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gilbetron

5,194 karma · joined December 3, 2014

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gilbetron··on The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
Click on one of the other previews that come up, last I looked there were 4 options, at least one had the full article
gilbetron··on The Importance of Being Idle
This easily could be AI generated, there is little character to it, and if you told me it was AI generated, I would believe you.
gilbetron··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
That's undoubtedly to detect frustration signals, a useful metric/signal for UX. The UI equivalent is the user shaking their mouse around or clicking really fast.
gilbetron··on I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog
Decades? Wasn't it created in 2020?
gilbetron··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
Our local Subaru dealership has an option to use an AI assistant when you call to set up an appointment. I tried it, it worked perfectly, better than a human, honestly. Likewise our local Taco Bell is uses AI ordering and it works great as well. I'm sure they have their issues, but I'm losing nothing by not talking to a human in this situation, and there's always a human available if I need one.
gilbetron··on Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance
US automotive companies are backing away from EVs because they would have a huge impact on the automotive adjacent industries. They are more reliable and have little to no maintenance, whereas ICE cars prop up multiple billion+ dollar industries. We would spend far less on an automotive industry if we switched predominately to EVs, and so the existing industry is pushing back. End of story.
gilbetron··on Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
The "A" in AGI is for artificial, not advanced.
gilbetron··on Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
"100% AI-generated code soon" doesn't mean no humans, just that the code itself is generated by AI. Generating code is a relatively small part of software engineering. And if AI can do the whole job, then white collar work will largely be gone.
gilbetron··on Grief and the AI split
I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm using the past few months. Where I work, Claude Code is developing major changes to our very large code base (many repos, millions upon millions of lines of really important code) and pushing to prod regularly. Even the most bearish of engineers are now using it to ship important code daily. It still has issues and you have to know how to use it, but it is a shocking productivity increase (although Amdahl's Law applies for software engineering, too. Coding is only a relatively small percentage of what is done)
gilbetron··on US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide
Ok, and?
gilbetron··on US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide
That's because there are fewer white men because white men (and women) are the ones that are returning from the Baby Boomer era. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1T9dv&heig...
gilbetron··on US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1T9dv&heig...

There are way more retired people as a percentage.

gilbetron··on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
I didn't prompt anything odd, just standard prompt "etiquette", actually I significantly prompted less than I would usually do, trying to do a simple prompt like you did.
gilbetron··on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
I just tested this with Claude Code and Opus 4.6, with the following prompt:

"I have an arbitrary width rectangle that needs to be broken into smaller random width rectangles (maintaining depth) within a given min/max range. The solution needs to be highly performant from an algorithmic standpoint, well-tested using TDD and Red/Green testing, written in python, and not have any subtle errors."

It got the answer you ended up with (if I'm understanding you correctly) the first time in just over 2 minutes of working, and included a solid test suite examining edge cases and with input validation.

gilbetron··on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
What was your take on this?

https://aisle.com/blog/what-ai-security-research-looks-like-...

gilbetron··on MacBook Neo
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

Strong disagree on this one - there are some great laptops available, they just aren't "macbook clones". I have an Asus Rog Strix that I love. Lenovo have great ones, Dell, even HP is back in the game somewhat.

I use a macbook professionally, but still don't like the keyboard very much. The display is good, but my Asus display is better. Aluminum is pretty, but I don't like the feel of it on my wrists.

gilbetron··on Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic
I think it is likely that they realize that LLM models will be able to be developed by many companies, and I see most early, heavy adopters of LLMs doing the math on giving OpenAI/Anthropic token fees versus just having in-house models, and realizing that, at this point, it sure seems like having your own models might be the future path.

Nvidia is in position, and has the resources, to see this with a much broader lens, and realizes OpenAI/Anthropic won't be able to corner the market and the long term play is to sell GPUs to cloud providers and companies themselves.

gilbetron··on AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs.

No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it.

Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.

gilbetron··on $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
I have a 17 year old High School Junior, so I'm in the depths of the modern education system. Plus I had a brother that was a Professor of Education Technology. Plus, shocking on HN, I'm deep in tech myself.

