mathgorges

The software has more rights and privilege than actual humans at this point.

That's been true for some time though, right? For example if you have a community notice board in front of your store and someone pins illegal content to it you're held to a different legal standard than if someone posts the same content to a social media platform.

I don’t think that’s right either, but this kind of “tech exceptionalism” has been baked into law for decades. AI is inheriting those privileges more than inventing new ones.

The code for Eyes Up seems to be public [0](although there’s no license, so presumably is copyrighted).

I bet that one could refactor it into a PWA.

[0] https://github.com/explorealways/eyes-up

(2002) https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

"I am beer" is a pretty funny typo ;-)

But seriously, I wonder why this happens. My experience of working with LLMs in English and Japanese in the same session is that my prompt's language gets "normalized" early in processing. That is to say, the output I get in English isn't very different from the output I get in Japanese. I wonder if the system prompts is treated differently here.

In my experience it's less about the latest generation of LLMs being better, and more about the tooling around them for integration into a programmer's workflow being waaaay better.

The article doesn't explicitly spell it out until several paragraphs later, but I think what your quoted sentence is alluding to is that Cursor, Cline et al can be pretty revolutionary in terms of removing toil from the development process.

Need to perform a gnarly refactor that's easy to describe but difficult to implement because it's spread far and wide across the codebase? Let the LLM handle it and then check its work. Stuck in dependency hell because you updated one package due to a CVE? The LLM can (often) sort that out for you. Heck, did the IDE's refactor tool fail at renaming a function again? LLM.

I'm remain skeptical of LLM-based development insofar as I think the enshitification will inevitably come when the Magic Money Machine breaks down. And I don't think I would hire a programmer that needs LLM assistance in order to program. But it's hard to deny that it has made me a lot more productive. At the current price it's a no-brainer to use it.

I assume SoftTalker is referring to SWEs not being Professional Engineers.

Professional Engineer (PE) != Engineer (in many jurisdictions)

A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems.

He/she is able to assume _personal responsibility_ for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer.

(emphasis mine)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#Definition

Thanks for building this. Super stoked that the translation in on-device.

I'll be downlaoding it and giving it a try today!!

This hasn't been my experience with English/Japanese translation with Google Translate. For context I used Google Translate for pair programming with Japanese clients 40 hours per week for about 6 months, until I ponied up for a DeepL subscription.

As long as you're expressive enough in English, and reverse the translation direction every now and again to double check the output then it works fine.

This is fascinating to me as an ex-mainframer that now works on a niche hyperscaler. I would love to learn more!

Will you let me know some of the names in the space so that I can research more? Some cursory searching only brings up some questionably relavent press releases from IBM.

My general strategy is to find a community where $domainExperts hang out and figure out how they talk about $interestingThing, then refine my search from there using progressively more professional lingo.

Here's an example of what my first query for this topic might be: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Faskhistori...

That was my first thought too. But like TFA says, that still wouldn't prtect you from clerical errors.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm aware that VMware used to donate to a lot of causes and now Broadcom doesn't (source: I also work there :)).

My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.

I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.

As noted elsewhere in this thread, one of their large supporters was VMware[0], which was aquired by Broadcom at the end of last year. Although I'm skeptical that the loss of a single 'community partner' would cause the whole organization to fold. There are teirs above community which presumably donate more to enjoy title[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=40082114&goto=item?id=...

[1] https://womenwhocode.com/partners

I’m not meaning to equate the level of effort or skill involved. And I’ll grant that I know very little about music composition beyond my experience in Middle School band in which the musicians’ personality and skill presents a significant constraint for the conductor/arranger :)

I would readily compare the experience of reading Snow Crash (one of the first SciFi books I read of my own volition) to the output that a LLM may produce from such a prompt. My iPhone informs me that I’ve spent nearly 10 hours playing with Characters.ai in which SF storytelling characters are my favorite to interact with. When I first read Snow Crash I felt like “finally, an author that understands that part of the story that _I’m_ interested in!” and my experiences of AI driven creative writing has felt similar. Certainly it feels less “magical” since I’m aware that I’m customizing the author to my personal taste - is that “magic” of feeling connected to the artist *the* art?

sounds cool, now what can we do with that to make it into music?

