HN user
The economic system itself is incompatible with the physical reality of a finite planet
The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.
An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)
When you say €20 worth of tokens is it fair direct API call price or subsidized claude code?
Or when the Internet came and made memory kinda obsolete. Why remember facts if you can simply index them and then lookup on demand.
But now we delegate thinking itself, so I wonder what is left.
Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.
100k is small, but you're right, it can be millions. I usually skim through the code tho, and it's not that hard. I don't need to fully read and understand the code.
What I look at is: high-level architecture (is there any, is it modular or one big lump of code, how modular it is, what kind of modules and components it has and how they interact), code quality (structuring, naming, aesthetics), bus factor (how many people contribute and understand the code base).
I think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes".
I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality.
And given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy. I'm teaching myself to skip the stars and skim through the code and evaluate the quality of both architecture and implementation. And I found that quite a few times I prefer a less-"starry" alternative after looking directly at the repo content.
to eliminate "useless eaters"
It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.
It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replacement are a fuss, a pile of lies to justify layoffs and worsening financial situation.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...
at equivalent adjusted income levels
What is equivalent adjusted income level? PPP between Russia and USA is around 1.8. Median annual salary in the US is $57 ($1196 per week), median salary in Russia is $13200. Even if you adjust it, it's roughly two times smaller.
As someone who lived in a bunch of countries, some rich and some poor, no, living standards among the avg. Joes of the world are not even remotely the same.
Poverty levels
Poverty levels are measured relative to median. Poverty in US and poverty in Bangladesh, Russia or Vietnam are completely different things.
In the US poverty line is about $16k, while in Russia for example it is $2300. Even considering the PPP it's like 4 times the difference in living standards. I guess Vietnam or Bangladesh are far worse.
Upd: downvotes with no counterargument. Orange site is becomming more and more a reddit.
We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office.
Yes bc now this worker works same 3-4 hours but 4 days instead of 5.
The average person gets no benefit from this
You are proving the point. The avg. person gets an enormous benefit from it, even in countries like USA, Japan or Korea with far less generous welfare. The gap in standards of living of somebody in the US and somebody in Georgia or Vietnam are ridiculous.
I am very happy with this
I'm not. If you are european and will inherit something it's fine, but if not you'll barely be able to afford a house and a tiny investment portfolio. And at the face of the immense collapse of a pension system it's pretty grim.
Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally.
In DE I would argue that this is due to punitive taxes and I wouldn't call it progress.
Poor people work their asses 40+ hours and up to overwork since it's always paid here. White collars work less time and often switch to 4 days because at this tax progression working your ass is not worth it. Time is more valuable, indifference curve is screwed.
It also have negative effect on women's careers in combo with 3/5 tax classes thing. And it hurts EU economies very hard since the most productive ones are disincentivized to work more.
It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.
Well FFmpeg is roughly 1500k, but it's C+Asm and it's dozens of codecs and pretty complex features. SBCL is around 500k I guess.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily too much, I'm genuinely asking if this is a bloat or if it's justified.
500k lines of code
Isn't it a simple REPL with some tools and integrations, written in a very high level language? How the hell is it so big? Is it because it's vibecoded and LLMs strive for bloat, or is it meaningful complexity?
I don't think government funded projects are any more secure. The political climate changes once in a few years and we had a lot of examples of previous decisions being scrapped. Limux in München was scrapped overnight, usaid was shut down in no time.
You get a little more stability for a lot of headache but nobody guarantees that in a few years political stance won't change drastically and the fund won't be cut or even closed.
Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand.
I would argue that the split existed before AI and these camps were not the same.
There were always "Quality first" people and "Get the shit done ASAP" people. Former would go for a better considerations, more careful attitude towards dependencies. Latter would write the dirty POC code and move on, add huge 3rd party libs for one small function and so on.
Both have pros and cons. Former are better in envs like Aerospace or Medtech, latter would thrive in product companies and web. The second cathegory are the people who are happy the most about AI and who would usually delegate the whole thing to the agents from start to finish including the review and deployment.
Indeed. I have a few colleages and they constantly try to push these long convoluted functions which look like
is_done = False
while not is_done:
if pattern1:
...
if pattern2:
...
if matched == "SUCCESS":
is_done = True
break
if pattern3:
...
And the colleages tend to do reviews with the help of the agents so they don't even care to read this mess.
Same in Germany. That's why usually Max Mustermann (55) get's a better compensation for doing bare minimum than you for doing more work.
But in case of layoffs you will be kicked out first and he would be kicked out the last and with a far better severance package.
meaningful measures of economic health
As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.
Indeed. "Science-based" lifting become quite popular in the recent years, but the actual science behind it is quite loose with a lot of methodologically weak studies, small samples etc.
Tcc even supports that with `#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run`, although I don't understand people who use c or go for "scripting", when python, ruby, TCL or perl have much superior ergonomics.
That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.
That's true, but at this point I would prefer slow but steady over being disembarked at random *dorf or standstill in a middle of nowhere with zero signal and no clue when we'll get back on track.
Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.
Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped
Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.
I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
Better explain to me how to get to the USA.
Rather than getting stuck in front-end minutiae, the tutorial goes straight to generating working assembly code, from very early on.
I think this is important and for a more sophisticated compiler design I find Ghuloum approach very appealing [1]. I.e. build a very simple subset of the language from top to bottom and then grow the meat gradually.
The really great book following this approach I've discovered recently was [2]. Although I find both C and x86 not the best targets for your first compiler, still a very good book for writing your first compiler.
[1] http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf
[2] https://norasandler.com/2024/08/20/The-Book-Is-Here.html
Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.
At this point I think it's utopic. Meta has an army of lawyers, they will optimize and adapt.
But it's really hard to tinker as a single hacker when a German legal troll firm can come for you for linking Google fonts on your web page (i.e. transferring IPs so breaching privacy)