fzeroracer

How can you own the design if you don't know what your design actually does?

If I'm on call solving a problem another engineer caused and I reach out to them for clarification and they say 'I don't know, the AI wrote it' I am going to advocate for them being fired tomorrow.

> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.

And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.

>The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it.

>Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on.

These two things might be connected. It's almost like Brexit caused a series of large social problems.

I see there is no point trying to get through to you. These are not hypotheticals, as an example just recently ChatGPT advised a user to mix bleach and vinegar. I have seen Googles AI hallucinate many details that I had to double check and would've been disastrous had I assumed it was truthy. There's a reason why models have the legal clauses like 'this is for entertainment purposes only' because they are trying to shield themselves from legal obligations when it makes catastrophic mistakes.

The people least willing to understand how the system works are also the most willing to blindly believe it.

> But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can.

No, no, no and no. This is the biggest mistake I see people consistently make with LLMs. It is not designed to give you the most accurate answer, it is designed to give you the most likely series of words following your prompt.

If an LLM is trained on 10 jackasses thinking bleach is a medicinal drink and 1 doctor who disagrees, it will by virtue of probability tell you to drink bleach. Companies add additional safeguards or system prompts to try and keep it 'on rails' but it's all probability based on what you prompt it. It is by the literal functionality of how it works to do so. A function depending on what said company ingests during training, many of which include the entire corpus of the internet.

If you do not understand how LLMs work under the hood then yes, you shouldn't trust your own personal learned experience because you've already demonstrated that you're wrong.

And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it?

When you ask 'who knows' that's the point of research which was my original comment here. The same goes true for some random asshole telling you to drink bleach as it does an LLM, except people seemingly have hyped themselves into believing the LLM is more right somehow instead of being trained on every random asshole ever.

And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house.

So did you build a house, or did you build a house?

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you.

If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

> An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning

No, it doesn't. Because in any scenario where you are using AI in a potentially appropriate manner, you are verifying every single source it spits out and cross referencing everything it says. If you do not do this you are failing the process entirely.

Isn't this effectively the same argument an addict would put forward?

>Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.

Would these material conditions change if the person involved was responsible for making bombs used in a genocide? Or if they were working for the Torture Nexus company? Or responsible for money laundering and other illegal activities?

Life certainly has many shades and while I can be sympathetic to certain conditions here we're talking about a highly educated group of individuals who have multiple options to choose from. They've made their choice (or a series of choices) to end up where they are and that does not render them immune to criticism.

There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.

The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.

I certainly can't think of any. I've gone through about 18,000 games on Steam (since I dig for hidden gems and interesting games) and the only time a vibe-coded game stood out to me was when it was so awful I did a double take.

There's so many vibe-coded roguelite deckbuilders out there and all of them look exactly the same. A bunch of shitty art with zero cohesion, mechanics that don't actually work and a UI that's actively offensive to engage with.

This would be fair...except said wary individuals have had zero problem giving the state the ability to confiscate private property as long as it appeals directly to their emotions. We've seen cheers from those same types as the government sends jack-booted thugs to kick in doors and destroy property.

This technical site for years had a large contingent of users fellating every action Musk did (just look at the cyber truck thread here all those years ago). Now criticism of Musk and his immense amounts of often ill-gotten wealth is tantamount to partisanship.

Food stamps are definitely not 'very generous', speaking from personal historical experience. And food stamps can't pay for health insurance, rent or car bills.

This is what people have been speculating will happen with the rise of the K-shaped economy. An economy where a smaller and smaller number of consumers are responsible for more and more of consumption.

I think the problem is a sort of self-correcting one though because when the cuts start to bleed deep enough that people can no longer afford food or basic amenities that's when people start to get violent. Unfortunately that also tends to be very bad for economic outcomes.

I wonder what it would take to shake America of the whole 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' problem.

At this point I assume even a hard economic crash pioneered and gleefully supported by the rich isn't enough of a cold water splash. I think that mentality is too locked in for a large subset of Americans. Musk has been increasingly getting more and more rancid and that doesn't seem to deter his supporters at all.

Austin's affordability is still incredibly bad, especially when you consider how stratified the incomes tend to be. When I was working there my apartment cost around $1300 a month and the year I left my rent rose by 30% to around 1700 a month. This was in an area far away from the core of Austin, next to absolutely nothing. It's recovered a bit recently but because all of the people (you included) are encouraging folks (see: tech) to move to Austin the rents spike based on how much perceived demand there is. The minimum wage has not (and by state law cannot change) kept up with modern standards and while many companies offer starting pay above minimum wage it's still well below other cities. If you honestly think Austin is a place where people can go to own something then I think you've been so long away from the city as to be out of touch.

In comparison I'm paying around $2000/month for an apartment in Seattle but this is in an area that's right next to the light rail and well taken care of. With the light rail expanding I could easily find apartments even cheaper that still keep me within walking distance and without needing a car.

>The only thing that sucks about Texas is the property taxes, other than that it is a very welcoming state with great infra and comfortable standard of living.

Great infrastructure is fucking insane thing to say. I was living there during the big freeze in 2021 The state is incredibly unprepared for any sort of major weather event and refuses to actively harden infrastructure against these sort of events. That was one of the many reasons why I chose to leave, because I don't want a repeat.

I've lived in Texas. It is exactly as bad as people say, and I will never move back. Regardless of how nice Austin is, there is only so much I can tolerate an actively hostile state government to my existence.

I think the only people that genuinely think AI translation is viable are those that never read in the first place.

There are a number of games I've seen and played on Steam which use MTL to get the game playable in English and universally the translation is absolute shit. Sentences that don't transition into another, wordplay that becomes nonsense and a completely flat affect to everything.

> So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and benefits. The world is headed this way; if you want to develop software for a living and afford to eat, you need to be too.

It's really saddening to see software engineers throw out all critical thinking and innovation out the window to behave like sheep and follow the trend line. The industry was trailblazed by people that refused to do just that and the same is going to be true in the future.

> right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth

What? Where? Citations please. We're seeing big companies massively stall in all traditional sectors except AI which is a irrational market built off hype.

Companies learned one weird trick, that's why you don't see job opening collapse. Most of the job openings listed are fake. Companies aren't hiring despite showing signals that they are; you can ask any engineer that's been laid off over the past year and they'll tell you the same story of how bad the job market is right now.

Reading the post made me quite sad because it felt like the author didn't understand the actual purpose of a hackathon and just shit out some AI crap tied to a raspberry pi and pat themselves on their back.

At least game jams still carry on that general spirit and the people that try to put together stuff with AI immediately make it obvious.

> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal

And in that period where the markets are irrational people are losing their jobs, hardware is being priced out of consumer markets and the rich are trying to embed themselves so hard that we get to pay for it when the market corrects itself. I think your take is highly indicative that you live in a shrinking bubble unaffected by those things.

Sadly while I agree with this attitude, from experience they will ever get to the point of acknowledging help is needed. Eventually they'll find a way to blame the workers again to justify laying them off and double downing on doing things the stupid way.

> investing all the work to build his own.

I don't think you understand why the author did this on a fundamental level. Sometimes it isn't explicitly about getting the outcome directly, it's about putting in the work to understand how you get there.