crnkofe

Hacker news is so one-dimensional when it comes to China. Its like people here are living in an alternate dimension where everyone outside the horizon is playing catchup. Imo a sandboxed local expert handheld or mobile AIs are the future. They'll be open weight and maybe even open sourced if we ever figure out a way to beatdown training costs. And I find that pretty exciting. There will be some bloodbath on the Wallstreet for sure but I don't anticipate or shiver anticipating double digit losses from any major corp.

I don't get this US medical system. And the more I get to read about it the less informed I feel. Sounds like every involved medical service out there is just to rip the patient off.

I had an itch to rewrite every project after it got large enough and have rewritten some of them. The tragedy of rewriting stuff is that it often ends up becoming more of a duplicate than an improved original. Its hard to see all the edge cases when skimming codebase from afar. Maybe for prototyped code it could work. Not sure if feeding prototype AI slop into AI will produce results though. GIGO. Rewriting code is anyhow not the critical aspect. Its testing and QAing the result and legacy edge cases that's the most time consuming part and that isn't really covered by writing more code.

While I find robots cool they just don't literally "fit" in an average flat or house I lived in majority of my life. In order to squeeze one more member into your average household the lil thing needs to justify refurbishing the entire place so it can actually operate there without being a nuisance. Reminds of how my relative spent quite a bit of time making sure an old house being renovated was flat enough so automatic vacuum cleaner could traverse room to room without getting stuck. A humanoid robot is larger still. I can see them being adopted by businesses first though.

Sounds like just a case of pirates "illicitly" stealing from pirates. I don't really see anything ethically questionable there. I wonder if US corps will ever come out about all the resources used to train the original models and who they actually asked for permission when collecting data.

This is revolting. Given how many kids played and are still playing the game this literally means weaponizing kids playing games. Humanity has been lost somewhere along the way.

There's a reason why everyone must use agents and LLMs exclusively or be left behind. The entire Silicon valley livelihood is now a stack of cards built on a promise of infinite productivity gains based on LLMs. If that falls we're likely seeing a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis given the insane commitments made.

I find this doomsday interpretation of AI replacing engineers ridiculous. Lots of it also seems to be bot-written spam.

Just because an AI seems to know finance/architecture/debugging doesn't devalue authors knowledge of said domain. Its essentially like your coworker having the same knowledge. There's space on the market for both. And if AI gets to the point that it can in fact replace engineers (somehow also claiming accountability?) I'd expect it to be priced competitively enough to make every manager think hard whether to buy and become hopelessly dependent on some 3rd party service or hire an engineer. The market is not a zero sum game.

I don't get why every AI article is so hyper-focused on coding speed. If the coding is so fast doesn't it make sense to invest more time into quality, learning, documentation, testing refactoring, making a better product? I'm beginning to think that the slopcoders are evaluated by kLOCs of lines written in addition to LLM token usage and they're just maximising the measured metrics. Whether that actually ends up in production or is used by any real person is seemingly irrelevant. Likely the more bugs that are produced the more agents can be spun in parallel to simulate busywork.

This entire debacle weirds me out. Surely the police is aware of the water issues. They drink from the same tap as the locals do. What would a sane person call arresting people that publicly call out that your water supply is obviously contaminated?

I'm also wondering about the process. What was the prompt, what they fed into the model, what it was trained on, etc. The article reads like a marketing post.

Nevertheless new maths is exciting and might lead to what I find slightly more interesting - new physics.

Sounds pretty accurate. Bunch of comments on this thread sound like AI is some kind of a new doomsday cult. The most annoying thing I find personally is that all engineering principles are getting crushed by non techies. Management counting token usage, forcing agent use, reducing headcount in the name of productivity gain. Devs building bridges but nobody knows what the bridge is, what are the standards to which it was built, how it works and how to maintain it. VCs counting extra money claiming chasing the holy profit is the future. The abundance of engineering apathy is disturbing.

The way we got to 40 hours workweek wasn't really through productivity increase despite productivity increasing substantially in the era before less work hours became standard. It was due to rebellion by the workers and syndicates. I expect any further changes will require standing up to the elite who's been preparing for that moment by buying themselves islands and private bomb shelters.

The productivity increase religion has never really been about workers. Any increase in productivity is used to reduce the workforce count and to bleed dry existing workers who now have to overproduce in place of their fired coworkers. Its sad how occasionally some people obsess about their productivity on HN as-if they're unaware that they're buying into the very thing that will get them fired and/or burned out.

There's a lot of ads/propaganda/influencer BS/copywriting about how incredible AI but the reality is that its not "that" good. VCs want a return on their investment.

