smugglerFlynn

Exactly. Imagine alternative time line where tech is the same but each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills, and keeps them in control of their own work.

Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

Another thing is attribution. Even a book that was re-published illegally can be easily attributed to its author. What happened is the exact opposite: no attribution, not even a notice, just obfuscation that strips away any traces of the original ideas and original work. Imagine piracy websites and trackers just dropping first few pages that name their authors, and publishing "the book you are looking for". This is exactly what happened.

This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?

I cannot shake the feeling that we are chasing the wrong goose.

The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.

I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?

Comparison between LLMs and atomic weapons just mystifies the issue.

I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036

Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?

This is seriously cool, Mitya

Thanks for sharing this.

I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.

I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.

Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.

It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

This implementation is tune-able. One idea that comes to mind is setting up e.g. salience scores for different company-internal lingo and names of internal components and teams, enriching wiki / chats / tickets / logs this way for quicker and more accurate skimming.

You get downvoted but I remember the times when Google was carrying exact same sentiment, people who used Google were labeled 'lazy' etc

Going from “the human brain might use similar language techniques” to “human output is driven by autocomplete” - and implying that LLMs and the brain are therefore similar - is a very long road.

Prove to me that autocomplete contributes even 2% of what we write here, if you are so trigger-happy to assign the burden of proof to someone else.

There is a difference between historical institutions failing people, and monkey A getting to a wrench quicker than monkey B (exactly what that email points to)

   > My other children were smart enough to choose tennis and horses

I am giving you a black card warning right there, sir

Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.

If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.

There was an emergent and surprising phenomena in collaboratively writing Linux kernel and low level backbone of modern operating systems, or developing mobile apps, or scaling Internet to broader population.

What is different about LLMs? Is it their social aspect and influence? All three examples above were also social to a different extent.

I find this a very engineering/technology focused point of view. Most business related functions run on this “human in the loop” with zero hints from industry this will change anytime soon - quite the opposite.

Even if we take purely engineering, support and operations functions, there is still plenty of “human glue” in the organizations that allow for them to function - the larger the org, the more often you need to interface people between each other, and corner cases become more complex.

Big Tech which is the most vocal about their technological savviness is a great example: pretty much nothing has changed on business and cross-functional side since the 90th and earlier, all key decisions are made via Powerpoint, memos and personal contacts. Jeff’s innovation of preparing and reading a one page of problem statement and proposal at the beginning of a meeting was considered breakthrough in this field. No LLM in sight that can magically fix this [semi-ironically] beautiful mess.

And don’t get me started on B2B Sales and Partnerships.

How do you solve this problem right now?

This feature is well thought out in terms of battery use, because nobody is going to ever use their phone as a "bedtime clock"

Work smarter, not harder

If Apple continues like that, in 10 years it won’t exist

   > you must ask yourself a single tough question: 
   > How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design?

This quote applies to so much more than just gaming

Modern LLM services are engineer's pipe dream that was heavily shaped by the shadiest product management dark patterns you can find: applying gambling-style engagement tactics, exploiting cognitive biases, exploiting users' lack of technical understanding to inflate product expectations, using fear mongering in external and investor communications. And that's not even a complete list.

You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...

If intern is making a breakfast, and boss is the one who suddenly runs to the grocery store because eggs are missing, is boss still the one in a driver’s seat?

From the original goal point of view yes, as it was boss who has initiated whole breakfast procedure. But from an execution standpoint it is intern who gives its boss a job of a grocery store run. He could give same job to anyone else, boss as a persona is irrelevant here.

   > Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good?

It is weird if you think about it this way: it is AI that waits for you, its ‘eyes’, to provide a feedback so it can continue working. It literally uses you as its organ.

<!!spoiler ahead!!>There is a TV show called Person of Interest <!!spoiler ahead!!>, where Machine (AI connected to Internet and CCTV networks) has no legs or eyes, so when it needs to go and check something not covered by CCTV feeds, it gives instructions to a real person. In the show it is called an ‘analog interface.’

I see aviation sentiment raised from time to time. In aviation failure is catastrophic, and systems you operate do not change on the fly (pun intended).

You can probably drill SREs that way but you are only teaching them how to _react_ efficiently, not how to _fix_ unique unicorn root causes of these failures. Aviation analogy would be an airplane engineer that tries to drill himself for in-flight engine failures AND engine debugging / engine redesign both at the same time.

It never made sense in software engineering, and never will. Minute spent on drills is a minute better spent on reworking codebase to reduce changes of future incidents. This post is very SRE centric.

"Middle devs take care of incidents, senior devs lose touch with their systems"

Interestingly, I took a different route: the problem was not quality of my memory, but all the overblown expectations I've put towards myself remembering all that stuff.

Turns out most people are not even trying to juggle all these facts. Interestingly, just removing this pressure helped to remember more about the people I care about.

Not saying this will work for you (everyone is different), just sharing my 2c.

I am not the target audience for this product, but I can’t get over the irony of building a CRM specifically to track details about people you genuinely care about

Can't help but notice that this line is not true anymore in 2026:

   > It’s harder to read code than to write it.

"I have really enjoyed that hand-crafted email" is not something you hear from actual people in real life.

I am saying this non-ironically as I understand what you are talking about, but very few people are geeky about how the document or email is written and thought out. Which is the whole reason we see these insane adoption levels of AI slop documents and emails nowadays.

Not the guy you are asking the queation, but: be honest to the extent we can. Market and “visionaries” will catch up on reality sooner or later.