yuye

Compilers and AI are not the same.

2. There's a strong superposition of "things are bad" and "we are still the best";

These can be reconciled by good old xenophobia: "Yes, things are horrible, but the way they do it is worse because it is not the way we do it"

There’s a general sense that Germany is a prosperous, influential country. The reason for that must be that things are done correctly in Germany.

I'm from the Netherlands(also not living there anymore) and I recognize this arrogance there, too.

And at the same time, almost paradoxically, the Netherlands has an inferiority complex.

AI

Assorted Imaginaries?

Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?

I don't. I'm not a gambling man, and I respect my fellow engineers to not inundate them with slop.

Since programming is still my passion I think it's worthwhile as I can experiment and create a lot of stuff with little effort

Yes, driving is my passion, which is why I've hired a private driver to do it for me.

Loads of people do cocaine and have "fun and whimsy" and I'm willing to bet there are even a few out there that have had their life improved by cocaine.

Why focus on the negative?

The difference is that drunk driving stocks aren't at an all-time high.

"I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.

AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results.

The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.

Even if we ignore AI for a moment, I doubt many programmers actually solve the kind of challenges Zachtronics games are known for on a daily basis.

Last time I got a rental car, it was a Mazda 3. I really enjoy how the dial works.

How practical is this?

This is basically how ICPC works (https://icpc.global/)

Contestant computers boot a Linux image that contains all the interpreters/compilers and documentation for the supported languages, some editors/IDEs(vim, Jetbrains, Eclipse, etc) and a web browser.

Network access is limited to the judging system only.

My experience in Europe is that most universities can support this.

Most every "good" story about him outside of donating money later on ends up with not so great details and reality.

It's pretty well known he was a huge antisemite.

Then again, from what I understand, antisemitism was pretty popular in the US in the early 20th century. It was only after WWII that it became more of a taboo.

I'm a SWE, helping build AI infrastructure.

I get where you're coming from, but I haven't "got mine", at least not yet. I'm still relatively early in my career.

If AI fulfills its promise, I might lose my job. If the bubble bursts, I'll definitely lose my job.

For now, it's where the money is. I'd like to make money now so that I won't have a completely horrible time if things ever take a turn for the worse.

- Wealth is not a zero-sum game

It literally is, though. For one's wealth to grow, the wealth of others must shrink. You could print more money, but that'd just result in inflation reducing everyone's wealth.

If you intend to say value is not a zero-sum game, I agree.

I had one of the last available Huawei phones, the P30 Pro, for 3 years. The only reason I had to get a new phone is because it got stolen.

Xiaomi is great build quality but they are rotting out their OS with too much bloat and up sell.

I've tried Xiaomi phones in their stores a few times. I feel like they're trying to copy the look and feel of iOS in a way, and I generally don't like the iOS UX.

The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear.

While I think the "chinese quality bad" narrative still applies to many Chinese brands, this isn't as universal as it was in the past.

I think my eyes were first opened when I bought myself a Huawei phone(before the Google ban). My first few smartphones had been Samsung, I've always felt the term "planned obsolence" was the best way to describe these phones: After just a year, the phone felt considerably slower, and after two it was almost unusable.

Huawei flagship phones were similar in price to Samsung, but I felt they lasted way longer.

Basically Yoko Ono?

Virus alert! I've also burned all of my clothes I may have worn any time I was online.

It's tonedeaf and criminal

Hasn't that been their MO since the start? Absolutely scummy company.

I think looking at an LLM code and thinking you're now a coder is like watching a someone play guitar and think you can just pick up a guitar and play a song. The truth is, if you want to be good, you have to do the work.

So many posts here on HN claiming they created another useful tool with AI.

No, you didn't create it. AI did. You only had a supporting role. You're Ringo Starr and the AI is John Lennon.

Ithey just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work.

It's called "mise au placard" and it's illegal. It's a technique to get people to quit by themselves, so companies don't have deal with the hassle of firing them. The lawsuit is 100% justified.

It's also very common in Japan.

Copper is an essential trace element for many living organisms, including humans, meaning you need copper to survive. Generally, copper has low toxicity. (That is, unless you have rare genetic defects such as Wilson's Disease)

Lead is nothing like that. We don't need lead to survive, we shouldn't put lead in our bodies. Lead is also known to accumulate in your body (especially your brain). Avoid lead exposure as much as you can.

The first half wasn't too bad, but the AI tells get strong in the second half.

Should've made my example a bit less extreme, but other forms of harm exist:

Downtime causing monetary damage (This one is obvious...)

Improper security measures causing leaks of customer data, making the victims a target for spam, or in extreme cases, identity theft, scams and (spear)phishing. One of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to having every random calorie counter app requiring you to sign up for an account asking you for your email and/or phone number.

I also recently saw a post here on HN about how VSCode had a bug that caused all commits to have a "Co-authored bv Copilot" line in the commit message, even if Copilot was disabled. One of the top replies mentioned how this could cause issues with employees working for companies that disallow the use of Copilot.

When you take these risks into account, I'm pretty sure you cover the vast majority of software.

I love Wube's FFFs. I wish more devs would do it; not just a devlog, but really going into the nitty-gritty of how some systems work.

I always believe software wages shouldn't be more than a plumber or mechanic.

Wages in the trades have gone up a lot recently, at least where I'm from. Decades of parents telling their kids the trades are for losers lowering the supply of capable craftsmen...

And not all software will work as specialized tooling.

Calorie tracker apps? Sure.

Operating system kernels? Each with their own schedulers and allocators and ABIs and syscalls? Definitely not.

It's not just AI-generated, it's also slop!

Use AI where it helps you and avoid where it doesn't

When all you've got is a hammer...

...you'll eventually stop knowing how to use other tools.

Ever since LLMs started writing decent code, I started feeling like a part of that joy of code-writing has been taken away.

The SWEs that go all-in on AI will never understand this, because they have never enjoyed the joy of code-writing. I would even go as far as saying that many of them even hate it.

Of this group, I think the majority are the same people that have joined the industry not because of an innate love for engineering, but because they saw an opportunity to make big bucks in big tech.