munksbeer

I think you're arguing against something that is made up by doomers. They truly believe (evidence by the comments below yours) that the billionaire class are all a of one mind and want to eradicate other humans, live in cloud cities, and have robots cater to their every need.

I don't even really know how to start refuting this. It seems to absurd to even start.

One thing to look for in the EU is free movement of people. Young people can and do migrate to regions that pay them more. It would be interesting to look at Spanish youth migration to see if the younger workers (i.e. those more likely to have children) have moved elsewhere. That would create a further dent on the stats.

I have a good experience too.

I do the same as you. I actively want to succeed with it, and therefore put time into making it work, and I have a good experience. As do the other 80+ developers at my company (it is a fintech). Pretty much every commit is written by claude currently, but I have to steer it constantly, and keep tweaking my setup.

I think the difference is probably that some people just don't really like the idea, therefore put in the minimum of effort, see that results are sub-optimal (which they definitely can be), and declare it useless.

I do laugh at mathematician's (assuming you are one) explanations to laypeople.

There is this in the post:

> The final dataset contained a few hundred thousand MIDI files, representing roughly 300 million note events.

For what it is worth, I agree with you. So there is at least one other person out there who would like statements to remain factual. When the entire topic is already so emotionally charged, it seems even more important to attempt to just stick to being factual.

Yes, absolutely comfortable. Because the real world seems very different to this online world to me. The sheer volume of anti-AI sentiment here and on reddit are not even closely matched by my real life experience.

All the parents in the group of people I socialise with from my children's school dabble with AI. They're not techies, but they're enjoying it. And they're curious about how I use it at work. Some of them (law) have started to use it more aggressively in their own work.

At my actual job, there is a reasonable amount of frustration at the verbosity of ai comments and people just copy pasting ai text in response to human questions. And I'm with them. But everyone, as far as I can tell, genuinely, has adapted to coding agents and use them for coding 99% now. I have been in my industry for a long time, and have a lot of connections around London (and across continents) and they report similar.

In the real world, people are just getting on with things.

The frankly surreal amount of vicious negativity about AI here is just not something I experience whatsoever in real life.

So yes, I'm very comfortable talking about it, and even the phrase "admit" is leading, implying by default I should be ashamed.

That's not the point of my response. It is tiresome, and detracts from meaningful discourse to have the same tired anti-capitalism meme tacked onto everything. It didn't even make sense in the post I was responding to - which is entirely my point.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm a new contributor, long time reader on hn. I also have an old reddit account. I have always thought hn as higher quality than reddit, but lately I'm becoming a victim of my own irritation. I can't help but click and read comments that grate me and I'm finding more an more here.

I don't want to make this into the very thing I'm trying to avoid, so my direct question is, if my interest is in building quality software with AI (in the current form, that is LLMs), where should I go to interact with like minded, friendly people? I've literally avoided reddit like the plague for the last couple of years, but perhaps I should return to certain subs there?

I'd just like to avoid a certain style of comment, remove the noise so to speak, and just trade helpful advice and opinions from people with similar goals. I can't do that here on hn, because it isn't that sort of forum. 99.9% of ask hn posts are going to get no traction.

The person you're responding to didn't say they loved software though. They said they saw it as a tool to get interesting stuff done.

I was nodding to your post for a short period, then you just had to throw in the usual anti-capitalism zeitgeist rant.

Reframe your context, pretend you're in a communist society, and you could be making the exact same point about speaking up against the grain being bad for you. It feels as though people are brainwashed by anti-capitalism sentiment at the moment, unable to see outside of that context.

I thought the point of this article was they are benefiting from reduced grid costs?

> I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope

It's not weird, because it's an anecdote, not an accepted fact.

Personally I've not been too happy with Opus 5, but I've had similar experiences with other models previously, feeling like they didn't quite fit with my working style.

So nothing indicates we've hit a peak.

I'm considering a home project done in Rust. I've not even touched Rust before, I'm a Java dev. It'll be something reasonably complicated, using a bit of unsafe etc. Do you know how Luna does writing Rust code?

"Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone."

> A stock exchange is nothing more than a marketplace. Anyone can start their own (the challenge being, getting a bunch of companies to want to list their stock with you).

Not really true. I can't just start a stock exchange. I need to comply with a bazillion regulations. Then I need a license, which I won't get.

As much as the crypto space is disliked, it also showed what happens when regulation isn't stopping you. Exchanges would pop up and anyone could create one. You didn't have to be already wealthy, a spin off from a hedge fund, a connected family, a connected person. You could just do it, and if it was good enough, people would trade on your venue.

Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone. The little person can't do that any longer, it is now reserved for the elites again.

It seems to have become "the thing" to do. I can't figure out if it is bad as it feels. Why would I run `curl | bash` on something that could be doing literally anything. It feels crazy that all the lessons we've learned just get thrown away.

On the other hand, just because I run `brew install someapp`, it somehow feels safer, but why? That app could be doing anything too.

Brilliant :)

> And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this.

I just wrote a comment saying something along these same lines (though talking about how the state functions). I absolutely agree with your comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283826

Exactly. Exasperating how many people are not only oblivious to this, they seem to actively buy in to the status where the government are our masters. They're not, they are literally our employees. We elect them to do what we want.

