kentm

Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.

I don't think anyone is expecting to seriously "derail AI" just by preventing data centers from being built in their neighborhood. But they can at least inconvenience the people they see as the perpetrators. If you can't win the fight, and can't walk away, at least you can give your opponent a bloody lip. And who knows, maybe it gets steam and the people in congress who have been actively ignoring them have incentives to at least throw them a bone.

If there were serious macro consequences then maybe it would be an issue but from the point of view of the communities -- there aren't. Data centers don't bring a lot of permanent employment and tend to be given tax breaks. They are skeptical that data centers are the boon that these people claim they are -- and they are right to be so since people pushing these data centers have been wildly untrustworthy at best.

Saying "You can't stop it so you might as well get on board and hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI" is going to go over like a lead brick. There's no reason to trust that UBI will come if you give up any leverage you have, even if it is a minuscule amount of leverage.

I'm not sure why this is relevant:

> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.

Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.

Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.

The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.

> This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.

I don't see why you think that. Its something that:

1) These CEOs and people with power want

2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.

That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.

> if there is UBI?

At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."

Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?

This has an incorrect baked-in assumption that arguments should be equally weighed based on political leaning. But sometimes arguments are just wrong -- the right wing argument on climate change was that it was a hoax or not human-made for a long time. A properly truth-seeking AI would not present that argument as valid or supported.

Thats a double-edged sword in some scenarios. If you're trying to keep info private then feeding it into a shared agent basically means that you can't guarantee that privacy. I'd imagine the approach here would be to have separate agents for private data and then restrict Slack access, but I could imagine tons of accidents from managers that habitually @Claude without understanding the implications.

Yes. It’s very easy actually. People think it’s hard only because they’ve built revenue streams on unethical behavior.

> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.

Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).

I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.

I find it can often write correct code but not maintainable, performant, or reviewable code without additional human guidance. The "solution" frequently given is that humans don't need to maintain it anymore so its not actually a problem. But the agent can't be accountable for mistakes, so unless that changes or the risk of a defect is close to zero, one still has to put forth effort to keep the code maintainable.

To be fair, there are plenty of situations where throwaway code is perfectly fine and/or defect risks are low enough to make the trade-off worth it. I don't think a lot of developers are thinking about it in that context, though.

(No unit tests aren't enough)

It should be but often isn't. There's been a lot of threads on HN where the response to huge PRs wasn't "Don't do that, use AI when authoring better" but "The reviewers are actually the problem, they're missing the AI train". And I see this in industry too.

Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time.

The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.

The solution is that he spends more time scoping the size of the PR so that it’s reviewable and understands the code he’s submitting well enough to have discussions about it. And that he does so human to human so that they can come to mutual understanding.

> The person you're responding to never said those teams didn't have customers.

> It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work what what that person created.

Thank god, I really want to say that I appreciate that you got what I said. A simple upvote didn't feel like enough.

Employees are humans, not robots. Its inconvenient, but if you want a world-class team then you're going to have to deal with the fact that people derive satisfaction from different things, and you're not going to be able to motivate them by beating them into submission about what they "should care about." This may involve having to think creatively about how to manage your people instead of treating them as fungible work units.

I'm going to apologize in advance for being long-winded, but I feel there's a lot to unpack here.

> Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this.

Respectfully, this response here is a perfect example of you not getting it and assuming that I am the one that doesn't get it. You have not said anything that I have not already heard and understood before. The fact that people have different values does not mean they "don't get it." But saying something like "Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?" does imply that you don't understand other peoples' values.

The fact that you posted "Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well." indicates to me that you missed the point. Whether they are on those teams and whether they consider other engineers their customer is besides the point; they may not derive satisfaction from "delivering value" to those people regardless. That doesn't mean they don't care about their customers, which is the take away the median HN poster takes, but rather that they are not energized and motivated at the end of the day by delivering value to them.

> I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology,

Sure, everyone has. But the flip-side of this is a class of people who assume any tech improvement that doesn't directly move a metric is just an effort at resume-building. Just as often I've seen efforts and building a more robust system as unneeded resume building despite clear need (usually because the need is very hard to measure).

> and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.

I mean, this is incredibly dismissive and exactly the attitude I was talking about. No-one is saying that engineers should be allowed to just do whatever to have fun. Work is work. But ideally you find ways to organize your team so that everyone is motivated and energized by their work, and doing so requires that you understand that not everyone is motivated by the same thing. But in these discussions, the attitude comes across as "everyone should be motivated by delivering good customer experience and if they aren't we shouldn't care."

If there's no opportunity to give these sorts of people fulfilling work, then fair enough. It *is* work. But the attitude displayed here is that we shouldn't even try and understand their values and think about ways to productively deploy that.

As an aside about customers, internal and external customers are, in my experience, treated vastly differently. We care about experience for external customers, but internal customers is usually all about velocity and trade offs. The bar is substantially lower, and rough edges are almost always ignored. So I am skeptical at the idea that we can just frame internal users as customers and all the discrepancies go away.

It also misses the fact that other people on my team are also my customers, because they have to maintain the system! And I am also my own customer, because I also have to maintain it!

> Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?

Quite a few don't, no.

Different people derive enjoyment in different things and some of the best engineers do not find satisfaction in "delivering better customer experience" but in working with, and improving, cool technology. Its up to management to find areas of the business where they can deploy these people in a way that dove-tails with business success.

Its also the case that only working on projects that "deliver customer value", and having to justify every single endeavor through that lense, is how you end up in a local maxima in your tech stack, get mired in technical debt, and then get lapped by your competitors who have the foresight to work on foundational technology that enables future velocity.

To be frank, its endlessly frustrating that your median Hacker News poster doesn't get this, and instead prefer to brow-beat people about how they're caring about the wrong things.

> but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to.

This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.

I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.

I don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.

I very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI.

It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.

When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.

Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.

It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).

Do they persist at the same rates? Lower doesn't mean eliminated, so both of these can be true.

Sure, its reasonable to doubt Apple's claim here. Or even think that its accurate now but may change in the future. I'd probably phrase it as a possibility rather than treat it as fait accompli.

Apple claims its on-device, and if thats true then the phone company is not spying on users.

It looks like you can click through it, so you can still have your sexy time. Based on the description, it seems like its intended to prevent accidents, which seems ok to me.

We’ve also seen that you’re not safe on a green card either.

It really is amazing to me how many developers do not understand that governance is important. If I have a dependency and a maintainer of that dependency has a process I can’t trust, it’s perfectly valid to remove that dependency based on that lack of trust.

Not caring about governance is how we end up with repeated supply chain attacks.

To be honest, it could be one with XAi too. Im no fan of Musk and Grok but the deal with Anthropic pointed out by other contributors isn't nothing. And I don't think SpaceX losing money at this stage isn't quite the problem that people think it is -- as someone who as worked at companies losing money and then going on to make quite a bit. Revenue growth is there.

The issue is that none of this is really worth $2T now. Yes, you might expect that SpaceX could launch Starship, build space-based datacenters, get a good foothold on the AI market, and grow Twitter. But you don't want to pay for future performance now, you want it to be discounted because you're taking on the risk that those things don't happen. $2T feels like expecting that story has already been actualized.

Growth companies not paying dividends is normal and they're likely many years out from when they'd need to seriously consider it. I don't think thats a big deal.

Its unfortunate that its being fast tracked and I'm really annoyed that NASDAQ is doing this. But I think that the impact should be relatively minimal, at least for the funds I hold. I really just find the transparent grift annoying.

Kardashev Type II is mentioned three times in the doc.

> We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun.

To be fair, he's not claiming here that SpaceX will accomplish this themselves, solo.