gitremote

It's not even about the degree. Fresh computer science graduates already know how to code but can't do the senior developer stuff.

https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

There were no comments.

If there were comments for each conditional, it should still be refactored as

  return a || b // comment 1
    || c // comment 2
    // long comment 3
    // on multiple lines
    || d;

Many years ago, "lines of code" was the classic example of nonsense management metrics. Today, there are somehow HN users who argue that lines of code is indeed a good metric and ask "But what if the code had comments?" as if they have never seen comments interleaved with code.

> In that case, it may be better in its expanded form, and you should let an optimizing compiler do the collapsing.

This is nonsense. This optimization is not about compiler optimization for efficiency. It's an optimization for human readability and maintainability.

> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add?

Yes.

> That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them.

It sounds effective to me, like removing garbage from sidewalks so people can walk straight instead of walking around the trash.

> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

Correct. Today I cleaned up

  if (a || b)
    return true;
  if (c)
    return true;
  if (d)
    return true;
  return false;

to

  return a || b || c || d;

and contributed various other negative lines of code in multiple areas.

Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

Do you have any experience coding before LLMs?

Nonprofit organizations are not the same as companies.

ICE arrests U.S. citizens, which is bad.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/ice-apprehension-o...

The decline of the US government is the faster than "Europe", because it's been declining rapidly in a few months. The US government currently has a monthly quota for ICE arrests. ICE agents racially profile people and ignore non-white people telling them they are US citizens because they assume they are lying. Non-white US citizens need to have papers on them that prove their status (US citizen), or else might be disappeared. The US government now bans immigrants from a list of dark skin countries but fast-tracks White South Africans for immigration. It politically persecutes their political opponents and ignores the rule of law. It is preparing for war with Venezuela, which would conveniently tie up US resources as Russia positions itself for entering Europe.

The UK is rapidly declining as a close second, but calling it "European" (especially when UK citizens see themselves as non-European) is just a lazy generalization.

In layman's terms, it's the age of monopolies and oligopolies. We don't have enough market competition.

Perhaps large corporations successfully lobby the government the pass laws that boost their profits while stifling smaller competitors.

Why would the Chinese government want to regularly launch cyber attacks against US infrastructure, except it's been happening for years? US security companies and governments have been defending against it for years and have even cataloged the state-sponsored attack groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat#Chi...

It's very easy to think other people are being paranoid when you're ignorant about the topic.

> We have always agreed that a natural language compiler is theoretically possible.

No. Nobody here except you agrees with this. The distinction between natural languages and formal languages exists for a reason.

Neural network research and development existed since the 1980s at least, so at least 40 years. One of the bottlenecks before was not enough compute.

I've been doing API development for over ten years and worked at different companies. Most PMs are not technical and it's the development team's job figure out the technical specifications for APIs we build. If you press the PMs, they will ask the engineering/development manager for the written technical requirements, and if the manager is not technical, they will assign it to the developers/engineers. Technical requirements for an API are really a system design question.

My company mandates AI usage and logs AI usage metrics as input to performance evaluation, so I use it every day. It's a Copilot subscription, though.

PMs wouldn't be able to ask the right questions. They have zero experience with developer experience (DevEx) and they only have experience with user experience (UX).

I believe they are arguing against vibe-coding categorically by pointing out that high-level programming languages are for human expression. It's a reductio ad absurdum against the logical conclusion that follows from vibe coding as a premise. If vibe coding is like a using a compiler, why not just translate English directly to machine code or lower level languages?

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive.

In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements.

> And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap.

False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink.

"according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power is distributed in a 10:20:70 ratio among experimentation, training, and inference respectively, with inference taking the lion’s share."

https://blogs.dal.ca/openthink/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-convers...

All the models are pre-trained on the same one Internet.

> What you're describing seems more like a advertisement problem, not a product problem.

It's called "false advertising".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

It's not an argument by analogy. It's a reductio ad absurdum on the generalization that reality always lies in the middle but not always at the exact middle.

Flat-earthers: The earth is flat.

Round-earthers: The earth is round.

"Reality lies in the middle" argument: The earth is oblong, not a perfect sphere, so both sides were right.

> Reality lies in the middle

The argument to moderation/middle ground fallacy is a fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

> When Chatgpt3 came out we all declared that test utterly destroyed.

No, I did not. I tested it with questions that could not be answered by the Internet (spatial, logical, cultural, impossible coding tasks) and it failed in non-human-like ways, but also surprised me by answering some decently.

Yes, they're amazingly good given they didn't have copies of the original posters, Internet access to get reference images, or even VCRs at home to play the movies themselves.

The clickbait title is about "Africa" and "bad", but it's specifically about Ghana and awesome.

You think when ICE arrested over 300 South Korean citizens who were setting up a Georgia Hyundai plant and subjected them to alleged human rights abuses, it was only a perceived slight?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/south-korea-human-rights-inve...

How Trump’s ICE Raid Triggered Nationwide Outrage in South Korea

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-ice-raid-hyundai-outrage-sout...

'The raid "will do lasting damage to America's credibility," John Delury, a senior fellow at the Asia Society think tank, told Bloomberg. "How can a government that treats Koreans this way be relied upon as an 'ironclad' ally in a crisis?"'

1. Did you read the first link? Virtually all of Ukraine's FPV (first-person view) attack drones are domestically produced.

2. If that's the case, why is the US trying to invest heavily into AI as well if we learned from Ukraine that AI controlled drones are shittier than human controlled drones?

The US is too proud to admit that Ukraine is the world expert on drone warfare and that Americans should learn from Ukrainians.

"Ukraine's homegrown drones have become increasingly lethal, critical tools in war with Russia" https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-fedorov-drones-war-rus...

"Poland turns to Ukraine for drone warfare expertise after Russian weapons enter airspace" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/poland-turns-to-ukraine-f...

The US needs Ukraine to exist and not be annexed by Russia.

> Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot.

> All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out.

It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white.

Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI caused the crash, he said, "Because I have common sense." He claimed without any source that the Obama administration "actually came out with a directive, too white" on aviation agency standards.

When executives can't measure success by output, they measure success by input, a perverse incentive that rewards inefficiency.

Execs ask their employees to return to office, because they don't know how to measure good employee output.

Now OpenAI and Nvidia measure success by gigawatt input into AI instead of successful business outcomes from AI.

Incorrect. Vertebrate animal brains update their neural connections when interacting with the environment. LLMs don't do that. Their model weights are frozen for every release.

This is incorrect. Left-leaning preppers grow food and medicinal plants in their garden, install solar panels, and get vaccines, rather than stock up on guns and ammo.