It's not a right, but I think discrimination in the use of AI is a big problem when without AI you are completely unable to compete in the future. If for whatever reason both OpenAI and Anthropic decides to ban you, and open source hasn't caught up, you are at a severe disadvantage compared to others.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
I promise you if you had the experience I've had you would understand what I'm talking about. Especially one friend has gotten me down. I share what I'm doing with him because he's actually in the right industry, just not technical. I've been showing him my technical progress, which may sound delusional, but I'm building something very cool that hasn't been done before, and when generalized has a high potential value. But every time I share I just get negative feedback, not constructive. I don't think he realizes he's doing it, and we're childhood friends. Anyway, I'm convinced this has value so I'm not giving up (I do get good feedback when showing it to potential users), but I would kill for even a "wow, that looks really cool".
Sure, but to find what works you need to take action first. The problem is if you have no support network that encourages you to take action you are more likely not to start or to give up when you face headwinds. That's one reason startups tend to happen in a few hubs. Yes, it's also where VC is, but to get started you need likeminded people who don't reflexively shoot down anything new.
I don't mean to vilify them, I think it's just a matter of fact that if you habitually poke 100 holes in any idea, both your own and others, you will do the very safe thing.
If someone had taken risks, had ideas, seen some fail some work and they said my idea is bad, I would listen to them more for sure. Maybe my idea is bad, only time will tell. I'm not saying these people are stupid, many of them are smart. I think if you are smart it actually gets easier to poke holes in an idea.
The "new ideas are fragile" is certainly true. I'm struggling with something I'm building which I think is extremely cool but technically difficult, but which if based on the reaction of friends and family I'd abandoned long ago. Only after having worked on it for 2 years and really got it working technically did I see a small spark in my dad's eyes as he said "oh, you can make MONEY off of this?". I feel like I have a strong internal compass but I have to admit external validation is needed at some point, but I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed. Unsurprisingly these people have not achieved much themselves, never taking any risk.
Salaries are a product of supply AND demand. Supply of good programmers and EE/MechE is low because it requires above average intelligence and a lot of education, while demand for software has been much higher than demand for EE/MechE. Now that the demand side might invert.
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
I mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
I mean, talk about circular investment and FOMO all you want, but if you use Fable every day you know what's coming. This is no bubble, we're just getting started.
I prefer working alone, and even more so now with AI. When I work alone and own the whole project, I make the judgment call when and where slop is fine and where it's not. When working on a team there is always this battle to get code through the tests and review, often for code that is temporary or simply does not matter that much. Reviews rarely result in any meaningful changes anyway, unless the changes are < 50 LoC, in which case it's nitpicked to death instead of the "LGTM" you get for larger PRs. It all reminds me of airport security theater. Similarly, a 2 hour flight is now a 4 hour time waste of time, and a simple change that should take 10 minutes now takes up most of your day.
Until lately I thought messaging apps like WhatsApp is ok, but this summer my eleven year old niece has been depressed, crying at the summer lake house with extended family because she can see her friends hanging out on WhatsApp. Incredibly toxic. Basically she can't enjoy the adventures we have here because of it. Even a simple thing like group chats completely destroy their brains.
This is on the level of "just use rsync bro". I prefer the console experience of clicking a button to order, plugging it in and playing. Valve is doing the vertical integration, they're putting together the hardware, the software and the OS, of course you'll be getting a better experience than pulling together random stuff. Also game devs will be optimizing games specifically for this hardware combo, just like consoles.
As an adult with kids, why would I want to spend my scarce time and energy building my own machine, installing and configuring shit when I can just buy this that is guaranteed to work well. Yeah, when I was 18 I'd probably do it myself, but I just don't have the patience for bullshit anymore.
I'll probably buy one. It's small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it's all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it'll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.
Yeah, the double standard... We are here on hacker news probably because our parents let us freely explore computers and the internet. "Screen time" wasn't even a concept. Most friends I talked to had really off-hands parents as well, parents were rarely involved or interested in what the kids were doing. Glad I didn't have overbearing parents who limited my technology use to the radio and LPs.
Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
I bet LLMs and world models will merge. World models essentially try to predict the future, with or without actions taken. LLMs with tokenized image input can also be made to predict the future image tokens. It's a very valuable supervised learning signal aside from pre-training and various forms of RL.
I like working on it and will definitely release it, just don't want to set myself up for disappointment later. Try to enjoy the process of creation instead. But, it could also be that it's something that has value for a few years, and maybe that's enough.
Leaving your job has a different sense of finality now. When time comes to look for a new job, will the job even exist anymore? Makes the risk calculus a bit different. Maybe there won't be mass unemployment, but even a modest increase in SWE unemployment could make it so much harder and more stressful to find a job.