But the state feels so far removed from this in practice now. I'm probably just more aware of it as I get older, but all the recent changes just show how little power people actually have. In theory, we could elect a government who undoes all the current institutionalised state power over people, and move to a more representative system, but in practice it is extremely difficult to impossible.

I wouldn't mind this so much if the state wasn't so utterly useless at actually wielding this power. I look at a place like Singapore, and I see how most people not actually living in Singapore speak down about the supposed conditions Singaporeans must accept. And yet, as every state approaches this level of authoritarian, one thing you can say, at Singapore is actually good at being authoritarian. Stuff works. The plan is long, and works.

This is exactly it. I love my children more than anything, I would die for them. I do regret having children though, *at the moment*. I didn't realise just how very hard it would be. My eldest is autistic though, so for seven years we've doubted ourselves, struggling because of his extreme emotions and meltdowns. And then feeling judged by the entire world because I don't feel as the world prescribes.

Until you've lived that life, it is best not to judge. Just like I couldn't judge how I would personally react to being a parent until I became one.

Btw, my regret fluctuates, and there are periods where I would not change things at all. I hope, with time, those periods grow longer until they're the only periods.

In university in 1995/96 I remember having to put my bank card details into a website to pay for something. I hated the idea that some third party would probably be storing these details and could in theory abuse them or leak them.

I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.

> Cleaning is easy to optimize

Your entire argument rests on this statement, yet I don't see any further talk about it or anything to back it up. Perhaps sleep is the very best way to optimise cleaning, outweighing the disadvantages?

Thank you for writing that. It's a good example.

I think 99.999% of all coding/engineering is not like this example though.

> Scientific programming, hardware interfacing, embedded, demoscene, game engines, HFT or HPC calls for much different breed of code, and generally way harder to formulate in code w.r.t. these enterprise projects.

I don't mean to undersell this type of programming. I don't work in the true HFT space, which now means something very different from 20 years ago. These days it is FPGA, or maybe more, not sure.

But for standard low latency (think microsecond hotpath, rather than nanos) the techniques are well known and easily codified with example code and AGENTS.md rules.

You can achieve very good results this way, and then further refine with human intervention and measuring. Measuring and iterating is often the hard part.

I'd really love someone to describe in detail the type of programming they are doing that can't be codified such that another human can learn it, follow the rules and achieve the needed results. I just don't see any magic in our craft, it is all just following rules.

> Do you have a sense of what shapes this? There are so many people in that orbit whose writing I find both exhausting and suspect.

I'm not remotely from that scene, and I only really discovered it was a "scene" a few years ago, having managed to live out quite a nice life, even in tech circles here in London, without knowing this type of thing existed.

So, my take might be extremely wrong, but also, extremely simple:

They are just humans being human. Human's love an in-group. It starts at the play ground in school. Making in-group talk, making fun of out-group people. In that scene, in-group and out-group swap daily. Anyway, this just continues on throughout life, no-one is really immune. People see the LessWrong crowd ("scene") and are seduced by it, and signal that they are in that group by adopting the same language. This just perpetuates.

I am trying to not sound offensive here, but given the question you're asking, I don't think we're going to join up here. I think one of us is missing something fairly fundamental, and my hunch is it is you.

The agent will already have seen enough super optimised code and read enough material about it. It will read the entire repo you're in, and understand how the code should be structured and written to work efficiently. And anything it doesn't get at first, you write about in the AGENTS.md file and tell it.

Then it works. If you can teach a human to write specialised 3d rendering code, you can distill the same teachings to an agent in text form, and it'll work.

I am supremely confident of this, and I bet that neither you nor the author of the article has bothered to try properly.

I'm not a mathematician, so I may be talking nonsense. Would it not be equally possible that AI solutions to these problems have, or start revealing new maths, or new techniques. I doubt that is the case for these type of problems, but it may well be in the future. And maybe these techniques are seen by the right people, who have the correct intuition of how they may be a bridge in other problems.

Or another angle. Given that, from my amateur understanding, a lot of these problems are proof by counter-example, could you not argue that at least AI eliminates low hanging fruit and more important problems can gain focus.

Of course, I could equally argue that the low hanging fruit is needed to train up mathematicians.

So yeah, in the end, I don't know. But am pretty certain that AI is not going to be limited by these sort of proofs for much longer.

There is no magic to coding, any sort of coding. Humans learn how to do it by learning the rules. A coding agent can learn the rules, easily.

> That may be true for bloom filters or what have you. But the author states the obvious: all recent games are closed-source. So any algorithms or techniques for real-time 3D that an LLM was trained on are going to be a long way behind the state of the art.

Neither you, nor the author of the article has to use LLMs for coding. But if you want to, there are some practices you should follow to get best results, and that includes setting up your environment to give the agent the best chance for success. If you have various rules that are non-obvious, you add them to your AGENTS.md file (as we have at my corp and in my little niche). The agent will then follow those rules, and learn from the surrounding code.

I'll just be blunt here - I don't believe the author would have done anything more than the bare minimum to test his pre-existing bias that coding agents are bad. I don't believe he would have put the effort into getting it writing good quality code to suit the project he was working in.

We write high performance, low latency java for trading systems. Our codebase is highly structured around this and the READMEs and AGENTs file contain the information for how to successfully write code like this, originally for human consumption, and now agents.

And it works. So, I don't trust the article.