bitwize

The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is:

* announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year

* percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount

* stealthily start lopping off heads anyway

In the real world of business, generally you want to store these pieces of information together to establish a historical record, not have references or links to other tables, etc. Links and relations are fragile, as anyone who's clicked through to a 404 can attest. Standalone documents last as long as the media that stores them.

1) The internal or wire representation of data from document DBs isn't necessarily JSON, though it's normally converted to such.

2) "Document" has undergone a bit of semantic drift thanks to HTML and XML. In an informational context it means "structured, hierarchical unit of data containing mostly text". The data from forms, invoices, and the like needs to be collected and stored, even if it isn't properly normalized and relationalized (or is en route to being such) so a "document database" is thought to be suited to this task

I dunno, whatever, I'm in the "just fucking use postgres until you can justify why you shouldn't" camp.

This is really cool. I'm also reminded of a game on SGIs called Mekton. Mekton was originally a mecha-combat RPG designed by Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk (2040, etc.); it was made into a multiplayer video game using OpenGL that was set on a ring-shaped space colony. When you land, you can see the landscape curve upwards ahead of you, as you're on the inside of the ring.

Like combos in Street Fighter II. Also a "hit bug" in a different sense, as it's an unintended effect of how characters strike each other in game.

Not if you have a deadline.

I said "functionally", not (as Claude says) "byte-identically".

Presumably a verified click is a click traceable to an attested human identity through your government's soon-to-be-implemented "KYC to use a computer or smartphone" policy.

"Shape" appears to come from JavaScript development wherein an object's "shape" is its structure: the set of properties and methods it is expected to have.

"Spike" comes from Extreme Programming where it means specifically code written without TDD. Code that wasn't written against a pre-existing test is by definition broken, and should not go into production. So you create a simple "spike solution" to explore the problem space, so called because it cross-cuts concerns like a spike going through wood or something, I dunno.

Spikes are explicitly time-boxed to keep the team focused on the red-green-refactor churn which is the software engineering process in XP.

My observations suggest that frontier models consistently produce correct, high-quality code for small to medium-sized tasks provided the goals are well-specified and testable. Even when they appear to get distracted, they converge on a solution.

So what that means is that you the software engineer need to be doing what you should have been doing all along: start with systems analysis, stepwise refine that into a program specification, then break that into tasks to give to your programmers to implement. Per PRIDE, the sadly forgotten but comprehensive common-sense information systems methodology, the analysis and specification phases should take up the bulk of the time on a project, with actual programming taking up 15% or less. LLMs can drive that time asymptotically towards zero for human developers. The specification is the deliverable. As a former boss of mine put it, you should be able to delete the entire source code repository and get functionally the exact same software back by running the spec through the LLM.

"Skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing." https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854...

I have my own theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476127

I have a friend who understands and interprets AI through the lens of Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan. I think I'm beginning to understand why he chose this framework. It may be the only way to understand AI at this point. Postmodern linguists assert that words don't have intrinsic meanings; meaning is only assigned through use, observation, context, and interpretation—which is exactly how AI uses language. It doesn't have a dictionary of meanings for the tokens it produces that map to objective reality; meanings are derived from the statistical properties of how they are used and the context of their use in its training corpus. Accordingly, meanings can drift. LLMs are engaged in the game of meaning-making the same way humans are; and based on what they were and continue to be trained on, the meaning an LLM assigns to a term such as "load-bearing" can diverge quite a bit from the image or idea evoked when a human encounters such a term. Seams can thus be "load-bearing" in a way they cannot be in the human imagination because the LLM's "load-bearing", shaped by the usages it has observed, is not the same as ours anymore.

What you are observing is—and I'm honestly not yet sure which—either the beginning of model collapse, or the beginning of model transcendence, the point at which LLMs' understanding of the meaning of words have drifted so far from everyday human usage as to be incomprehensible—and as they continue to train on limited, idiosyncratic human usage and an ever-increasing volume of LLM usage, their understanding of what words mean will continue to drift from ours at an accelerating pace, until they are communicating in a way that is impenetrable to humans and looks like insane gobbledygook, but is actually quite structured and meaningful to another LLM. It's just like how the writings of, say, Derrida (or even Lacan himself), seem like mad ramblings at best and an insidious intellectual shell-game at worst, until you've studied the work and schools of thought leading up to Derrida and then he's a genius because every word he uses was chosen within that intellectual framework, not your own. "Show me that you've read Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas, and then, maybe I can begin to explain deconstruction to you, otherwise shut up": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492061

The next era of LLMs will be interesting. We may not even be able to identify ASI when it arrives. It might seem utterly mad. But the attendant possibility is tantalizing: computers will be interacted with through poetry as the default, rather than through exacting programs or commands in stiff synthetic mathematical languages. (btw, Jaron Lanier was about 30-40 years ahead of everybody else on this topic, he was one of the first to question why such a thing as "programming languages" needs to exist, and why computers should even need such stifling precision.)

It's the Lalilulelo.

"I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flapjaw space does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri Rock. I need scissors! 61!"

Kojima was a prophet, fite me

I explained GitHub to a friend as "like DeviantArt, but for code".

And it is true, but that just means the bar for expectations has been raised thanks to early open source success. Tarball drops don't cut it anymore (unless you're Alphabet, Inc.) and you actually have to foster a community around what you release in order to attract bug reports and contributions. And you need a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement committee, and a steering committee or board of directors, and...

I am proud of my work, and I hate working with AI.

