rdevilla

I'd love to respond, but I am shadowbanned.

The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.

Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.

This is great. I sort of feel a lack of fora for discussing technical books over a longer lifetime than merely say, the HN front page.

While there is a very good selection of readings, it's unfortunate that both LinkedIn and Google are being used here, especially if the discussion is text-only.

Isn't it obvious? They aren't using AI to automate their business. That's why GM is doing this.

Rem acu tango.

A better counter argument to "catch the pedo" is to bring up cases of creeps who were insiders - law officers

Certainly. You mean like that time an Israeli Cyber Directorate division chief fled Nevada for Israel after being investigated for soliciting a minor for sexual purposes?

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-21/ty-article/.p...

https://archive.is/kNYUo

Everything people have figured out needs to be in living form to carried on.

It would appear that LLMs are invalidating this claim. Things can live in synthetic form and carry on just fine. Instead of cultivating a population of learned minds we are just feeding a few dozen egregores of models and training corpuses.

The point is the death of the celebration of excellence and technical mastery.

Once insurmountable challenges are now trivial to implement with, as you say, "low effort."

For those who were attracted to computing by the grind and the grand narrative that you, too, with sufficient effort, discipline, and merit, could become a revered craftsman, LLMs trivialize an entire lifetime of practice. I can't think of anything more demoralizing.

Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this.

Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?"

I mourn the death of a human artform.

often on the other side of the goddamn world and have usually a lot lot less tie-in to the company (if they even work directly for it) than when you get someone local on the line.

What the fuck does this have to do with accents?

Are you Canadian or something? Your entire comment is just tantamount to a defence of racism.

White first world workers doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than overseas workers,is the definition of racism [0] and white privilege. If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas, that just means Canadians are not competitive in that labour market. Any attempt to correct this fact is a market distortion and artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.

[0] DiAngelo 2011

Very naive for you to say that.

As the article states, it's an older practice so this maybe goes without saying - canary traps are also useful for tracking the flow of information throughout a population.

A well crafted, bespoke whisper passed into one ear that returns to you from another direction is a very strong signal.

I've come to the conclusion in the last couple years that being the guy who understands how the abstraction works under the hood is treated by companies is more of a liability than a virtue.

This is one of the most alienating things about the modern software engineering industry. Someone who grew up just fucking around with computers since they were 5 is supposedly now on even footing with someone who took a 16 week bootcamp and a Claude subscription and has never seen a terminal before.

I was at a drum and bass show recently and talked to one of the other people there. It was obvious I didn't really listen to that much drum and bass as I couldn't name anybody except the most popular artists. You see peoples' reactions change slightly when they discover you are not really part of their music scene - you're an outsider, or a tourist, or even a poser. That's not even a problem, that's just the way subcultures are - you've either lived and breathed that way of life, or not.

What LLMs are doing is they are automating the manufacture of posers and cultural appropriators at scale - you don't really understand the nooks and crannies of this territory, you never actually lived on IRC or in the bash terminal - but you can sure wave around these oversimplified maps of the territory with all the back alleys and laneways missing, and use your pocket book of translated phrases to pose as a native.

My general sense is that nobody understands how React works under the hood. The answer I get when I ask questions is generally just "don't worry about it".

The problem in software is it seems that we are losing the ability to distinguish between appropriators of computer geek culture and those who do "speak" programming languages natively. The bar has fallen so low that I can't even expect people to understand the difference between runtime and compile time. Anybody who brings up such advanced and esoteric (read: high school level computing) topics is viewed with scorn, as if their ability to expose ignorance on foundational topics presents an existential (or career) threat.

There's been a rise of anti-intellectualism in software from people with non-STEM backgrounds who actually disdain seeking out and possessing such knowledge. It's utterly useless to study - just like math. I find it harder and harder to locate hobbyists, especially here in Toronto, who bother to go below the abstractions not just because they want to, but because they are compelled to understand.

I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.

Yes, precisely.

There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.

There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.

I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era.

At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.

There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.

This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.

There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.

Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.

Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.

Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."

The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality.

You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):

    [...] its deepest and most complex
    usage is related to the postmodern
    philosophical concept of
    constructivism or, in social
    psychology, social constructionism –
    the notion that reality is co-
    constructed by participants in a
    relationship and in society.

Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).

    White Rose: Do you ever think
    that if you imagined or
    believed in something, it
    could come true... Simply by
    will?

    Angela: Yes. Actually, I did
    believe that. But I'm slowly
    having to admit that's just
    not the real world... Even if
    I want it to be.

    White Rose: Well, I guess it
    all depends on what your
    definition of real is.

Not modern enough. Unix is too low level, antiquated, and discriminates against those who just want to get shit done instead of reading manpages or documentation by hand.

The joke's on you all for willingly posting this content online for it to later be harvested by AI.

Nobody is forcing you to use these systems. The hackers have always said this moment, or something like it, would come, from beneath their canopies of tin foil. I've posted almost nothing online - not under pseudonyms nor real names - for over a decade. I sat on this HN username for almost 12 years before making a single post - and now HN forms the overwhelming majority of my port 443 footprint, where I state up front that everything is now associated to my real name.

Complete magick is possible when you simply refuse to participate in the things that society has tacitly assumed everybody does.

every time you can't refute something, you bring in gender or race.

I learned from the highly effective rhetoric of the 2010s.

The purpose was to illustrate how even basic commerce is going to be monitored to a much greater degree in highly electronic socities like those in North America. Go ask the fucking corner store in the deep Philippine provinces, where the power goes out twice a month, to bring out the credit card machine - no, almost all transactions will be done in cash, whereas only 10% will be in Canada. Let's just assume one nine, even - 90% of your business conducted in private overseas in a cash-based society, vs. 90% of your business being surveilled by the government and private industry in North America.

The claim is not false. Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats and numbers in aggregate, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?

let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too

This is hilarious. Toronto has no respect for facts, it has shown it will just fabricate histories out of whole cloth.

Nevertheless I'm tired of people citing anecdata and personal experience when upthread I have linked to a CBC article discussing a Bank of Canada report "arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...

Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata.

Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.

That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...

You weren't transacting at all in Toronto during COVID then.

This is the endgame of surveillance capitalism: submission, or opting out. Few can, or care enough to, do the latter.

Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0].

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...

Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex.

It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.

Experiencing time, sound, or visual motion as continuous, rather than discrete signal inputs is so much simpler.

Some practice with Mahasi Sayadaw style "noting" can train you into seeing your phenomenological experience as a stream of point-events between which we weave the illusion of continuity.

My old memories of Guava in Java 6 have been triggered.

No? I don't agree. The domain can be strongly modelled in the types; for instance, declaring kilometers, seconds, etc. instead of using primitive floats/reals everywhere, to statically prevent dimensional analysis issues.

However, it working as a lateral join is critical as you need the function to fire for every row.

Right, what I mean is, for functions in the standard expression position, e.g. `SELECT COALESCE(..., 0)`, those functions will also fire for every row. jsonb_to_recordset however needs to know the schema of the table it will output, and the only way syntactically to declare the column types output by a function returning a recordset is in LATERAL clauses [0].

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-select.html