imiric

While creating good software is as much of an art as it is a science, this is not why the craft is important. It is because people who pay attention to detail and put care into their work undoubtedly create better products. This is true in all industries, not just in IT.

The question is how much does the market value this, and how much it should value it.

For one-off scripts and software built for personal use, it doesn't matter. Go nuts. Move fast and break things.

But the quality requirement scales proportionally with how many people use and rely on the software. And not just users, but developers. Subjective properties like maintainability become very important if more than one developer needs to work on the codebase. This is true even for LLMs, which can often make a larger mess if the existing code is not in good shape.

To be clear, I don't think LLMs inevitably produce poor quality software. They can certainly be steered in a good direction. But that also requires an expert at the wheel to provide good guidance, which IME often takes as much, if not more, work than doing it by hand.

So all this talk about these new tools replacing the craft of programming is overblown. What they're doing, and will continue to do unless some fundamental breakthrough is reached, is make the creation of poor quality software very accessible. This is not the fault of the tools, but of the humans who use them. And this should concern everyone.

That's amusing, but it's another logical fallacy (non sequitur). :)

Was advertising necessary to produce all of this inarguably useful technology? Is this technology somehow unique in the world?

There are alternatives to all of those products that are not monetized via advertising. You may argue that they're not good enough, and I may agree to some extent, but they certainly work well enough for many people who decide to not use Google and other ad supported products and services.

Google et al don't have a monopoly on "amazing" technology. They just dominate the market to make it seem like they do.

Besides, it's not like Google developed these products in a vacuum (except perhaps early web search). Many of them are based on the work of other companies and individuals, which they either acquired, forked, or depend on. Which is fine, but the point is that not all of it is built and maintained entirely by G.[1]

[1]: The Roman analogy actually works in this sense as well, since accomplishments of the Roman empire were also largely based on work borrowed, adapted, or simply stolen from others. So were all the atrocities they committed necessary to advance technology? Perhaps. But if alternatives existed during their time that didn't come with the same downsides, I'm sure people would choose to use those instead, which is where your analogy falls flat. :)

> You could just as easily see it as the best minds are building huge amounts of amazing, free technology and need a way to pay for it.

That's a false dichotomy.

First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.

Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.

Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.

Those books look amazing! *_*

Snatched the collection. Thanks for mentioning it!

It looks like HN's new AI guideline is working as intended.

> Education worked to cut cigarette use

Ah, yes, it was education, and certainly not strong regulation of how cigarettes are produced, marketed, and sold. Educating the youth is why vaping and smoking is not cool anymore.

What "free speech" exactly? Do you think that such a thing actually exists on platforms controlled by giant corporations? This "free speech" is heavily regulated by opaque algorithms and very specific terms of service. It's "free" as long as it aligns with the company's values and business goals, and your opinions will only reach other people if the algorithm decides that promoting it would drive engagement.

There is definitely a risk of governments using this as an excuse to encroach upon civil liberties, as they've done in the past, but this is not a black or white issue. The reality is nuanced and passing regulation requires careful discussion and balancing. I'm sure we can agree that regulating Big Tobacco and Big Pharma was a good thing, and not some civil rights issue, so why is Big Tech different?

We can also work on educating people, as you suggest, but it can't be the only solution. Regulating greedy and predatory companies should be a part of it.

It's amusing that you would rather support a ban on screens in schools, than regulating companies that make using screens harmful in the first place. It's very reminiscent of the blanket "TVs are bad" argument from past decades.

Notice that I said "many people". I have no way of knowing what your affiliation or agenda is, or even if you're human. That doesn't change the fact that many people here are indeed biased in favor of Big Tech, and at the same time would never admit it. You may simply be a fervent social media user, or have your own reasons for being wrong. :)

Look, do you think that I somehow don't care about my civil liberties? That I wish to live in a nanny state where the government gets to control every facet of my life? Obviously not. But at the same time, it would be foolish to look at the current state of the world without coming to the conclusion that social media has played a significant role in creating it.

FWIW, I'm not opposed to social media in principle. I think it creates spaces where cacophony dominates which ironically does the exact opposite of "connecting people", so I wouldn't be a part of it even if it weren't controlled by giant corporations. But if someone else feels differently, it's their own choice and I respect it. The real problem is the weaponization of these platforms to corrupt democratic processes, spread disinformation, and serve as a playground for companies to conduct mass psychological experiments, and do all kinds of devious shit we're not privy to, which should make it very clear that this technology is doing much more harm than good.