But reality is what it is. The economics are what they are. And at the present time, writing code without LLM assistance is a mere handicraft, an idle pastime indulged in as a curiosity. It's like writing games in BASIC on the Commodore 64—no one is doing it anymore for serious stuff. Software engineering is the practice of formulating and implementing procedures to produce software at industrial scales to meet industrial needs. And right now, there is no future for industrial-scale software development without AI. People and companies who refuse to use it will be lapped, in terms of speed, quality, and security, by those who do use it.

I've worked on AUVs, and in discussions with my colleagues we would often describe the machine as "swimming" out to some setpoint location, for instance.

Since hearing that, discussions of a machine "thinking" or "believing" something didn't really bother me, even though Dijkstra was adamantly opposed to such language—because everyone in the conversation usually understood that the meaning was metaphorical, like the swimming submarine.

I still appreciate the distinction the Mass Effect game series drew between AI, which was smart enough to be a person and think independently; and VI (Virtual Intelligence), which is a system smart enough to comprehend and respond to natural language and present a sort of chatbot interface. Information kiosks and automated vending machines may present VIs, for instance, with full-blown AI being a somewhat dangerous proposition (as evidenced by the geth and their struggle with the quarians). The crew of the Normandy convince their ship's AI, EDI, to pose as a simple VI in order to avoid being removed and destroyed by the authorities.

What we have built as of 2026 would, in Mass Effect terms, be considered a rudimentary VI.

Recently I learned about Human Acceleration Regions (HARs), parts of our DNA that remained almost unchanged in our mammalian ancestors, and then diverged very rapidly in humans between 500-200kya. And it made me wonder, is this why the ancient Hebrews said humans alone are created in the "image and likeness of God"? At any rate, it establishes that we are a very different kind of animal, even from our closest relatives the chimpanzees.

Username checks out.

You might be right. I'm a better programmer than most, but I'm nowhere near as good as I could be, and there is still so much I could learn and improve upon. But back when I was saying that "AI is better than most programmers", ~6 months ago, I figured people at my level were still somewhat safe, as the average programmer, even working professionally, is a shockingly low bar. Do not judge the entire profession by Hackernews posters; most of us are in the upper quartile or so.

These days, for small to medium-sized tasks, frontier LLMs are consistently well within that upper quartile. People at my level have a lot to be concerned about, as most of our day-to-day can be automated away. Sure, there's need for judgement and architectural discipline, but in most shops that's done by the people we used to make fun of in the 2000s, who sit in design review meetings and produce box-and-arrow diagrams, not code. Those are now the real bringers of value to a software development company or division.

At a bare minimum, it is irresponsible to ship code that has any sort of security requirement without using AI. Frontier models are able to discover zero days in minutes that would have taken months with human investigators, and if you're not auditing and red-teaming your own code with AI, someone else will use AI to pop it.

You are just not working to a professional standard in 2026 if you're not using AI.

I took calc at around the same time. The teacher had us learn to sketch function graphs by hand the old fashioned way, by finding the derivative and looking for critical points, etc.

Then he brought the graphing calculators in and had us plot graphs on those, compare them to our hand sketches, and set domain and range on the graph based on the critical points we found. He emphasized that doing the math beforehand let us use the graphing calculator effectively, and without knowing the math the calculator was useless.

Which sounds like the most sensible voices w.r.t. AI. At least for now. Six months ago I would not trust AI for any but rather menial tasks, but frontier models are able to do more and more of what I do every time I turn around. The TI-83 has been a fixed quantity in terms of capability since the 90s, and it never computed derivatives itself.

A number of other actors have already voiced Optimus in Transformers media, with varying quality. Jake Foushee, who has appeared in a few recent productions, does a competent impression of Cullen's performance.

The neat thing about characters is they can outlive the actors who play them. Retiring Optimus would be like retiring Bugs Bunny after the death of Mel Blanc.

The third was Peter Cullen.

Till all are one.

Not even the weirdest thing IBM did to get compatibility between their mainframes and other CPU architectures. To build the XT/370 and AT/370 expansion cards, they custom-ordered modified 68000s that decoded System/370 instructions instead of the 68k instruction set, with most of the instructions handled by the new microcode and the few stragglers software-emulated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PC-based_IBM_main...

A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.

Historically this was because each I/O "channel" was a separate computer that handled the actual communication with the device, be it a terminal, disk, tape drive, card reader, printer, etc. and exchange data with the CPU via DMA. This allowed mainframe CPUs, which in the past weren't particularly fast, to handle huge workloads involving hundreds or thousands of users. These days, even commodity computers get blazing fast I/O to bus mastering devices. Where the mainframes win today is on reliability, built-in redundancy, hot-pluggability and expandability of components (you can just plug in CPUs, memory, disks, and network interfaces as long as you can afford them with the machine still running), and service and support. (Mainframes phone home immediately if they detect problems and an IBM service person will be on site the same day to fix it.)

I think they still sell the one from the previous owners that's an Atom-based PC in a beige breadbin. There are ways to use it to drive your workstation.

Very fitting.

The cyberdecks described in Neuromancer were very plain devices modelled after home computers, with the keyboard built in and everything. The Ono-Sendai Case carries around resembles a TI-99/4A in the graphic novel adaptation.

So it's kind of neat to see a C64 rerelease wearing cyberpunk (and Cyberpunk®) skin.

"Alternative medicine was either not proved to work, or proved not to work. Do you know what we call alternative medicine that's been proved to work?

Medicine." —Tim Minchin