30 karma · joined June 10, 2025
There is not really any exodus, sadly. The US still is significantly more competitive and offers much higher upsides to talented people willing to take risks. I live in the EU and want us to succeed, but I'm skeptical about our ability to compete with America economically and technologically, because we foster a different type of spirit.
It would be nice if this didn't matter.
I forget what it's called, but there's this fallacy of ordinary people, that states that we attribute superhuman abilities to people far enough from us on the social scale. In reality, rich people are far from movie villains, life is much more mundane.
It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded. In a quest to avoid these fantasized dictators, it is very well likely that we will vote for the one who promises to give us what we want, if only we give them enough power. In the end, the world's worst political systems were also the ones promising of liberating the poor and equalizing everyone.
Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective.
Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.
I am not sure why, but it kept trying to do that, although I made several attempts.
Ended up writing it on my own, very odd. This was in Cursor, however.
E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.
There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.
Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.
Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.
To be fair, we shouldn't bundle Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with John MacArthur and Joel Osteen. Meaning that some religious thought is more philosophically robust than other religious thought.
Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power?
Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.
As a developer, I can just make it myself. Now with LLMs, if it's very simple and bounded, I can just vibe most of it with very little to lose.
As a lay person, I don't see what the TAM for this is. Who will spend the time to learn how to drag and drop an application?
On a more serious note: how could anyone possibly ever write meaningful tests without a deep understanding of the code that is being written?
That we will end up just trying to review code, writing tests and some kind of specifications in natural language (which is very imprecise)
However, I can't see how this approach would ever scale to a larger project.