JauntyHatAngle

The bit that lost me quite early in the piece was

>"A side effect. You're asking me to believe in sentient weights."

Huh? Did I miss that logical jump? Genuine question, maybe I'm not clueing into something here.

Blaming AI is gonna be the security breach equivalent to blaming ddos when your website breaks isn't it.

Isn't this where the research plan implement loop comes in though? Assuming comprehension used effectively?

You should be learning alongside the llm through the research phase of anything. Updating your understanding of what is possible and best practices with rigorous checks and limiting scope to a high fidelity to leave little room for doubt. In-line commenting and questioning and asking for more passes on the living document of the area you are working on and then judiciously breaking it down further when you think there is too broad a scope for an llm to understand and synthesise properly.

If you do end up with too much vagueness, you need to limit scope more or break up the feature, implementation etc to be specific and applies enough to again, properly research and decide the plan.

I guess this is not so easy because lot of it depends on your own ability of reading comprehension, but I've had great success learning niche topics because I research (as a sub agent usually) essentially any topic that is mysterious until every level of the puzzle is properly mapped out to the specificity required.

Do I think most people are doing this? No. So I guess the statistics make sense. It's not intuitive to many people I think - because as you said, it's an embodiment of literature that is a tangled web of thought patterns and perspectives, so you need to pare it's answers down to the specific level, direction and area of ideas you want to get out of it. Way easier to do than it sounds, but it requires finesse in comprehension rather than getting lazy with it - normalcy of deviance comes to mind.

Lets generalise a bit more here - every company at any time could completely heel-turn and do awful things. Even my favourite private companies (e.g. Valve) have done things that I would consider evil.

However, I would think I'm not alone in that I'm generally wanting to do good while also wanting convenience, I know that really every bit of consumption I do is probably negative in some ways, and there is no real "apolitical" action anyone can take.

But can't I at least get annoyed and take my money somewhere else for the short amount of time another company is doing it better?

Yes, if openAI suddenly leaps forwards with codex and pounds anthropic into the dust, I'll likely switch back despite my moral grievances, but in a situation where I can get mildly motivated to jump over for something that - to me - seems like a better morality without much punishment to me, I'll do it.

The problem with that logic is that its clear now that Tesla is run by someone who is has directly said that we can wait 50-100 years to set up a sustainable energy economy, and is currently working against federal scientific bodies.

Combined with the fact that there are many EV's on the market of similar quality, it is clear you do not need to purchase from Tesla.

So you can avoid enriching someone who is in direct opposition to climate action while also making your own move to EVs. You can have your cake and eat it too.

I also take issue with "petty grievance". I do not know and will never meet Musk, there is no personal feud here.

I simply do not believe he is doing good things for the world, and the quality of the product offered does not force my hand in any way, so I will simply choose to take my money elsewhere. No petty grievance involved.

I'd be surprised if they weren't using climate change data in their modellin/planning.

Whether you are trying to reduce emissions or ignoring it is a separate concern than finding appropriate projected climates for agriculture etc.

I think the idea is that this keyword list will be expanded to include climate change etc over time, or some similar uncontroversial topic scientifically, but controversial socially/religiously that will reduce USA's scientific output in areas that are a genuine competition globally. E.g. climate change research to plan locations for future farming enterprises etc.

We shall see if true.

I know it's overused, but I do find myself saying YAGNI to my junior devs more and more often, as I find they go off on a quest for the perfect abstraction and spend days yak shaving as a result.

Like almost anything in IT, if you are good at using a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.

You certainly can legislate freedoms. The biggest news of last year was enabling legislating away access to abortion in many states for example.

Internet freedom is harder to legislate, but with enough backing you can legislate things in a way to make it difficult for the common person to access certain websites, which is certainly impactful.

It hasn't happened yet but there is nothing to say it wouldn't happen with enough time and backing of certain politicians.

I think that rather avoids one of the best parts of hacker news - getting the vision/justifications from the creator directly.

While I'm not saying most people by far aren't doing it to save money, I have bought switch games and then emulated them just to try the graphics at 4k 60fps that isn't possible on the console.

That's the part I'm sad about - that we won't get emulated games that look and feel better due to faster hardware in the future. Money isn't an issue for me.

I think they were referring to CIFS. Not the innocence project.

To be fair, it's a definite truth that shows get more chance of funding based on what is popular and how it fits into that perceived potential popularity.

So TBBT is a part of the overall zeitgeist, an example of a show of its type that was very successful.

You bet if a sci-fi show was number 1, than other sci-fi shows would be being made and better funded.

Doping is probably still common, but the more endurance or speed based the more drugs help.

Soccer values attributes drugs exaggerate - but it has a skill component that is more important vs cycling. Soccer also has breaks and substitutes and ways to slow the game down to close the gap.