I have mixed feelings on all this. The education system largely seems a bit better than when I was in school, however the impetus to learn has to be entirely provided by the parent (or innately by the rare student). Socially, it is a big problem because of phones, kids don't interact face-to-face nearly as much, as they can easily escape into the phone world.

But laptops? They seem fine, largely a positive, probably worth the cost? I'm undoubtedly far more aware of what and how my son does in school than my parents were. Teachers seem to use whatever works best, and there are lazy teacher and great teachers. The great ones use tech to great effect. One of my son's worst teachers didn't let them use laptops and did everything with paper, and she was terrible. Tech isn't a magic cure, but neither is paper!

I know my son is a better thinker, more informed, knows much more about life, history and science then I did at his age. If he wants to know something he can dig into it and learn what he wants. I had to bike up to the library and pray they had a decent book on the subject (they rarely did).

All that being said, AI is a big threat, but again, it will be a big differentiator. Those that want to learn we'll accelerate away from those that don't.

In many ways I feel like my son is on the proverbial last chopper out of 'Nam, when it comes to the public school system.

Of course, it also feels like going from the frying pan into the fire with the state of the world, but that's another topic.

gilbetron··on A16z partner says that the theory that we’ll vibe code everything is wrong
AI allows innovative people to create more innovations by reducing a lot of the non-innovative grunt work in an efficient manner. It isn't the AI doing the innovation, but allows innovators to focus more on innovating.

Or at least that is the theory. It is certainly true from observations of those around me. It also scales well. Even someone a bit innovative gets a multiplier by using AI intelligently. Those that just focus on the grunt work are the ones in trouble.

gilbetron··on AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
I can't control random internet people, but within my personal and professional life, I see the effective pattern of comparing prompts/contexts/harnesses to figure out why some are more effective than others (in fact tooling is being developed in the AI industry as a whole to do so, claude even added the "insights" command).

I feel that many people that don't find AI useful are doing things like, "Are there any bugs in this software?" rather than developing the appropriate harness to enable the AI to function effectively.

gilbetron··on YouTube Is Down
I'm already, seriously, looking forward to the post-mortem. It kind of sucks when things break, but it is also really interesting to hear the gritty details. Hopefully they don't disappoint? Odds that is AI related?
gilbetron··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
> if these things can't reason

I see people talk about "reasoning". How do you define reasoning such that it is clear humans can do it and AI (currently) cannot?

gilbetron··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
TRS-80 CoCo! First computer I owned (started with a borrowed Commodore Pet). I appreciate the simplicity of flicking the switch and writing code in basic. One of my favorite gaming memories is this beauty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKQHKdWTRs
gilbetron··on xAI joins SpaceX
Musk wants to put up 500-1000 TW per year. Even 1 TW would be 4.348 million of your systems. Even one of your clusters is at the edge of what we've built, and you talk about snapping 4000 of them together as if they were legos.

To run just one cluster (which would be generally a useless endeavor given it is just a few dozen GPUs) would be equivalent to the best we've ever done, and you wonder why you're being downvoted? Your calculations, which are correct from a scientific (but not engineering) standpoint, don't support the argument that it is possible, but rather show how hard it is. I can put the same cluster in my living room and dissipate the heat just fine, but you require a billion dollar system to do it in space.

gilbetron··on xAI joins SpaceX
"Space" aka Orbit, is done not by going high, but by going fast.
gilbetron··on Tesla is committing automotive suicide
And also what people said to Dean Kamen when he was making the Segway in 2001.
gilbetron··on US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year
It would be interesting to see the same graph broken down by wealth (preferably) or income quintile. Maybe higher tax rates don't mean more tax income, but it does mean more wealth redistribution.
gilbetron··on Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density
I emphasize, somewhat, with them for some complaints. The thing I love about our EV is the greatly reduced maintenance. No oil changes, no transmission fluid changes, greatly less parts means less that can fail, etc. That's awesome, but it also means people in industries supporting those will see their industries reduce or go away. This is good for us overall, but is painful for those in the midst.

That's why there is a big backlash against EVs, and I get it. Long term progress means short/medium term pain for some people. Think about all the stress facing software developers with AI progress.

Some empathy and plan to handle these changes would go a long way.

gilbetron··on Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis
Just think of mice as the staging environment for production humans.
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