ravenstine

That is true. AI reveals a festering problem.

It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude? You can sell crap like hotcakes with enough money and advertising minds. Yours isn't really an argument for Linux APIs being any worse or better quality.

> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.

WINE would have been invented one way or another because enough people would have wanted to run Windows programs on Linux in a world where Linux had dominant market share. For Pete's sake, there are Commodore 64 emulators for Linux in a world where that system has been dead for decades. It has nothing to do with what "works" or not. WINE and Proton are developed as actively as they are today because Microslop has been able to market so effectively to convince average joes and businesss leaders to buy their crappy OS. This has nothing to do with the quality of APIs.

> They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck.

Is there ever a situation where this statement isn't true? Everything built in software can be seen as sucking, and all software could have been written better the first time around.

100%

This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.

Research is of course useful but not even necessary here. This is common sense.

And why wouldn't they? Companies are quite literally instructing them to do so. I work at such a company and have heard similar anecdotes from colleagues that work at other companies.

Amen! As professionals we are supposed to have opinions about these issues. This "everyone's right" thing, while well intentioned, is one of the factors that allows, frankly, dysfunctional dev teams like the OP's to exist. If companies are never really wrong for doing things a certain way then nobody can challenge them, which of course is exactly what insecure and egotistical leadership wants; little serfs to do the bidding of a few anointed priests. We should care because we actually do have a responsibility to the world we live in. We are the ones building the buggy, insecure, dark patterned crap that HNers take part in complaining about. No one being wrong means more crap for everyone.

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OP, your employer sucks. You are not wrong; they are. You have to make 1 PR a day? Bullshit of the highest order. Since they are unlikely to be receptive to change, always say "yes sir" with a shit eating grin while you prepare to monkeybranch to another job. I'd have said to quit now a few years ago, but the job market is so bad right now that the best you can do is coast where you are right now while finding new opportunities.

That said, welcome to this stage in your career. Lots of companies hire people with our level of experience to deal with their dumbass mistakes while ironically promoting the same dumbasses who continually make those mistakes.

Hah! I once did essentially what this page does, albeit in SQLite with one of those SQL workbench apps. The data was pulled from US census data. Kind of a fun little project. I wish I had my laptop with me (currently backpacking through Europe) because I remember there were some interesting little insights I came across. For instance, I think I remember there was some weird town in the middle of nowhere in California where the residents are almost entirely 50+ women. I also remember Port Hueneme being heavily skewed towards men. It was also interesting seeing how the gender ratio could change significantly between neighborhoods and towns in the same city.

The truth is I came up with this a few years ago because I wanted to try living in a different city and wanted to make sure it didn't have a worse gender ratio than the one I'd been living in. I'm a man so it made sense to find one that has more women than men. I know some people find it weird to use statistics for dating purposes. Well, I can't seem to not be a weird person no matter how hard I try, so I'll just own it. Anyhow, one thing that my project did that this one doesn't seem to is break down the numbers by people who are unmarried vs married, education levels, etc. It also included corrections based on data from Gallup in regards to what percentage of single people are interested in dating vs wanting to remain single. I remember there were some cases where a place looked like a sea of women but if I adjusted the numbers to exclude married people then the resulting gender ratios were way less skewed.

Ultimately, I think culture matters more than gender ratios. I'm not gonna say where it was that I was loving for a while (which was influenced by my analysis), but I will say that I in part chose it for having a highly educated population; I found that I was definitely judged harshly for being a self taught person with no degree. Where I'm from very few people care that much. My point being you can move somewhere with lots more single women than men and end up no more successful at dating, if not less.

Considering this guy has made an obscene fortune by not fulfilling promises, I can't say I have the slightest sympathy.

Those are also common hallucinations reported for recreational Benadryl dosages.

So basically it's a codebase mostly composed of bugs, and the features mysteriously work because they're based on bugs that happen to be mitigated by other bugs. :)

Exactly. Software quality has become worse, online media has become even more trash than before, and life is otherwise basically the same, lack of jobs notwithstanding. The legitimately useful things regular people can use AI for would be mostly solved by locally run quantized models. This AI "revolution" may be setting several billion on fire without even 1% of that being real value added to the world.

Coding velocity doesn't matter if it the net result is software that sucks massive schlong. The real world doesn't care if programmers can write code faster.

How am I supposed to know if I want to sign up for Bloomberg if I can't read any of the article, then accept cookies, and then get two nag screens? Dumbass website.

Doesn't that describe all eBook readers? I've owned a few Kindle and Kobo devices and meaningful improvements are never shipped to them. No actual performance improvements, no new useful features, nothing.

