unknownfuture

Not sure what your point is? Those things can both be true.

Or should the discourse in a diverse community like HN only reflect the positions you personally hold?

This shouldn't even be a question: the operators of those agents must be held accountable.

There may not be established precedent but there exists established law. And if there's ambiguity, then fine, legislate.

But there can be no other reasonable answer in a society that's still governed by the rule of law as anything else means anything is legal so long as a robot does it, and that is an objectively absurd outcome.

Uh, non-profits absolutely may have unionized employees:

https://npeu.org/

I... wonder if you don't know what a non-profit corporation is or how they work?

Honestly it's hard to blame folks. The US (and Canada, where I'm from) has seen a 40+ year concerted effort to destroy unions and the propaganda runs deep. There's been a long-running cultural project to depict unions as purely lazy, corrupt, and self-dealing. That same project also involved demonizing social safety nets ("welfare queen") and public projects more broadly using the exact same rhetoric: some people might cheat so we must tear these systems down. It's a language that directs the anger of the aggrieved away from those in power toward those who are powerless, and for nearly a half a century it's been wildly successful.

Look I'm not going to teach you about the entire history of labor relations and the role of unions.

But rest assured that this isn't some new, unique moment in history. The exact same questions could have been raised during the introduction of automation in literally any industry throughout modern history. And yes, unions have, through that same period, acted as a critical bulwark in protecting worker rights.

Literally demonstrating the point in dofm's second paragraph right here...

I can only assume you aren't paying attention to, and aren't personally experiencing, the impact of AI on the industry.

Power has shifted dramatically in favour of the ownership class in the last couple of years. That's precisely what unions are meant to counterbalance.

Vibecoding == digital dowsing?

Ehhhh, it's better at some things and not others.

My own reviews have shifted now. I tend not to examine detailed semantics anymore. The AI is as good or better than me at assessing whether a chunk of code does what the author said it was supposed to do.

Instead my job is to spot design and architecture smells, broader semantic errors, violations of unspoken business requirements, etc.

For example, I was recently reviewing code that built out a transactional flow. Part of that flow involved recording the transaction somewhere user visible and I knew that should only happen after the transaction was confirmed. AI implemented it where the transaction was posted.

That starts as an issue of underspecified requirements but that always happens in the real world. Thus that's where I can provide the most valuable insight: assessing with that context, whether business, operational, historical, or forward looking.

Yes. They know what you meant. You missed the point of their response.

A compiler is semantically deterministic. It has a spec. Give it an input and you can know exactly what the output will do. And if there's edge cases where behaviour is undefined, thats also well known apriori.

(And yes, to get ahead of the nitpickers, I know the specific sequence of bytes the compiler will emit can vary (hence the difficulty of reproducible builds), hence why I said "semantically").

LLMs do not share this property. At all. I mean not even close

They are a completely new and different class of tool. They are not just a step up the abstraction layer. They're not compilers for English. To call them that is to fundamentally not grok what a compiler is or does.

That doesn't make them bad. It just makes that analogy, and any conclusions you might draw from it, bad.

> There's an entire profession doing that: traders.

Well no, there's an entire profession trying to time the market. The data is not favourable as to their ability to actually do it at a rate greater than random chance.

But.

I also don't think it's reasonable to label as a conspiracy a claim that markets are rife with cheating, insider trading, etc. Just look at the current US Presidents profit margins.

Is that systematic, organized, conspiratorial, rich v poor market rigging? No. But it would be naive, I think, to believe that the rich aren't significantly advantaged in the market in ways that the average person isn't. There is, after all, a reason payment for order flow exists as a valuable thing.

The problem is the old saw about the market staying irrational.

You can't time the market reliably. Ultimately the base advice remains sound even if it's couched in a bit of conspiracy: diversify and allocate your assets based on your risk profile, as informed by your retirement timeline.

Read more carefully. I didn't say any of that. "Rich people hang out together and influence each other" isn't, in fact, a conspiracy, it's demonstrable fact.

Thing about offhand comments from random guys like Lutke is a) they're born of the cultural pool in which he's swimming, which is made up of many other very influential rich guys, and b) they have the power and influence to actually make their ideas happen.

One only need look at Peter Thiel's private rich club for assholes and the ideas they're circulating or the absurdities espoused by the effective altruists that birthed guys like Sam Bankman Fried to realize that it's worth paying attention to wild, off the cuff comments by folks like Lutke. His ideas might be more prevalent than you realize.

