adamtaylor_13

Re-read what I said, specifically, I'm addressing the reflexive hand-wave of fascism as an all-too-common way to suppress thoughts we find distasteful rather than actually engaging.

That's what wartywhoa did to a commenter who was in no way suggesting a fascist view.

That's not worse faith, that's simply pointing out that aligning your ideological opponents with Hitler is intellectually dishonest.

In this you and I agree: "dismissing all criticism because it draws a parallel you don't like isn't reasonable."

> I'd not even bother to reply

Yes, you've shown yourself quite ambivalent to any notion of truth. You'd just as soon call someone Hitler and be on with it rather than try to understand another human's perspective. Pat yourself on the back, friend.

wartywhoa expresses an opinion that I find intellectually lazy and spiritually prideful. Refusing to engage with an idea because it was dimly echoed in a statement made by an evil man is just intellectually lazy.

It's a spectacular bit of pride in oneself to try to silence someone's opinion because you found an abstractly-similar statement made by an evil man. Why probe the idea when you could just assign Hitler's evil intentions directly to them?

It's gross. It's tired. I wish people cared more to engage in good faith.

I can't help but notice that for certain people with a particular anger against society, everything they disagree with is fascist in nature.

If Mao had said it, it would've been "absolutely communist", if Washington had said it, it would've been "absolutely Patriotic".

Dude said "Adapt" and you really pulled out Hitler.

Oi. Discussion on this site gets more difficult each day. Instead of pointing out where you disagreed you just pulled out the most egregious appeal to authority and said, "oH yEaH?"

I must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it.

All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.

I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?

I just don't think it's that serious.

I'd levy the same critique at other foldable phones. I don't know a single person, personally, that owns one. Compared to the hundreds of people I know with an iPhone it's crazy to me that the market is supposedly big enough for Apple to put this much R&D into a device like this.

I thought this was a joke at first. I do not understand the demand for such a device at all.

It's not pretty, it doesn't look very functional. The selling point is "a bigger screen", but never once in my life have I looked at my phone and thought "Make it bigger."

> They are as clean as they can be

Indeed, which is to say not clean at all.

"Only slightly dirty" and "much dirtier than mine" are fine judgements to console yourself of your involvement, but if you intend to indict a man, you'll need much stricter standards than this.

To be completely clear: I agree with your moral assessment. I too would not work for Facebook due to my moral qualms with the company. However, it is a terribly dangerous game to begin judging a man's choices when you know nothing about him.

Before long you'll convince yourself that you're the only decent man around and the rest are less-than-human.

The word "complicit" is sneaking in a lot of philosophical baggage into your statement. Surely you cannot mean that being witness to a murder (while failing to prevent it) and committing the murder are the same sin? Or that they should be held to the same degree of judgement?

While we may say the cowardly bystander has less moral character than the one who would risk their life to attempt to stop the murder, surely you cannot mean the witness is as guilty of judgement as the murderer? You cannot mean they deserve the same sentence.

I will, for the sake of my own sanity, assume you mean that the witness is a coward. You are indicting their moral character. There is a degree of self-sacrifice that you might personally find more or less agreeable in a man. Fine.

But merely witnessing the murder is not complicity, just as merely working at Google is not complicity. Whether society is "ok" with the cowardly bystander not preventing murder is not, in my eyes, what this discussion is about.

What next? Will we compel all men to live to our standard?

What part of providing half of the internet's infrastructure is supposed to be the "orphan killing" part?

Ahh yes. The old "because they were within 10 feet of evil, they are evil." He didn't single-handedly stop Google, so he's guilty of perpetrating the evil himself, right?

Go on, next you'll tell me about how your hands are clean. You've never so much as touched a product that made someone's life worse.

If the people who cry about the rich spent 15% of their time minding their own business and focusing on their own success, they'd actually be successful.

Somehow those who cry nonstop about the rich are even more insufferable than the rich.

Who cares? They got lucky or worked hard or whatever. Congrats to them. Their success does not make your life worse.

Agreed. There is essentially nothing that could convince me to buy a Chevy over a Toyota or Honda. CarPlay be damned: I can install one after market.

There is not a single vehicle produced by Ford, GMC, or Chevy that I'm interested in owning.

> Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.

You are correct and yet it's a straw man. At no point did the author advocate for everyone knowing everything.

He IS advocating that everyone know something. A position that is increasingly, comically, tragically untrue.

I just can't agree with this. Social media has a noticeable, damaging effect on those who consume it constantly.

If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you.

There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion:

Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.

The anecdata I'm seeing is that people whose identity was "I am a good coder" are experiencing an (understandable) disorientation and even identity loss.

That appears to be the crux of it. There are still fun problems to be tackled. In fact, I'm having a ton of fun figuring out how to use AI to build subtractive solutions: solutions that remove, or reduce to enhance what is left.

The principle of KISS keeps coming to mind when I consider local computing. I'm looking forward to the day we can just run Opus-level models at 100 tok/sec on consumer hardware.

But currently it's really hard to beat anything offered by the cloud companies. And the cost and complexity of setting it all up, just to barely (if at all) touch on Opus-level intelligence makes it seem like we're not quite there for the common man (enthusiasts are a different story.)

I am very excited for open source local models, and we're nearly there, but it's still too complex and expensive to be my daily driver (yet).

If they're not scannable, there's a good chance they're too dense and should be rewritten.

I think I'm beginning to see why Mr. Khan was let go. That's a mind-numbing lack of care put forth there.

Genuinely not trying to be pedantic but deterministic workflows are not what agents do. Indeed they're not capable of them.

You want workflows where the human gates are properly placed, not a "software factory" that you never place eyes on.

I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm skeptical they're that smart. Hanlon's razor would say it's just the system doing what the system does.

I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation.

I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.

You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.

We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.

(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)

I'll keep banging the drum: the foregone conclusion is that 90% of the "engineering" out there is necessary and that by "losing" these skills, Bad Things will happen.

What if there's always been two general buckets (or more)? One bucket are large systems that must perform to spec, and the rest are "good enough" systems to at must simply not blow up enough to be useful (see: almost every enterprise software ever written)

I'm likely wrong. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Humans have produced shit code for a long time, and it's not clear that clueless humans + shit AI code is something the market will reject.

You should spend less time seething over stuff you disagree with, and more time enjoying beautiful things in life...

Like Omakase.

The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."

And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.

So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.

I think you might be taking that number a bit too literally. What I mean is, it works enough that no one is complaining. But, all software has bugs. Some are logic/syntax bugs, and some are intent. "It should do this, but actually does that."

The sum of ALL of these classes of bugs is such that our clients haven't complained about the software being particularly faulty. It's impossible to tell if it's more or less buggy than it would've been written entirely by hand, but I suspect it's less buggy than it would be if written by hand.

Being generous in my assumptions, you may have missed that my intent by "recent sprawl" indicates, "things are getting worse, at a rapid rate". At no point did I mean malware didn't exist 15 years ago.

It is getting worse, faster. That's objectively true.

Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).

Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?

I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.

Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)

All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)

It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.