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untrust

78 karma · joined January 25, 2025

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untrust··on Coding Is Over. Get over It
I think a lot of the people who say coding is dead either have low standards or or are low skilled. If you still think the quality of the codebase matters then agents absolutely cannot do the job of a human yet. The only way to know this is to review their code and understand how bone headed the decisions made by agents are. Sure, it may solve the problem and add unit tests, but it's absolutely creating junk while doing so.
untrust··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Text posts, yes. Videos can't be watched with volume on web as any interaction with the video player redirects you to the App Store
untrust··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
Exercise absolutely helps as it helps regulate blood sugar more effectively. A surprising effect of building muscle and exercising is that your body becomes more insulin sensitive and your blood sugar stabilizes instead of having drastic swings.
untrust··on Ask HN: What is the job market like?
April is the start of the second fiscal quarter, so companies had completed Q1 and were doing quarterly earnings reports. The stock market was trending downward all of Q1, so it was probably an attempt to reduce costs to ensure that Q2 would have better numbers for the Q2 earnings reports.
untrust··on Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)
I have a visible six pack at rest but have it.
untrust··on Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
> to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go

What was the time scale here? Was it actual skill atrophy or were they just shipping slop PRs all the time

untrust··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
What if the outcome is the competition burns their money on LLM usage for little to no gain? If you're an exec and you jumped into LLMs as well then you also lose any advantage you would have had by saving your money or hiring a few more humans.
untrust··on Talking to strangers at the gym
Boomers and Gen X are riddled with diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle and poor nutrition/diet. I would like to think the generations are learning from the mistakes of their predecessors. A lot of science has come out about the benefits of resistance training as well, along with the normalization of women doing resistance training in large part due to CrossFit
untrust··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
I think there might be something here. I believe people flock to bigger, stronger and healthier people as some sort of evolutionary strategy for survival. If we were in a crisis and had to revert to tribes requiring everyone to pitch in to save humanity would you rather have the person who can resist impulses and keep a strict schedule (fit/healthy) or the person who looks like they lay around eating everything in sight. Using looks alone someone may assume the more healthy and fit person would be better to keep in their circle and thus prioritize being in their good graces.

I understand that it's not that simple, and someone's physical ability has nothing to do with intelligence in the real world. Unfortunately we're all subject to making split second judgements when interacting with strangers and as a result people don't think deeply about how that impacts those they deal with (or don't care).

untrust··on A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)
Technically in the USA: It is impolite to begin eating without first washing your hands, rest your elbows on the table, chew with your mouth open, double dip in shared dishes, leave your napkin on the table, and also all sorts of rules about which spoon to use when. None of these rules are followed by your average American and nobody really cares, I imagine it's similar to these.
untrust··on How to effectively write quality code with AI
Imagine everyone who is in less technical or skilled domains.

I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.

untrust··on Intermittent hypoxia increases blood flow and benefits executive function
I think that this way of thinking is a little reductive. Every sport depends on certain intelligence metrics, and the brain is ultimately the operator behind all movement. The intelligence required to read a defense and solve a complex math problem may be different, but being good at either require intelligence.

A professional athlete in team based sports, at any given moment, is parsing a ton of data and responsing with quick reflexes and intuition to their changing environment. For example, quarterbacks in the NFL are reading a defense, parsing coverage, and making split second decisions after the play begins to develop.

A soccer goalkeeper is ensuring precise geometry to stay in an optimal position to make a stop, ensuring they are creating a triangle between the ball and the goalposts to optimize their position relative to the possible shooter.

Ontop of all of the in-game aspects, there is intelligence required to train to optimal levels, and hand waving this away as the coaches responsibility is not based in reality. Professional athletes have to stay very mentally focused in their training off the field to achieve their on the field results.

A lot of people judge professional athletes intelligence based on their communications with reporters and on field interviews, but public speaking ability and intelligence are not necessarily correlated. Your smartest engineer is probably not great at making keynote speeches, and likewise would be particularly terrible if they were making them after exerting extreme effort (like athletes do in post game interviews) or while they are pumped with adrenaline with an elevated heart rate (conditions sideline interviews tend to take place in).

All of this is to say, professional athletes arent all meat heads like most computer programmers and bookworms tend to believe. Your judgement that they aren't smart is probably based off of your bias and you are likely overweighting your analysis on a few notable dumb athletes against the crop.

Also, to top it all off, every sport is different, so you can't lump professional athletes into a single bucket.

untrust··on Stop Saying Vibes
This is an odd attack on a single slang word which is en vogue right now. Its slang. Its meant to be terse and communicates belonging of a cultural subgroup. Nobody thinks using "vibes" is eloquent.
untrust··on Feedback doesn't scale
> Note: The photo is of a large crowd gathering for a union meeting during the 1933 New York Dressmakers Strike. That's scaling feedback.

