HN user
I'm a longtime emacs head and partisan ... but I learned vi to compose emails in the Berkeley computer lab in 1989 and somehow have never forgotten vi key commands ever since. Emacs is my preferred sw dev editor for most things but I feel like not knowing vi is almost professional negligence if you are on the terminal.
Is cargo really a reason to love rust? I'm not a full-on rustacean but in my limited experience cargo certainly had its flaws and warts like any other build system.
I find it a little puzzling when a language ships the one build system to rule them all. I get that it saves some decision stress but it also is a monoculture. Gradle vs Maven in Java at least puts competitive pressure on each; c/c++ obviously have many options; even Haskell had/has stack vs cabal.
I was actually expecting that article to say something about performance. In the 90s telecom DBs removed all constraints including primary key from their ingestion tables for speed, and in general constraints are for OLAP not OLTP.
Having said that, given sqlite's tiny type universe I can't imagine TC would be at all slow.
Just give us the prompt
Two showstopper problems with this:
1. Many of "us" don't like interacting with LLMs more than we have to, and view reading as a pleasure that would be extinguished instantly at a chat prompt.
2. It lazily implies that the essence of an article is so easy to communicate that it can be compressed into a prompt. There's a reason for titles, subtitles, open sentences, hero images, paragraph openers, etc etc: they pull you in, establish tone and voice and so forth. Where are the prompts that can entice a reader to even skim it much less plug into their favorite chatbot?
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
I got one of those off of one hit of some absurd resin moonrock preroll. Not fun
CBD gave me anxiety as much as sativa. The only thing I actually enjoy is low-dose indica+hash/resin.
Point being, ymmv.
The founder portrait is surprisingly sympathetic given what a train wreck is being described. This one stood out for me:
The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution
"Execution" being one of those magic business words, I've said this exact thing but only once lampooned thusly did it dawn on me how psychotic it is. If VC-funded startups are almost by definition about "a big vision", then the vision is never wrong -- a self-consuming logic answered by the magic of Execution.
Interestingly, what is ignored there is the founder is also the CEO here, so if the execution was bad ... shouldn't he be fired?
You being a doctor matters how? Plenty of idiot antivax doctors out there.
Switching to a more modern topic, the introduction of the Rust language into Linux, Torvalds is disappointed that its adoption isn't going faster. "I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust. They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-talks-ai-rust-a...
And yet, all the spending couldn't dent DSAs huge gains in NYC and now Colorado.
US apparently still has a functioning democracy, at least when candidates ignore the consultants and insiders and speak straight to the voters. Worked for Trump after all, remember that in 2016 the establishment was against him. Sure he's rich but that's not why he "won" (popular vote aside :( )
Just like Maga/populist right, the left can beat the billionaires if they're willing to take the message to the people.
I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing
I'm not even sure losing this method is such a bad thing. Tooling, build scripts, home networking -- any learning you gain from stumbling through man pages and trial-and-error at best results in some hard-won, single-purpose scripts, the knowledge will evaporate instantly b/c everything is so bespoke, "fix once and forget" until you have new gear and have to solve new problems years later.
Presenting a well-specified problem thoroughly to an LLM, then analyzing results and testing the output, is valid problem solving.
Not sure "real finance" is a meaningful value-add? Finance itself is shockingly antisocial in its own right.
When you see fintech companies talking up the virtue of "looping" stablecoins, or pushing wobbly derivatives like the spaceX synthetics, it's hard to see anything good coming from the integration of "crypto rails".
Kalshi was just exposed doing this "hero" stuff, running social media spots with paid actors using a fake mockup of their site to simulate real wins on camera.
While you're looking things up, check out "predatory lending", and maybe the history of casinos. It's been recognized for centuries that lending money to someone with no ability to pay it back is morally wrong and, rightfully/normally, illegal.
Username checks out.
BTC is nifty but it is far from world-changing. Nowhere near the impact of Bretton-Woods, Nixon abolishing the gold standard, securitization of mortgages, petrodollars, ZIRP, etc etc.
