adamtaylor_13

Why is this depressing and bleak? No one is stopping you from doing math if that's what you want to do.

Should I ban table saws because they make people too good at woodworking? Should we ban right-angles?

This line of thought doesn't lead anywhere fruitful.

That's a hot-take, but yeah. Something like that.

Probably more like, "Prevent adversarially installed software from having unfettered access to your machine by giving software you specifically requested unfettered access to your machine."

If it makes you feel safer, you can just tell it to give you the commands run them yourself. The point is, I'm not a Windows sysadmin so idk how to do stuff like this--claude does.

On my windows machine I do. Not on my important machines.

This is an excellent use of agentic AI, btw. Fire Claude up and say, "Remove LG malware and mcafee from this computer. Make regex changes so it can't be installed again."

My current windows 10 install is cleaner than any other windows machine I've ever owned due to using Claude to deep dive and rip stuff out.

There's still a question of what that would do for them. I haven't used SO in years because I haven't needed it in years.

That's primarily due to AI answering my technical questions.

AI might've delivered the final blow, but Stack Overflow was in decline LONG before LLMs came on the scene.

I read a great article not long ago outlining the full series of events and changes that led to its downfall. I wish I could find that article, but I've forgotten where it was.

Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

I've got senior engineers (20+ yoe) who have never been having more fun and then some who feel like OP here.

Why is it so decisive? There's no other tool (not even emacs) that's caused this sort of division.

This has been my experience as well. In fact, Grok 4.5 is better at visual design than Fable from what I've seen.

And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.

Both. And internal tools. And infrastructure scaffolding a la terraform. And visual design.

And frontier models routinely crush all the above in a way I couldn't, at speeds unattainable to mere flesh and blood like me.

Is this satire? That's my most charitable interpretation.

This smells like it was written by someone who doesn't actually write code. How does one make the logic leap that any code AI is able to write, is only because that code is "trivial"? The author doesn't even bother defending that claim.

I suppose the only other charitable interpretation would be to say, "Well then 99% of the code I'm paid to write is 'trivial'." If that's the case, then you have to separate "code as means to an end" (which is clearly well within the wheelhouse of AI) from "code as a mathematical art" which is okay, but the latter doesn't pay my bills or create value for my clients.

I looked at my logs and saw no such behavior. Am I just lucky? Is this a poor configuration? A bug?

Did I misunderstand or was that whole rant just to establish that, actually, we do need super tiny frameworks for the front end, but they're super tiny so it's not a big deal and they're not bad like React?

I'm about as pro second amendment as they come, and that was not at all the message I got reading that blog post.

I guess my point stands. They should work on their delivery.

I get what the author is saying, but they may want to consider saying it in a slightly more compelling way, that has a logical flow that doesn't end with the reader thinking, "Why should AI help me cover-up a murder?"

Look, I'm sorry to be that guy. But if you're struggling to bulk edit text in vim, you're definitely holding it wrong.

And emacs isn't even in the same category of tools, though I understand why one might think it is.

My retraction aside, I agree that the BEST software is the one you never really think about. Raycast is a great, recent example for me. Or perhaps Keyboard Maestro. It takes some fiddling to get set up, but then it just becomes a part of how I use my Mac. I only notice it when it breaks because my flow breaks.

> As far as we know, the universe "just is".

I don't know this. In fact, billions of people around the world don't know this. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary.

You have objective value being made in the image of a personal God. Denying that leads to a lot of pain, namely nihilistic suffering because it's on you to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" in any endeavor involving your own self-worth.

My point still stands, the author is confidently stating something that's clearly just wrong. The alternative is that everyone is creating tech debt 10x as fast (while being completely oblivious to it.)

It's pretty obvious that's not what's happening. To pretend otherwise would suggest that every software developer everywhere is completely unaware of what tech debt is AND that they don't care at all.

Again: it's obviously wrong if we think about it for longer than 5 seconds. This is just pure emotional cope.

That's a pedantic word game. The industry at-large doesn't track lines of code as a measure of velocity. So, yes, faster does mean more productive, since that's what any sane programmer means when they say "I built it faster". They don't mean that they literally slapped the keyboard faster than someone else.

It's so intriguing to me how confidently people state this.

Millions of programmers out there, and you're saying there's not even a 1% chance that a single one of them is moving 10x faster?

> A couple of seconds is enough for a child's attention to wander and for learning to stop.

I'm not sure they understand just how dystopian this sounds. God forbid the five year old mind wanders.

I see what you're saying, and perhaps you're right.

However, I will point out that illegal != immoral. Sometimes when you have the power to do the right thing, you do it. Especially if the "within the law" approach won't work (see: Congress)

I recognize that many would disagree with me, and many would especially disagree regarding whether it was "right". I'm incredibly disillusioned that we even have the ability to course-correct as a nation; especially not through Congress.

So... idk. I'm conflicted. Musk hardly seems like the biggest problem this country is facing, and at least he's doing whatever is within his power to address it.

A very quick search showed that USAID had extensive ethical compromise throughout the organization.

Were we supposed to just subsidize that forever?

It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down.

That's just one example, but frankly I get the feeling that if I dug into more examples they'd end up the same: easily explained and not entirely shocking.

Are you sincerely suggesting, as you write a digital comment on Hacker News, that some people don't have 10-15 minutes in their day to read or write?

Who are these people? Why do they not have the same 24 hours you and I do?

Uh... by who?

I think you underestimate the unparalleled dominance of the United States Navy. (Which is but one of 4 major branches, mind you.)

Is anyone talking/writing about the philosophy of alignment? We can't even figure out how to properly motivate 100% of humans to align correctly, what makes us think that a wizard box trained on human corpus is going to be aligned?

I don't mean that snarkily. I mean it from a philosophical standpoint. As-in: What makes us think it's even possible?

Yeah I've used Opus fast mode a few times and it's incredible for staying in a flow state.

But it is crazy expensive so, not a feasible daily driver yet.

This is a pretty cool experiment. Thanks for sharing!

Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy.

Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.

Is spending $20 considered "super rich"?

It's really interesting what "normal" is for folks. I use the $200/month Anthropic subscription and use it within a few percentages of my limit every week.

I'd blow through $20/month plan in hours.