Which brings me back to the core of my argument, and what GP brought up: the undeniable parallels between social media and cigarettes. Do you think that regulating Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other industries, was government overreach? Would you rather live in a world where cigarettes are marketed towards children, are pumped full of addicting chemicals (beyond some "safe" limit, whatever that is), and where the Zuckerbergs, Sacklers, and Johnsons of the world get to do what they want? That seems objectively much more harmful to society than whatever erosion of your "liberties" you think is taking place. Governments don't need some big excuse to erode your liberties; they'll do that behind your back regardless. This "free" world you think you live in is an illusion.

Besides, which civil liberties are you particularly defending in regards to social media? Your rights to publish and consume content on platforms controlled by giant corporations? These are not some "public squares", as its CEOs would lead you to believe. Your "free speech" on them is heavily regulated by opaque algorithms and very specific terms of service. There are plenty of other channels you can use to communicate with people without being exploited and manipulated, while enjoying actual freedoms, so why is social media so sacred?

Regulation is a double-edged sword that needs to be carefully balanced. I share your own concerns about government overreach. But it's foolish to have the viewpoint that social media, and Big Tech in general, shouldn't be regulated. This is not "off the back of a moral panic"—it's based on hard evidence of the harm it actually causes. Do these companies actually have to commit genocide before you agree that something has to be done? Which has effectively already happened if you consider Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide.

It's ridiculous that you're getting downvoted, you're 100% right. Though it's not unexpected given the forum. Many people here are either directly employed by social media companies and Big Tech, or are inside that bubble. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The parallels between social media and cigarettes are undeniable. Nicotine and chemicals in tobacco are addictive on their own, yet tobacco companies made cigarettes as addictive as they possibly could. They also advertised to children, and deceived the public with false advertising and disinformation for decades. They were prosecuted for all of this, which put a stop to it in first-world countries, at least. There are still countries with lax regulation where the tobacco industry is engaging in the same tactics they used decades ago, and business is booming. Cigarettes didn't go away. People can still smoke if they want, but it's much more strictly regulated, as it should be.

Nobody was against regulating Big Tobacco, as it was obviously doing more harm than good. And yet whenever regulating social media and Big Tech is brought up, it is a civil liberties and government overreach issue. Give me a break.

Hey, that's a perfectly reasonable stance, and I can relate to it.

Apologies for working around it and putting the code out there against your wishes. If you check my post history, you can see how opposed I am to these new tools, and "vibe coding" specifically. In my defense, I really didn't want to spend a lot of time on this, and LLMs do a decent job at this type of mechanical conversion. And I really don't judge anyone for using them mindfully, as you've clearly done in this case. The code didn't read like slop to me, if it's any consolation. :)

Besides, this "closed source" criticism is really a non-issue in this case considering it's a browser extension with clear JS, which anyone can inspect if they were really interested.

Cheers!

EDIT: I've deleted the gist. :)

To be fair, the .xpi is just a .zip file, and the JS isn't minimized.

I vibe-converted it to a userscript[1], but it doesn't work for me in qutebrowser because it depends on profile data fetched from `https://hn-trustspark.com/alltrust.json`, which seems to be periodically updated by the author, and qutebrowser has limited userscript support. :(

It could probably be worked around by fetching the data externally, but I don't want to depend on hn-trustspark.com. It would be great if the profile updating tool could be published as well.

Anyway, hope it helps someone else :)

FWIW, after a quick review of the script, it looks safe to me. As long as you trust that the served profile data is correct, and don't mind leaking your IP to it.

Great idea and kudos to the author! We need more tools like this to help us deal with spam, and not just on HN, but everywhere.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/imiric/a5d1cd187e91eb0b725c4661250e5...

I agree that it was a tragedy, but the cultural and religious tensions have existed in the Balkans for centuries. Tito's strong leadership, charisma, "bratstvo i jedinstvo", etc., managed to keep it together, often by sheer force that suppressed nationalism. After he died, all it took for it to fall apart was a group of small-minded political pawns that filled the vacuum and infected the masses with their narrative, along with external influence from all sides that wanted their own piece of the pie.

Today each country might not be as relevant as Yugoslavia once was, but there's relative peace in the region, and the countries that are part of the EU today are significantly better off in many ways than they were before. It's a miracle that the Yugoslav experiment lasted as long as it did, so perhaps we should accept that the only way southern slavs can coexist is in independent states.