Also, bitcoin alone would have never gained as much value if it wasn't for the 2019-21 defi explosion. Ethereum is integral to the cryptocoin story, period.
enabling research in cryptographic theory
Yes but ... most/all of this research is for solving weird self-made problems created from some flawed premise like "we need a decentralized sequencer" or "we need a hash function that can't be profitably made into an ASIC". A lot of the zk research is for "roll-ups", themselves a horrifically complex "solution" for Ethereum's inability to scale its consensus.
If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service
There is such a thing as principled resistance? Not everything has to pass some EA effectiveness test. Some inconvenience or discomfort is rewarded by the self-integrity bolstered by rejecting things you don't support.
Amen. I don't really notice the AI speak, especially if the content makes sense like TFA.
But man am I tired of the "Too good to be made by a regular person, but too average in every way to be made by a graphic designer" [1] graphics. It's just so smarmy somehow, "hey isn't my article a blast with these slick graphics?"
1 - seen today in a funny nymag article about AI bodega signs: https://www.curbed.com/article/ai-slop-bodega-signage-design...
Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing
You answered your own question :)
Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize
As in, failed to turn free users into VC returns by selling their data or forcing them into a subscription model
former PE vulture did the math
Self-explanatory
I know coding is the killer app thus far, but if businesses are seeing any kind of significant cost for other LLM usecases, seems like at least a decent consultancy opportunity to set up medium-sized businesses with in-house kit.
The other question is how the middle ground (hetzner etc) is shaping up, because obviously so many orgs won't want to run servers.
What does profile-switching provide that switching containers within a single profile doesn't?
Edit: I RTFA'd, containers can't adjust `privacy.resistfingerprinting`. Boo
In case you haven't noticed, the era of sw devs being able to leave and find better conditions/pay anytime they want is gone. But even in the good old ZIRP days, leaving for better pay is not an action that can be taken collectively. OP said "workers" not "worker": if you want to improve conditions at a given company, collective bargaining is all you have.
Store shelf space is reserved
I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?
Plus as TFA notes, they went full copyleft:
As of v9.0 in August 2024 the project relicensed from MIT to GPLv3+, with the explicit goal of staying copyleft and resisting future commercial capture of the codebase.
The value of copyleft for decentralization is too often overlooked.
I guess it's what you think the work of sw dev is.
Developing an entire architecture and then abandoning it because it turned out that it didn't scale too well, or couldn't handle some edge cases, is not a major mistake or problem any more.
Cool, but I can count on one (two?) hands how many times in a 30yr career I had the opportunity to do this, except when I "made the opportunity" by coding the solution fast enough that the PHBs couldn't say no. LLMs should be even better for this of course.
But it's rare, and those times I forced the issue were good for my career but not always for the team. Most of the time, once an organization has a working product, you want to stay in the lanes, roughly, of that product, which is IMO where the coding time advantage vanishes.
Yes but ... people will sign that paper for almost any severance. Consider the alternative (don't sign, get a lawyer etc) -- many folks will just sign to get whatever's on offer
- The DORA report is about organizations not individuals
- Mythical man-month is about organizations not individuals
- No Silver Bullet: "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation." Clearly he's NOT talking about the 10x dev building the whole thing themselves, which everybody knows is faster, better, probably doesn't even need a spec. Organizations are who need specs -- they have clients, business people etc. An organization with a single developer moves at light speed -- but this doesn't scale.
Nobody's disputing that LLMs give multiples for certain development tasks. The main thrust of the argument centers on how unimportant coding time is ... for organizations. Coding time is a HUGE lever if you're the one dev building everything, but that's not a repeatable pattern.
OMG I forgot all about cucumber, but wow the "cucumber cycle" of old sounds a lot like LLM psychosis of today. As in, the solution to cucumber problems was always to invest more into cucumber! Add more operations! Integrate more things into it!
Did cucumber go away? I never hear about it anymore.
I was waiting for the "so I tried coding something with an LLM myself, and I found..."
Why? Most of the article was about the productivity of teams.
This is a very academic approach to the subject - read what other people have written about it
Meta-studies have tremendous value. He's asking a simple question: if LLMs are changing the world, let's look at what studies are showing.
My experience has been remarkable, and, like others, I'm finding real joy in being able to move past the code to actually design and play with whole systems and architectures
Great! What does that have to do with the age-old problem that software development doesn't scale to teams well? It is indeed a "50 year old problem", so please tell us how LLMs solve it.