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> If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck is human decision-making time, not compute cost.

This seems entirely backwards. Why spend money to optimize something that _isn't_ the bottleneck?

wesselbindton AI Is Not Ready to Replace Junior Devs Says Ruby on Rails Creator

So someone says they think a place got worse because it has fewer whites than it used to, and I'm somehow in the wrong for interpreting that as them finding a place worse because it has fewer whites. Check. Very clear. Thank you for the explanation.

wesselbindton How I estimate work

https://thestory.is/en/journal/chaos-report/

^ This report from 2020 analyzed about 50,000 IT projects in a wide range of market segments, and they found that 50% exceeded their deadline. This seems to suggest that your conclusion holds more generally than just your specific context.

On a personal level, I hardly ever see a developer's estimate turn out to be right, on whatever scale. I'm wondering what the pro estimate folks in this thread work on that they're able to estimate accurately.

wesselbindton AI Is Not Ready to Replace Junior Devs Says Ruby on Rails Creator

Fair point, as can be seen from this quote here (emphasis mine):

> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late ’90s and early 2000s. _Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits_. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

Here it clear that the thing you refer to as majority culture, DHH refers to as "native Brit". So what majority culture is he talking about that dropped from about 60 to about 30% in that time? Helpfully, DHH links to a wikipedia page on the ethnic makeup of London to clarify his point. The group that dropped from 60 to 30 is that of native white Brits. So the majority culture he's explicitly referring to is that of native white Brits. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

wesselbindton The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

Seems like a reasonable feeling to have. Anything that's not worth writing is not worth reading imo.

wesselbindton AI Is Not Ready to Replace Junior Devs Says Ruby on Rails Creator

Call me conservative, but between writing an article against TDD where the main argument was "I don't like the people who do TDD", his opinion on typescript, and the article he wrote on London not being great because it has only 30% whites, I find DHH not really worth listening to. I know, I know, ad hominem, but there's only so much I can read in my life and I have to filter it down somehow. I find that filtering out people who've written a lot of stupid stuff in the past works well for me.

wesselbindton Project Cybersyn

The amount of effort spent and blood spilled to make anything that even remotely smells like socialism fail is one of the greater tragedies of the 20th century.

wesselbindton Are You YES AI or No AI?

What does either option even mean?

wesselbindton Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory

Conflict of interest that the author fails to mention: he's a QA manager at Amazon, and has a vested interest in QA being seen as a necessary role. It may well be, but this is definitely a conflict of interest.

Aside from that, this article is incredibly heavy on theory and very light on empirical fact. Its bibliography consists of a very narrow selection of blogs (4 of the articles he quotes are one and the same blog somehow), which talk about a very narrow subset of the industry. This article not referencing the serious and well-established research that has been done on the effectivity of dev-owned tests by for example the DORA folks, almost seems dishonest.

The clickbait title, when compared to the content of the article, is outright dishonest. The author theorizes about some warts dev-owned testing may have at some specific companies, but this is a very far cry from it failing in practice, especially when you compare them to the warts of offloading quality to a different team.

It's probably a bit harsh, but I feel like, as an industry, we should have a higher standard of empiricism when it comes to evaluating our ways of working.

wesselbindton 25 Years of Wikipedia

I really hate gotcha questions like "who are you".

wesselbindton Date is out, Temporal is in

Polyfills are a thing, no?

wesselbindton Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

Here's some more context, which you seem to need: the reason they've laid off 75% of their devs is because their revenue is down 80%, despite tailwind being more popular than ever. This seems to be caused by a drop in visits to their documentation, which is really the only way people find out about their commercial offerings. This drop in visits to the docs is, in turn, most likely caused by the increased use of LLMs.

wesselbindton Mamdani Targets Junk Fees and Hidden Charges in Two Executive Orders

I can't speak for executive orders for a mayor, but I can say that executive orders of the president are anything but symbolic. Their scope was expanded significantly under Bush and Cheney, and they are binding for federal agencies. For example, they used executive order 13440 to circumvent a supreme court ruling that stated the Geneva convention applied to the people they illegally kidnapped and held at CIA black sites. This EO functioned by essentially weakening the definition of torture, so they could go on and torture the folks they captured.

So, while the next president can just undo executive orders made by any previous one, making them a bit ephemeral, they do have direct and real consequences going as far as torture.

wesselbindton 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform

This makes me MAD AS HELL

wesselbindton New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

Given that enshittification is a thing, and embrace extend extinguish is a thing, I'm inclined to agree with you there, without the /s.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

I'm talking about the 20th century as well. The silent holocaust was in the 80s, east Timor extended from the 70s to the 90s, the highway of death and the gulf war was in the 90s, the invasion of Vietnam and the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos was in the 60s, the mass killings in Indonesia were in the 60s, arming the Mujahideen (ultimately leading to 9/11) was in the 80s, bombing Korea, killing 20% of its population was in the 50s, the overthrow of the democratically elecred Allende leading to the reign of Pinochet, the terror they've inflicted on Cuba by Poisoning crops and the sanctions, the coup in Iran, the assassination of Lumumba, and so on, and so forth. On the whole, America has absolutely terrorized the world. And yes, that has been quite nice for the beneficiaries of this reign of terror, but to say the world did well in the American century is just wrong.

And regarding the support for Iran, it's possible to be supportive of a party you're otherwise critical of. Sure, the Iranian regime executes gay people, but do you think Israel's bombs and famine somehow make an exception for gay people? One side is worse, and it's the one that's been committing an ethnic cleansing for 77 years.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

Ok, from what you say, I get the sense that the applicability of the quote is non-obvious. I'll paraphrase the quote: "people who choose the lesser of two evils, forget that they chose evil".

