skwirl

The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true? Recently, there's a lot of talk about AI allegedly finding security flaws in software. That is an unsubstantiated claim. As such, it would need to be verified by a non-machine, and arguably, the verification process would require the same amount of effort or more than would be required to find the issue to begin with.

Came for the bad AI take, stayed for the P=NP claim.

It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos - started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids" legitimately horrifies me.

You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma.

OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.

You aren't in a position to post this.

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.

If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.

The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

This is a HN comment reply masquerading as a novel submission.

It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in 2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.

We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.

This thread is a great discussion and I have kept coming back to it over the last couple days to read more of it when I have a chance. I’m kind of disappointed that it artificially ended. I think at some useful comment threshold level you just have to let it go.

But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.

The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."

On this topic I think it’s pretty off base to call HN a “well insulated bubble” - AI skepticism and outright hate is pretty common here and AI negative comments often get a lot of support. This thread itself offers plenty of examples.

Surely we all know that when we post or upvote comments like this that we are being incredibly disingenuous.

The database is being reverse engineered and published anyways, as per the article.

They are useful for putting URLs in print materials like books. Useful for sharing very long links in IRC and some other text based chat apps (many google maps links would span multiple IRC lines if not shortened, for example). They are good for making more easily scannable QR codes.

Not when everyone logs in as ec2-user.

So not being able to download any of the games you have purchased ever again?

The major difference is that in the type of reading Joel Splosky is talking about, you are coming in not knowing the code's intent. It was written by one or more other people at some point in the past, likely with many iterative changes over a period of time. Figuring out the intent in this case is 90%+ of the work. With LLM generated code, you know the intent. You just told the assistant exactly what your intent was. It's much, much easier to read code that you already know the intent of.

Again, implicit in this comment is the belief that I am out to or need to convince you of something. You would be the only person who would benefit from that. I don’t gain anything from it. All I get out of this is having insulting comments about my “skill level” posted by someone who knows nothing about me.

It doesn’t really matter what this or that person said six months ago or what they are saying today. This morning I used cursor to write something in under an hour that previously would have taken me a couple of days. That is what matters to me. I gain nothing from posting about my experience here. I’ve got nothing to sell and nothing to prove.

You write like this is some grand debate you are engaging in and trying to win. But to people on what you see as the other side, there is no debate. The debate is over.

You drag your feet at your own peril.

Do you just mean within Amazon? Because outside of Amazon, there was major resistance to AWS/cloud computing in general from older devs highly invested in the status quo. I have spent a significant amount of effort in my career fighting for cloud adoption.

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This was given to the AI by having it watch a video that explains it.

That is not what the article says. It says that was separate, previous research.

Nobody has any idea if they broke any EU laws until regulatory agencies and courts arbitrarily interpret the laws based on their political views pertaining to the companies in question. These are agencies that will suddenly have a new interpretation of a law after more than a decade and go after companies retroactively for something they had previously been fine with. It’s essentially a dolled up version of tariffs.

I strongly suspect the EU will not find that companies must retrain models in response to GDPR requests because 1. It would destroy Mistral, one of the few beacons of hope in EU tech and 2. It would put Europeans and European companies at huge disadvantages in not being able to use these tools.

As an American software engineer I would only benefit from Europe banning these products as it would put a large segment of the low cost labor force at a huge disadvantage relative to me, so I am not really bothered by the possibility of them doing it. It would be a very interesting experiment.

It would mean no LLM-based AI chat products in Europe for the foreseeable future. So the cost to the companies would be net revenue in Europe and the cost to Europeans would be inability to use these products.

If you went back to 2004 and told people the NYT was trying to help re-elect George W Bush they would nervously back away slowly from you.

Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.

This was in an era when fathers had little to do with childcare. I don’t know about Einstein’s specific situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers had never changed a diaper.

If you aren’t interested in the post, what compelled you to click into the comments and tell everyone about it instead of just ignoring it?

This is not a constant fact, though. In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around. Right now is going to be a very different story for many roles.

This comment is a great example of the Stockholm Syndrome related to DPI scaling and desktop Linux. This is just slightly better than the "why does anyone need 4K monitors to begin with" takes.

If anyone is really bored, go try what this comment is suggesting. Run things at native resolution and change every system/application font setting to be 1.5x the default. Or instead just think about it for 30 seconds and just realize that a lot of UI is not text, and now you get 'normal' sized text with tiny images, icons, scroll bars, etc. and a lot of UI glitches such as text overflowing tiny buttons or clipping out of panels. The entire experience being suggested is hot garbage.

As a user of 27" 4k monitors, the terrible 150% DPI scaling has been a dealbreaker for Linux desktop for me for years. Every so often I will go out and search to see if it's any better, and I always find people insisting that it works "perfectly" now, and then I will go and try to replicate what they did only to find out that "perfectly" means something very different to Linux desktop users who clearly have never used MacOS or even Windows with fractional DPI scaling.

No, this paragraph was not hyperbole. This was in conclusion and the author’s serious opinion.