accurrent

Minor bug and develop whole new field of cryptography are very different scales. I do agree alms are really good with a lot of common bug fix related tasks to the point you have to split commits out. The fact is you recognise it's a minor bug. Who is sitting through the proof of Navier Stokes and going through it and finding connections between itself and other fields? Im not saying LLMs are bad, but I do think understanding is important. Heck, the fact you identified the minor bug suggests you understand the output. Im not so sure the same can be said of a gajillion line lean dump.

Yeah but do you read through and find if one of those side quests is useful?

One thing that concerns me from all this is "understanding" is very important to human progress. The fact it took 400 years to crack Fermat's theorem resulted in a lot of "Side Quests". These side quests helped grow other fields (for instance elliptical cryptography). Im concerned with AI that we will loose these side quests.

Its complicated... You can't function without feedback. Imagine you have a pothole, a 0 feedback society would tell you that the contractor the government selected is perfect and there are no pot holes in ba sing se. If you actually go to china you would find that roads are genuinely pothole-free. Obviously there are feedback channels. You can't run a country with zero feedback. China knows this and they monitor a lot of things. There are channels (like they have online petition platforms, 12345 hotline - organised demonstrations are not allowed). Theres also a whole industry around gathering metrics from citizen surveys and online studies. Every government program is measured carefully and methodically. Is it democratic in the western sense? no. Will you get killed for reporting a pothole or flaw? Absolutely not.

Government ban is part of the reason, but cultural differences are also important. There are other countries where Google is not the defacto search engine: South Korea, Japan, Russia, etc.

Similarly if your were to look into food delivery companies/ridehailing you would also find many countries where Uber has completely failed.

This. The circus that is academic publishing is just not worth the effort. Ultimately, companies do have to make money.

I really like the diagrams! This is a great way to show what happens deep down. A lot of engineers I know have very poor understanding of how software actually works. However a couple of things: - Theres a lot of text and not all of it is valuable - Hijacking the browsers "back" button is kind of annoying.

Ah I see your point, I took the word science to mean bio, physics, chemistry, etc. IMO mathematics is a different discipline and not one Id consider a science, rather I see it as the language with which we express science.

If AI is somehow able to prove everything wouldn't it bypass Godel's incompleteness theorems?

The intelligence is only one part of the story. People need to actually go out there and do experiments. Science is not only theory, but also experimental. The best science happens when experiments show that a previously held assumption was not true. Eg the Michaelson Morley experiment where the assumption of ether was disproved. While AI is an incredibly powerful tool, it does not replace the act of observation. Thus Im sure we will still have scientists in the future and some degree of open science. There are experiments out there that by nature of their complexity need massive public coordination (CERN for instance) which in turn benefits from openness.

What is going to suck though is the ladder for juniors. We dont start out by working on big ticket problems, but usually early career researchers solve really tiny problems in a cheap way. The lowest bar for a cash strapped PhD student would be to contribute to some new theory in some way even if the student doesnt have access to equipment.

Isn't this problem solved in the speech recognition domain by CTC? Nobody annotates phonemes there.

A lot of this article reads like an egotistical toxic senior dev. I agree with your take. I tend to agree that "not generating unreasonable work" is not a good signal. If I do 0 work I can fall in the "not generating unreasonable work" category - thats not a good signal.

Also the "Your manager or your tech lead could finish those in much less time and with much less hassle than it takes to help you through them." suggests that he is not hiring talented juniors.

It is also a good senior dev's job to architect and scope tasks so that juniors dont bring the whole system crashing down.

: Apply your same silly "lived in" rule to your comment about India. The hard part about building in India: It is a democracy with a (somewhat) functional court system and (somewhat) free media, so you cannot steal/take people's property without just compensation. In China? Forget it. The govt does whatever it wants.

Im of Indian origin, I have lived in India. I also have lived in both China and now call SG home.

Re your point about "somewhat functional court system" and government land acquisition.

In Singapore when the government wants to acquire private estates a vote is held locally against an offer. The offers are extremely generous and hence it is rare for votes not to fall through. The government is also able to actually pay its citizens.

In India we had local political goons threaten to come in and takeover my relative's home since it was not occupied. We could open a court case, but when will it be heard? 50 years from now? Yes the home was in a tier 3 city but still, which is more fair/democratic?

You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment. What usually happens is some authorities float a project idea on the news. At this point the idea would be toyed with. Depending on feedback gathered via academic studies and social media responses, if the project is seen as controversial the projects scope will be adjusted to some common ground that works well enough for most of the identified stakeholders involved - this is what the civil servants are paid to do. In china this usually is an ongoing dialog between local and central government. In Singapore this usually means focus groups and discussion. Neither countries really want to deal with angry citizens (but will do so extremely harshly when the need arises).

