dvt

LLMs can live in the cloud, but all tools need to be (1) local, and (2) containerized. It's clear to me that just willy-nilly "running stuff" is going to blow things up eventually. Maybe folks don't know this, but even Codex installs random binaries on your PC. "Read this PDF" installs a pdf reader executable. Is it vetted? Where's it from? Is it a virus? Who knows, who cares. Model goes brrrr.

I'm working on a project that includes WASI containerization for local LLM workflows (which is a pretty tough problem), and I'm flabbergasted that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't more worried about these attack vectors. It feels like amateur hour.

> Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading

Could be both :)

The way I look at it is like this, and you could call this my thesis: I do not categorically think that code in itself is primarily relevant to us looking at a "software engineer" and saying "wow, she's good." The product (the Linux kernel, in Torvalds' case) is, on the other hand, what actually matters. I think we're getting caught up on the idea of a code review; a code review can serve many purposes, as a code review is basically just people talking about the code, the product, their feelings, and so on. Sure, sometimes it's like "this `i` should be a `j`", but other times it's "this should serve feature X, not feature Y."

Overall, I don't think Torvalds is judged by his code quality. And the snippet I cited is the man himself saying "I don't write code anymore" so I took that at face value, even though my conviction stands wether or not he actually does still write code. I don't think anyone actually cared that much about his code quality (maybe with the caveat that the kernel didn't crash).

PS: I could be totally wrong, and this is an interesting & stimulating conversation, regardless.

> You're contradicting yourself

How?

> you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products

Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies.

> that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now

Linus hasn't written any code[1] in at least half a decade+. To argue that he's being judged on his code misunderstands why Linux became so popular to begin with.

[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...

> No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".

I feel like I need to push back here, because some of the best programmers around: Carmack, Torvalds, Johnathan Blow, even folks that make programming languages like K&R, Rob Pike, etc. are judged on their respective end products, not on minutia found in code reviews. For example, if I asked you "why do you think Stroustrup is a good programmer?"—you wouldn't cite some obscure optimization he came up with, but would rather talk about his overall vision for C++, his ideas of evolving C, his staunch anti-GC takes over the years (and their justification), etc.

Imo, this is like saying "I judge a carpenter based on how straight they can cut a piece of plywood." Or like saying "I judge an artist on how accurately they can draw a circle by hand."

I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the other hand, as a trained logician, I definitely see proofs (which, by the Curry–Howard isomorphism, are computer programs) have some degree of beauty-within-themselves, but that's quite hard to achieve. Not everyone is a Gödel, after all.

I also think programming languages, despite being Turing complete (which is frankly not saying much), are far too limiting to truly construct magnificent things with.

Maybe you're right and I was a bit too snarky, apologies to the author if he/she was offended. Writing anything implies some vulnerability, and criticism should be constructive.

The key difference is that code is not the end product, but writing is itself the product. (No one's doing "vibe-product-management" for example.) Tbh, I still think code can have a beauty and elegance to it (like a logical proof can, or like a mathematical theorem can), but there's a difference between the two and I'm way less forgiving of AI writing than I am of AI code, especially considering most code (by line count) is just boilerplate anyway.

Lol my blog was hacked recently and I've been lazy about moving my backed-up mySQL DB to the new WP installation. Not sure where moral high ground enters the picture. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I'd cite a book I co-wrote and another I edited.

Hah, ChatGPT constantly says "that's real" or "less about X, more about Y."

Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. One book a month is hardly an aspirational goal. You don't even have to read Melville or Hemingway or Chaucer or Shakespeare, just pick up any popular NYT best seller, and it'll be significantly better than anything an LLM can generate.

It's kind of interesting how genuinely hard it is to get models to deviate from basically all of these tropes. You can straight up tell it "I hate that card design, do something different, get creative!" and it'll do something either (a) ugly as sin (clearly just essentially a random walk through parameters) or (b) some same-y derivation of that card.

In coding, I've noticed a few tropes as well: everything is a "contract" or an "artifact" (clearly trained on like three decades of Java lol), everything is constantly "backwards-compatible" or "versioned" (even if working on a brand new greenfield project), and a few others.

> I’m referring specifically to the cards, which exploded in popularity after some YouTuber paid millions for a rare card

Objectively untrue boomer take. Pokemon cards have been popular & have been traded since I was in middle school and I'm 40 now lol. Even without ever collecting them I know how cool having a Holo Charizard was.

> These are not the type of people who you want running a company.

This is quite literally the opposite of reality, and it's funny to see internet experts that haven't so much as raised 100k always criticize seasoned C-level execs. Not that C-levels are geniuses or something (in fact a lot of times they're idiots), but there's a very good reason people are flocking to AI. The downside is relatively minor: a few million wasted, whatever; while the upside could be generational: being on the forefromt of an internet-level technology.

It's easy to make fun of bad ideas in retrospect (the Metaverse, VR, blockchain, etc.) but what people forget is that good ideas are often indistinguishable from bad ideas. So you should (as a tech company; not as a bank or as a hospital) generally prefer a CEO that's willing to swing for the fences rather than someone timid and overly conservative.

I always get downvoted when I say this, but React is imo the biggest piece of astroturfed garbage corpo-slopware in the history of software engineering. It achieved such ubiquitous status for a few reasons:

(1) The extreme boom of software engineering as a "get rich quick" career over the past 15 years, and it being the "default" framework for doing stuff on the web. It's so bad, in fact, that most developers these days don't even really understand the difference between a backend and a front-end. I've had to explain, from first principles, how cookies work. All these very important details are simplified or straight up buried by React and its ecosystem.

