1dom

We should just throw in the towel now then, I guess.

I don't disagree with you, but now what? Seriously - if we accept humans are just generally losing to AI now, what's the right thing for us to do now?

I dunno. Lobotomy? Heroic amounts of debauchery?

Any suggestions?

I agree. There's definitely value in it.

But I think you put it well that the problem is making it all accompanying. e.g.

> Something that people learn quickly when they work with me is that my approach to pretty much every problem is:

The overall sentiment is good, positive and actionable (think, do informed things intentionally, understand things well) but I feel like the tone tries to make it all accompanying and somewhat unquestionable, which is confusing for an article titled "I am often wrong" that ends with "I am open to changing it".

> They beat a lack of them, for me.

I generally agree, but I feel like there's a midground where we acknowledge positive, productive motivation, whilst also acknowledging that it is not how normal humans go around talking about their normal day to day activities. I feel I only see this stuff in environments where people are expected to be pushed to the point of being uncomfortable, and to be okay with it. There's a time and a place for that. I think it's not always sustainable, but that's not always understood/believed by younger engineers/younger me (and younger you?)

I think without that nuance, things like this will always be criticised/torn apart by people not currently in that kinda zone.

This post has the same vibe as the best/worst of modern tech leadership principals. I feel these things are like a rorschach test for an individuals current position corporate psychopathy scale.

There are times in my life where I'd have read these, been really deeply impacted by them, and picked up a new mantra or 2 for a few weeks. It's like "Get a plan, execute it violently, do it today".

If you're in a time and place where you're motivated to "move fast and break things", I think you'll nod along with Boris' post.

But it's so general and high level, the only meaning you get from it depends entirely on your own personal attitude and examples that you throw at it.

The obvious pro angle is: "yeah, understand stuff well, biased for action, act urgently, yeah!" and competent, motivated, currently-in-the-zone people will spring into action. (But they would have done anyway, because they're already motivated and in the zone).

The obvious against angle is "uuuh, last week you said we needed to be goal oriented, and now you're telling us to go and learn a bunch before we even know why/what we're learning? And I've learnt a bunch of stuff, but you're telling me it's not right because it doesn't fit within this framework you just invented that you're now telling me I absolutely have to follow and you're my manager so I have no choice?"

I'm not totally hating on this, there's a time and a place for it and I've found it very motivating at times where I was already thoroughly motivated, but I think it's also useful to recognise that it comes across as self-serving platitudes for a lot of people who aren't already in that kinda zone.

If you can't state your point clearly, I'm not going to spend time trying to figure it out for you, sorry.

I think the negative impact lots of humans regularly experience from Google's approach to business is far more than the benefit of the very, very specific learning that "this idea doesn't make enough money for Google the way Google did it".

Sorry, I don't understand your point.

Can you state what actual point you're trying to make, rather than just picking each of my sentences and saying you're not so sure or you disagree? I could do the same to you, but it's just a waste of time if we're not trying to actually come to a conclusion together.

My hypothesis is that I suspect there's a MAD type situation where technically - by the letter of the law - all the big tech companies bragging about x% of their code being LLM generated are basically admitting to breaching copyright laws. But if one well funded tech company successfully prosecutes that and sets a precedence, then all big tech is going to have to wind back all the LLM code its put in production in the past few years to prevent litigation, which is probably unworkable, hence MAD.

I was looking to disprove my own hypothesis by asking for court cases prosecuting this. I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you.

(FWIW, I was repeatedly taught by various legal scholars at various levels of education that a criminal is someone who has been found by a court to be guilty of committing an act that violates criminal law. Up until that point, they're usually just a suspect or similar. Not debating, just highlighting that your definition of criminal doesn't negate or disprove any point I'm making. Same for your definition of illegal.)

> If by "this" you mean "an LLM [reproducing] copyrighted material

No. I have absolutely no doubt that happens, and I'm not defending it or encouraging it.

My point is whilst it technically might be illegal and happening all the time, if it's unenforceable or sets a precedence that would severely break the business world, there's every chance nobody would dare bring it to a court room.

I'm not aware of it happening yet (someone trying to enforce copyright on code that was put in production via an LLM) and I would have thought if it did, we would all know about the precedence now.

Because if it's feasible for any company with a war chest to start a court case about a competitor maybe having a matching line of code to theirs via an LLM, then basically every single company with a warchest would be at war with eachother, because they're all using LLMs.

Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.

And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?

I'm fully aware of lots of times powerful companies have used the courts to protect their business. My point is basically all of the powerful companies are elbow deep in LLMs to the extent of some sort of mutually assured destruction if they were to start court cases like this.

LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

The last post on HN I read was about someone using LLMs to reverse engineer an Apple GPU driver for linux in a month. The top comment points out how the poster must have had specialist internal domain specific contact with Apple. But then the thread concludes that wasn't the case and that this would take domain experts years to do.

> "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks"

I feel this statement is extreme. I can't personally reconcile it with any of the projects we're regularly seeing get delivered largely by LLMs now.

What are you thoughts? Like, what's your position here? Even if you sincerely believe frontier models need laborious oversight on even the simplest of tasks, do you think that accurately captures and reflects the current state and progress of frontier LLMs?

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things LLMs can't do well, but the idea that they're basically not helpful for even the simplest of tasks seems... disingenuous?

> If an LLM reproduces copyrighted material (which is very hard to verify) then the lawsuit from the copyright owner can still sink even robustly funded projects.

Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?

I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.

I think this is the definition of a polarising topic. It's very hard to hold a sensible middle ground without everyone wanting to take it to extremes of either "AI is just useless autocomplete" or "AI has solved software engineering".

> You may bristle and think the above is not true...

Hehe, my undergrad was comp sci, I turned down an Oxbridge postgraduate in Advanced Computing Science to do an interdisiplinary PhD, technically in the social sciences department, because I genuinely do understand and agree with you on a few levels. At the end of the day, people are the ones who need to be kept happy. The flip side of 1000's of isolated hours of screentime is a lack of practice at making people feel comfortable in real life. But, the same is true for basically any craftsman of any craft, just swap screen with lathe or instrument or other tool of choice.

I think there's a biological element to being a nerd, so "Have you tried not being a nerd?" is like asking someone with ginger hair "have you tried not being ginger?" Sure, they can try/dye, but the roots will keep growing through, fighting against something that's a massive asset in the right environment.

Regarding PRIDE, it sounds like that came from a time where people were genuinely scared/amazed/confused by computers. When you consider that, minimising the role of people who are going to make it all about tech and computers makes sense. Maybe the tide is changing over the past 2 - 5 years against tech, but the entire 2000s up until recently were defined IMO by the pervasiveness and excitement and accessibility of tech by literally everyone on the planet. In that world, where customers pay good money for magic tech they don't understand, a company of nerds brings safety and reassurance (and high salaries and decision impact for said nerds).

I worry nerds and the products of nerds at the top like Zuckerberg, Altman and Musk are causing the public attitude to shift back to what they were like pre-2000s, where tech is dangerous and powerful and scary and normal humans need to be kept away from it, and advocates of tech should be viewed sceptically.

> Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.

This is essentially my central point/worry. I hope there's more nuance to it though, mainly because 1 younger relative in particular is in his early teens, and he's clearly a naive/friendly/enthusiastic/hyper-fixating/lots of nerdy screentime type. Until a few years ago, I assumed he'd have the life a lot of us have had. Now though, I wonder what life will be afforded to nerdy, weird people born into a world where they're seen as significantly less necessary.

> I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG.

I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.

> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.

Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.

I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)

> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.

That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

I don't see it as "do a job because adding value" or "do a job because enjoying the activity".

I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.

Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.

Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.

But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).

Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.

Maybe we're about to test the scifi trope that a common enemy - like a superior invading alien life form - is the only thing that could unite all of humanity.

What are you on about? I'm not a mathematician, but I did a bit more Googling based on your comment, so happy to be corrected here.

From what I understand, the solution OpenAI came out with might or might not have been informed or shaped by work from humans. This is how research, science and knowledge generally works, basically no new knowledge or discoveries are made in a vacuum.

Whether or not OpenAI should have had access to that extra bit of work from other humans is a totally fair discussion about research ethics and attribution and such, and OpenAI should be dressed down for that accordingly.

But I don't see the relevance to the point I was making.

I guess the issue is we don't have a solid definition of intelligence or AGI. If we did, there would be no reframing possible. It'd be nice to be able to say "being smart is x, the computers can do more x and faster than humans, therefore the computers can outsmart the humans".

I don't really understand what value reframing brings here, other than give some sense of comfort that maybe we're still able to outsmart AI (based on a reframed definition of outsmarting.)

I'm not sure. Coming up with solutions to maths problems that humans haven't yet, finding and utilising multiple zero day exploits to form message boards to then hack other companies without being noticed.... I think accepting that AI can outsmart humans here seems to be less mental gymnastics than "lets just reframe this".

Reframing the problem as more of what we already know will lead us to doing more of what we've always done, but it's the things we've always had and done now that are starting to fall to AI.

> AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet.

"AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

It feels like you're suggesting the solution to keeping on top of this thing that can outsmart smart humans is to just keep doing smart human things.

Sorry, I think you're being short sighted here.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time rebuilding custom kernels and installing Puppy, DSL and other niche small operating systems on whatever random bits of hardware I could come across. I assume a lot of other HN users did the same. My parents would have had no opportunity to set the flag, meaning everywhere would have to assume default locked/blocked.