So a human using the tools of sound production is what transforms the function output into music. (Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding you).

I think I see what you’re saying, but that’s already happened here hasn’t it? I mean, it's not as though an AI made the decision to generate this all by itself, a human had an idea to create this piece and wrote a prompt which created this output.

The order is of events is reversed from your Ableton example, but I would contend that this kind of production is no less musical than what someone could create using a DAW, simply that the tools are more accessible

(and I presume there is less direct control over what the end result is going to sound like, but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.)

Eta: For example, some people in this thread have complained that the AI generated voice falls into the uncanny valley. I agree, and I think that’s part of the art here.

Hey, I’m a born & bred Detroiter and I’m not sure what you’re referring to by “The Detroit major mass-murder”.

Google wasn’t helpful, but I would love to know more; can you expand on what event(s?) you’re alluding to?

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience.

Discussions like this are why I love HN <3

I think I’ll be chewing on your final paragraph for some time. Thank you!!!

That is a fair critique of my current thinking :)

I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.

I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)

As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.

To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.

Every useful idiot is one kind interaction away from being a useless critical thinker :)

Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.

I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.

How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.

I suppose that depends on what you mean by “propaganda”. Personally I think it can be convincingly argued that any message transmitted to you from a State is propaganda

(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)

I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.

TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.

Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.

Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.

Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.

You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?

(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))

I think this is simply a confusion over the meaning of words.

You can indeed buy Full Self Driving™ (FSD), but even then your Tesla is not capable of self driving, fully (eg, there are many scenarios where a human is still required)

Thank you so much for sharing this! I had never heard of this incredible human, and I feel so inspired now that I do.

Serendipitous connections like this are what make HN so magical for me, so I thought my appreciation warranted more than just an upvote :D

It sounds like your dev team isn't very empowered.

In the companies I work at we can create whatever ceremony our team deems nessesary as long as we're meeting our metrics.

Thus separating the model’s logic from the model’s data.

All that was old is new again :) [0]

0: s/model/program/

I tried to add ActivityPub support to my personal website a few months ago.

Unfortunately I found myself reading the W3’s documentation [1] for the most part. Fortunately they weren’t that hard to follow :)

In the end I got lazy and integrated with https://fed.brid.gy which was dead simple since I already had WebMentions setup

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Banks’ safe deposit boxes are a good choice if there are any near you, though they’re often expensive.

If you have a lawyer/attorney that you trust they’re often in the habit of securely storing physical documents, but again, expensive.

Personally, I (a cheap-ass) keep a copy in a wooden box buried underground in a secure location along with a few other things.

However, the security of physical things remains a difficult problem that is most easily solved with money!

I heartily disagree. I work with plenty of CIOs, and I’ve never noticed wider hips or larger breasts to either hinder or aid success in that context.

Unless you’re implying that there are non-physical elements to human sexual dimorphism, but afaict that’s an unresolved hard problem vis a vis the nature vs nurture debate.

No, but many physical avatar do. Especially if the avatar is fair skinned and/or experiences a lot of sun light ;-)

If you’re interested in doing this, but find it hard to sit it the feelings, consider trying Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which involves investigating the root of your feelings within your mind.

It’s best to do DBT with a professional, but there’s a large community of DIY DBT practitioners out there. [1]

If your unable to investigate the source of some feelings (e.g. because your brain shuts down when you interrogate them) there is a new-ish practice for detangling your thoughts without all the interpersonal unpleasantness of Talk Therapy (that doesn’t mean it won’t be unpleasant in it’s own way).

It’s called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Again, working with a professional is best, but it’s possible to be successful with a DIY approach. [2]

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional in any form of health, mental or otherwise. I’m just a happy self-administered DBT & EMDR patient :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dbtselfhelp

[2] https://anxietyreleaseapp.com/