weakfish

> AI Echo

I don't think it's fair to these very real humans to try and distill their essence from what they presented publicly. Real humans are messy and complicated.

This feels really, really disrespectful. Just because someone died a long time ago doesn't mean it's any less weird to do digital necromancy.

This premise is based around the assumption that Moore's law is still working, which it very much isn't [0]

[0] https://cap.csail.mit.edu/death-moores-law-what-it-means-and...

From the rules [0]:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don’t get me wrong, :) that’s pretty cool! I’ve also made highly personalized mini apps for my own personal life. Currently working on an iOS one to log mood and correlate it with HealthKit data since the native health app does a bad job of it.

That said, I meant more like production grade apps that have to serve N>1, which is IME where the hard part LLMs suck at comes in. I saw a tweet somewhere along the lines of “CEOs/execs are so divorced from the last mile effort that they are uniquely susceptible to believing AI can replace engineers end to end”

Then why don’t we see a bunch of amazing software for sale that solves every niche issue?

Oh. Oh my. In-house Docker gives me hope for my future as a cleanup consultant.

I highly recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman to help cope with this anxiety

Like full self driving!

Yeah, the thing that worries me is that an LLM can be guided to agree with any premise and will rarely ever take a hard stance.

Ah, excuse me, I didn’t realize I was a mere layman.

The AI-style CSS that all AI apps have is an instant turn off to me.

Why read article with human brain if not written by human brain?

Who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

Thanks tom, you’re right and I apologize. I truly do appreciate you and dang keeping us accountable.

I think it's pretty good at review and finding bugs, but IME it's really not great at designing solutions to non-trivial problems, which IME is the part of the job that makes me "good" at it. YMMV

Oh no don't get me wrong I don't think you're tacitly endorsing it, I just mean it's probably gotten worse since you last looked, from all sides.

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but I refuse the notion that an agent writes better code / prose than I do and I am concerned for anyone who does think that.

Is it _faster_? sure! That is NOT better.

Before you ask, I write code w/ agents daily, I find it useful, but it's not better than I am purely on quality.

I'd look again, there's a (now deleted, but quoted) comment of violence being threatened (and drawn??) against the maintainers.

Right. Sure. But this isn't a professional setting.

take heart knowing at least I'm there with ya.

I think the other commenter's point is that there's no industry-wide proof that QA can fix bugs by just describing the issue. That's an anecdote. Why is it acceptable now to just follow anecdotes and FOMO?

Reading comments like this is like watching someone who is absolutely convinced that they have a crystal ball in their lap when at best they have a foggy piece of plastic. You could be right you could be wrong, but don’t act like you have such certainty.

Right, but my point is that I think that being the baseline requirement is silly. I get why that reaction exists, but I think it's over-fitting. Like I said before, cooperative is so broad.

It's impossible to debate a topic with someone who takes anecdotes, declares it is proof of something and then says smugly "there you have it!"

"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?

For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.

The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?

Well, the comment you're replying to is patently false, as explained in a separate comment.

I mean... that's just.. wrong?

Indigenous North American cultures, Amish cultures, medieval monastic communities, the list goes on.

Really, you can't just make blanket claims like that over _all of human history_ and expect to be right.

My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.

“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.

Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)

TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.

Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.