"Real" numbers make it easier for them to lie to leadership who then use or ignore those lies to justify decisions they were already going to make in spite of users.

No offense, but the humor of it has gone right over your head. Building an InfoWars clone isn't nearly as funny as acquiring the real one just to mock it.

> Which is how most of the world does it.

That's not persuasive. America does a lot of things different from most of the world, and they're not inherently wrong for doing so.

The rest of your comment makes an interesting point, though.

Jira is buggy as hell these days. Lots of desyncing that forces me to refresh the page. I can have a ticket open on a sprint board and the modal spontaneously closes after a while, forcing me to reopen it frequently. The other week there were tickets that simply refused to show up in their respective sprint board no matter what I did; later the epic magically appeared on the board out of nowhere, then finally the individual tickets themselves reappeared.

Gotta love the value that vibe coding has added to this world.

Amazon can and already did this for my circa 2015 Kindle. I think it's just a lack of will to do so for devices even older than that.

I deal with it by progressively developing some ideas that might one day allow me to exit the software industry entirely. Simultaneously, I'm holding on to my job and collecting paychecks while secretly giggling as various Dilbert strips play out in real life because of AI hype. Saving up a "micro FU" fund also helps.

They're likely doing this because it's likely the only remaining loophole to their new DRM scheme. Too bad for them it's caused me to buy all my ebooks elsewhere.

Sounds fascinating! If you wrote an article on this I bet it'd have a good shot at making it to the home page of HN.

Thanks, Tim Berners-Lee.

I see what you're saying, and our labor isn't the bottleneck from the perspective of engineers. However, I'm pretty sure that business leadership would beg to differ. They see engineering as a necessary evil to getting their products out the window, and it can never be done fast enough. The solution is the bottleneck in their eyes. Engineers have a better understanding of why they do what they do, hence they get that their work isn't inherently a bottleneck in spite of how challenging it can be.

But yes, in reality, you're correct that programming itself is not (or should not) be a bottleneck, but the process around developing a product definitely can be. The irony here is that this bottleneck usually gets worse the more corporate a business becomes and the more they try to treat programming as if it were a bottleneck. Not a day goes by that my job isn't made more difficult because the business wants greater agility and efficiency.

Truth! I converted my still to electric and would never go back to gas now that I know how easy the conversion is. Also uses air cooling so that almost no water is wasted.

Corporate leaders don't learn lessons. They follow trends, chase growth, reduce the perception of risk, diffuse blame, get their business acquired, and exit with money bags in both hands. No learning from experience necessary.

Not explosive, but still a potential fire hazard, especially if a still gets way too hot (coolant system fails) and alcohol vapors escape. The risk becomes extremely minimal when using an electric still.

Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.

The saying also ignores the fact that humans are not perfect programmers, and they all vary in skills and motives. Being a programmer often not about simply writing new code but modifying existing code, and that can be incredibly challenging when that code is hairbrained or overly clever and the people who wrote it are long gone. That involves programming and it's really hard.

Though I think these companies are wildly overvalued, I don't see LLMs as a service going away in the future. The value in OpenAI is that it provides extra compute, data access, etc. My money is on local AI becoming more of a thing, while services like OpenAI still exist for local AIs to consult with. If a local model can somehow know that it's out of it's depth on a question/prompt, it can ask an OpenAI model if it's available, but otherwise still work locally if OpenAI fails to respond or goes out of business. To me that makes a lot more sense than the future being either-or.

They were more or less remarketed as a luxury, though. Historically (at least in the US), lobster and crab were considered low class foods, if not outright fertilizer for crops. Some terrestrial bug could theoretically be given the same sort of luxury status, but lobsters have the advantage of actually tasting good. The best candidates would be snails and bee drone larvae. But what would be the point? Neither could be farmed at such a scale that they could be made food staples that are also better for the environment.

It's not even more economical than raising chickens. Just because raising relatively small batches of crickets uses less water per unit of protein (which isn't even necessarily a problem) doesn't mean that it's manageable at scale.

Moreover, as you said, bugs have to taste good for people to want to eat them. I was into entomophagy way before it became this sort of thing in the 2020s. As much as I appreciate it from a curiosity standpoint, the truth is most bugs don't taste very good. I think there's maybe one insect that I thought was truly worth eating again (sphinx moth caterpillars). Supposedly bee drone larvae taste good but I've not had them. Neither of those can be scaled for mass food production. The rest of the bugs I've had either taste extremely earthy or like nothing.

Civilization should just scale with how much food it can produce. The idea that food production should infinitely scale with civilization is backwards.