Maybe try reading the article instead of scanning it.

Its neither ranting nor rambling, nor is it complaining or making excuses. It pokes holes in common patterns around agentic coding (e.g. SDD, TDD, etc) and identifies two interesting new approaches, one which they're building.

The piece took ten minutes to read. Surely focus isn't that hard to come by.

Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?

I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.

NeXT itself, as a company, was absolutely a failure. That Apple came along and bought them and stripped them for parts is certainly convenient for Jobs, but doesn't change that, had they continued on their own, it would've ended up in the dustbin of history.

TBH I'm surprised you're arguing. NeXT is generally accepted as a commercial failure. Hell the NeXT cube, alone, was a famously collosal flop. This isn't even a little bit controversial.

They would if they cared to invest in it. That they've not is a policy and economic choice (possibly because they don't have the same sense of panicked urgency I see among a lot of folks around here), not evidence of some insurmountable barrier to entry.

You also jumped to a conclusion that I don't think is self-evident: that owning the production chain matters.

Assuming open weight models continue to advance, who cares? Just let the US and China expend the compute on model development.

And if they close up, then fine, do what China did and build up a domestic industry and distill as a way to get a jumpstart. We already know that's possible since China already did it.

> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier.

So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models?

I don't see the problem here.

If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to.

And that's ignoring the fact that many of these models are open weight so hosting/owning sovereign inference/intelligence itself is entirely a hardware problem.

This whole conversation reminds me a lot of North Korea deciding they needed their own OS when Linux is right there. If the technology is open and available to all, then sovereignty over this core technology is irrelevant.

Eh, even if we take those mythologized examples as real (I'd argue the history of both is heavily whitewashed and their failues, like NeXT or Windows Phone to name just two, are papered over in their mythmaking), if anything they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

I don't see a reason to believe any CEO, past or present, has had the ability to accurately predict the future. Luck and foresight look the same when you happen to get it right.

> I am waiting for a precedent on this one. In general, training on copyrighted material is legal, there is a lot of precedent there. But every now and then there is a case where the owner of the training material wins.

You're making a fundamental assumption: that model outputs are subject to copyright. In the US that's only the case if a human is part of the creative process:

https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html

> It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.

> You should aim to be working on one project at a time in your team.

You're swimming against the tide with this. AI pilled management is driving teams to deliver more parallel workstreams, not fewer, with fewer, AI-augmented devs taking them on.

Context switching isn't seen as a cost. AI is seen as the solution to the bus factor and experience problem. Same goes with the issue of dev capacity.

IMO it's deeply misguided but it's crystal clear where the winds are blowing.

And now I know you either don't understand what an economy of scale is or you're not discussing in good faith. Carry on!

All of those industries benefited and continue to benefit from economies of scale in the manufacturing and delivery of their products. You're not making the case you think you are, and I have a suspicion the article's point is just sailing right past you.

Yup. We're just all re-learning Amdahl's Law.

That's still not the kind of efficiency the article is talking about.

They're referring to raw training and inference scaling and it's relationship (or lack thereof) to traditional economies of scale that we've seen with past technologies where they get cheaper as adoption increases, not more expensive.

Its true that the models requiring fewer turns and tokens due to increasing sophistication improves cost efficiency for users but that doesn't address the fundamental computational scaling problems of LLM architectures.

1.5B settlement where they admitted no wrongdoing and are indemnified? They burn 5B per year. If an individual did the same their lives would be destroyed. It's just another case of a corporation breaking the law and paying a fine as a cost of doing business.

And none of this changes the fact that they did it in the first place and were comfortable doing so, thereby demonstrating that they are not trustworthy actors. If they could spend another 1.5B to advance their models with ill-gotten training data, there's every reason to believe they'd do it all over again.

> This is obviously untrue so either the author is knowingly lying or is plain incompetent. We had LLMs not being able to do simple high school mathematics a year back, now it is solving open problems in mathematics. Fields medalists in physics and mathematics are using it on a daily basis.

I'm confused, how do you think this disproves the claim in the article?

What do you think that quoted portion was talking about?

> I mean, that is the essence of how to fix the problems in a capitalist society?

So... we're just gonna forget that governments exist?

We gonna assume rivers would've stopped burning in the US if only there had just been more startups working on making rivers stop burning?