In our conversation, we are essentially choosing between two parties: - The nazis, or the communists, or whatever. Let's call them the baddies. - America. The good guys!

I personally believe (and you do not have to agree with this, I realize that this is subjective) that murdering children and committing genocide is evil. The nazis committed a genocide, and so they are evil. Let's say the holodomor was a genocide, so the communists are evil too. Conclusion: the baddies are evil. It is also a fact that in the past 75 years or so, America has gone around the globe murdering children, and committing genocides. This is not up for debate. This is a fact. I have listed the examples countless times in this thread, I will not do so again. Conclusion: the good guys are also evil (if you believe murdering children is bad, which again, totally up to you).

In saying "but the nazis were worse!" in response to American murdering a million Koreans, you are effectively choosing the lesser evil (the nazis killed 6 million jews, 30 million Russians, in a fairly short timespan, whereas the US has killed about 12 million over the decades, the nazis are worse). And in saying that we did pretty well in the American century, you are dismissing the genocides, the murders, the torture that the US is responsible for. You're forgetting that the US is also evil. When you say we did alright under American hegemony, you are completely dismissing the suffering, overexploitation, destabilization, and violence that the US has meted out on the global South.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil."

Crazy how well this Hannah Arendt quote applies to both you and mid 20th century Germans.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

No I won't because I never said they did. But there's plenty of war crimes to point to though. Surely you've seen the picture of the girl on fire because of napalm. You've seen the torture of innocent civilians in the Iraq war. You know about the use of cluster bombs in Iraq. You know they cut off the water to Fallujah. You know of the highway of death. You know they've made close to a million people homeless in Cambodia and Laos, countries that weren't even involved in the war. You know about the illegal invasion of Iraq. You know about the excess mortality of 500,000 children after the gulf war. You know about the mass killing of nearly a million people in Indonesia in the sixties perpetrated by troops trained in, armed by, and supplied with kill lists by America. You know of the troops that killed 160,000 Guatamalans, armed by America, and described by Reagan as great humanitarians. You've seen Gaza.

These are all war crimes, and they are war crimes because they knowingly and actively target civilians. And honestly, at the end of the day it doesn't matter much to me whether you kill a kid by shoving them into a gas chamber or by shooting them, or by dropping bombs or napalm on preschools, because either way you've murdered a child.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

1. No they didn't, and that's not controversial. Even the most cursory Google search can dispell you of this notion.

2. "The world is messy" does not excuse countless war crimes. Imagine a lawyer in the Nuremberg trials saying "well sure the defendant sent children to the gas chamber, but your honor, have you considered that the world is a messy place?"

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

I'm sure the folks who were tortured in Abu Ghraib were very happy that their toruturers bore no swastika. And I'm sure the Iraqi children who lost their entire families felt very blessed that the people who killed them were in fact the good guys. And the 130000 Mayans killed in the silent Holocaust? Well, imagine the added humiliation of knowing your killers were armed by Nazis. Phew, dodged that (metaphorical) bullet!

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

Not the Kurds though. Or the Mayans. Or the Chileans. Or Cuba. Iran got screwed pretty hard. And Iraq too for that matter. Afghanistan. East Timor, and Indonesia too. Oof and the Palestinians really got the short end of the stick. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. But yeah I concede your point, the small minority of people living in the Imperial core did pretty ok.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

Oh get off it. We all know who pushed for the invasions. We all know who operated the black sites.

wesselbindton US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

Goodness me where oh where could that anti US bias come from? Couldn't be the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War, couldn't be arming the Guatamalans who carried out the silent Holocaust, couldn't be arming the Turks while they were slaughtering Kurds, couldn't be the illegal invasion of Iraq, killing up to a million people, and torturing others without due process, ultimately leading to violent blowback from Islamic extremists in Europe in the form of terrorist attacks. Couldn't be providing billions of dollars in weapons for Israel to carry out its genocide, likely leading to even more blowback across the globe. No, surely it's because they're _ungrateful_.

wesselbindton Show HN: PyDoll – Async Python scraping engine with native CAPTCHA bypass

I am also wondering about this, and in case you have a chef's knife in your kitchen, I would also like to hear if you have any comment on how that may be abused.

wesselbindton Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

I'm not entirely sure what your parent post is referring to, but I know the UK government has been going after anti-genocide folks to such an extent that a group of four UN rapporteurs sent them a letter about it. Details and some more context can be found here:

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/un-special-r...

wesselbindton Differences in link hallucination and source comprehension across different LLM

Are you being paid to post here? They're giving me nothing. Cheapskates.

wesselbindton The David Lynch Collection

Taxes, maybe? Buy a fork for 1750, have it appraised by a friend to be worth much more than that, donate your million dollar fork to a museum to write it off.

wesselbindton At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

One simile I've heard describing the situation where fancy autocomplete can no longer keep track of its patches is that you'll be sloshing back and forth between bugs. I thought it was quite poetic.

wesselbindton European Investment Bank to inject €70B in European tech

But the thing is that there's other ways of dealing with discontent in the working class. Sure, UBI is one of them, but there are less pleasant solutions (just do slavery, or have a well paid class of kapos, or sow internal strife by pushing an "it's the Jews/Muslims/trans folks" narrative with the media that you own), and history shows that the politically dominant class is mighty partial to that kind of solution.

EDIT: Maybe I'm too cynical, but as far as I can see the last time serious improvements to the material conditions of the working class were made was when the soviets were still around, and the threat of a worker's revolution still seemed somewhat realistic. I think the politically dominant class has become quite adept at suppressing that kind of thing, and UBI does not seem to be part of their preferred playbook.