Pozdrav!

I think you're underestimating the significance of Yugoslavia in its heyday (~1960-1980).

It was a major political power not just in the region, but globally. Tito led and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, and effectively maintained sovereignty during the peak of the Cold War. It had a unique liberal flavor of socialism, where people enjoyed high standards of living, intellectual and cultural freedoms, freedom of movement (the Yugoslav passport was accepted globally), housing as a social right, decent wages, universal healthcare, etc. People were generally very happy. This is a big reason why "Yugonostalgia" still persists today.

Yes, the regime could be considered a dictatorship, with a strong police presence, and there are documented human rights violations, but it was far from an oppressive country.

Slovenia and Croatia were indeed wealthier than other regions, but the fiscal burden you mention is part of the socialist system that ensures a respectable standard of living for everyone. This doesn't work if there's a large wealth disparity between regions.

Yugoslavia was an interesting country with a unique political and social model which was not perfect, but IMO had less faults than the systems we have today. I think it's shortsighted to say that it would have the relevance of Bulgaria and Romania today.

Great, so how do you know this stuff works? Did you evaluate it against other approaches? How do you know it's actually reliable?

The Vercel team had some interesting findings[1]:

> In 56% of eval cases, the skill was never invoked. The agent had access to the documentation but didn't use it.

Others had different findings for commonly accepted practices[2], some you may have adopted from reading documentation, which surely didn't come from influencers.

And yet others swear by magical Markdown documents[3].

So... who is the ultimate authority on what actually works, and who is just cargo culting the trendy practice of the week? And how is any of this different from what was being done a few years ago?

[1]: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988

[3]: https://soul.md/

> Why isn't it "worth discussing"?

Because it's obviously not true. The second sentence follows the first.

> There are many, many folks living their lives as fully as they can right now who are convinced these things are alive.

And those people are living in a delusion, whether it's self-imposed, or the result of false advertising. The way you get them out of that is by rationalizing and explaining the technology in terms they can understand, not by mistifying it and bringing up existential topics.

> Are you aware of the concept of philosophical zombies?

I wasn't, no.

> Some of the top minds on the planet are telling us they can't even determine if you or me are conscious and sentient, let alone if a machine is.

Look, we can philosophize about the nature of existence until we're blue in the face. People have been pondering about similar questions since the dawn of humanity. FWIW I don't believe in "top minds" as having authority to tell us anything. What we know for certain is how technology works, since we built it. And we damn well know that this technology has absolutely zero understanding about anything. Go ahead, ask it how it works. It will tell you that it doesn't understand a single word it's generating, but it sure can string together patterns that make it look like it does. And you think there's some deeper meaning here we should discuss seriously? Please.

Like I said, I think these are interesting thought experiments, and something we should keep thinking about. But it should be clear to anyone, especially technically minded people, that we're nowhere near being able to create artificial intelligence. What we have now are a bunch of grifters and snake oil salesmen selling us a neat statistical trick and telling us it's "AI". This should be criminally prosecuted, if you ask me.

Modern "skills" and Markdown formats of the day are no different than "save the kittens". All of these practices are promoted by influencers and adopted based on wishful thinking and anecdata.

> You only hurt yourself with that attitude.

Funny, others seem more hurt by it.

> AI might take your job.

I'm not the one "grieving the loss of his career". :)

Ah, that's great, sounds like the ideal working environment.

So, which company is it again?

Great story, thanks for sharing. RIP John.

I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.

Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.

There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.

Interesting project, but...

> BUILT ON OPEN STANDARDS. PRIVATE WHEN NEEDED.

> Running a private group chat? As soon as the AT protocol supports private data, we'll work on implementing it and giving you the option to create private communities.

Not exactly "private when needed" then, is it? It's disingenuous to even mention this in the marketing copy.

You lost me there. :)

The question of whether the current generation of "AI" can think, whether it is conscious, let alone whether it can suffer(!), is not even worth discussing. It should be obvious to anyone who understands how these tools work that they don't in fact "think", for even the most liberal definition of that term. They're statistical models that can generate useful patterns when fed with vast amounts of high quality data. That's it. The fact we interpret their output as though it is coming from a sentient being is simply due to our inability to comprehend patterns in the data at such scales. It's the best mimicry of intelligence we've ever invented, for better or worse, but it's far from how intelligence actually works, even if we struggle to define it accurately. Which doesn't mean that this technology can't be useful—far from it—but it's ludicrous to ascribe any human-like qualities to it.

