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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.

That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.

Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.

Curl is one of the most audited code bases, so that's not surprising.

Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.

Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?

No, it’s my experience from the past 6 months

Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.

Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...

Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...

As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.

I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.

"objectively revolutionary"

That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.

Yes exactly! The last time this happened we called it the industrial revolution and it put a lot of junior farmland developers out of jobs.

I feel like comparisons with the industrial revolution are reductionist in dangerous ways. The industrial revolution first shifted and then increased overall demand for labor. This made the labor movement possible and eventually ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the working classes. AI (by it's own marketing claims) is poised to vastly reduce demand for traditional labor without creating any new demand to replace it. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the modern economy it's not hard to imagine this proposed reduction in labor demand collapsing the economy in ways that fucking with interest rates and printing money don't fix.

I'm really struggling to get a handle on your position here. You appear to be arguing the worst positions from both sides of the debate around AI at the same time. If you're claiming the future is here and it is deeply stupid then we're in violent agreement.

> Net result:

The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.

I feel like you missed the point pretty aggressively here if you're trying to claim waymo's existence in any way justifies burning roughly the GDP of Luxembourg on R&D. This should be a fairly alarming indicator of how utterly divorced the tech industry is from any kind of real world outcomes and just one of countless examples of tech industry hype resulting in embarrassingly miniscule returns when actual results are considered.

The cars exist, and they drive themselves. In the real world. Here's the latest city list:

San Francisco Bay Area, CA Los Angeles, CA Metro Phoenix, AZ Miami, FL Orlando, FL Dallas, TX Houston, TX San Antonio, TX Nashville, TN

I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?

pinches nose in frustration Yeah and they fled the Atlanta metro area because it rained. The point (the actual point here) isn't to relitigate Waymo's arc of existence. I merely hold them up as one of countless examples of the market's apparent disinterest in examining basically any of the tech industry's claims vs reality and how this leads to deeply perverse outcomes that absolutely would not be tolerated from any other industry segment. I'm guessing I'd get less pushback if I'd instead mentioned techbros attempts to reinvent trains badly from first principles being a smoke screen to sabotage mass transit projects, or pretty much anything involving social media or computers in classrooms.

While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?

Not really.

It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.

That's not the option most are going to take.

shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.

That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.

eyeroll If you truly had the courage of your convictions you would have gone all in here and told me to stop using electricity.

I haven't told you to do anything, only highlighted that you can choose how to live your life, including not using LLM's.

Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.

"can't"

Still feeling chippy over there I see.

Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.

Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.

Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s

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