3,203 karma · joined July 18, 2021
I paid for 120hz but it can’t even hit 60 on the Home Screen :(
You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much code written on a side project).
It’s not a personal attack, it is a corrective to the trend of claiming 5,10,100x improvements to developer productivity, which rarely if ever holds up to scrutiny.
It is actually a very forgiving metric over a year because it is measuring only your own productivity relative to your personal trend. That includes vacation time and sick time, so the year smooths over all the variation.
Maybe he did do 5 weeks of work in 1 week, and I’ll accept that (a much more modest claim than the usual 10-100x claimed multiplier).
That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk.
If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not make you 10x more productive.
Meanwhile, the people claiming 10x productivity are taken at face value by people who don’t know any better, and we end up in an insane hype cycle that has obvious externalities. Things like management telling people that they must use AI or else. Things like developer tooling making zero progress on anything that isn’t an AI feature for the last two years. Things like RAM becoming unaffordable because Silicon Valley thinks they are a step away from inventing god. And I haven’t scratched the surface.
Except six months ago n-1 was n and the boosters were busy ruining their credibility saying that their garbage tier AI was world class and making them 10x more productive.
Today’s leading world-class agentic model is tomorrow’s horrible garbage tier slop generator that was patently never good enough to be taken seriously.
This has been going on for years, the pattern is obvious and undeniable.
Citation needed. Even with specific examples, “follow the patterns from the existing tests”, etc copilot (gpt 5) still insists on generating tests using the wrong methods (“describe” and “it” in a codebase that uses “suite” and “test”).
An intern, even an intern with a severe cognitive disability, would not be so bad at pattern following.
iPhone capitalizes Whole Foods for some reason.
I would have hoped that better access to nutrition information would have led to parents making better choices. Absolutely insane that they’re still choosing desserts for breakfast every day instead of high quality Whole Foods like eggs.
A typical pattern might be to have two eggs for breakfast (a whopping 120 calories), boiled eggs for lunch/snack (another 60-120 calories), and of course baking, but I will pretend that people don’t bake.
A more typical serving for an adult breakfast might be 3 eggs if not supplemented.
For mom and dad and the little one, you’re now at 35 (2+2+1+2)x5 eggs per week. When your cost goes from $6 (2x18 @3) to $16 (2x18@8) per week, you notice.
Obviously the political discourse around this was not healthy. But eggs suddenly becoming a cost you have to notice is a big deal, and a symbol for all of the other grocery prices that went up simultaneously.
If you’re a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real hardship when you’re raising a family on limited income.
The peak was actually closer to $8/dozen, my math has been conservative at every step, the situation is worse than I describe.
> it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
Which is it? Is Europe spending enough, or does American have influence because Europe is still cripplingly dependent on the US?
I wouldn’t argue that the US isn’t abusing that dependence at the moment.
What I would argue is that the US spent 20 years telling Europe to get its act together, and finally in the last 3 years that has started to change, but notably that was years after NATO was publicly declared braindead. So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.
There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.
There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.
Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.
https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a... from The Economist
Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
If Europeans were serious about their sovereignty they’d have made very different choices up until now.
It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
What am I missing?
Almost daily, I use commit messages and history as part of understanding why a decision was made, why a seemingly obvious alternative wasn’t chosen, etc. seeing the commit title on every line, and hovering to see the full message has become a core editor feature for me.
It’s kind of like testing, the more I do it, the more I want to do it because the value is so consistently reinforced.
There’s nothing like being able to track down exactly why a decision was made 6 years ago in a part of the code base you are struggling to understand written by someone who left before you joined the team.
I know financially it will be bad because number not go up and number need go up.
But do we actually depend on generative/agentic AI at all in meaningful ways? I’m pretty sure all LLMs could be Thanos snapped away and there would be near zero material impact. If the studies are at all reliable all the programmers will be more efficient. Maybe we’d be better off because there wouldn’t be so much AI slop.
It is very far from clear that there is any real value being extracted from this technology.
The government should let it burn.
Edit: I forgot about “country girls make do”. Maybe gen AI is a critical pillar of the economy after all.
I grew up in “nature” (aka a forest that emerged from not working farmland iykyk) and every ride to school, the grocery store, a friend’s house, or heaven forbid medical care or a restaurant visit involved 30-45 minutes of driving. That sucks.
I also had drastically degraded (increased) resting heart rate, (decreased) heart rate variability, and exercise intolerance - a normal easy run started to make it feel like my heart would explode and gave me palpitations. Off it, I can run a 5K and beyond no problem, if my knees cooperate.
Food noise came into the picture much worse than baseline after I stopped, although it did eventually come down and I’ve been able to start losing weight again after a few months off. Berberine seems to help, at the expense of giving me nausea like semaglutide, but no other side effects.
The problem is it comes through as an extremely loud rumble, usually in only one ear at a time.
Not a high pitched squeal, but a low pitched rumble. Goes away if I remove and reinsert, but immediately comes back in short order.
I can make it go away but only by using tips that don’t fit as well, and therefore don’t reduce noise as well (and also fall out of my ears while running).
iOS and Mac used to do a good job with things like animations, now they are horrible. Pre-beta quality.
And dark mode and accessibility settings need to just work. That is a core part of the job of every front end iOS developer, including the ones at Apple.
It absolutely is serial incompetence and the Apple engineering leadership that signed off on it should be ashamed.