Isn't that from Jabberwocky?
4,546 karma · joined October 27, 2009
> A new way, a better way.
The autumn winds blow.
> ... adding an automation into HA ... took a few minutes max
... plus the hours it takes to setup and maintain HA and the machine its running on and the wireless hub and the dishwasher... etc. I bet you won't save back the total time spent across the whole lifetime of the system. That's not the only measure of success and that's fine.
You asserted that
> pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves...
and latterly
> ... HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space
and my point is that I disagree - the implementation of an idea in terms of the actual coding is far less interesting to me (and my assertion is: by extension, less interesting to the average reader) than the implementation in terms of the behaviour of the thing. Perhaps you're concerned about someone opening Claude Code and typing "Write me an application that does XYZ" but it's pretty obvious that so far that doesn't produce anything useful, and I think is more of a problem for sites like Stack Overflow where an answer is a small singular thing rather than an entire system.
There is a spectrum between 'writing it all yourself' and 'YOLO vibe-coding' and if you're only arguing about the latter end of the spectrum then, sure, those tend to suck, but I don't think we're really at risk of being drowned in those projects; that's a kind of slippery-slope argument. This is why I talked about 3D graphics; I earlier feared the 'YOLO 3D game' projects taking over, and that just hasn't happened. I believe we (humans) had similar discussions around the time that typewriters and the printing press were invented - 'if you're not handwriting your ideas then you're not really thinking!' but the ideas are the point, not the process of writing them down.
There is a proliferation of frameworks and libraries supplying all kinds of mundane needs that developers have; is it wrong for people Showing HN to use those? Do libraries and frameworks not lower the barrier to entry? There have been many cases of 'I threw this together over a weekend using XYZ and ABC', haven't there? What's interesting is how they understand the domain and how they address the problems posed by it - isn't it? Sure, the technical discussion can be interesting too but unless some deep technical problem is being solved, I don't care too much if they used Django or Flask, and which database backend they chose, unless these things have a significant impact on the problem space.
> the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated
I was very interested in 3D graphics programming back in the DOS days before GPUs were a commodity, and at that time I felt the same about hardware accelerated rendering - if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. Turns out that lowering barriers to entry doesn't magically make everything easier, but does allow a lot more people to express their creativity who otherwise would lack the knowledge and time to do so. That's a good thing! Pre-made engines like Godot remove an absolute ton of the work that goes into making a game, and are a great benefit to the one-man-bands and time-strapped would-be game designers out there whose ideas would otherwise die in the dark.
You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.
The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.
I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
Whether or not it's "better" is orthogonal to the point at hand.
Do you have that number? Do you have any numbers to back up your claims or are you just talking about what works for you?
Since, as you say, your hypothetical children would not be purely British, at what point are your descendents 'pure Brits'? Is it 50 years from now? 100? 500? Now think about what life was like in Britain 50, 100 and 500 years ago. How close would you say the lives of children today are, compared to children in those times? Closer than to children born today in, say, Norway? Consider that 1986 is as far away from today as it was from 1946; someone born today is as distant from someone born in the 80's, as someone born in the 80's was from the end of World War 2.
And think about British culture in the 90's and 00's - it was heavily influenced by US culture at that time; today I imagine things like K-Pop are having an increasing influence. Britain (as indeed most other nations) has for thousands of years been a melting pot of different cultural inputs. In fact, the very notion of 'Britain' has changed over time - the British empire once spanned the globe and included places as diverse as India, South Africa and Singapore. Even the Britain of today is not a single country; would you say that, say, Northern Irish and south-eastern English people are culturally homogeneous?
So, while I do agree that telling me you were born in Britain, or China, or Zimbabwe would help me to calibrate broad expectations about you, I can't see how any of those things is or ever was 'pure' in any way.
You're right - a healthy dose of luck, 'right place, right time', is also needed. Plus the arrogance to assume that they deserve everything they want.
> You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)
Maybe you and I disagree on the definition of a genius; Ellison and Musk are of course smart, but there are very many smart people - that is also not sufficient, and 'genius' is not required. Elon Musk spends a lot of time arguing with random people on Twitter, and espouses some very dumb, and sometimes racist views. He's a good salesman (principally of himself), and possessed of huge self-confidence, but I don't see any evidence of genius. More like being born 3-0 up and convinced he'd scored a hat-trick, amplified by survivor bias; for every billionaire, there are thousands like them who just didn't get the right breaks.
Compare Elon and 'lawnmower' Larry to everyone's favourite genius, Einstein, and they're not even in the same league.
... hooked up to the ISS, with humans in attendance to fix anything that goes wrong... not doing very much.
It's akin to the difference between a boat moored up in a port, and an autonomous drone in the middle of the Pacific. Aside from that, satellites have to maneuver in orbit (to stay in the correct orbit, and increasingly to avoid other satellites). Hefting around additional kgs of shielding makes that more difficult, and costly in terms of propellant, which is very important for the lifetime of a satellite.
We're humans, and humans have always and always mixed between cultural groups, except in rare instances of total isolation; such people are not 'pure' anything, but they would likely be inbred. There is no 'pure' genetic strain of any race or indeed any organism. Whatever divisions there are between us are extremely blurry and constantly changing.
Seems like quite an engineering challenge with this new design...