I'm not ignorant to the tactics and technique required in cycling, but its a smaller part of the sport vs tactics and skill in football.

So it's not as important to dope. But yes, still happens.

I don't really see why it would be surprising. He is an influential figure that is greatly impacting tech, culture and politics.

For better or worse is up to the individual opinion, but its not really weird to have a strong view on a polarising figure, especially one with the influence of musk.

I never though so either, but then I worked at a place that had a stale product, product teams powerless and developers rejecting most features/writing random code all the time.

It took me a month to realise that the staff developers very much revelled in and protected their bad code and bizarre domain choices.

It was so far gone that there was no way to get rid of them and the product was just slowly dying and burning the remaining cash.

Then the mergers happened and they all got let go, only retaining the name for brand power and the entire stack was quietly moved over to another similar product which was rebranded.

Separately, there were absolutely very large consultancies that had a programming style/rules based on making their implementations difficult to read/modify, needing to call their COE back in to fix their code or add features - with it being very hard to modify. Talking entire codebase structured with ridiculous levels of abstraction and annoying code style. Bad integrations requiring their tooling to work and make sense of etc.

They target traditional orgs where the management just wants to get a project through and then bleed them over years.

Which makes the name a bit of a misnomer - Judas knew what he was doing.

Have they been diagnosed medically?

Because plenty of people say they are OCD too, but they don't mean the diagnosed condition. And it's quite different to "being tidy and needing things to be ordered" that the common vernacular makes it out to be.

Same as ADHD. Plenty of people who say they are "a bit ADD" mean something else.

ADHD can be debilitating when severe.

It's a truly awful condition that is not the "can't concentrate need to play games all day!" Condition the 00's characterised it as.

To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all.

The trick (which is very hard) is to recognise when one of your own arguments is one of convenience, emotion, illogical etc. And not be biased towards logical fallacies against others.

But this does not mean that your average person on hacker news doesn't tend towards better educated and more rational discussion than large amounts of the public. It also means hacker news tends towards specific blindspots, sure.

Minecraft Java edition isn't really that though.

Roblox is in a class of its own compared to fortnite and minecraft in terms of toxic monetisation.

Online gaming is definitely a tough one to navigate though, regardless. I had no problems as subscription was the limit to paying when I was a kid, but now it's a generation raised with mtx.

Along similar lines to what you are saying, I think one of the more general problems that I see with titles is that people do tend to gravitate around specific industries/sizes of companies, even within IT, and then tend to associate their own experience as "normal" when it comes to seniority.

I've moved a bit between different sizes and government vs startup vs mid-sized etc, and the titles vary wildly.

Some government jobs had people with 4 years experience be "senior" or even "tech leads" because they weren't paying enough so they simply promoted any bright spark that was going to last to senior roles so they could at least get a few more years out of them before they left, as HR wouldn't pay more money without them getting the a specific title.

Other place I've worked, your title was essentially a lottery system, others you were hard pressed to be a Senior without anything less than 10 years experience.

But each of those places, I encountered people with very specific ideas of exactly what a senior was, and they were convinced their own standards were the "accepted" ones.

There are definitely general guidelines for senior, associate etc, but they aren't normalised, just like you are saying.

So point is, in support of your post, you can't dismiss someone just based on the title they give themselves, as it might have been perfectly normal thing to call themselves in previous positions.

*appear to get out of you

Which is why shit, unmaintainable code often goes unpunished

That was so chillingly accurate to my own experience I am actually baffled.

I would quibble on relating the idea of selfish donation in the personal satisfaction sense, with the monetary and brand reward sense.

Two different concepts that should be looked at separately.

It's an interesting experience reviewing a "smart" solution you wrote years ago, and happening upon it again.

It's like opening a time capsule to yourself and getting nothing but a punch in the face.

Really dumb question from someone who barely knows this stuff, but does quantum computing in theory reduce that size again if it takes off in the future?

I think you can go more detailed on that and say physical controls for common, quick inputs especially ones people use while they are driving and you don't want them to look down for.

Touch screen is fine for setup screens, extra info, fine tuning stuff etc.

Point is when I'm driving down the road I should be able to muscle memory/tactily skip song, change volume, change air-conditioning settings etc...

But Bluetooth settings... changing colour of display, changing voice assistant tone... leave that on the touch screen. Don't need it.

I work in devops, and while chat gpt can write some starting terraform code or suggest aws architecture to some degree, the reality is my job is more about figuring out all the hairy details and how to smooth them out or add to them, in an existing world with a domain knowledge required.

Chatgpt isn't even remotely useful for the money making part of my work. If all I did was write boilerplate pipelines I'd be worth diddly squat.