CSSer

It looks nice. I wouldn’t roast it as much as admit that I can tell from some of the content phrasing that an LLM was used. The h1 feels cliche, for example. That comma doesn’t really need to be there.

I think they just meant that it's so many other people that they don't reasonably fit in the UI

But if you don't only surround yourself with people who think exactly like you, how will you ever recruit an army of yes men and women?

Weirdly when I first got my California DL I thought it felt fake compared to my home state because it was so much thinner. Maybe it’s better for the environment.

Do you really need flock cameras to catch low rank criminals in skid row or kids sneaking into the pool after hours? This seems like a massively imbalanced transaction. Moreover, who really cares about these kids doing that? Our justice system is completely overloaded, and the tools it has to deal with one of those kids in the wrong jurisdiction runs an extremely high risk of ruining their life rather than scaring them straight. One of those old people could probably accomplish the same thing by spending a couple of late evenings at the pool with a very bright flashlight if it’s that big of a deal.

Finally, I’m really worried about the parental surveillance we’re sticking everywhere. You are absolutely training your children to never take risks and wondering why they’re an anxious mess. There is a wide gulf between cutting through private property and vandalizing it, and I’m not convinced our current system is properly equipped to handle the nuances of that.

It’s fascinating to me how polished these things can look now. Years ago I recall reading a story of some consultant or new team member remarking how strange it is to start at a company, be given a tour of the codebases, and eventually find some awkward aspect of the architecture no one could really explain the reason for that had slipped under the radar for years. This feels like that but multiplied by a thousand.

I have spent the better part of the last decade of my career being approached by executives asking me how to optimize or automate away services that I felt had reached a local optimum. Each time this was the case I would gently express that our options were to commodify, by offering a kind of template, the service or optimize the process and way we gathered information from clients. Without fail, they hated the latter option. It was hard to do, and it implied that any number of people needed to do a lot better at their job in seemingly abstract ways. No, they’d always go for the template, then be dissatisfied by the fact that it’s, well, a template! Finally, they’d go back to begging me for alternatives.

This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.

The thing about this is that in a different codebase, even just that search for the trumpet guy could either burn a ton of tokens and come back with nothing or find it but light the ocean on fire in the process. This is because trumpet guy would be named "asset-ds1f23nbiq35421fsda.jpg", and it would be located in an images folder with thousands of other similar assets. So the agent starts by grepping for reasonable names, discovers nothing but finds an image directory, and then searches inside. In the worst case, I guess it starts analyzing each image. Or maybe it checks the article like he mentions, but the codebase uses a component library and the filename thing is still true, so it analyzes every image in the page. This is a bit of hyperbole, of course. Please allow it for the sake of comedic example.

Many of his other prompt examples also illustrate this. The author is massively leveraging the architecture of the organization through familiarity. It could well be the case that even an LLM was used to set that up, but I doubt it happened in one prompt or without critical thought. To be fair, I guess he's sort of trying to point that out, but by saying "Look how lazy I am while it still works" or something like that in order to look cool, I think all he's conveying is "Look how easy this is", when it's potentially not and could increasingly cost him/his company wildly varying amounts of money based on how he goes about it. When tokens were virtually free, no one cared. This is increasingly not true. Many are drawing comparisons to early cloud architecture.

I find this is sort of similar to the problematic idea that in theory anyone can clone your repo and get a local dev environment running in a few seconds. So then you try it with a non-technical staff member and quickly realize how unrealistic that is as you run into abstraction after abstraction that is completely foreign to them.

Makes me consider it just by thinking about enduring that

I can’t teach someone design in a day, but I can elaborate on the reference and point out some of the worst habits. A lot of these designs feature ornamentation without purpose. Look critically at the content in a design it produces. Ask yourself if each piece of information is serving a purpose for the end-user. This used to be, at least a little, harder to get wrong when adding noise came at the cost of more effort. The other thing is most often just typography. For a number of reasons, text below 16px should be treated very seriously. Claude throws it around everywhere.

Actually if I must be literal it’s a pretty big part of the culture out there. The playa is rife is with inside jokes that lately revolve around people telling you to have a terrible time, or saying there’s absolutely nothing at some place with a wink. Discovery and resilience is the point.

And sure, there’s a bit of old guard/new guard here, where the new guard is a bit softer about it. Personally, it was never my favorite aspect, but dismissing it says more about you than me.

