mrsilencedogood

"This is the best argument on the page imo, and even that is highly debated. I agree with "AI is performing copyright infringement" and see constant "AI ignores my robots.txt". I also grew up being told that ANYTHING on the internet was for the public, and copyright never stopped me from saving images or pirating movies."

I think the main problem for me is that these companies benefit from copyright - by beating anyone they can reach with the DMCA stick - and are now also showing they don't actually care about it at all and when they do it, it's ok.

Go ahead, AI companies. End copyright law. Do it. Start lobbying now.

(They won't, they'll just continue to eat their cake and have it too).

"intern or college-hire"

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around.

I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literally can't find it. I suspect "my", "kafka", and "topic" all get constructed somewhere to produce that topic name because it doesn't show up in the code as a literal. I also think there's so much indirection between the producer setup and where the "event" actually first gets emitted that MyMessage might not look very much like the actual origination point. Where's the initial origin point?"

Previously, that was "ctrl-shift-F my.kafka.topic" and then ask a staff engineer and hope to God they know off-hand, and if they don't, go read the entire codebase/framework for 16 hours straight until you figure it out.

Now, LLMs have a decent shot at figuring it out.

I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

But anyone expecting anything like Gen AI (being able to replace a real software engineer, or quality customer support rep, etc) is going to be disappointed.

I also think AI will generally eviscerate the bottoms of industries (expect generic gacha girl-collection games to get a lot of AI art) but also leave people valuing the tops of industries a lot more (lovingly crafted indie games, etc). So now this compute-expensive AI is targeting the already low-margin bottoms of industries. Probably not what VCs want. They want to replace software engineers, not make a slop gacha game cost 1/10th of its already low cost.

"If you commit to institutional neutrality, the result is a one-way ratchet"

Can you explain why this is the result? And why is it allegedly democrats that the ratchet pushed towards?

There are well-known differences in political alignment both among more-educated workers (the federal government probably does not employ many people without at least a college degree of some sort?) and being employed in a public-services government job (e.g. what kinds of workers are more likely to want to work for the EPA? People who want to protect the environment or people who want to exploit it more? Remember, one party tried to sell off a large number of public forests and lands and is gutting the national parks).

These seem like they would explain the majority of the effect you mention without any mention of some kind of ratchet mechanism.

We literally have collectively (to the value that US democracy approximates collectively) decided to abridge those rights within a certain distance of a border. I want people to understand what they are getting themselves into for the sake of their political protest. I would argue it is better to try to approach this reform differently than simply ending up in a border jail with your holiday ruined.

People who try to enforce this stuff via license fundamentally misunderstand the nature of copyright law.

Do you plan to sue people to enforce your license? Do you think people who are committing war crimes / crimes against humanity are going to not violate your license alongside all their other crimes?

The only thing this license accomplishes is ensuring no even semi-serious business will touch this with a 10' pole because it's a completely bespoke license with no prior understanding by their legal counsel. But you can already basically do that via the AGPL, except that some companies who are well-meaning may actually still use it.

Yeah, people love to LARP being Snowden but never actually have anything even theoretically worth being sent to border-jail over protecting.

And, if you do, and you're really asking hacker news for opsec advice, I would suggest you abandon your career as a super-spy or whatever you're doing, because you're doing it very wrong.

I suspect this is because open-core companies are often just 1 rugpull away from being not open at all. Open-core just means if I have some small bug, I might PR to fix it if it's not too hard for me. I am absolutely not doing free work for that company.

Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.

No, American big business talking heads are supposed to be direct. American workers are supposed to be demure, grateful to have health insurance, and slot perfectly into the cog slot they've been assigned. Someone who openly criticizes their former employer is showing they have opinions and will resist being mistreated. I mean, showing they're not a team player.

Companies would much rather miss out on growth than have employees who have any kind of leverage over them.

Well of course it's more complicated. But these 2 broad strokes do resonate with me as a meaningful bucketing. There are some people I see DMs from and go "ooh" and some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".

TBC, I agree with you. I was pointing out how important even small variations in grading can be.

"Sr. Director and given an opportunity to prove yourself"

from OP: "new team is known to be under-performing"

Uhh it sounds to me like the senior staff that the guy displaced OP with was the go-to guy and that OP has been given a shit sandwich. If OP wasn't specifically briefed by the sr director and TOLD "You're one of my go-to guys. I know this is a shit sandwich. Please help me fix it.", then this is basically constructive dismissal and they want you to just disappear.

On top of that, IME, go-to guys don't get sent to go fix stuff unless it's a clean sweep of the old "bad" team. They wouldn't send you in with known-low-performers, it's setting you up to fail.

Edit: Reading over other comments, I'm just in disbelief at how universally people are saying this is an opportunity. No, they cut off OP's support system, pushed them out of their top-spot, and off over to some team that leadership views as the trash pile. There's a difference between "this team is struggling and I'm bringing in support" and "damn, where do i put this guy. i'll just put them over here, with the rest of the fire."

