datsci_est_2015

Okay what happens when an AI agent hacks a children’s hospital and turns off the all the ventilators? “Lol whoops”?

What about power infrastructure?

There’s uncountably many ways to cause severe economic (and public welfare!) damage with malicious code generated irresponsibly with language models.

Cool, this will be added to harnesses and then it’ll stop being effective and we’ll move on to the next magical incantation.

“Sorry officer, I didn’t intend to shoot her, I was just firing my gun wildly and she got in the way.”

I don’t know why I’m seeing this rationalization so much in this forum when this topic comes up. Negligence is a concept in law as well. You don’t have to squint to see that irresponsible use of code-generating language models is criminally negligent.

I meant to suggest Georgeist natural resources taxes as an alternative to the current property tax scheme.

I'm not sure strict Georgeist policies hold up in a world where so much value is created digitally. It creates the perverse incentive to focus only on digital value creation rather than physical, and that's how you end up with a fragile or lopsided economy based solely on financialization (U.K.) or advertising (U.S.A.).

Caught one! I jest. Probably.

Voter registration deadlines are a tool for paternalistic racists and classists to enforce their voter suppression agenda with the thinnest veil of plausible deniability. Here you are, declaring their denial as strictly plausible.

Maybe we could have voter registration deadlines if there weren't so many bad actors who use it as a tool for voter suppression, but apparently ~50% of US state governments can't be trusted with that responsibility.

Edit: that's actually the issue, inherently; many rules and requirements for voting sound reasonable when presented absent of the context of the entire history of the United States (especially in the apartheid South...), but there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements that make sure that only white wealthy people who live in certain zip codes and have plenty of flexibility in their schedule have an opportunity to vote.

And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum. This is why being "woke" matters and the Trumpist campaign against historical literacy is critical to keeping certain states red. The historical literacy in some of these states is already abysmal (based on first-hand conversations), and to think it could get even worse...

I like Georgism, but I don't think it should be limited to just LVT. I think ownership of all natural resources (especially scarce ones) should be taxed at an aggressively progressive rate. Own one oil well? Cool. Own enough oil wells to supply the entirety of the Allied Forces throughout the duration of the European Theater in World War 2? Meh.

Meh, I think a lot of my people in my cohort are a lot more sympathetic towards people who lash out violently against the Kafkaesque capitalist system that many of us are suffering under. It also engrained a cultural understanding (in my cohort) that profit-seeking is not a shield of innocence: many agree that the leadership of United was inherently evil due to their business practices.

So, there has been a shift in our shared reality. Maybe not as significant as something like 9/11, but maybe an order of magnitude or two below it.

> That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company.

Ah yes, 2026 America, famous for its wealth of commercial competition and diversity of business practices. Just the other day I was bragging to my friends how many reasonable options I have for so many of my critical necessities, including televisions and other cheap plastic cheap manufactured in China and white-labeled by glorified dropshippers.

The corporations are quickly becoming the government you are so quick to demonize. The death panels that FoxNews spoke about 24/7 back in 2010 are now embedded into our insurance industry, except you have no democratic recourse and will be statistically drained of your wealth before your offspring have a chance to inherit it, all while they watch you die and stress over the Byzantine processes that are “economically efficient”.

There’s a rich history of voter suppression tactics in the US. Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines. Anti-democratic conservatives take great joy in continuing the racist and classist traditions of their forefathers (both by blood and by tradition), and you’ll find such characters packed in the state governments in the South.

When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.

Evidence of wage theft being a core principle behind Silicon Valley gig economy profitability?

Or evidence of uppity liberals overstepping their bounds when it comes to free market association of workers and employers?

I haven’t used open weight models yet, but this would match my intuition given I haven’t experienced a noticeable increase in code quality this calendar year. If open weight models are already on par with January frontier models that’s already enough for me to automate most of the manual parts of my work (I.e. not “architecting”).

And once frontier models can architect (turn business requirements into engineered systems) then I guess no one needs a job because that’s the digital singularity.

Idiot directors and VPs don’t realize that the independence is what leads to the games being different enough to justify separate existences. Put the same teams on Halo and CoD and they’ll converge and cannibalize each other.

Or maybe they do realize this and are willing to sacrifice the IP at the altar of Moloch.

I’m coming from the angle that the majority of software written is internal or B2B rather than B2C, and that most critical B2B software features are hammered out in the first couple of years of development while the remaining development cycles are for niche requests to maintain specific clients who don’t actually know what they want and then don’t end up resubscribing / even using the feature.

