davidclark

The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months.

It is weird that the author seems to understand that the pro-AI claims made by AI companies about the product’s necessity are not falsifiable, but then backtracks with “woah woah woah but don’t think I’m anti-AI.”

How is the assertion above any more rigorous than the productivity claims the author is criticizing throughout the rest of the article? That you won’t “survive” if you don’t adopt AI within a few months?

It is not true when the AI CEO says it, and it is not true when the person calling BS on the AI CEO… for some reason also says it…

The described problem sounds so utterly not human though.

If you give a human a programming task and tell them to use a specific programming language, how many times are they going to use a different language? I think the answer is very close to zero. At most, they’d push back and have further discussion about the language choice, but once everyone gets on the same page, they’d use the specified language, no?

The author is making up a human flaw and seeing it in LLMs.

[about the Grand Canyon] It looks like this. There, you’re done. You don’t need to go.

I don’t understand how this person can have gone to all these places and be so cynical about them. The above quote is the kind of reaction I get from people who don’t get out much when talking about the National Parks.

LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human.

Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.

Not convinced?

Below, what Perplexity Pro had to say.

When will this be as socially embarrassing as sending someone a “let me google that for you” link?

I don’t have an answer. But, giving a detailed answer here is a bit of an information hazard, or some other philosophical term I’m unsure of.

If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.

However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.

I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.

The article claims:

He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

Is that false? It also discusses a new policy:

Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.

Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

The secret is that the author is also Claude.

On the other hand, when people who claim success with AI share their prompts, I see all the same misses and flaws that keep me from fully buying in. For the person though, it seems like they gloss over these errors and claim wild success. Their prompts never actually seem that different from the ones that fail me as well.

It seems like “you’re not doing it correctly” is just a rationalization to protect the pro-AI person’s established opinion.

What about the reply in the link indicates to you that the person has empathy for marsf’s complaints and is willing to change anything at Mozilla in response to them?

For the reasons I stated above, the response comes off as faking understanding to manage a PR issue rather than genuine empathy and possible negotiation, but I am often wrong about many things.

My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)

Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.

This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.

I’d do it more if it wasn’t an annoying UX! I have message previews on lock screen turned off. If I get a message when my phone is sitting next to my keyboard on my desk, I unlock it to view the message. Might type a quick reply.

“Thinnest” should be measured by the thickest slice for a given dimension.

I have an iPhone 11 which also has a camera bump and the experience of typing while the phone is on a flat surface is laughably annoying. For a company that prides itself on design aesthetics, it is honestly an embarrassing miss.

I think the “crushing nihilism” pro-AI argument is what makes me most depressed. We are going to have so much fun when we do not communicate with other humans because it is a task that we can easily “filter out.”

The OP author shows that the cost to scrape an Anubis site is essentially zero since it is a fairly simple PoW algorithm that the scraper can easily solve. It adds basically no compute time or cost for a crawler run out of a data center. How does that force rethinking?

You should try to do some load testing of a real Erlang system and compare how it handles this scenario against other languages/frameworks. What you are describing is one of the exact things the Erlang system is strong against due to the scheduler.

I don’t know Go, but that sounds like someone has simply written part of Erlang in Go.

Well written typespecs + dialyzer catches most things you’d want to catch with a type system: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/typespecs.html

There is also pattern matching and guard clauses so you can write something like:

def add(a, b) when is_integer(a) and is_integer(b), do: a + b

def add(_, _), do: :error

It’s up to personal preference and the exact context if you want a fall through case like this. Could also have it raise an error if that is preferred. Not including the fallback case will cause an error if the conditions aren’t met for values passed to the function.

Let's unpack that a bit.

I’m not accusing you of anything, just giving the feedback that this line makes your post sound like it is AI slop. This is an extremely typical phrase when you prompt any current AI with some variation of “explain this post”. Honestly, the verbosity of the rest of your post also reinforces this signal. The typo here also indicates cutting and pasting things together “Given what he has to say about . But more importantly,”

If it is not AI slop, then hopefully you can use this feedback for future writing.

The correctness of 8%, 16%, and 90% are all equally unknown since we only have one timeline, no?

That PR, would have taken me at least a couple of days and up to 2 weeks to fully manually write out and test

What is your accuracy on software development estimates? I always see these productivity claims matched again “It would’ve taken me” timelines.

But, it’s never examined if we’re good at estimating. I know I am not good at estimates.

It’s also never examined if the quality of the PR is the same as it would’ve been. Are you skipping steps and system understanding which let you go faster, but with a higher % chance of bugs? You can do that without AI and get the same speed up.

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number?

Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor.

If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users.

There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.

Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...

It is important to note that ARC is a work in progress, not a definitive solution; it does not fit all of the requirements listed in II.3.2, and it features a number of key weaknesses…

Page 53

The study of general artificial intelligence is a field still in its infancy, and we do not wish to convey the impression that we have provided a definitive solution to the problem of characterizing and measuring the intelligence held by an AI system.

Page 56

The “Based on…” prompt is simply a horoscope. This is a great piece about how LLMs use the same tricks as psychics to appear helpful, useful, and intelligent.

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

In the video, François Chollet, creator of the ARC benchmarks, says that beating ARC does not equate to AGI. He specifically says they will be able to be beaten without AGI.

Have you considered the opposite? Reflected on your own biases?

I’m listening to my own experience. Just today I gave it another fair shot. GitHub Copilot agent mode with GPT-4.1. Still unimpressed.

This is a really insightful look at why people perceive the usefulness of these models differently. It is fair to both sides without being dismissive as one side just not “getting it” or how we should be “so far” past debate:

https://ferd.ca/the-gap-through-which-we-praise-the-machine....

Good example of why I have been totally ignoring people who beat the drum of needing to develop the skills of interacting with models. “Learn to prompt” is already dead? Of course, the true believers will just call this an evolution of prompting or some such goalpost moving.

Personally, my goalpost still hasn’t moved: I’ll invest in using AI when we are past this grand debate about its usefulness. The utility of a calculator is self-evident. The utility of an LLM requires 30k words of explanation and nuanced caveats. I just can’t even be bothered to read the sales pitch anymore.

From a recent blog shared on HN, among a list of reasons they can’t or won’t use LLMs:

The training data for LLMs is stolen. I don’t mean like “pirated” in the sense where someone illicitly shares a copy they obtained legitimately; I mean their scrapers are ignoring both norms and laws to obtain copies under false pretenses, destroying other people’s infrastructure. [footnotes omitted]

“I think I'm done thinking about GenAI for now” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193018

I’m not sure anyone I know could make an em dash with their keyboard off the top of their head.

[meta] Here’s where I wish I could personally flag HN accounts.

If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.

Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite.

It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why should I believe anything outlined in the article is transformative now when all the same vague claims about productivity increases were being made about the LLMs from 6 months ago which we now all agree are bad?

I don’t really know what would actually unseat this epistemic prior at this point for me.

In six months, I predict the author will again think the LLM products of 6 month ago (now) were actually not very useful and didn’t live up to the hype.