(2) The overall groupthink of engineers: a lot of us will weirdly become fixated on some framework, operating system, programming language and turn into absolute zealots. This has a long and storied history (Linux vs Windows, C++ vs Java, and so on, so it's nothing new). React just happened to capture a lot of the zeitgeist even though it was objectively the wrong tool to use for like 90% of use cases.

(3) Terrible alternatives. I mostly blame the W3C for this, as JQuery helpers (selectors, AJAX/websockets, etc.) should've been inducted in the DOM standard much earlier and because the W3C (and by extention, the ECMAscript committee) is essentially a beaureaucratic battleground for big tech[1], it's painfully slow to get anything passed, standards are all over the place, and everyone tries to push their own agenda (Google wants to track you, Facebook wants social stuff, Apple wants secure payments via fingerprints, etc.)

(4) The startup boom of the last 15 years or so. This has always been a bit of a problem, but a common trope has been (and still very much is): if it's good enough for "huge tech company," it's good enough for us. So you've had a ton of startups that have been built from the ground up on React and the sunken cost has always been too much to switch.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2018/04/13/go-away-kid-...

Somehow managed to make a Ferrari look as cheap as a Tesla (inside and out).

The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.

I experimented with this a few years ago, and token-level search-and-replace can do wonders here. For example, you instruct the model to, whenever it wants to reference the time, to just say "[time]." Then, you intercept the token stream, and always replace it with the proper time; inject/reconstruct the stream and then continue the output. This is sort-of analogous to tool calling, but with much less overhead.

(Obviously this only works when running local models, as you don't have access to raw token streams in the cloud.)

Apologies for being a bit snarky, you're alright :)

> doesn't do much to forward creativity, entrepreneurship, or engineering

Who are you (or who am I) to decide that? The entire point of a show HN is to be non-judgmental and charitable, otherwise it's just going to turn into a cynical echo-chamber. The famous Dropbox comment is a cautionary tale for a reason.

I know it's a grey area, but I've started to really push back against this kind of low-effort reddit-style gotcha' posting on HN (especially on "Show HN" posts, which are meant to be—from what I've always understood—a safe space for creativity, entrepreneurship, and engineering). It used to be rare enough that we could just collectively ignore it, but it's been getting super bad in the last 2-3 years.

Also, your comment is just trivially unininteresting to begin with: what is "submitting," what is "private," what is a "privacy guarantee," what is a "crime"? It's just outrage slop. If you're a lawyer and have something substantive to say, please do so (and a lot of lawyers on HN do), but otherwise, Lincoln put it best: "Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

> Newton and Leibniz were "hand-waving"?

Yes, and it's pretty common knowledge that Calculus was (finally) formalized by Weierstrass in the early 19th century, having spent almost two centuries in mathematical limbo. Calculus was intuitive, solved a great class of problems, but its roots were very much (ironically) vibes-based.

This isn't unique to Newton or Leibniz, Euler did all kinds of "illegal" things (like playing with divergent series, treating differentials as actual quantities, etc.) which worked out and solved problems, but were also not formalized until much later.

> This "new math" might be a recombination of things that we already know

If you know anything about the invention of new math (analytic geometry, Calculus, etc.), you'd know how untrue this is. In fact, Calculus was extremely hand-wavy and without rigorous underpinnings until the mid 1800s. Again: more art than science.

Because by definition LLMs are permutation machines, not creativity machines. (My premise, which you may disagree with, is that creativity/imagination/artistry is not merely permutation.)

> I think that idea is deeply fascinating, AND have no problem that we still credit mathematicians with discoveries.

Most discoveries are indeed implied from axioms, but every now and then, new mathematics is (for lack of a better word) "created"—and you have people like Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Euler, Ramanujan, Galois, etc. that treat math more like an art than a science.

For example, many belive that to sovle the Riemann Hypothesis, we likely need some new kind of math. Imo, it's unlikely that an LLM will somehow invent it.

Did you install Antigravity 2.0? It literally asks you to run a git command 30 seconds in lol.

> So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?

> Love that way of thinking.

I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).

It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?

I was curious and just installed it, and... Antigravity is a literal clone of VSCode. Wtf? Honestly, it's so embarassing. I might write a blog post about this, but I remember falling in love with the art of product watching Google demo Google Wave. Janky sure, ahead-of-its-time maybe, but also visionary and mind-blowing. Here we are almost two decades later and Google is re-releasing something made by Microsoft. The epitome of laziness and uninspired hive-think.

Imo, there's so much room for an actual normie end-product that supercharges local work with AI for regular people (office workers, creatives, etc.), but a VSCode clone ain't it. (Insert: fine, I'll do it myself Thanos meme.)

Great video here by the man himself: https://x.com/filpizlo/status/1976831020566798656

From my cursory glance, the real magic (InvisiCaps) appears to be a unique take on fat pointers to track types, access rights, etc. Pretty clever, and the website is a great technical read.

> why Foucault is taken seriously

I studied philosophy at a pretty prestigious institution, and he's not taken that seriously. He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space, where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology, and so on. But even there, he doesn't reach the level of Sartre, Heidegger, or (of course) Hegel.

Let alone Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (who generally all have specifically dedicated courses). I'm not a huge fan of Nietzsche, but he always has a point. When I read Sartre or Foucault, I'm just left scratching my head as to what they are talking about.

I work routinely from coffee shops. Literally like 80% of people on their laptops have Claude or ChatGPT open when I glance over. Listen, I do think AI still has a LONG way to go to be the automation & productivity utopia we so desperately crave, but underselling its usefulness is just silly at this point.

I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.