HN user
I find it really funny to read "I invested early in X" and then shortly later read "X has won this category of business" from the same author.
Gives the same vibe as those 'popular alternatives to X' blog posts written by one of the vendors, placing their offering as #1 and picking mediocre competitors to compare themselves against.
I'm not sure about more contemporary works that build on those themes. Maybe it's lost its edge as "futuristic" technology has pushed its way more and more into our lives?
Yep. Food surplus yet millions starving. Advanced cosmetic medicine yet millions die of preventable infections. Access to nearly all information ever gathered yet it can feel like we're living through Idiocracy!
It's not all bad, but that was my nihilist take on your question :) I think any attempt at commentary right now would end up eerily reminiscent of modern life.
Yeah until vendors butcher Postgres replication behaviors and prevent common paths of integrating these capabilities into other tools. Looking at you AWS
There it is!
caching often does simplify software though when done well
I have to push back here, I think this is objectively untrue. By definition a system or piece of code on where you add a condition where something else happens (cache) that behaves differently than the uncached path increases complexity.
I'm not saying it's wrong to cache things or that they aren't useful, but I think they absolutely are an abstraction and an optimization at the cost of complexity. Good code bases hide complexity from the devs all the time, so it's not a question of whether you can code it away, but rather how difficult is it to troubleshoot the internals of the system.
I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory
Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.
I don't think everyone's using the term 'firehose' the same here. A child comment refers to half a billion tokens for $20.
I did some really basic napkin math with some Rails logs. One request with some extra junk in it was about 400 tokens according to the OpenAI tokenizer[0]. 500M/400 = ~1.25 million log lines.
Paying linearly for logs at $20 per 1.25 million lines is not reasonable for mid-to-high scale tech environments.
I think this would be sufficient if a 'firehose of data' is a bunch of news/media/content feeds that needs to be summarized/parsed/guessed at.
Problem is you can't get timestamps and run times of your commands 'when you really need it', unlike almost everything else
Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.
Why though? Because vibrations from a speaker can cause the turntable to move and move the arm or cause the needle to move.
In a jazz cafe, I assume the music plays low most of the time and so it probably doesn't matter much.
Honestly this might do the trick...
Second this. My solution is to have a 'non-AI' IDE and then a Cursor/VS Code to switch between. Deep work cannot be achieved by chatting with the coding bots, sorry.
Very well-written. My main takeaway and constant reminder is that our privilege, no matter the size, usually comes at someone's expense.
Ask an LLM!
100% agree, but I bet there will be a quality blowback in software much like what we've seen at Boeing over the last few decades. I think there will be a premium on higher-quality software, but most companies don't need it
If it results in megacorps 'forcing' papers that misrepresent the truth for their own gains, yeah that's pretty bleak. Think weed killers, sugar, etc.
I think you can tease this out a bunch of ways.
where one side has a lot more power than the other side
This is life, in its entirety. Even those who feel like they live a 'free' life should realize they depend on things like national security and access to healthcare, right? So the power dynamic there doesn't make sense to me, unless you're also constantly in fear of all these other systems falling apart. Humans have worked to earn money to live forever. There wouldn't be money to give to workers if there wasn't an imbalance to begin with. Even farmers sustaining their own land have to pay workers to harvest.
whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people
This IMO is a personal failure. Others don't determine whether I'm satisfied with my work, I do. I'm proud of my work even if others don't care for it.
not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be
There is no entity responsible, just like there is no reason for 'being here'. Your parents are to thank for raising you, but it could have just as well been other parents or another child! Our lives are a gift we're lucky to experience and we should enjoy it to the fullest on our own terms. If work fulfills you, great. If it doesn't, then do something else.
I really dislike people putting their value systems on others, especially around these kinds of topics. Telling people that what they think is valuable is in fact not is akin to telling people to believe in your faith, or how to raise their kids, etc.
Edit: Also curious why you would create a throwaway for this kind of opinion.
Nitpicking like this must be fair, if you look at typical AI code - styles, extra newlines, comments, tests/fixtures, etc. it is the same. And again LoC isn't a good measurement in the first place.
Not all my 5k lines are hand-written or even more than a character; a line can be a closing bracket etc. which autocomplete has handled for the last 20 years. It's definitely an achievement, which is why it's important to get clarity when folks claim to reach peak developer productivity with some new tools. To quote the curl devs, "AI slop" isn't worth nearly the same as thoughtful code right now.
Is that final number really that crazy? With a well defined goal, you can put out 5-8K per day by writing code the old fashioned way. Also would love to see the code, since in my experience (I use Cursor as a daily driver), AI bloats code by 50% or more with unnecessary comments and whitespace especially when making full classes/files.
I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success.
Normally I wouldn't post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!
I don't see any relationship between idolizing rich people as a culture and capitalism
The primary goal of capitalism is profit. Therefore successful people in capitalism are rich. People look up to and idolize the most successful people within their cultures.
The connection is crystal clear to me.
There's also nothing wrong with capitalism ...
I think if you put yourself in my shoes, you could come up with your own counter examples. There's plenty of things wrong with the pursuit of profit when many people suffer needlessly. It breeds callousness, greed, selfishness, and other personality traits that aren't great for society.
One of the core problems I think America refuses to acknowledge is the pervasive culture of idolatry and putting the rich on pedestals. It seems inevitable that if the "American Dream" is basically just becoming rich enough, that you get lots of people that value money over everything else. Power and wealth usually seek more power and wealth, and here we are. Capitalism is a cancer.
Source? I did not see this active anywhere, only mentioned.
Side-point - I'd even put an asterisk on OpenAI's innovation. a) Initial release was an amalgamation of prior research (valid) b) Subsequent models have for the most part been upgrades + optimizations (new iphone models aren't innovations), and c) their products are essentially emergent behaviors of a technology that is already a commodity (or ideas taken from the wider ecosystem). Not to say they aren't great engineers!
By constantly being in the headlines, they've given competitors lots of room to catch up.
Through LLMs, new developers are learning the beauty of writing software specs :')
Good point, honestly! Farming/whaling/harvesting/ranching all works, too. I guess my brain automatically went water=fish
I disagree, even with your compelling argument of... changing a quote font and appealing to morality.
Perhaps use a better word than culprit, since fishing whale is legal in all three of those places!
`brew ls --versions` + `brew list | xargs brew list`
Everything you need is there...
I didn't think they meant literally the same. That would either be called a group trip, or a coincidence!
Liking beer doesn't really make people the same 'type'. Going to local bars to strike up conversations is great (one of my go-tos!), but those are not the 'same type of people' IMO.
I interpreted OP as a poorly veiled comment about wanting to avoid locals and local culture, instead preferring to beeline for a Starbucks or Gucci in a new city when 'traveling'. Or perhaps some snobbiness about what people like to do when travelling. Both of which are cringe.
Maybe I misinterpreted OP's preferences, though. My opinion is if you're going to use the resources to travel somewhere new, you should enjoy what is there, not seek copies of what you have at home.
Why do you prefer to spend time in the same setting with the same people when you are in a new place? Why not stay home?