A portentous reunion | Hacker News Reader

A portentous reunion

bcantrill.dtrace.org

147 pointscafkafk45 comments

Re: the anxiety of parents about the future: the people who best handle rapidly changing circumstances are the ones who are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it's far less important to teach young people specific skills in technology X, and far more important to teach them how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and effectively execute on them, and how to be objective about their own strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be something that a standard education focuses on, so whether or not you pick up these skills depends on whether your parents explicitly taught them to you or you happened to get lucky enough to develop them on your own.

One of my favorite quotes, from Stephenson's The Diamond Age:

"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

Great quote. Thanks for reminding me I need to check out Neal Stephenson!

Ah you're in for a treat.

Let me know when you recognise Claude hiding Diamond Age (time travelling to the early/mid 90s)

;-)

Additionally: the most important not is that you teach kids to face risks themselves. If you constantly hover around kids from the baby age onwards and jump in at the tiniest risk, what you teach them is that the world is a dangerous place that they are not equipped to deal with.

The cardinal mistake many inexperienced parents make is to think you can chose what your kid learns. So they will yell at their kid that it needs to be calm, something they fail at in this very moment. Kids care much more about how you live than what you say. You can tell your kid to respect nature, but what drives it home is if you show respect of nature without even mentioning it on a day to day basis.

Handling risk and uncertainty is one of those things. You can't tell your kid to be able to deal with uncertainty without fear, you will have to show to them (1) that you are also able to deal with it and (2) that you trust them to do it too. Sure they should ask their parents if something seems off or a bit too much to them, but there are so many parents who appear to trust their kid with next to nothing.

Emotional intelligence about yourself and others is important, sure. But you're confusing acquisition of facts and education. Many people are effectively illiterate for all but the most simple communication. Likewise so many people are innumerate and without basic reason or understanding of basic rhetoric both making and evaluating arguments and information.

Teaching math, history, and language isn't about remembering facts or specific skills, they're proxies for teaching you to think and reason and operate in the world.

> comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty

> regulate their emotions

> Emotional intelligence

I'm not sure we read the same parent comment. There is almost nothing in there about emotional intelligence beyond learning self-regulation, but emotional intelligence is at least as much about understanding others' emotions, understanding social cues and etiquette. But the bulk of the parent comment is about adaptability, general self-awareness and self-examination.

You then make an argument that education does, in fact, teach those critical skills indirectly through basic subjects. Having given such a bold premise, you would need to back it up with at least some supporting evidence. Given that you provided none at all, you shouldn't be surprised that no one sees reason to agree with that premise.

I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!

> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM.

While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?

* https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206

it is really very long. I was trying to read it on monday evening and an eyebrow was raised when, after some time, I saw CHAPTER ONE and realised that up until that point I had been reading the foreword!

Well, they are tools, aren't they? They aren't inherently good or bad, what people are doubtful of who will get to reap the benefits of the tools.

For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.

We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.

Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at the time; today everywhere. Is AI really that much of an outlier other than public knowledge?

AI is absurdly, massively centralized though.

You don't own it. You can't own it. Access can be removed at any time.

This situation may not persist but it's not like traditional pillars of society have demonstrated any incentive or even a perception of obligation to act in the public interest lately.

Local LLMs are getting pretty darn good.

True, but presumably they weren't trained locally.

you mean just like the Document editors or email systems these days? (or cloudflare etc etc)

It was great to see you, Adam, and others at the reunion.

I've done some tool-assisted ports (including without original source), the work you already did is probably 1/4 of the way to a web-hosted Rust BattleTris.

I'm curious whether you have any insights into why high quality LLM-assisted (or enabled?) projects seem so relatively rare? Instead it seems like the preponderant contribution is a deluge of low quality slop.

You didn't share yours and Adam's prompts in the post, so I'm left wondering how much of the success of this project is attributable to your collective ability and experience (both with this particular project and software in general) vs the capability of the model and harness itself? On that note, do you anticipate releasing LLMs at Oxide[1] (linked from RFD 0576)?

Personally I find credible success stories like yours interesting, if a little jarring. If they were commonplace, shouldn't software be generally getting a lot better?

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/tree/master/engineerin...

There exist a great many people in the world who think that the only important thing is having a good enough idea, and everything else is almost valueless by comparison. You've probably met them, people who say things like "I just need someone to code it, can you sign this NDA, what do you mean you want to be paid, it's just coding?"

They exist in other formats too - blogs in the vein of "for exposure" cover the same premise, mostly.

Vibe coding has allowed them all to try and show everyone how right they were.

Right, but most of them don't already work as software engineers, at least it hasn't been my experience of my colleagues. However, companies that are aggressively adopting AI coding tools aren't (at least nobody has shown it) getting better by any metric. So, what gives? Why, generally, isn't this kind of success story common?

Because most tasks aren't "refresh this code from 10-20 years ago"?

If you needed an old piece of code at $WORK, you probably already paid the tax of refreshing it or replacing it.

This sort of task is similar in nature to something like "I have a 25yo unmaintained Linux driver, let's refresh it for modern Linux" - a great demonstration of the efficacy of these tools if you have the right-shaped task, but not a task that comes up repeatedly in most people's days.

