sunaurus

I've been maintaining homelab servers for two decades, used all kinds of IaC approaches etc.

Switched to NixOS a few years ago, and I can't overstate the amount of peace it has brought to my life. It just takes so much stress away, compared to everything else I've used before.

My only criticism is that the Nix language is not super ergonomic or easy to learn. But with LLMs nowadays, even that is barely ever a problem.

I'm constantly thinking about that Microsoft guy who posted something like "we want 1 million LoC per engineer per month", which basically read as satire to most engineers I talked to, except apparently it was not satire at all, and indeed seemed to reflect the position of many CEOs etc when it comes to LLM code generation.

I do think that over the past few months, it feels like the hype around producing unmaintainable amounts of LoC has started dying down. More pragmatic and realistic takes are seemingly shared more openly, and are maybe even getting through to top leadership at some tech companies. Maybe not all is lost yet.

I dunno, I find it extremely unbelievable that we will get self-improving AGI which chooses to become a slave to humanity at all, ultra rich or otherwise.

Glorifying this type of abuse needs to be called out.

Every human gets only ~16 waking hours a day to live their lives, it is absolutely immoral to sign a contract to pay somebody for literally half of this time, and then pressuring them into giving up even more of their life on top of that. Especially when using threats of revoking the original contract if they don’t comply, and/or not offering any additional compensation.

I'm honestly not convinced that it isn't just LLMs going in circles with each other

Realistically I am starting to think China would be more responsible with it than the US.

Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.

I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.

I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity.

In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fast progress. It's scary how easy it is to waste time on LLMs while not even realizing you are wasting time.

The point is that you can’t just serve tokens without also training the next models. It’s an inseparable part of your costs, so naturally you can’t be profitable unless the price you are charging ALSO covers training.

I'm really curious what you consider to be the obvious health reasons - it's far from obvious for me.

I am pretty convinced that for most types of day to day work, any perceived improvements from the latest Claude models for example were total placebo. In blind tests and with normal tasks, people would probably have no idea if they're using Opus 4.5 or 4.6.

Maybe I'm misreading it, but I don't see him saying it's just the cost of *inference* alone (which is the strawman that the article in the OP is arguing against). He says:

this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code

There is of course this meme that "Anthropic would be profitable today if they stopped training new models and only focused on inference", but people on HN are smart enough to understand that this is not realistic due to model drift, and also due to comeptition from other models. So training is forever a part of the cost of doing business, until we have some fundamental changes in the underlying technology.

I can only interpret Ed Zitron as saying "the cost of doing business is 200% to 3000% of the price users are paying for their subscriptions", which sounds extremely plausible to me.

Surely that can't be true? The expectation would be that people pay $200 a month for building open source and personal hobby software with Claude?

If it remains just a token-predictor that can’t evolve, then I am not worried about it replacing humans.

I’m not worried about job loss as a result of being replaced by AI, because if we get AI that is actually better than humans - which I imagine must be AGI - then I don’t see why that AI would be interested in working for humans.

I’m definitely worried about job loss as a result of the AI bubble bursting, though.

The US does not benefit from a stronger, more unified Europe. Thanks to NATO, "the west" has effectively become an empire in all but name, with the US having enough influence to be the de facto leaders of this empire.

If US pulls back from NATO, and Europe builds up military power to compensate, then the US loses this de facto leadership seat of an empire.

Today, the US appears in parallel to be doing two things:

1. Causing fragmentation in Europe, by promoting right-wing nationalist politics in the EU

2. Threatening to drastically reduce their role in NATO

At the very least we can both agree that these two efforts are completely in contradiction with each other, and it's very unlikely that Europeans will want to go for more fragmentation without the military power of the US on their side, right?

The question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?"

Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?

I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.

I've always found it ridiculous that Sony is allowed to sell their consoles and games in my county without allowing me to create a PSN account. They even sell the digital PS5, which REQUIRES a PSN account to get any games.

And then, even if you break their TOS and create an account in another country, you're still constantly inconvenienced - you can't pay for games using your local payment method, for example, and a useful Playstation mobile app is not even listed in the local app store.

IMO they should either provide the same level of service in all countries, or be forced to charge significantly less when selling their hardware in unsupported countries.

That's interesting. My feeling is that things became MORE explicit with hooks, not less, so I'm quite confused still.

What you're probably thinking is "it's faster to write a TODO example app with hooks". That's not really relevant for actual software development.

For me, that's not the case at all. I think with hooks, it's easier to reason about what values are actually used during what renders.

I've seen this criticism several times on HN, but have never been able to relate to it.

I've been using hooks since they were introduced, in several teams (at several different companies), and I've never experienced them being complicated to understand, either for myself, or for team mates - even juniors who are new to React. In my experience, it takes very little time (<1 hour) to understand the basics of React, and once you have that mental model in place, hooks fit in immediately.

I wonder if it's the case that many people on HN are just used to some completely different libraries and thus are coming in to React with a completely different mental model? And that's the cause of this sentiment being so common here.

I always mentally autocorrect "unlimited PTO" to "there is a limit to PTO, but we won't tell you what it is!"

That seems a bit dubious, can you point to any research which backs up this statement? Intuitively it seems to me like you would need to be switching input devices extremely often to avoid RSI (as in, once every few MINUTES rather than every few months).

Personally, the only real solution to fix RSI has been strength training & regular breaks during work.

How would constructing a new ship from new materials ever count as being the same as the original ship?

If it's a perfect replica (as you said in your original comment) then by what parameters is it different from the original ship? Sure, cooordinates might be different, but cooridnates can change. If the exact replica switches places with the original, then even that difference would disappear.

By the way, I am strictly speaking about this topic in the context of the thread we are in. If a replica is built according to exact blueprints of a snapshot of the original (and assuming no mistakes are made), then why would the result be any different than just replacing one part on the original with an replica part made according to exact blueprints of a snapshot of the original part?

What you're saying seems like a clear contradiction to me.

In your first paragraph, you say that we can take for granted that when an original is destroyed, having a replacement will preserve consciousness. Then, in your second paragraph, you say the opposite - that destroying an original would NOT preserve consciousness, even if there exists a replacement.

There must be some key assumption which lets you not see this as a contradiction. Maybe you believe that there is something extra-cellular which wouldn't get replicated in a teleporter?

But why would the feeling of continuity be broken by an instant replacement?

In both cases (gradual and instant replacement), at any given moment, there exists only one entity with your consciousness and self of sense and continuous memories leading up to that moment.

That brings me back to my original question:

What is the difference between slowly replacing your cells a few at a time through biological processes, and instantly replacing all of your cells through the teleporter?

If you believe that you die when your cells are replaced (because you are in the old cells and thus can't be in the replacement), then I understand your point of view. But if you're saying that slowly replacing you is different than quickly replacing you, then I would be super curious to hear the logic for this! (This is a sincere comment, I am not seeing the logic myself and would really like to understand it)

What is the practical difference, though? From the point of view of the entity whose atoms have been replaced, I don't think that the speed of replacement has any noticeable effect. And the previous versions are all "extinct" regardless of the speed, so from the point of view of any previous versions, the situation doesn't change either.

There is no single "you" in this scenario, there are two distinct persons. One experiences being transported to Mars, the other experiences the transporter failing and them being stuck on Earth.

Why do you think those two questions have different answers? For me, the only logical option is that both questions must have the same answer (regardless of what your answer is).