If you don’t think about it as a per-software criteria, but per-feature criteria, the vast majority of software features developed are probably completely ignored or even untouched compared to the “critical few”.

Very, very long tail distribution. The most executed 100 lines of code (maybe some Java class init snippet, or some Linux kernel snippet) is probably executed more per day than the per-day bottom 80% of all code combined. Maybe the bottom 99.9% of all code combined.

Same with pretty much any other profession. Hunting for reliable and reasonably-priced HVAC, plumbing, handymen, etc. is a part-time job.

But the point OP was trying to make is that because LLM harnesses output code that is at least better than the worst, say, 20% of developers then we should be fine with it. Meanwhile, I’ve worked in shops where you have to be way above the worst 20% in order to keep your job or even be hired in the first place. And it isn’t some crazy lose-sleep-over-it, stressful requirement. It’s just that literally if you’re not good enough your work will be identified as a liability and you’ll be let go. It’s only happened to 3 people fwiw.

I would say there’s nothing humane about this, but there’s a certain section of the population who read too much Ayn Rand at too impressionable an age, or saw Wolf of Wall Street as aspirational, that very much rationalize their own behavior as natural.

> Furthermore, humans are rather unlikely to be the optimal form of intelligence for software architecture and engineering

I like this framing. Humans invented software (and engineering in general) as a means to solve problems with methods that work best for us. There may be entirely different, and parallel, problem-solving methodologies outside of human best-practices.

Yes, the LLM knows the definitions of the words in my domain, that’s clear and obvious.

No, the LLM doesn’t know our product strategy and why certain things matter and certain things don’t. That’s very much what I get paid to do. There’s not even agreement within our team about what path we should take through the domain-product space, there’s no chance in hell that the LLM will choose a profitable random walk through that domain-product space.

If it were able to do that, then AGI would have already been achieved and we’re only compute power away from OpenAI or Anthropic making the marginal utility of any piece of code $0.

Yes, including myself in the past. I’m grateful to be out of that situation.

Probably a vast majority of software written never actually gets interacted with by a user. A vast majority of VC-funded software probably never gets interacted with by a user.

Feels pretty great to work on a product that actually has a user, and that user isn’t actually the product (and that user isn’t being manipulated or exploited). Tiny, tiny minority of the software industry I work in.

Source? Or are we just upvoting wild speculation based on vibes on HN now?

Yeah and they’re typically fired for incompetence, or their startup fails, or their product flounders but that’s okay because the company doesn’t need the product to actually be successful.

Meanwhile, the people who work on actual products that matter have a valid criticism that can’t be dismissed with “some humans don’t even manage to do that.”

Does writing table schemas count as writing code? Is that architecting? Both?

I personally don’t trust coding agents to have enough context to write domain-specific table schemas, and I don’t have the patience to transcribe all of the context into a natural language prompt. If I ask it to, it’ll write something for sure, and maybe that can be a jumping point for me, but at some point I have to physically write what the columns will be.

“Claude, make this code maintainable.”

I’m beginning to believe that if this was a “solvable” problem then the billions of dollars poured into coding agents would have solved it by now.

Maybe I overestimate the ability for corporate network administrators to block and detect access to certain websites from within their networks, like adult websites. My understanding was that there’s no way to circumvent those network controls.

How much above the local market rate are you paying for this level of qualified developer? 20%? 50%?

How do you prevent churn because this type of developer is somewhere around 1 in 20 or 1 in 100 in terms of rarity?

> To put humans through this kind of misaligned system is the stuff of nightmares.

And also the natural market equilibrium, apparently.

> Yes, the average distance per run may be higher for the 5 companies, but it won't be 5x.

You contradict yourself at the end of the comment. Yes, it could be estimated a linear equation (mx + b) where m is the cost per house and b is the cost per route, roughly. And then you could have a system of which equations, where each row in the system’s matrix corresponds to an additional company.

The optimal result is probably not 1 company, but it’s probably not 1 company per house either

Poor fella doesn’t have a seat. Intriguing design where both pedals are on the same side of the frame. Balancing must be a challenge.

Network administrators also solved these things, e.g. you can limit what websites a virtual machine is allowed to access.

Now, if you’re letting your agents abuse network traffic there becomes a point where you’re criminally liable. Unfortunately the current US government has no interest in prosecuting such abuse.

I can’t recreate a shuffling of cards.

Combinatorics is basically the study of mathematically generating and quantifying complexity.