munchler

Nobody knows what anything is going to be worth in 5 years.

(1989)

"This action is irreversible and ensures that your data remains protected."

This amounts to "We deleted all your data in order to keep it safe." WTF.

Code is code. It either does the job or doesn't.

Surely that is not the only dimension that matters when evaluating software. Maintainability and readability, for example, are crucial for any long-lived project.

I love the chatty tone of this utterly dystopian question.

If AGI is the goal and something like the Singularity is even a remote possibility, the difference between first and second place could be effectively infinite. Given China’s suppression of human rights, it’s not a chance I would want my government to take.

I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was surprised that software costs money

I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?

To expand on this a bit, I appreciate some audio overkill because, if I do hear sizzle or distortion, it eliminates one possible reason and helps me figure out what’s actually happening.

It’s like having gigabit internet to my house: I don’t actually need it, but when a website is slow, I know the problem isn’t in my internet connection.

It actually extends to all automation, even before computers. Replacing oxen with tractors? Now you have to keep the tractors running.

This would create more chaos than any other suggestion so far. Well done.

Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:

Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.

I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

As a kid, I liked arithmetic function machines that "magically" force a particular output or allow one to quickly deduce the input from the output. These are usually based on non-obvious (to a kid) identities. I would invent my own and then ask family members to play along. I'm not sure if this sort of puzzle game has a name?

A simple example:

- Multiply your number by 2

- Add 10

- Divide by 2

- Subtract the original number

The classic I remember from childhood is the card game "War". Assuming neither player cheats or makes a mistake, the outcome is totally predetermined.

If, say, a certain version of Claude tends to be better at front-end than back-end work, that can be important for deciding how to use it in the future. Just like when managing human developers.

Disclose your "AI" tools in a merge request if needed but leave them out of the damn commits, those are for technical information and not for advertising.

I think this is very poor advice. Knowing who/what changed the code is often crucial for understanding why it changed.

All types of problems. F# can do almost anything C# can do and with less ceremony. The quote I like is that once you get comfortable with F#, switching back to C# is like "having to fill out government forms in triplicate".

Yes, all that stuff. I try to stick to F# where no special syntax is required for missing values (via Option<T>).

Simple example:

   type Expr =
       | Primitive of int
       | Addition of (Expr * Expr)
       | Subtraction of (Expr * Expr)
       | Negation of Expr

All the weird cruft around nullability, for starters. Once again confirming that allowing null references is usually a mistake.

Unions are simpler than subclasses and more powerful than enums, so the use cases are plentiful. This should reduce the proliferation of verbose class hierarchies in C#. Algebraic data types (i.e. records and unions) can usually express domain models much more succinctly than traditional OO.

F# leads the way and C# slowly catches up, as always. Yet for some reason, C# still gets all the mindshare.

My understanding is that E2E encryption implies encryption in transit. The message is encrypted at the source and only decrypted at the destination, so it is encrypted everywhere in between.

The point is that, logically, the first part of that rule (“expose the king”) is implied by the second part (“leave that king”), so the first part is redundant. You could simplify the rule to:

No piece can be moved that will leave the king of the same color in check.

If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.

Well, that’s my point. You can model a coin flip, but you can’t predict it. A model and a prediction are two different things.

I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.

This is charming, but not at all like the soul-sucking content typical on LinkedIn.

The choppy language is the biggest trigger for me. Examples:

* "With Fraud Defense, there was no process to respond to. The product launched. The requirements page went live."

* "That is not a technical limitation waiting to be engineered around. It is the mechanism."

* "The defeat is mechanical. Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware."

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe humans are starting to write like LLM's, or maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part.

I think this is the third HN link I've clicked on in a row that leads to an LLM-generated article. I'm not opposed to AI, but I'm tired of seeing it quietly substituted for human thought and expression.

Thank you for this explanation. So the AI can respond based on the DOOM game that it’s watching? E.g. Could you ask the chatbot for advice on what to do next on the current game level?