bendmorris

I think throwaway use cases have very different requirements than products we expect to maintain and need to be treated differently. Go nuts with AI to generate a chart or a one off tool or whatever, if you don't care about deepening your skill to do those things yourself.

Someone taking over a project and working directly in it can build up their own deep understanding about it over time even if they didn't write it all. Documentation from the last expert can help, or just reading and changing things as you build up a mental model. But asking an LLM to change it for you will not arrive at the same place.

>Heck, I often don't remember anything about code I wrote six months ago. It might as well have been written by someone else.

This just isn't true at all in my experience. Do I remember every detail of code I haven't looked at for six months? No, but I can go back and recall pretty quickly how it's structured and find my way around. I'm much more able to do that with code I wrote and thought deeply about. It's like riding a bicycle - if you invested in building up your knowledge once, you can bring it back more easily.

LLMs can sometimes help you to understand someone else's code but they can also hallucinate and I think people gloss over how frequently this happens. If no one actually understands or can verify what it's saying, all I can say is good luck.

Completely resonate with this. There don't seem to be many of us, at least in my online bubble, but you're not alone.

I believe and hope eventually we'll come around to valuing people who have put in the work - not just to understand and review output but to make choices themselves and keep their knowledge and judgement sharp - when we fully realize the cost of not doing so.

This is a pretty defeatist take. Stop doing that, and start doing what instead?

Was this comment itself, somewhat ironically, AI generated? Why a separate line for nearly every sentence?

Language evolves; the term is now used to refer to a range of AI assisted coding. The concept has existed longer than the term.

Nothing that is possible is "too hard" if you're willing to put in some effort. The only question is whether you will learn to do it, or press a button, hope the LLM did it well, and let it forever remain "too hard."

Honestly, without judgment, I think this is just a fundamental difference in how people approach their craft. You either want to be capable yourself or you just want the results.

>This was a problem that wasn't even tractable without AI, and there's no "explosion of AI generated code".

People often say this when giving examples, but what specifically made the problem intractable?

Sometimes before beginning work on a problem, I dramatically overestimate how hard it will be (or underestimate how capable I am of solving it.)

The fixation with AI really harms the signal-to-noise ratio on HN lately. The author of this article very clearly used an LLM to generate much of it, which makes it read like the clickbait you see a ton of on LinkedIn. Then a commenter posts an LLM-generated bullet list summary of the LLM-generated article, which really adds nothing to the discussion.

Ultimately the author had some simple ideas that are worth sharing and discussing, but they're hidden behind so much non-additive slop.

>One environmental researcher NPR spoke to, whose employer receives federal funding, confirmed that they have been advised to avoid the terms "climate change," "sustainable" and "sustainability." Even "biodiversity" is of concern to some of their colleagues because it includes the word "diversity."

(Please don't just respond to the quote - lots of context in the full article.)

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5349473/trump-free-spee...

This language-based filtering began in the first term and has been widely reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/16/cdc-banned-w...

In the previous Trump term "diversity related topics" included things like biodiversity which is an important area of research and should be apolitical. Not because of a shift in focus, but because of top-down orders to not fund anything related to "diversity."

Conservatives in the past have also tried to belittle research grants to justify eliminating them, such as "studying X about fruit flies." It might sound silly to a lay person but drosophila is an incredibly important model organism from which many discoveries have come.

The problem is a highly political, often careless or incompetent, and sometimes blatantly corrupt administration taking a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel to so-called "waste."

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2019...

I've noticed AI generated docs frequently contain bulleted or numbered lists of trivialities, like file names - AI loves describing "architecture" by listing files with a 5 word summary of what they do which is probably not much more informative than the file name. Superficially it looks like it might be useful, but it doesn't contribute any actually useful context and has very low information density.

Devs (like yourself) might generate scaffolding for a greenfield project very quickly and be amazed and claim they're more productive, but I don't think that is evidence that an experienced developer will actually be more productive.

Honestly, project scaffolding is such a small part of the job. I spend a lot more time reading, designing, thinking critically about, reviewing changes to, and generally maintaining code than I do creating greenfield projects or writing boilerplate. For all of these tasks having actually written the code myself gives me an advantage. I don't believe today's tools are a net positive.

