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tarsinge

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At their core all these self help books are not teaching you how to reshape your speech, but emotional intelligence. They are teaching better understanding of other and yourself. You can then use this understanding to have more fulfilling relations, or more easily manipulate others if you are less well intentioned. The line is very easy to draw, being honest is natural, you say the truth and are open to genuinely understand and build on the other person responses. On the other hand manipulating takes a very different mindset of faking being open to what others are saying.

Bitcoin has a 1.5T market cap with 0 revenue. I think Musk really got his eyes opened when he started playing with Dogecoin a few years ago. He applied the lessons successfully with Tesla, making the company an empty shell PR vehicle to support the TSLA "token".

Interesting chart that confirms hiring dynamics for SE have not much to do with AI despite all the PR, as in 2023 models and agents capabilities were quite limited, and now that capabilities increase hiring is picking up. I hope more journalists will start to challenge that narrative.

I guess we are simply not doing the same job. I’m customer facing, and the bread and butter of my job is to create software for the customer and client’s needs and constraints using proven tools and solutions, exactly like in civil engineering. Sometimes there are projects that require innovation, and yes some can specialize in innovative projects, but that’s not the majority of projects. In fact in my study in university the specialization between software, electrical, civil, etc. happens late in the cursus.

Thanks I think that explains part of the misunderstanding: I’m from a country where engineer is a regulated title, you can’t call yourself a software engineer if you indeed didn’t go through a comparable certification to a civil engineer.

I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI. I can design quality control processes too to ensure the thing is built up to standard, I don’t have to build the thing myself to be sure. There is nothing wrong with artisanal code crafting, I appreciate this too, but professionally that’s not engineering. It seems AI is just forcing us to clear the confusion the hard way.

I'm not in the field but I think it's because historically neural nets were looked down and deemed unpromising because they lacked understanding, compared to Symbolic AI or SVM for example. Since the Deep Learning revolution, which is engineering driven, the trend has inverted, research to understand and theory are seen as the things that hindered progress with neural nets in the past.

To me it was already quite intuitive, we are not really managing the psychological state: at its core a LLM try to make the concatenation of your input + its generated output the more similar it can with what it has been trained on. I think it’s quite rare in the LLMs training set to have examples of well thought professional solution in a hackish and urgency context.

I understand why they might be anxious, but my point is it’s unrelated to the technology itself. Imagine people denying the internet works in 2000 because of the Dotcom bubble. Same with layoffs, they are not really due to AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_corporate_m...), it’s a political discussion. And the antiwork vibe is not new, I have strong political convictions on how we should more equally redistribute capital gains so that even if AI was able to replace software engineers it would not be an issue but again that is political.

LLMs tooling brings a lot to senior devs. I have 15 YOE, I own a small agency, we are shipping faster, with less bugs, and believe it or not we are hiring, because we are able to take more work and grow, as it is logical without the political issues plaguing the US in particular. The market is already adjusting, hence why to me we are way past the point of developing professionally without LLMs.

So no I don’t get why the political topics are not discussed elsewhere and the irrational denial of the technology because of said political issues.

How can you still can't distinguish between using LLMs as tools and a non technical person vibe coding? I have yet to run into any serious software engineer that had to dive into a legacy codebase or an unknown tech stack and found no value in e.g. Claude Code for general understanding and refactoring. Not even talking about coding, just the capacity of generating custom contextualised documentation and examples tailored to your constraints and skills on the fly is ridiculously helpful.

We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_

That's exactly why I've given up on programming, development or career subreddits. There are a lot of interesting software engineering challenges opening up, but instead of discussing it like professionals it all gets drowned in a big negative mixture of rants against the financial AI bubble, companies using AI as an excuse to lay off, and a general antiwork vibe. All these subreddits have become feel good/bad echo chambers for angry teens and students with no real world professional experience.

The reasoning is by being polite the LLM is more likely to stay on a professional path: at its core a LLM try to make your prompt coherent with its training set, and a polite prompt + its answer will score higher (gives better result) than a prompt that is out of place with the answer. I understand to some people it could feel like anthropomorphising and could turn them off but to me it's purely about engineering.

Edit: wording

The problem is not that individual action is not useful, it’s that governments and companies are actively discouraging it, because every success for climate change is a bad news item. People buying less cars? Climate change win, economic problem. People buying less stuff, consumption down? Huge climate change win, very bad economic news. Even on progressive news outlets they’re doing it.

Here in Europe even before Trump’s second mandate it was clear governments didn’t really want individual action to take off. And it’s even worse now. Because short and mid term it’s a choice between climate and GDP. And western governments and companies are fundamentally incapable of long term action that is painful short term.

It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?

I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.

another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you

Usually if you maintain the slightly slower speed you had to maintain a safe following distance it doesn't matter, as the distance will either increase or they'll leave for another lane. You have to get used to drivers doing messy things in front of you, but at a safe distance. When doing this you are in fact helping the traffic becoming more fluid.

The Great Unwind 6 months ago

The trick is to realize that most market discussion you're not paying for is itself marketing at best and cosplay at worst.

There was a leak posted on Wallstreetbets of some paid analysis (https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1qpwyqz/dbs...), and it was basically follow the hype with a layer of sophisticated post rationalisation on top. I fail to see the difference between these and the average "DD" on an investing subreddit.

Excerpt from the Tesla one (https://www.dbs.com/content/article/pdf/US_clover/Tesla.pdf):

Leading EV manufacturer. Tesla is a leading global EV manufacturer, backed by its firm market leadership and healthy automotive margins. Tesla's leading share is backed by its economic MOAT in EV charging infrastructure and supercharger network, autonomous driving and other software (e.g., full self- driving aka FSD) (...) Tesla’s pivot toward AI provides a long- term growth foundation, but near-term performance will remain sensitive to progress on AI-driven execution milestones.

To me it is simply good writing, the kind that is found in literature, but feels a bit out of place in discussions on the internet. What makes it stand out is that real English speaker on the internet are way more casual in their writing. I’ve also noticed that non native English speaker are sometimes mistaken for LLMs due to these less casual sentences structure.

This kind of warrior ethos outside of fantasy books or games is a huge turn off to me, it feels so anachronistic. I don’t understand why it seems so prevalent in the US, especially as a country built on Christianity that has Jesus coming as an harmless lamb to teach compassion, humility and love. Courage, devotion, perseverance, sure. Victory or defeat? No thanks.

To me there is an even more important point than economics and geopolitics: the Chinese government is thinking about the long term sustainability of its population, and given how large it is it makes quite aligned with the rest of the world. Environment, health, education, science, etc. when comparing the trajectory and future plans of China and the US it is quite telling. Here are a few excerpts, guess if they come from Project 2025 or Xi Jinping 14 commitments:

- Adopting new science-based ideas for "innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development".

- Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development

- Coexisting well with nature with "energy conservation and environmental protection" policies and "contribute to global ecological safety".

I don’t think the main issue is that this type of person has been put in charge, it’s that the system can fail because of the will of one person. It kind of reveals that the guardrails were decorum and at its core Americans elects dictators that up until now chose to behave well.

More generally I think in an age of social media democracies will have to evolve to prevent leadership cults. Maybe something like the head of state being indirectly elected by local representatives.

Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.