alphazard

I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.

Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.

In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?

If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.

The problem that I imagine you see with this, is that it doesn't conform to a particular, special, notion of fairness that you think the market should have.

Informed parties have an edge over uninformed parties. This edge is "unfair" if you believe the market should be a lottery. The market is designed to pay people with accurate beliefs, by taking from people with inaccurate beliefs. Everyone's belief is valued based on its accuracy, and the market is fair in that sense. Fairness is actually irrelevant to the societal good the market provides, which is to produce accurate prices. A third party, who doesn't participate, shouldn't care about the market being "fair", they should care about it giving good information.

A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.

If you are betting on what a person will say, and the person knows about the market, that is a chaotic system. If you bid the price away from max entropy then you deserve the outcome.

Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,

This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals. The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.

For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.

I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.

This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software.

What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion about, or start using day-to-day.

Things on the front page used to be high quality software, research papers, etc. And now it is entirely driven by marketing operations, and social circles. There is no differential amplification of quality.

I don't know what the solution is, but I imagine it involves some kind of weighted voting. That would be a step towards a complicated engagement algorithm, instead of the elegant and predictable exponential decay that HN is known for.

Instead of understanding all of this, and when it does or does not apply, it's probably better to disclose vulnerabilities anonymously over Tor. It's not worth the hassle of being forced to hire a lawyer, just to be a white hat.

This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.

I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building software.

The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that and just build the software they have in mind using AI.

And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces more problems than it solves. A sign of an elite engineer is knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed rather than call into it. Or to re-implement something because the library that does it is a bad fit.

The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a shared understanding.

People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work.

I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets.

All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.

In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people. Software is going to become an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly. The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.

I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.

The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy. That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.

Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target. Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.

Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.

This kind of "but for us it's different" thinking is a little amusing.

I don't care about the implementation process or the RFCs or what-have-you. If there is a democratic committee of humans that decides what goes in, and there is no bias for minimalism (e.g. 1/3 could strike down a proposal instead of 1/2) then the process will tend towards bloat.

Yes agree, we are definitely past peak Go.

Suspiciously, after Rob Pike retired from the project, the amount of language and standard library changes skyrocketed. Many people now trying to get their thing into the language so they can add it to their list of accomplishments.

Clear evidence that you need someone saying "no" often.

What no one wants to hear is rust is destined for the same fate. If you want to see the future of rust, look at C++. Rust has a much better initial state, but the rules evolving the system (the governance model, the kinds of developers that work on it, etc.) are the same as C++ and so we should expect the same trajectory.

Unless you have a system that says "no" a lot, and occasionally removes features, programming languages decay, and the game has been (historically, before LLMs) to pick a language that would be in the sweet spot for the time that you need to use it, while keeping your eye out for something else to switch to once it becomes sufficiently unusable.

Can someone, who knows computer graphics, explain why the old library had so many issues with flickering and black triangles or rectangles flashing on the app, and why the new library is expected to not have those same problems?

Voila: you've re-invented product management.

This is a names vs. structure thing. For a moment, taboo the term product manager.

What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.

The conventional wisdom (bad meme) is going to the labor market with a search term for people who claim to know what the users want, any user, any problem, doesn't matter. These people are usually incompetent and have never written software. Then hiring 1 and potentially more of the people that respond to the shibboleth.

If you want the first case, then you can't say "product manager" because people will automatically do the second case.

This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.

It's not.

Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI. That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality.

Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house. Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes?

So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving. And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them. No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be. The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs.

If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.

There are individuals who have good taste for products in certain domains. Their own preferences are an accurate approximation for those of the users. Those people might add value when they are given control of the product.

That good taste doesn't translate between domains very often. Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good taste for a video game inventory screen. And that's the crux of the problem. There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent, and spread lies about their importance to the success of every business. What's worse is that otherwise smart people (founders, executives) fall for it because they think hiring them is what they are supposed to do.

Over time, as more and more people realized that PM is a side door into big companies with lots of money, "Product Manager" became an imposter role like "Scrum Master". Now product orgs are pretty much synonymous with incompetence.

Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?

It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.

The ability to reverse is very dependent on the transformation being well known, in this case it is deterministic and known with certainty. Any algorithm to reverse motion blur will depend on the translation and rotation of the camera in physical space, and the best the algorithm could do will be limited by the uncertainty in estimating those values.

If you apply a fake motion blur like in photoshop or after effects then that could probably be reversed pretty well.

Naive self-interest is a characteristic of children. You didn't stumble upon some ancient wisdom of another culture, you just matured and established a family, which your instincts tell you to put before yourself.

The West is individualistic, but all that means is that individuals choose their circle of concern. Without any further guidance, that means that innate instincts about who is important (family, close friends) dominate, rather than a forced narrative about the collective.

What they call "fluid intelligence" is just intelligence and the rest are skills/aptitudes. "Crystallized intelligence" is more plainly: efficacy/productivity and it's common knowledge that people are most productive during the middle of their lives. When they have the best balance of knowledge accumulated and raw intelligence.

In humans, intelligence manifests as memory, spatial and verbal reasoning, pattern recognition, etc. What is so interesting about IQ and g (the general factor) is that all of these abilities trend together. A score in one area is a good prediction of the score in another area. There is no reason why that must be the case a priori, and LLMs are a great example of an intelligent system which is much better at recalling information than it is at reasoning.

Human aging doesn't seem to affect all of these abilities uniformly. e.g. Everyone seems to complain about memory the most (and that matches my experience), but I've been pleasantly surprised how well neuroplasticity and pattern recognition have held.

The series this is from (Free to Choose) is a great introduction to economics for people of any age. I highly recommend it.

This particular example can be misinterpreted though. It's true that no single person knows how to make that exact pencil that he is holding. But it's not true that no single individual exists who can make a pencil by themselves. If the criteria is just that it works as a pencil, then many people could make or find something that fills that criteria.

This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability. It's conceivable that a civilization could forget how to do something like that because it requires so many people with non-overlapping knowledge to create anything close. We aren't going to forget how to make pencils because it is such a simple problem, that many individuals are capable of figuring out workable solutions alone.

That's only true in relative terms. In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.

If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the government, but now they have control over more tax revenue. If taxes go down for everyone, the rich are still the ones that can manipulate the government, but now the government has less revenue and can't cause as much damage.

That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.

This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before. You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.

At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.

If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.

Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil.

Is this a widespread view where you live? As an outsider watching the fall of Britain in slow motion, this explains so much.

No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number. The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.

That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy. If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.

This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will

Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem. It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its solution doesn't require taking in lots of money. Giving the government more power/money causes people to spend more effort to manipulate it, so any weaknesses are exploited to the fullest extent.

and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.

This reveals a significant misunderstanding of how capital works in an economy. None of the billionaires that come up when you type in "billionaires" into Google have access to liquid cash anywhere near the number that shows up next to their face. Their money is invested in productive projects, it's paying salaries and invested in equipment. Concentrating capital is what allows a civilization to take on big projects. As a society we want big projects to be paid for by individuals bearing the risk (skin in the game). In a free-market, capital concentrates in individuals who, empirically, know how to use it well. Spending other people's money is a great way to make sure that money is spent frivolously. You can criticize luxury spending all you want, and taxing that is something most people consider "fair", but you aren't speaking for anyone economically literate when you say that you don't want capital to concentrate. I want it to concentrate as much as it does naturally.

I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.

Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp. If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way. Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.

And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.

Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well. If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea. Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard. If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you. Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.