This is in stark contrast to a place like India where pulling up bulldozers to solve problems is becoming increasingly common. Politicians will command building of infrastructure just to satisfy voters without thinking through long term consequences. Often you get projects which exist just to check of the fact that they have built something even if that thing is utterly useless once complete.

> Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.

Err...My point being that it's not like Biharis who move to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are welcomed with open arms. West Bengal itself is a masterclass in what happens when you dont industrialise and implement birth control policies.

> Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.

If USA's quality of life reduces people can still expect to live better lives than they do in India.

>IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.

Do you think China and Singapore just build like that? If you do you're kinda wrong. A LOT of time is put into planning and gaining consensus. Yes, the means aren't the same as India or USA, but Singapore for instance regularly holds ground level consultation with many people from different walks of life. Strong manning things leads to worse outcomes and both China and Singapore know this and only exercise it when absolutely necessary. The real issue is competent leadership. In most parts of the world only the most undesirable enter politics. It seems like the take away Indians and Americans have at looking at Singapore and China is StrongMan=Good without realising that it was a democracy that placed man on the moon, invented computing and more. The success of China and Singapore is predicated on their leadership and excellent civil service.

I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87.

Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.

In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty

At some point I hope that we will reach a point where these megacorps figure that running these things locally might be most cost effective. FWIW I think local models I run on my MacBook are good enough for most of the tasks that this kind of interaction may ask for.

Hah, Ive been thinking the same thing. Recently I prototyped a 2d paint app to validate the idea using chrome's Prompt API: https://arjo129.github.io/apps/voice_paint.html Honestly what'd be epic is if this could be made to work with a XR headset. Imagine using the headset to capture the piece you are working on and generating saying "hey can you drill some holes over here"?

Im an oss maintainer and recently the slop Ive had to deal with is excruciating. Theres nothing wrong with using AI for code, but generating 10prs that are all broken cause you have no idea what youre doing and hoping to get into GSoC is nonsense.

I use kde connect with my android for my htpc. Works nicely enough on stoxk kde.

This assumes citizens actually putp a lions share of their money into more risky investmemt vehicles. For reference, this may not be the case with a large swathes of our older population. Bank rates, t bills and bonds here are generally lower than cpf. If you are a high income earner the contribution is capped and combined with low taxes this is not a bad thing.

Very few locals pay rent here. Most people buy houses. Its kindof forced thanks to the system, but its designed in a way that unless you are a decimillionaire housing is expensive, but attainable. This is done by splitting the housing market into private and public housing. Is this perfect? No.

And yes it does drive inflation of house prices.

"Indonesian and Malaysian workers". Sounds like you never actually visited construction sites. Most of the workers ive come accross are from Bangladesh, India and China. Malaysian and indonesian immigrants tend to be better off than them.

What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page

I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.

Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location).

Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.

With research like this you need to start somewhere. The fact we can get 3d information helps. There are people looking into making splats capture collision information [1].

I have worked on simulation and in my day job do a lot of simulation. While physics is oftem hard and expensive you only need to write the code once.

Assets? You need to comission 3d artists and then spend hours wrangling file formats. Its extremely tedious. If we could take a photo and extract meshes Im sure we'd have a much easier time.

[1] https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

Simulation. It takes a lot of effort today to bring up simulations in various fields. 3 D programming is very nontrivial and asset development is extremely expensive. If I have a workspace I can take a photo of and just use it to generate a 3d scene I can then use it in simulations to test ideas out. This is particularly useful in robotics and industrial automation already.

Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing.

I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terrible.

I find it ironic that thats the first thing that comes to mind. I know people with rare blood groups, I think this could be huge for them.

While true, it's also true that scaling medical school is not like a CS situation. My school quadrupled the number of CS seats to meet demands over 4 years. I can't see this happening with medical schools. My brother who is currently in a medical school regularly says how hard it is for the faculty to find teachers simply because there aren't enough. To add to it there are bottlenecks like not having enough cadavers.

Medical education is very hands on unlike engineering where we just throw people in the deep end at work. This is with good reason.

I'm absolutely for having more doctors and medical school seats but I think it's important to acknowledge that it maynot be as simple as increasing seats. There needs to be more fundamental reforms. That being said yes there are completely pricks of doctors who enter politics.

My understanding is that in many countries the biggest blocker to increasing number of doctors is the fact that there aren't enough doctors to teach. Unlike CS where we can simply increase the number of seats in. A course with medical school there are real bottlenecks on things like cadavers and mentors.