So I 100% side with Dijkstra on that point.

What I'm criticizing is his apparent dismissal and refusal to even consider it a worthy philosophical exercise. This is why I think that the comparison to submarines and swimming is reductionist, and ultimately not productive. I would argue that we do need to keep thinking about whether machines can think, as that drives progress, and is a fundamentally interesting topic. It would be great if the progress wouldn't be fueled by greed, self-interest, and manipulation, or at the very least balanced by rationality, healthy skepticism, and safety measures, but I suppose this is just inescapable human nature.

On one hand: sure.

On the other, it's very different when companies explicitly design their products to be as addictive as possible.

We've been through this with Big Tobacco already. Nicotine and other tobacco substances are addictive on their own, but tobacco companies were prosecuted for deliberately making cigarettes as addictive as possible, besides also marketing to children. The parallels with Big Tech and social media are undeniable.

I've come across that quote several times, and reach the same conclusion as you.

While I share Dijkstra's sentiment that "thinking machines" is largely a marketing term we've been chasing for decades, and this new cycle is no different, it's still worth discussing and... thinking about. The implications of a machine that can approximate or mimic human thinking are far beyond the implications of a machine that can approximate or mimic swimming. It's frankly disappointing that such a prominent computer scientist and philosopher would be so dismissive and uninterested in this fundamental CS topic.

Also, it's worth contextualizing that quote. It's from a panel discussion in 1983, which was between the two major AI "winters", and during the Expert Systems hype cycle. Dijkstra was clearly frustrated by the false advertising, to which I can certainly relate today, and yet he couldn't have predicted that a few decades later we would have computers that mimic human thinking much more closely and are thus far more capable than Expert Systems ever were. There are still numerous problems to resolve, w.r.t. reliability, brittleness, explainability, etc., but the capability itself has vastly improved. So while we can still criticize modern "AI" companies for false advertising and anthropomorphizing their products just like in the 1980s hype cycle, the technology has clearly improved, which arguably wouldn't have happened if we didn't consider the question of whether machines can "think".

"AGI" is a marketing term, and benchmarks like this only serve to promote relative performance improvements of "AI" tools. It doesn't mean that performance in common tasks actually improves, let alone that achieving 100% in this benchmark means that we've reached "AGI".

So there is a business application, but no practical or philosophical one.

> You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation.

"Just verify" is glossing over a lot of difficult work, though. It doesn't just involve checking whether the program compiles and does what you wanted—that's the easy part. You should also verify that the program is secure, robust, reasonably performant, efficient, etc. Even if you think about these things, and ask the tool to do this for you, generate tests, etc., you will have the same verification problem in that case as well. The documentation could also be misleading, and so on. At each step of this process there will likely always be something you missed, which considering you're not experienced in X, Y, or Z, you have no ability to properly judge.

You can ignore all of this, of course, which majority of people do, but then don't be surprised when it fails in unexpected ways.

And verification is actually relatively simple for software. In many other fields and industries verification is very impractical and resource intensive. It doesn't take a genius to deduce the consequences of all of this. Hence, the net effect of these tools is arguably not positive.

Banning it is tackling the problem at the wrong end. Social media, and Big Tech in general, should be heavily regulated, and certain behavior strongly fined, including criminal prosecution and prison sentences for repeat offenders.

But we all know this is not happening because governments profit greatly and have much to gain from their symbiotic relationships with tech companies. So it's easier to hassle tax payers, or in this case children to gain political points.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority.

Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share.

In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify.

So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.

> "Software authors should have basic decency and respect for the users of their software." Why? Not at all.

Because that's the core reason why we build software in the first place. We solve problems for people. Software doesn't exist in a void. There's an inherent relationship created between software authors and its users. This exists for any good software, at least. If you think software accomplishes its purpose by just being published, regardless of its license, you've failed at the most fundamental principle of software development.

> you have any right to command its author is the very definition of being an asshole.

Hah. I'm not "commanding" anyone anything. I'm simply calling out asshole behavior. The fact is that software from authors who behave like this rarely amounts to anything. It either dies in obscurity, or is picked up by someone who does care about their users.

> "I'm demanding that people work for free for my benefit! Unbelievable." Yes, that's unbelievable.

Clearly sarcasm goes over your head, since I'm mimicking what you and others think I'm saying. But feel free to continue to think I'm coming from a place of moral superiority and privilege.