From the bottom of the article.

untrust··on A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool
Doing resistance training will mechanically stress the ligaments, bones and muscles which results in your body reinforcing and strengthening them. This is important to do on a localized level, as hypertrophy of the heart is not good whereas hypertrophy of the leg muscles is. You cant do this in pill form (at least yet)
untrust··on Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself)
> The AI of today can and if everyone knew about it, they would be using it.

The AI of today absolutely does not add 0.5x, I'm using cursor and copilot and they still are usually just a fiddly tool which gets it right half the time. Anything complicated enough to need me to review its work takes longer through series of prompting and correcting its work than if I did it myself, and anything trivial enough for it to one shot its not saving me much time on anyways. All for a costly monthly subscription.

untrust··on Python developers are embracing type hints
Did you forget /s at the end of this?

I work at big tech and the number of bad deploys and reverts I've seen go out due to getting types wrong is in the hundreds. Increased type safety would catch 99% of the reverts I've seen.

untrust··on 996
Every one of these quotes is from someone who would be junior or midlevel at best at any company. Not trying to be ageist but mid twenty somethings are filled with enthusiasm and fantastical ideas which are yet to be vetted or guided by real world experience. I agree with your skepticism here
untrust··on Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
At some point, the turnover has to lead to "the blind leading the blind" with nobody having a clearer big picture view on the software they own. This can't be a productive way to run a company, but they seem to persist nonetheless. It may take many years, but I imagine their software will rot from within due to their hiring practices.
untrust··on Review of Anti-Aging Drugs
And sleep
untrust··on Palantir is extending its reach even further into government
Why 2027?
untrust··on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness
These are not made up fears, this is illegal behavior and breaking the law means risking hefty fines and a criminal record. Drinking beer in a park is not worth the possible consequences
untrust··on Shallow water is dangerous too
Why are riptides safe for surfers? Is it because you can just take a break on your surfboard and float? I would think getting dragged out to sea on a surfboard would still be dangerous...
untrust··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
From the wiki they linked:

In 2015, former Basij chief and senior RIGC officer, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, stated in an interview that the destruction of Israel is "nonnegotiable". In addition, according to the Times of Israel, Naqdi said that during the summer Gaza conflict with Israel, a significant portion of Hamas’s weaponry, training, and technical expertise was provided by Iran.[27][28] In 2019, Naqdi made a direct call for the destruction of Israel during a televised interview. Naqdi asserted that the Zionist regime must be "annihilated and destroyed," asserting "This will definitely happen." He declared his intention to one day raise the flag of the Islamic Revolution over Jerusalem.

untrust··on WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
Same on Safari iOS
untrust··on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
Another question: If AI is going to eat up everyone's jobs, how will any business be safe from a new competitor showing up and unseating them off their throne? I don't think that the low level peons would be the only ones at stake as a company could be easily outcompeted as well since AI could conceivably outperform or replace any existing product anyways.

I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery to run the AI backing a product would be the biggest barrier to entry?

untrust··on Just use HTML
This form of banter reminds me of Maddox from the early 2000s, which funnily enough is still active at https://maddox.xmission.com/

I agree its relatively played out at this point. Really this page is just a showcase of HTML features for web developers who don't have much experience with HTML, and I think the insulting attitude and comedic approach may hold reader's interest than a more dry technical presentation of the content.

untrust··on An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it
Did you read the article?

> Safe to Sleep created the public health messaging for this information and distributed it on social media, as well as in pamphlets targeted to specific groups, such as grandparents, and translated it into different languages. It also provided the materials to hospitals and doctor's offices to be handed out to patients.

Your proposed solution doesnt cover what this did. How would you classify this as busywork, if the end result can prevent infant deaths? This is a net loss to society if it gets shuttered entirely.

untrust··on California Attorney General issues consumer alert for 23andMe customers
The government in power today is not guaranteed to exist indefinitely. Power structures change, and there is no definitive way to prevent your government changing underneath you as you are a single voter amongst a sea of people with different priorities.

The only power you as an individual truly have is to lower your risk profile if such an adverse event were to happen. History has shown time and time again that governments can change dramatically for the worse in short timespans, and if they have data to use against you then they will definitely use it

untrust··on Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command
I agree with most of what you said, but to be frank: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j95kNwZw8YY

Depending on your perspective, life can be amazing and full of wonders, or it could be drudgery where the only thing which makes you happy is a moment of respite. Someone could easily strawman your argument by saying that everything you do is worthless because we're infinitesimal beings on a tiny rock orbiting a star in a corner of the universe. The Sun is going to explode eventually, humans might destroy the planet no matter what you do, or an asteroid might take us all out like the dinosaurs, rendering your life of actions and purposeful existence useless in the end.

All of this is to say, do what makes you happy and dont worry about others so much.

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