snek_case

You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.

Probably constrained by training resources. It's much easier to experiment with a smaller architecture. You may need many training runs to figure out hyperparameters for example. If each run needs multiple GPUs for a week the cost adds up quickly. I think it makes a lot of sense to start small.

I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.

My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.

In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.

> imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.

It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.

> the political will to stop AI development

The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the potential harms are less tangible.

Surely a highly innovative product that will sell in high volumes /s

Mostly water, actually.

That's the direction the field is already going with "agents". People want autonomous AI agents that are capable of acting independently and that have more and more capabilities. For example, something like Claude code, but that acts as a sidekick that is constantly running, and able to act without being prompted. That's what people are imagining when they talk about teams of agents. You act as a manager, but your coding agents are off working on various features and only check in periodically.

First, believe it or not, 3 years is not that long. It's also not a given that LeCun was given the resources he needed to work on this tech at Meta. Zuck wanted another llama.

Second, AMI Labs just secured a billion in funding, and while that's a lot of money, it's literally just a fraction of the yearly salary they are paying to Wang. Big tech companies are literally throwing tens of billions to keep doing the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Why not try something else once in a while?

LLMs are super efficient at generating boilerplate for lots of APIs, which is a time consuming and tedious part of programming.

This would be an expensive benchmark to run on a regular basis, though I guess for the big AI labs it's nothing. Code quality is hard to objectively measure, however.

Maybe not a particularly astute observation, but what I've seen in 10 years of investing is that the stock market seems to like to do the opposite of what most people expect. There's probably a game theoretic explanation to this, but as you seem to be suggesting, it basically comes down to: if the stock market was easy to predict and everyone could easily anticipate its movement, then everyone would make money, and this isn't really possible. There are big fish trying to take your money. The people selling you stocks or buying stocks from you do so because they think they are making the better move.

IMO we'll see a correction some time after people get used to the crash not coming. Maybe the narrative will shift back to "money printing means it can't crash" for a while, the market will go "risk on" and then we'll get a surprise correction.

There is the Model YL now in China, which is longer and has 3 rows of seats. Apparently they're also about to release a Model YL+.

Now that they are going away, there's maybe an opportunity to produce some more premium 3/Y models. Before now, they couldn't make the 3/Y too premium because they had to distinguish them from the S/X and keep them in a distinct price bracket.

3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.

Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).

The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.

They're clearly not failing, but if you read comments here or on reddit, lots of people want them to, and have wanted them to for a decade.

> Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?

Because it's the most advanced car manufacturing in the US... Virtually the only successful EV maker outside of China, and it provides over 100,000 jobs worldwide.

Part of it is they wanted that factory space at Fremont for the Optimus production line. That's because the Optimus team is located there, in Silicon Valley.

I agree. I think the local models you can run on the "average computer" are not quite good enough yet, but I have hope that we will see much better small local models in the future.

In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to.

What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.

You can work on building LLMs that use less compute and run locally as well. There are some pretty good open models. They probably be made even more computationally efficient.

Cursor is in the business of selling you more tokens, so it makes sense that they would exaggerate the capabilities of their models, and even advertise it being used to produce lots of code over weeks. This would probably cost you thousands in API usage fees.

I've had AI write some very nice, readable code, but I make it go one function at a time.

I found the codebase very hard to navigate. Hundreds (over a thousand?) tiny files with less than 200 lines of code, in deeply nested subdirectories. I wanted to find where the JavaScript engine was, and where the DOM implementation was located, and I couldn't easily find it, even using the GitHub search feature. I'm not exactly sure what this browser implements and how.

Even their README is kind of crappy. Ideally you want installation instructions right near the top, but it's broken into multiple files. The README link that says "running + architecture" (but the file is actually called browser_ui.md???) is hard to follow. There is no explicit list of dependencies, and again no explanation of how JavaScript execution works, or how rendering works, really.

It's impressive that they got such a big project to be built by agents and to compile, but this codebase... Feels like AI slop, and you couldn't pay me to maintain it. You could try to get AI agents to maintain it, but my prediction is that past some scale, they would have a hard time figuring out their own mess. You would just be left with permanent bugs you can't easily fix.

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.

The thing is, a lot of the time, politicians make decisions that don't reflect majority opinion. They act against the will of the people... But people are forced to choose between two extremes because of the two party system. That's why less and less people are voting. They feel like politicians no longer represent them, that it's hopeless.

Weekend project?

Another big issue is that policy is based on politicians trying to get (re)elected. Their focus is doing things that make them look good, rather than actually doing good. There isn't a ton of long-term planning because elections happen so frequently. Politicians are also often old and not educated about technology.

It's probably very true for exposure therapy as well.

I would argue that there's obviously value in having your company/team use well-known languages and tools if they do the job well. Same as using open standards and well-known design patterns. If you choose a lesser known language, there better be a clear reason why.

Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.

It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.