Difference in grade basically DETERMINES the value. Even small steps down from perfect greatly diminish a card's value. Basically IGN review scale levels of drop-off.

Detective Conan, a very long-running anime, has been hilarious to watch this evolution in as well.

Phones go from landlines, to cordless, to flip phones, to smartphones

And at some point they get to stop re-explaining what a computer is/does every time they use one in a case.

I really wish Java had been like 5 years ahead on its modernizing push. That 10 year gap between 5 and 8 where the language __barely__ changed, while competitor languages were blasting, were just killer. Some might argue the reason the 8+ renaissance has been so successful is because it let other languages beta test, and Java took the winning ideas. Maybe so. But it gave Golang time to get big, which I like a lot less than Java. Especially when people try to use it as anything but a scripting language for grpc and a runtime for protobuf.

But I think with virtual threads, esp when they work with synchronized right, will finally put Java back on top of Go. People complain about Java, but imo Java's problems are mostly accidental and acknowledged, and they do often get improved or fixed. Whereas Go seems to mostly be happy with how it is exactly right now, and are loathe to improve the many pain points. So much gocode is needlessly obtuse, and it's not like the obtuseness actually accomplishes their goal. I've still seen just god-awful Gocode, with layers and layers of interfaces in between you and getting anything done. Very java-esque, despite their OOP resistance being specifically targeting not falling prey to Java's propensity for towering class hierarchies.

Imo, it's mostly because our brains are still hunter-gatherer brains. While things like language acquisition and culture-instilling do fundamentally change us, our base hardware is still pre-currency pre-agriculture (pre-pretty-much-everything) hunter-gatherer. In Sapiens, it's noted that if a homo sapiens from 100k years ago ended up on an autopsy table in the modern day, you would never know anything was amiss anatomically. You might notice the teeth are unusually straight and free of decay (pre-grain diet, with huge amounts of chewing strengthening the jaw and allowing teeth to properly align), well-trained body with low body fat, and similarly free of many of the scourges of our modern diet and lifestyles). But that's it.

So, people suddenly get taken out of "the grind" which was their only approximation of the drive-reward cycle that their brain depends on. So what now? Unfortunately, they've been freed to confront man's ultimate foe: philosophy. And lots of people aren't cut out or ready for that. (One could even say most philosophers aren't, given how much many of them suffered).

in capitalism, prices are literally how rationing happens. the theory is that it distributes the resources to those who can make them most productive. here, theoretically the water will be used more productively by chipmakers than by farmers, so the chipmakers will be able to out-bid the farmers and the water will be allocated to them. this is the "invisible hand" of the free market.

I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...

Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo

Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.

I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.

And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).

So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...

I've used rails for years, and have used old versions of django at one company, and used python extensively for non-web purposes.

I think my take is that there's no middle-ground between Rails and some of the newer Java-based frameworks.

Either I'm doing a side project or startup, and I need to go as FAST as possible, type systems and similar be damned, or I'm OK with not going as fast as possible and we're going to go slower but deliver something very solid.

Python/django still had me spending a bunch of time on stuff that rails will either generate, scaffold, or hide from you completely. While still not being nearly as safe or performant as anything in the Java world. Note I'm mostly thinking about more modern frameworks like Javalin, not necessarily Spring's entire ecosystem/way-of-life.

"Nobody wants to take their kids to an “edgy food and entertainment place”,"

This is 100% wrong though, my 5 year old is in kindergarten and they LOVED FNAF. Like, seriously a lot.

I've done my fair share of Chuck E Cheese birthday parties - the place near me already doesn't have animatronics etc and is virtually unrecognizable by people who knew it in the 90s. It's literally just a single big room with 5 very long tables to host 3-5 birthday parties concurrently, taking up about 40% of the space. Then there's a smallish trampoline area (which requires paying an additional $10 or $15 or somesuch amount) comprising 10% or so, then the other 50% is just arcade machines laid out in a grid that take a card scan instead of coins, and pay out non-tangible credits instead of physical tickets.

So I assume that's the future here - take a low-rent semi-large space off a side-street of a main road, fill it with low-operating-cost stuff, and let it collect revenue. Pretty sensible business, and also utterly soulless and has absolutely no cultural or sticking power.

I really cannot believe FNAF hasn't done some kind of play here - you could absolutely charge 2-4x the price of Chuck E Cheese's parties for a FNAF-themed "what-a-6-year-old-calls-scary" birthday party / event space and no kid would ever go to Chuck E Cheese ever again.

I'm guessing it's because Chuck E Cheese is busy being mediocre and barely existing, and why do physical stuff when you can make millions off selling plushies and funkos.

So I really think this is just a case of capitalism being too lazy and profit-motivated to bother with providing something people - kids - would definitely want.

