jadar

With the amount of talk about "inventing god", I'm surprised too.

Thanks!

Which economic system are you critiquing? I would tend to agree, since I think wealth taxes amount to a breaking of the 8th and 10th commandments. But I also think some would argue that the consumerism (envy) that often drives capitalism is a form of covetousness. I think the counter argument is that capitalism does not require consumerism, and that consumerism (envy) can appear in any economic system.

> [C]ritics estimate the lost revenue would have to be made up by roughly doubling the state sales tax

It is possible to just ... stop spending ...

I imagine this is worst at "AI native" companies that started and never had a basis of understanding in their code bases. I suspect that over time, any basis we had will erode more and more. I already feel that in my code base. I feel like the only way to actually fix that is either accept that you will never have full understanding anymore, and hope the models will get good enough to keep the lights on, or to use models to get understanding and then make or suggest changes that are informed from that understanding. I don't know how to do that yet, though.

I can’t read this. I tend to still think that things are human written, but it feels like everything is too long these days. I find myself skimming everything. It’s the lemon problem but for literature.

I don't think that's quite the problem the OP is pointing out. A corollary of "meat proxy" is "cognitive surrender." [1] In both cases, blindly pasting AI output and being an "Enter key presser", you have surrendered your cognition. In the latter case, you're in the loop but there's not a lot of reason for you to be.

Your underlying supposition is right, though. If you are truly thinking and in the loop, you are by definition not a meat proxy. I think those are the people who are successful with AI coding tools, but it takes discipline and it's still hard to find the joy and reward when you're not the one solving the problems.

[1] https://swiftrocks.com/using-ai-without-losing-critical-thin...

I think this is the dissonance that has been making me feel insecure / depressed around the state of AI coding. On the one hand I am way more productive. But on the other hand it is almost requiring more of my brain than before, because I am having to determine what is good output and what is slop. But that's not the part of my brain that I particularly like engaging — I like understanding something deeply. But in this case, that is just not possible. I like to think that as the human-in-the-loop, I am supplying the requisite _taste_ to the design and overall structure of the program. But at what point does my taste get taken over by the LLM as models improve?

Another problem is that when something breaks then I am very limited in my ability to reason through the breakage. It's necessary to go back to the LLM and ask it why it broke. At which point, I'm able to follow the reasoning — but not in any durable manner where I'll be able to remember it. To me, it's sort of like the difference between memorizing a passage and having a ready reference at hand at all time. We had this same problem with information before — now it's come for our reasoning.

Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.

First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.

I haven't pushed an update since June, but this has not been my recent experience...

Guessing this is poking fun of Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672510

I forsook RN years ago. I am not a huge fan of the JavaScript ecosystem in the first place, and the UX of RN apps is not the best. Instead, I adopted Kotlin Multiplatform (shortly after their memory management overhaul). I haven't been disappointed. As coding agents have come along, they are really good at writing both Swift and Kotlin, and I get to write all the business logic once. UI can either be shared with CMP, which is quite good, or platform-specific.

This is so good at replicating the experience of frustration, then relief when it finally does what you asked it to do in the first place!

I did this as well. I found that it was really inefficient because if I was doing anything with a significant amount of text, it has to shuttle all of that through the model to the MCP invocation. It was way better to work with temporary files and pipe them around CLI tools once you’re happy with the contents. E.g. developing a user story and creating the Jira issue.

This seems like a very reasonable and thoughtful response. You have plenty of password manager options if it bothers you.

The author says it's about 700k LoC that he's worked on for 20 years.[1] I don't know how many tokens that arrives at, but that seems non-trivial.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/

This. It’s easy to let happen too. If you’re on a machine that’s not behind NAT then it’s really easy to pwn yourself.

Couldn’t you say that about any Arch spinoff? Seems to be the no true scotsman fallacy.

It depends on what distinction you’re making…

If you are asking concerning security, the answer is that it’s an insecure default that should have protected an unwitting user.

If you are asking concerning consistency with real world situations, then there is no difference and it feels like the fit is over a somewhat controversial figure (DHH) and how he created the distro’s recent release without reading any of the code himself. The counter is that no one installing a distro actually understands how their distro is configured, and trusts someone else’s judgement. Here that judgment was farmed out to AI, and while that is controversial, the uncomfortable truth is that this is how an awful lot of real people are told to configure their Docker installations.

IMO Docker running as a root daemon is a bad idea in the first place and I’d much rather use Podman’s rootless containers.

Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.

I get it the sentiment behind the post…but it has some “let them eat cake” vibes though.

That works for a couple turns but the model reverts after just a couple turns. Not to mention after compaction.

Cue the N.I.C.E comparisons.

I appreciate that the OP puts his finger on the problem. I think he's right. I wish there was more optimism or ideas about how to solve it, though. How do I fight against it as an engineer? Or, how do I become a "good" engineer? It feels like sometimes the only solution people have is effectively "don't use it."

Yet we have the option to decide not to participate. That is an option.

You're right. But I used it specifically because of the open letter calling for open models — or at least for not banning them — which went around recently and represented a very large number of tech and AI companies. Anthropic seemed the only exception.

Isn't this the opposite of what everyone is saying should happen? That is, lead with open models -- or at least "openness" and don't leave the capabilities in the hands of an elite few? Did they learn nothing from the Hugging Face incident, where HF wasn't even able to use the models to defend itself from OAI's attack?

That's some form of success.

I stopped at "f*ck*ss". Irreverent drivel is unserious and a waste of time.