Also I suggest giving it low-level instructions. Its half-decent for low level stuff especially if it has access to preexisting code. Also note that it does exactly what you tell it to do like a genie. I've asked it to write a func that already exists in the codebase and it wrote a massive chunk of code. It wasn't until after it was done that I remembered we already have the solution to the problem done. Anyhow the hype is unreal so tailor expectations accordingly.

What's with all the AI fear mongering and doomspeak? Feels like people have never been so excited about getting laid off and becoming obsolete. It used to be that workers fought for their rights but maybe decades of software engineering proliferation has dampened that survival instinct. These days feels like OpenAI is paying writers to scare as many people into believing they're no longer needed.

I also find it kind of funny that the only perspective on AI is about being laid off. This says a lot about who's writing all these articles. But beware the cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive . If the AI boom allows a company to lay off a large amount of its engineers the engineers can also simply band together and as-easily become a competitor unburdained by legacy code resulting in profits going down for existing businesses. Alternatively they can simply join the customers of various SaaS businesses and roll their own solution with same net effect.

I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.

Gotta say the article hits the right notes. I'm one of the peeps thinking about whether I actually still need Windows. I'm not a power user of office and photoshop. I could in fact live with various online office-alike suites or Linux Libre office. I also no longer need a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. The HW I have is well supported on Linux nowadays. The only real reason for still running it is games and most of those I still play run crossplatform in large-part due to Steam. The new features being announced sound like a MS board-cooked joke. Agentic OS? For who? Secretaries? Small businesses that need local AI crawlers to find - what - 3y old invoice? I don't get it. And lets not forget their plans to turn the octopus into a subscription-based model which to me sounds horrific and likely the final step to purging it off my machines. Still a good choice for non-tech-savvy users and for users forced into it due to OS-exclusive software. Hopefully not for long though. More competition in the space should hopefully spur some innovation.

I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk. Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal attention and having it all back is great for sanity.

Gotta say I'm super annoyed by getting spoon-fed AI popups in every piece of software I'm using. How about fixing bugs and optimizing mem and perf? Whatever happened to caring for end users. Empathy is aparently dead in the era of VC capital.

Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.

Gotta say I'm pessimistic about the future of AI. At least until its adopted by public sector, schools and societies. Right now its just enhancing what we already have. More "efficient" meetings with auto-note-taking so we can have more meetings. More productivity so we can make less people do more, increase the workload and make them burn out faster. Better and more sophisticated scammers. More sophisticated propaganda by various legal and illegal actors. Cheaper and more grotesque looking vidz and music. More software slop. Not to mention all the "cool" improvements coming our way in the form of smart rockets, bombs and drones and of course I drool for all the smart improvements in surveillance capitalism 2.0. They call it a revolution but for now its just a catalyst for more of all the things we "love".

I survived one day. Feels accurate. I don't get why there are so many serious comments around this game. Its not rocket science. We often make fun of autism in the team, its just a nice way to chew the fat in the modern workplace.

True that. Its unsustainable. They'll keep it clean to attract a mass of consumers and then enshittify the experience by serving nicely disguised ads afterwards. Feels like this scenario has been on repeat since forever not just in Google but every product that supposedly shows "relevant" products.

Looks like another BS article that tries to compare a junior dev. to an AI. And its not even close. Anyone that actually tried to use AI tooling should know better. Feels like the CEOs that got sold this ideas are force-feeding this idea to senior devs and sadly senior devs are trying to gulp it down instead of rejecting the entire idea.

LLMs are more like a lightning fast pseudo-random text generator at this point. To see that though you'd need to run it a few times, test it and understand the output. Something that's a bit beyond the casual amateur ability. Maybe what we need is the AI bubble to burst first.

Its sad that we've gotten here though. Every tried having a coffee with your preferred AI as opposed to doing it with a highly motivate junior? Maybe you're not even going to get a chance to experience this.

I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.

Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.

I rarely use LLMs nowadays. Most of the time I'm fixing difficult to debug issues spanning multiple projects and a variety of backend systems and there's just no easy way to plug them to all this spaghetti. Autocomplete also spews out complete BS and was the first thing I disabled.

I did find they very useful when writing completely new stuff (things like "write a <insert your favorite API" client or making test boilerplate ie. as a copy&paste replacement tool.

It'd be nice to hear in detail how its been useful for other devs. There's too much propaganda around on how amazing it is and not nearly enough use cases.

So sad to hear this. It sounds like gutting various agencies and public sector is being done for no real purpose other than to "save". What's being saved for is something apparently nobody knows. Probably not even the current top brass.

I still can't believe Musk came up with a name that shortens to DOGE. This is next level political trolling. Then again people got what they voted for.

This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.

Hard to stomach but you can't deny honesty. I wouldn't be surprised that more business high brass people think that way about the workers but are smart enough not to be open about it.

Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.