pmg101

AI-generated code has about 1.7 times as many major issues as code written by humans

That's a very specific number I'd love to know the source of (and investigate further.)

The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.

This style of prose sets my teeth on edge and practically gives me PTSD I see so much of it. I prefer code but I get paid to read this shit instead now.

I want to say "ok, and now say that in a way that doesn't sound totally bizarre" yet instead I sigh and continue.

A massive amount of human natural intelligence goes into war, economic competition and gaining dominance over others though?

I just don't see that borne out in the real world though.

My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women.

At some point computers began to enter offices, bosses typed their own letters and then emails, and this category of job simply evaporated. Of course there was still SOME secretarial work, and some workers retrained to do it, but most simply had to leave the sector.

Isn't that a common story with technology replacing workers?

If you wanna travel faster you can build muscle, or you can just get in a car.

I've also wondered about it.

I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was designed and built from scratch with a team of 3 which eventually peaked at 20-30. Does anyone seriously believe a company building a web app needs 10,000 engineers?

Isn't that basically a one sentence description of the feudal system that operated for five centuries in Europe?

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous [0]

You can interpret that as either "there's always a moral panic about anything new" or (my own take) "this is how far we have fallen".

[0] https://clivethompson.medium.com/why-novels-will-destroy-you...

If iPhone user may I suggest Apple Configurator or Assistive Access to strictly limit the things you can do with your phone?

Not sure what solutions exist on Android but I'd be amazed if there are none.

My back button is actually a triangle at the bottom left of my Android screen so I don't think that works, but it's a great hack to know for desktop and I'll remember it! Much obliged

I had to press the Back button a LOT of times to get back to HN!

Have you seen the original bicycles. Boneshakers and so on. No pneumatic tires. They were just enough more efficient than walking to sell but other than that pretty dreadful. Penny farthings where your feet directly drove the wheel. So many injuries!

Pretty good analogy I reckon.

Of course it's accurate to say a lot of people aren't smart.

A lot of people also may or may not be smart but have limited knowledge of this area and limited time/effort to expend thinking about it.

I don't think you should rail against those things because they will always be true for every topic.

Instead, people who have understood the deeper implications of this, for instance the typical HN reader, need to connect with the average person, engage with rather than dismiss their child protection fears, while explaining the downsides.

Taking a high handed dismissive attitude will not help to shift public opinion.

I am so tired of everyone assuming the worst possible implementation of age verification.

Whatever happened to steel manning? It's supposed to be in the fabric of HN. Curious enquiry.

Is it nice children are exposed to dreadful things? No. Could we, with tech, come up with a way to improve things? Probably! Let's discuss and think about how!

I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.

Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.

It certainly seems similar.

Except China is just humans in a different location so it shouldn't be surprising they can do things humans in the US can do.

LLMs are a totally distinct type of thing. It's possible they'll be able to do Taste but it's also quite possible they'll never be able to.

I have a 10yo. I know loads of parents too. I don't think I've ever heard the "freedom" position taken apart from on HN. To non-techies it just seems self evident we should block kids from seeing beheadings and donkey porn. They haven't usually thought much about how that would be achieved and what the knock on effects would be. But they do want it.

A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.

I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.

Because god forbid that childhood, the one time in your life when you don't have any responsibilities, should be fun.

Will we all be automated out of our jobs? Will it create an economic boom, or a crash? How will it affect education? Will we all work from home?

The microprocessor revolution.

I think the right comparison is the invention of the microprocessor. At that time people were grappling with a lot of the same things we are today - would it automate jobs away, would it transform education and the work place, etc.

It seems to me that the supply of friends is more or less unlimited, such that it's pretty reasonable to apply filters when choosing who to befriend.

"Also not using tiktok" could be one such filter.

I wouldn't describe it as malice. If your job is to make the line go up, you make the line go up, and are rewarded for doing so, then you have done your job.

This is one explanation, sure.

Isn't it more likely that they simply don't in fact care about the "thing they care about", only the metric?

They can plot the metric on a chart and receive praise, so that's what they're interested in.

Are you saying that the proposals will not protect children?

Or that they may protect children, and that is being presented as the rationale behind such proposals, but that is not the real underlying reason?

If you're the kind of engineer who reads the implementation instead of trusting the function name, we'd like to talk.

Functional decomposition, combined with good naming, is what allows engineers to raise the level of abstraction and localise understanding of a large codebase.

Without it, if your only option is "read the implementation" for every line of code, you've lost control of the codebase.

Nothing to do with mothers, wasn't it something to do with visiting your "mother church", the church where you were baptised?

That certainly used to be the case.

Do you think that in 2026 maybe rapid progress can also come from using the same primitives faster?

I'm still figuring this out but I'm certainly open to the possibility.

Fourth Sunday in Lent or something, very easy to forget it!