> This, as noted above, requires that services respect the flag, which they do not universally do today. That requires legislation, something that will be a part of any workable solution.

This is advocating for a variety of closed internet that is legally locked by default and would require a level of legal and international cooperation that would never happen. I'd argue that the resulting network isn't the Web any more.

I think you need to explain the solution you're thinking of in detail.

"an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information." is no different to "turn on age lock?" that you see on website now. It requires the parent to be present, engaged and 1 step ahead of their kids, and if we could depend on that, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Yup, because if you had one, this post would have been the ideal opportunity to put it forward, but you just make some sassy "no u" comment instead.

FYI I stopped engaging with handfuloflight. I couldn't find a coherent argument or position through all the condescension and disagreement.

It's a strawman because it only makes sense if the one off up front cost is $50k, which wasn't the argument I was making. If the one-off up front cost is $20, then your point makes no sense - your boss would have no issue.

An alternative would be instead of 1 of charging over 100k users $50k, charge every user a one off $20.

I guess it's hard to discuss alternative billing methods without knowing what need to be recuperated.

Thanks for the response, appreciated. Again, sorry for the sassyness.

The only reason my chair manufacturer would be entitled to the proceeds of my success whilst I was in their chair is if I hadn't already paid them for the work they put into making the chair for me. Even then, why would my success with their product have anything to do with how much they can charge me for their labour? What other things work like that outside of the modern tech world?

Seriously, look around you, pick a thing, imagine a world where the price you paid for that thing hinged on your personal individual success with that thing.

edit: to clarify, my point is why can't we pay for the model weights up front for offline models? Why would we continue paying for things we don't want/need anymore, like updates for offline software that does it's job fine?

This seems like common sense. I guess it's not seen as common sense any more because the assumption is that all software is going to be using someone else's compute, or be connected to the internet and therefore require regular updates.

If neither of those are true, a subscription or recurring license or similar regular fee just feels like greed/robbery.

I think the issues you're describing are all modern internet software issues. I'd guess you're possibly a bit younger than me, or maybe forgotten how software worked before about 2010.

- All compiled software is static. New versions are released. I'm happy to pay for new versions/features if I want/need them. But if the version I have is working offline, it doesn't need security updates, and if it does what I need, it doesn't need new features. Same applies if I'm building software for others, if the library does what I need for my software for my customers and I need nothing more off the dev, why should I keep paying the dev?

- I'm struggling not be sarcastic here, sorry, but this might shock you to hear: most humans find the idea of being able to try whatever they want and get paid for it appealing. That's not really how money or life works though.

- I don't know how to respond to this point, it's a bit of a strawman. Yes, if the only other option is to pay $50k up front for a local model, then your point is valid.

As a kid, I spent literally hundreds of £ on the first Sims, and Sims expansion packs at £20 /pop. EA got loads of money off me, I got loads of new features I wanted. I moaned at the time, but on reflection, everyone was a winner. Sims is still going now (possibly as a subscription!)

Again, apologies for a bit of sass here (that's a me problem), but the number of people who seem to sincerely believe the points you've put forward is why I'm personally sad at the state of modern software economics.

This is a cool way of approaching AI models. I'm a big fan of local LLMs, local specific models like this should be even more powerful.

> Every model is free up to 100k monthly active devices. No tokens, no logins.

I dunno about the business model though. Cloud LLM billing makes sense: you're getting another computer to do work with each request, and using their compute via their gateway that they bill you.

These local models are like old school software. They're producing the weights, and then giving them to people. If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

The whole "but we need to keep it updated for your security" doesn't really work as well for software designed to run fully offline like these local models are.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid, but I guess I feel a personal sadness that it's less obvious how to successfully monetise such a sincerely useful and beneficial approach towards AI models.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's no 1-size-fit-all solution. I think the problem should shift onto "how many solutions do we need"?

At least 2 I'd guess: 1 is going to be incomprehensibly hard and painful compared to now, but there will be maybe only a few handfuls per country. Sure you have to sacrifice your first newborn, but it will come with the full weight of government PSAs because lots of normal and vulnerable citizens depend on it.

The other solution matters less so, because it's could all just be optional/nice to have things, and if people want them, they have to accept some amount of risk/competency in exchange for easy of access. The current solution getting only <50% spam/scam seems to be doing better than traditional mediums so is probably fine for that group.

Maybe there's some more measure solutions between the 2 extremes, but I really don't think there can or should be 1 fix for the DNS system given the range of use cases and customers.

Regardless, Dave down at the local is always going to panic click amazaoncom.paercel-delay.info regardless of what the local bus stop ad or government tell him to do. Such a Dave thing to do.