I really dislike how the dribbble/envato style somehow escaped containment into Claude and now I’m seeing it everywhere mixed with mediocre design layouts. I think to myself that maybe stuff like this will help counteract that but then I see it in use with 12px typography (the kubernetes 3D dashboard thing) and I recoil in horror. Please consider this a PSA: Claude doesn’t understand UX or good design principles out of the box. Please go hug a designer.

I feel like there’s a non-zero chance you’re getting downvoted because HN doesn’t understand sarcastic burner humor.

> The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive

And he pleaded guilty. There’s nothing “alleged” about this conversation, despite feelings about any other aspects of it.

Despite partial agreement, you’ve only reinforced my point as far as I’m concerned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Not the same kind of mess” breaks the comparison, so… no.

Whenever I point out (in agreement with your statement) that the idea that the left and the right are somehow equally bad is a kind of fantasy on HN I usually get downvoted. People seem very committed to "shades of gray", moderate thinking to the point that it's viewed as always correct, which is well, just wrong. Yeah, often things are more complicated than they appear, but I find it almost hilarious how often you can't do that in American politics. And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.

A consumer watch dog that meticulously tracks equivalents to combat this would be an interesting project.

This is true. Here’s a cautionary tale to that end. My org’s IT recently introduced, without input, an ai filtering tool to automatically filter junk email. It apparently worked too well. In an ironic twist of fate, it filtered a raft of emails (across multiple domains, including tickets and account reps!) to IT from an important vendor about contract renewal into junk that ultimately resulted in leaving the vendor no choice but to suspend service until the bill was paid (they waited until the very large bill was over two months past due to do this, to their credit).

When I learned about this during the post-mortem I was incensed, to say the least. Email mgmt is part of a professional’s job, for better or worse. Accountability for that doesn’t suddenly evaporate because of a scenario like this. I don’t practice zero inbox for fun. I do it for my sanity and effectiveness. Technology can’t magically solve every problem.

Yes, and it’s trivial to form one! If you look up the documentation necessary you may not believe your eyes.

Given that I just read this comment after getting off a connecting flight that had me waiting on a fully boarded plane in 100 degree Phoenix weather for half an hour, it’s pretty poignant. I read an article earlier today about how Phoenix may not be inhabitable in twenty years, and I’m here to tell you that it’s already insufferable no matter how well the A/C was or was not working on that plane.

I don’t need a plane that flies faster. I need an airline that puts pure service before profit.

Put that on a T-shirt!

I think people miss this because these companies exist in a space that is new in tech, and that means lots of competition through PR and marketing. When that happens, it’s easy to feel like a company is telling you about everything they’ve been working on or are openly talking about what gives them their edge when in fact the opposite is often true.

They want it to equal identity verification! When virtually every top tech executive who wants a favor is at the inauguration and you have companies doing 180 degrees on support for something they previously furiously opposed, someone is getting something they wanted. It seems naive to think otherwise. Furthermore, the current administration in the U.S. fired or ignored the competent people to which you’re referring, and those people oppose a centralized repository of various metadata because it creates a central point of failure, otherwise known as a target, that is generally a bad idea for both our nation and our citizens. Of course there are agencies in the federal government that possess this information already, but they possess it for their purposes only. This is good because it means that it’s both more difficult to abuse internally in addition to being more cumbersome to collect externally.

Everything is going to plan! Protect the precious bodily fluids.

And C) they don't always have to be at parity with human hands to be good enough because humans are flat out expensive. Humans need health accommodations, have sick days, vacation, and make mistakes too. The bar is much lower and the incentives are much higher than many people probably think.

Before LLMs, learning on the job looked like reading documentation. Now it’s a guided tour with verification. When I produce things in this way, I’m not just blindly accepting it. The goal is that by the end of it I have learned more about the codebase and architecture, not less. I feel that’s important.

Oh joy. A model whose safeguards make it prone towards code that make your systems less safe. How brilliant!

Yes, and "in collaboration with the U.S. Government" feels like a very gross ploy at appeal to authority. You don't need Mythos or really any SotA frontier model to make malware or do extensive penetration testing/reconnaissance already. Sure, Mythos might be faster/more efficient, but the cat has been out of the bag for awhile. Even the terminology "infrastructure providers" practically screams "Enterprise leads".

I don’t think you’re going to find a consensus on this because it really just comes down to the quality of the employees in each discipline. Actions speak louder than words. I’ve seen the IT people GP is describing. I’ve also seen yours. In GP’s scenario, they often even mean well but are very overwhelmed because they’ve come to exist in a space where _everything is IT_ because no one else is remotely qualified to fill the specialty gap. When I found myself in your scenario, the opposite was true and it completely matched what you described.