HN user

dazamarquez

46 karma
Posts1
Comments16
View on HN

I use AI to write specific types of unit tests, that would be extremely tedious to write by hand, but are easy to verify for correctness. That aside, it's pretty much useless. Context windows are never big enough to encompass anything that isn't a toy project, and/or the costs build up fast, and/or the project is legacy with many obscure concurrently moving parts which the AI isn't able to correctly understand, and/or overall it takes significantly more time to get the AI to generate something passable and double check it than just doing it myself from the get go.

Rarely, I'm able to get the AI to generate function implementations for somewhat complex but self-contained tasks that I then copy-paste into the code base.

I would say this article is very shallow. Zitron criticizes what he calls the AI bubble from multiple angles, it's not just "they will never be profitable" — and I agree this would be a wild claim. Even in the worst-case scenario where AI is a giant con, as Zitron paints it, they might just become profitable if they can con enough people. I also don't expect people with a stake in any of this to read Zitron's posts and immediately stop doing what they're doing. That would be silly. I don't think Zitron writes for them, and that what he writes needs "debunking". For how I see it, Zitron mainly advocates for a more critic journalism. Regardless of whether he's right or wrong, he does attempt to critically report on AI.

The piece isn't an independent analysis as the author has an obvious interest in Zitron being wrong. In fact, the piece closes off with a nice marketing self-plug. But that aside, the author doesn't actually refute Zitron's points. One of the main argument is "the comparison with Netflix is wrong", which doesn't prove anything in itself; and then tries to show that inference is profitable. Though just as in their baker analogy, you must factor in all other costs, including training new models. Worthless marketing plug.

I am realizing something that Companies do not seem very welcoming towards entrepreneurship

I'm not a HR person, but I do interviews. If someone introduced themselves as an "indie maker" or "solopreneur", that'd be a major turn-off. These terms are very easy to interpret as "unemployed person who tries to stay busy" or worse "unemployed person who tries to misrepresent themselves". Staying busy is not a bad thing, but is obviously unimpressive when compared with folks with actual work experience. Calling that "enterpreneurship" may even come across as lying to yourself or being deceitful. It's not surprising that "companies don't seem very welcoming towards [it]".

Maybe focus on the skills you got out of it that are relevant to your job prospects, or better cut it entirely from your resume and just market yourself as a junior dev; or whatever position/level you can aspire to based on your non-solopreneur work history.

I don't understand why this would be interesting.

These "digital nomads" who would travel to Japan for work+sightseeing aren't taking local jobs and don't have a Japanese bank account.

Does Japan want to tax income produced within its borders, regardless of where one is actually a tax resident? Most countries I'm aware of treat people as tax residents if they reside there for more than 180 days a year.

Find a new job as soon as possible. Even if the promise of no more layoffs is true, when the atmosphere affects your ability to perform, you gain nothing by staying there. Your mental health should be top priority.

Also, if anxiety causes you to underperform, if/when there'll be a new round of layoffs, you might be on the line anyway.

Step 1: Ask ChatGPT. You can throw at it literally whatever poorly framed question you have and it will come up with a reply right away. The more basic and well udnerstood the subject matter is, the more accurate its responses will be.

ChatGPT is invaluable at this stage because it will correctly guess what you are talking about even if you don't know how to formulate your questions. The typical problem beginners face is that they don't know how to describe things with the correct technical terminology. This makes it hard to find results by just Googling stuff, because that stuff is (hopefully) written by people who are experts and experts use the right terminology. You don't.

Step 2: once you are familiar with the basic terminology, verify ChatGPT responses against wikipedia or any other expert resources. Mind you that at this stage you are still doing your own research.

Step 3: once you are able to productively frame your questions, refine your knowledge by asking in expert forums.

Step 4: repeat

In step 1 you obviously can replace ChatGPT with actual human tutors. My point is, don't go to expert forums unless you know how to frame your questions.

"phantom" and "phantom type" are well-understood terms that describe a type with a type parameter that isn't used in the type definition. "spectral" is a pun (phantom -> spectral). It has nothing to do with runtime representation of types.

1) why would I use this site instead of Reddit/4chan/StackExchange/Quora/any specialized Q&A board, that are free? 2) How do I make sure the answers I paid for are correct and/or worth my bucks? 3) How is this going to deal with plagiarism? Once you put money into the equation, what prevents a random answerer from copy-pasting swathes of text from wikipedia or one of the aforementioned websites?

Honestly I asked my question without any expectation. I thought most people scoff at it because it make me seem as a newbie/stupid person. Instead you gave me a interesting and useful reply. I now have much more leads to dig deeper in that topic. Thank you!!