment of mafia rule is even more obviously a false alternative.

I’d say the same thing except about 25-30 years ago and definitely not 15, which suggests to me that both of us suffer from observer bias and likely there’s always been a real mix of programmers who were really into it and others who were only after a job. Perhaps the proportion of uninterested programmers has increased though.

Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows) Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries.

Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.

Yes, I meant something else, and of course I'm not advocating for hard to understand code. However, as the sibling comment suggests, what's obscure or hard is relative.

The problem with indiscriminate application of "code has to be easy to understand" is that it can be used to make pretty much anything, including most features of your language, off limits. After all, a junior developer may not be familiar with any given feature. Thus, we can establish no reasonable lower bound on allowed complexity using such a guideline.

Conversely, what’s too simple or too difficult is very specific to the person. Somebody who’s coming to a junior developer role from a data science background might have no problem reading 200 lines of SQL. Somebody with FP background might find data transformation pipelines simple to understand but class hierarchies difficult, and so on. So the "easy to understand for anyone" guideline proves less than useful for establishing an upper bound on allowed complexity as well.

Therefore, I find that it’s more useful to talk about a lower and upper bound of what’s required and acceptable. There are things we should reasonably expect a person working on the project to know or learn (such as most language features, basic framework features, how to manipulate data, how to debug etc.) regardless of seniority. On the other hand, we don’t want to have code that’s only understood by one or two people on the team, so perhaps we say that advanced metaprogramming or category theory concepts should be applied very sparingly.

Once that competency band is established, we can work to bring everyone into the band (by providing training and support) rather than trying to stretch the band downwards to suit everyone regardless of experience.

Indeed, specialist knowledge is a real constraint, but I think it’s possible to at least _orient_ towards building systems that require no baseline level of skill (the fast food model I guess) or towards training your staff so they acquire the necessary level of skills to work with a less accessible system. I suspect that the second pathway results in higher productivity and achievement in the long term.

However, management tends to align with reducing the baseline level of skill, presumably because it’s convenient for various business reasons to have everyone be a replaceable “resource”, and to have new people quickly become productive without requiring expensive training.

Ironically, this is one of the factors that drives ever faster job hopping, which reinforces the need for replaceable “resources”, and on it goes.

This is a wonderfully insightful comment!

I’ve encountered a similar phenomenon with regard to skill as well: people want to ensure that every part of the software system can be understood and operated by the least skilled members of the team (meaning completely inexperienced people).

But similarly to personal responsibility, it’s worth asking what the costs of that approach are, and why it is that we shouldn’t have either baseline expectations of skill or shouldn’t expect that some parts of the software system require higher levels of expertise.

Aha! advertises as far as New Zealand and I also never heard back when I applied. The excuse they supply (at least they do that much…) is that they receive too many applications to respond to everyone. But then why advertise all over the world? A scummy tactic when I think about it.

Which cloud provider is it, if you don’t mind sharing?

Thanks! I used to play it as a kid and have been trying to remember the name of the game for years.