You can generate boilerplate without AI and whenever there's a significant amount of boilerplate needed there should be a (non-AI) generation tool to go with it. Deterministic code generation is a lot easier to have confidence in than LLM output.

>I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025.

It amazes me how fast the hype has taken off. There is no credible evidence that, for experienced devs, working with AI coding tools makes you significantly more productive.

>It's cool to ask Claude or Cursor to code something, but I feel less emotionally invested in the craft of coding.

So don't. Just write code yourself. I promise you some of us are still doing it.

I have news for you. The Republican budget plan will increase the debt by about 4 trillion [1], an unprecedented amount. They're slashing spending in tiny departments and then handing out multiples of that as tax breaks, mostly to very wealthy people. So if you're relying on "DOGE" and the Trump administration to bring down the debt, you're going to be disappointed.

The last budget surplus was under Clinton.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-reveal-trump-tax-plan-w...

The deficit is a result of deficit spending authorized by Congress. Audits have nothing to do with reducing the deficit.

DOGE is literally one deeply compromised person deciding what is "necessary" or "unnecessary" to spend, after Congress already authorized it. That is blatantly unconstitutional. There are checks and balances in the system for a reason.

>seemingly without audit or checks and balances

Federal agencies are regularly audited - internally by their own inspectors general, and externally by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) - and most of those reports are publicly available. There are numerous checks on these agencies including management by the president, who can typically fire at will, and oversight by Congress.

Like him or not, Elon Musk is not an auditor, has no relevant experience or expertise and is deeply compromised as he profits from large federal contracts. Giving him unchecked power with no accountability is not the proper way to shine a light on fraud, it's a way to get more of it.

On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?

Training a human and training a model may use the same verb but are very different.

If the person directly copied another work, that's a derivative work and requires a license. But if a person learned an abstract concept by studying art and later created art, it's not derivative.

Computers can't learn abstract concepts. What they can do is break down existing images and then numerically combine them to produce something else. The inputs are directly used in the outputs. It's literally derivative, whether or not the courts decide it's legally so.

>it could be argued that it's a unique derivative work

Creating a derivative work of a copyrighted image requires permission from the copyright holder (i.e., a license) which many of these services do not have. So the real question is whether AI-generated "art" counts as a derivative work of the inputs, and we just don't know yet.

>b) often has explicit licensing and therefore intent on its usage

It doesn't matter. In the absence of a license, the default is "you can't use this." It's not "do whatever you want with it." Licenses grant (limited) permission to use; without one you have no permission (except fair use, etc. which are very specifically defined.)

There are more texture mapping approaches which can be added on top of normal mapping to make the illusion even better, such as parallax [1] or displacement [2] mapping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_mapping

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_mapping

No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subjectively prefer.

Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?

It says clearly on the GitHub mirror that pull requests aren't accepted; there's a mailing list that you can submit patches to.

If you think extreme polarization and degradation of critical thinking is exclusively a problem of the other side, it probably applies to you as well.

Epic is a great example. Their own store lists alternative stores on the Epic store, like itch.io. But they don't take a cut of games bought from those stores. Once you launch itch, you're in itch.

As a parent who has made this decision myself, I certainly wasn't "happy to" do it. But it's very clear to me that without medication, my child lacked control over his thoughts and actions, and it was affecting his life - school, friendships, etc. - to a degree that was very frustrating for him. He's happier and more successful now. And, it's not a "lifetime supply" for sure - many kids do grow out of it and stop requiring medication by the time they reach adulthood. Some don't, and they can decide where to go from there.

I suspect that by:

>People thinking it’s not a real condition.

the person you're responding to meant statements like yours:

>Frankly, the symptoms you describe apply to pretty much everybody, and are just the things one deals with in life.

According to the NIH, prevalence of severe ADHD in children is around 4% [1]. This differs by degree from "the things one deals with in life" for most people - it's an extreme version that can be debilitating without treatment.

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/attention-deficit...