Suppose you're living paycheck to paycheck and your car breaks down.

Lose my job - yep

Lose the ability to get a new job - no car

Burn all my savings and assets - you couldn't pay to fix your car, so you have no savings or liquid assets

Burn all my familial relationships - hope you didn't turn to (or increase preexisting) drug use due to ^

Burn all my friendships - ^

Get rejected by all social welfare programs - easy, be male and addicted to drugs

There you have it

I'm also suspect for similar reasons, but this at least seems consistent with lots of other stuff we're finding out about the random things humanity has been imbibing for millennia (coffee, tea, cacao, etc). Anything that's anti-inflammatory seems to help fix a lot of stuff, as long as whatever you do to get that anti-inflammatory effect doesn't have too many downsides.

For instance, I wonder if we'll eventually find an NSAID that isn't hard on the liver, and low doses end up in things like vitamins. (My understanding is that that's the main reason you can't just constantly take small doses of advil - the marginal positive effects of reduced inflammation are outweighed by your kidneys and liver being made to constantly work harder).

If they did that anyway, who would stop them? This seems like a great time to make an exception.

That's because it's a ccTLD, not because it's not dot-com though. The powers that be could very well decide to just promote it to be a gTLD if they wanted to not destroy stuff for no reason. Actual gTLDs aren't susceptible to the same kinds of issues.

There are a few options, though. The fact that .io got so popular shows that we are not forever chained to .com. It's just that a lot of the nuTLD options are honestly hilariously bad, most of them are just lame. My personal top picks are ".online" and ".software" with mention to ".network" but they're all WAY too long. I actually use ".cafe" for my personal stuff because it's short and cute. Obviously can't use that for your SV rocketship company though.

Would it have been so hard to sit down and pick a couple short ones - yknow, ones people might actually use?

>Once it escaped Jupiter its trajectory is just a straight line.

I honestly don't know that we understand gravity well enough to keep this close of track of this small of an object for so long. Plus all the effects of the "negligible" gravities of nearby objects have to add up over time, and we can only include so many bodies in our N-bodies simulation, right?

Even if you magically had your own DSN, would anyone but NASA even know exactly where they are with enough precision to communicate with them? In a way, that's now your layer 1 authentication key. The coordinates of where to "point" your DSN.

It's always amazed me how much leeway and clemency leadership gets. I worked at a company that was always fairly intentional about their performance review process being a meat grinder, and they also did something that didn't look nearly dissimilar enough to good ole microsoft forced curve / stack ranking.

So if you were an IC and were on a project that failed (or even just didn't succeed enough), God help you. Many folks just quit when they saw a project going sideways, or tried to escape/transfer. Alternatively, people would report green statuses and hope someone else fell over first so they wouldn't be the root-cause.

Obviously this caused many problems. It was very hard to execute projects with lots of people or teams, and/or that took a long (>3mo) time. It came to a head when finally a major initiative missed another deadline "just barely" and it finally tripped circuit breakers and someone went in and did a full Inquisition. Yeah no the project was f'd and they basically just gave up ("pivoted") to an adjacent goal. Their official diagnosis/RCA was "people were too scared to report red, so everyone prettied up their status reports a bit, and that was compounded by each roll-up status report also prettying up the status.

Literally no leadership changes happened as a result of this. Then I got laid off. (Unrelated, just the big layoffs of 22. I was not directly involved in this, I was in big data and this was all happening in the main product infra stuff).

So yeah. Your project fails? Bye. But your f'd up performance grinder culture causes literally hundreds of people to behave so out-of-alignment with the actual company goals? Nah man stick around for 2 more years and leave at your leisure over some other petty squabble.

This is my take too. At one of my old jobs, we were early (very early) to the Hadoop and then Spark games. Maybe too early, because by the time Spark 2 made it all easy, we had already written a lot of mapreduce-streaming and then some RDD-based code. Towards the end of my tenure there, I was experimenting with alternate datastores, and clickhouse was one I evaluated. It worked really, really well in my demos. But I couldn't get buy-in because management was a little wary of the russian side of it (which they have now distanced/divorced from, I think?) and also they didn't really have the appetite for such a large undertaking anymore. (The org was going through some things.) (So instead a different team blessed by the company owner basically DIYd a system to store .feather files on NVME SSDs... anyway).

If I were still there, I'd be pushing a lot harder to finally throw away the legacy system (which has lost so many people it's basically ossified, anyway) and just "rebase" it all onto clickhouse and pyspark sparksql. We would throw away so much shitty cruft, and a lot of the newer mapreduce and RDD code is pretty portable to the point that it could be plugged into RDD's pipe() method.

Anyway. My current job, we just stood up a new product that, from day 1, was ingesting billions of rows (event data) (~nothing for clickhouse, to be clear. but obviously way too much for pg). And it's just chugging along. Clickhouse is definitely in my toolbox right after postgres, as you state.