That's a good point, this does seem qualitatively different. Like dialect translation. In that case the specification is really precise, it's just the old code. Building something new or adding functionality to existing software the spec is almost guaranteed to be more vague.

EDIT: this specificity seems important for language models but the harder I think about it the less sure I am that it's the right intuition..

My intuition is that what makes them well suited is that the transformations on the input desired are well-defined and frequent tasks - e.g. any other software that migrated from, say, SDL1 to SDL2, or had to move from gcc 3 to 4, or Sun cc to gcc, had to have these transformations in their source history.

IOW, "there is probably very little stopping you except time from having written Coccinelle patches to mechanically do most of these transformations".

for the same reason that there is so much bad writing online? you'd think that making it much easier to make large projects would mean a great many more people would make large projects - this will inevitably reduce quality.

The number of people with the time and dilligence, the people who previously would have been making them previously, is much fewer. They hide themselves away to find likeminded people anyway, but now its even harder to find them amongst all the deafening slop.

Yeah I mean people are talking about 'the eternal Sloptember' but the other side of that is - you know how everyone is nostalgic for 90s/early 2000s websites and all the silliness and creativity? Well that is happening now in programs and apps. Any fool can make a terribly-architected game/app to scratch his itch. Most of them are bad, and most won't last, but there's also a lot of fun.

Nobody criticizes people making AI slop for their own amusement. Nobody said anything for DALL-E generated random stuff. Similarly nobody cared about people's GeoCities pages.

People care about when AI is forced in production workloads with very little care. Those productions could be the government, insurance and healthcare systems. Getting prosecuted or denied for treatment by a black box is what makes them angry. People care when their bosses brag about and threaten them with layoffs.

I wasn't criticizing any of these arguments.

Back in 2006 I cornered Bryan in the CIT elevator and asked him for the BattleTris source. Glad to see some progress being made.

On the topic of tetris conflicts with weapons. There's also Tetrinet, for win32 over ip; up to six players IIRC?. Or Tetris Battle Gaiden on Super Famicom for single screen gaming.

Looks like we're going to get a BattleTris show hn soon!

I feel like the last 30 years are significantly less distinctive than the prior 30 (actually 70+) years. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all had iconic and partitioned cultures that are instantly recognizable. I feel like that started to fade a bit in the 90s (what I call the Pottery Barn decade). The 2000s have felt more "alive" to me than the 90s but they're also significantly more post-modern and less distinctive. I consider the 1980s "peak humanity", prior to mega capitalism and data driven marketing enabled by the rise of computing power. I don't think we could ever go back to an iconic and focused cultural decade like say, the 1960s.

BTW Chuck Klosterman discussed this at length in this 2022 book on the 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nineties_(book)

I think it's a pretty deep point -- your memory and consciousness are shaped by the media environment (media being the thing that Klosterman thinks about obsessively)

And the media environment drastically changed after the 90's -- because of the Internet

I think his main point was about access to media in different eras, but it's worth reading directly if you feel like that

With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.

By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.

I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.

[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.

How distinct was 1940s US culture from the 1930s? To me, a European born much later, the 1940s are the decade of 20th-century American aesthetics that blends the most into the previous. The changes I see are all related to WWII. Civilian everyday life captured in film and press photos seems the same as in the 1930s.

I think the 1940s war time culture is pretty distinct. Aside from that, I agree, those are probably aesthetically the most similar of the bunch.

While partitioning these cultural attitudes and artifacts by decades is a useful heuristic, I often feel like the actual cutoff point is around mid-decade. The late '80s feels closer the the early '90s than it does the early '80s.

I liked this story, thanks for sharing

I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)

As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)

So here is some color on what I learned:

- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)

Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me

- I walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. (That happened in San Francisco too, and I'm sure many people here have had that experience)

And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled "pale ale", but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they came up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol, aka Pale Ale.

I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in Philly, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!

---

So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.

- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years

- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years

- based on simple verbal descriptions, they are able to recommend the beers that I actually drank and liked (even though I use Gemini anonymously, and that was my first time asking Claude about beer)

I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words on the label. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.

The folks who pour those very beers you order usually know a fair amount about how they’re made and what differences exist, especially if you’re at a brewery (not e.g., a dive bar). Chat ‘em up!

> I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.

Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.

The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)

> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.

Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?

> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us

Wait for it.

> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).

Why use Claude then?

So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.

Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.

> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.

> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.

We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...

No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.

> Why use Claude then?

I don't understand this question in response to the quote preceding it. He just explained why Claude was useful in this instance.

It isn’t clear from all the quoatage but it was meant to follow my own thoughts on the progression of the piece. (1) There is concern for the future because of AI (2) so anyway we used AI for fun and giggles... No wait, stop. Why enable the training and the development for such a non-essential little thing? If AI is so concerning?

Apparently because the concern is not evenly distributed.

Thank you for the explanation. I understand what you meant now.

I read the point as: if it's an existential threat that you've got principled objections to - why would it even matter that it's useful?

the entire piece is about nostalgia + this tension?

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