MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelsey98765431 | 2025-05-14 23:19:00+00:00
I have used a simple benchmark for productivity related personal workflow changes that has always served me very well and kept me feeling good about what i choose to use to do my job, and that's what i now call the airplane mode test. can i use this tool completely offline, isolated from the rest of the world? growing up wifi was not ubiquitous for me. i didn't live somewhere remote, i was just an early adopter of computers and carried a laptop in school when that was considered a rare piece of kit. learning programming i always kept the philosophy of can i do this on the train while going home in mind when selecting how i wrote code. i kept man pages handy and learned how to search them properly (man -k . | grep), learned how to access the gnu info pages on my machine, and even found the glibc manual tucked away safely in my /usr/share directory which i hadn't know was there. over the years i stayed away from stack overflow and google when i was writing code as much as possible, first looking at the resources available to me on my local machine.

i now have qwen3. it runs locally on my machine. it can vibe code, it can oneshot, it can reason about complex non code problems and give me tons of background information on the entire world. i used to keep a copy of wikipedia offline, only some few gigabytes for the text version and even if that is too much there's reduced selection versions available in kiwix.

i am fine with llms taking over a lot of that tedious work, because i am confident i will always have this tool the same as all my other tools and data that i backup and keep for myself. that means its ok for me to cheat a bit here and there and reach out to the higher power models in the cloud the same way i would sometimes google an error message before even reading it if i am doing work to pay my bills. i have these rungs of the ladder to climb down from and feel like i am not falling into oblivion.

i think the phrase that sums this up best is work smarter not harder. im ok with accepting a smarter way of doing things, as long as i can always depend on it being there for me in an adverse situation.
by macspoofing | 2025-05-14 23:19:02+00:00
>Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?

Yes. They are part of general non-car transit. You would never build an entire public transit infrastructure on taxis, but they are a component of it. A person who doesn't need to own a car because they use taxis/ubers is a net benefit to the environment, and city congestion - not to mention limiting need for parking spaces.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-05-14 23:19:15+00:00
The analogy likening LLMs to compilers is extremely specious. In both steps, the text written by the user/programmer is higher-level and thus "easier" but beyond that, the analogy doesn't hold.

- Natural language is not precise and has no spec, unlike programming languages.

- The translation from C (or other higher-level language) to assembly by a given compiler is determined in a way that the behavior of an LLM is not.

- On the flip side, the amount of control given to the tool versus what is specified by the programmer is wildly different between the two.
by NegativeLatency | 2025-05-14 23:19:26+00:00
Hoping for more easy columnar support in databases, which is one of the things that can lead you to storing json in database columns (if your data is truly columnar).

Currently the vendor lock-in or requirements for installing plugins make it hard to do with cloud sql providers. Especially hard since by the time it's a problem you're probably at enough scale to make switching db/vendors hard or impossible.
by tiffanyh | 2025-05-14 23:20:25+00:00
I’ve been afraid of this as well.

Which is why I try to treat LLMs like a “calculator” to check my work.

I do things myself, then after I do it myself - ask an LLM to do the same.

That way, I’m still critical thinking and as a result - I actually get more benefit from the LLM since I can be more specific in having it help me fill in gaps.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-14 23:21:15+00:00
> Our eyes can see both just fine.

This gets to a gaming rant of mine: Our natural vision can handle these things because our eyes scan sections of the scene with constant adjustment (light-level, focus) while our brain is compositing it together into what feels like a single moment.

However certain effects in games (i.e. "HDR" and Depth of Field) instead reduce the fidelity of the experience. These features limp along only while our gaze is aimed at the exact spot the software expects. If you glance anywhere else around the scene, you instead percieve an unrealistically wrong coloration or blur that frustratingly persists no matter how much you squint. These problems will remain until gaze-tracking support becomes standard.

So ultimately these features reduce the realism of the experience. They make it less like being there and more like you're watching a second-hand movie recorded on flawed video-cameras. This distinction is even clearer if you consider cases where "film grain" is added.
by stephen_g | 2025-05-14 23:21:24+00:00
In my country (Australia) unclaimed money is surrendered to a department of the Federal Government and held in trust, and people can claim it back if they can prove it’s theirs (usually the bank has your name and tax file number so it’s not at all difficult).

So there’s no impediment here to closing accounts after a few years of inactivity, whatever the balance (if it’s positive) it just has to be sent there.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-14 23:22:02+00:00
For a critical article it lists quite a lot of pro-LLM analogies, which are false in my opinion.

The pocket calculator simplifies exactly one part of math and probably isn't even used that much by research mathematicians.

Chess programs are obviously forbidden in competitions. Should we forbid LLMs for programming? In line with the headline though, Magnus Carlsen said that he does not use chess programs that much and that they do make him dumber. His seconds of course use them in preparation for competitions.

LLMs destroy the essence of humanity: Free thought. We are fortunate that many people have come to the same conclusion and are fighting back.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-05-14 23:22:33+00:00
> Historical Analogies

I want to add another one to the author's list, which I think is even more relevant:

Writing.

Story goes, the Celtic druids relied on oral tradition and rejected writing, because they figured relying on writing was a crutch that made them weaker. They're gone now and, because of that choice, most of their culture with them.

Like Assembly to C to Python, as the author points out, LLMs allow us to move up the ladder of abstraction. There are obvious downsides to this, but I expect the evolution is inevitable.

The complaints about that evolution are also inevitable. We lose control, and expertise is less valued. We experts stand to lose a lot, especially if we clutch to the old ways. We're in the midst of a sea-change, we know what we're losing, but we're not sure what we're gaining.
by MarkSweep | 2025-05-14 23:22:40+00:00
> I haven't run into any these limitations in my own usage really, but I'm working at very small scales.

That’s the way a lot of the optimization problems work. If you have a sever or two, the efficiency is not such a big deal. Once you have a lot of servers, making Ruby a few percents more efficient reduces the number of servers you need and thus justifies paying people to optimize Ruby.
by thrance | 2025-05-14 23:23:18+00:00
They initially made Grok to be "maximally truth seeking" but it ended "woke" [1]. So instead they imbued it with right-wing cognitive dissonance. Here are the results, it now has about the same coherence in its ramblings as the median Republican voter, so mission accomplished?

For real though, X has shown absolutely no respect toward Europeans hate speech laws, as well as repeated willful offences. What are the legislators waiting for to ban this fascist propaganda tool?

[1] https://decrypt.co/317677/grok-woke-maga-furious-elon-musk-a...
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-05-14 23:24:09+00:00
"However… even this might still be too slow. Why understand every line of code deeply if you can just build and ship?"

Because the journey is the destination. Using AI extensively so far appears to be a path that mostly allows for a regression to the mean. Caring about what you're doing, being intentional, and having presence of mind is what leads to interesting outcomes, even if every step along the way isn't engaging or yielding the same output as telling an LLM to do it.

I suppose if you don't care about what you're doing, go ahead and get an LLM to do it. But if it isn't worth doing yourself... Why are you doing it?

Really, do you need those Chrome extensions?

Alternatively, though... If you do, but they aren't mission critical, maybe it's fine to have an LLM puke it out.

For something that really matters to you though, I'd recommend being deep in it and taking whatever time it takes.

Also the tutor approach seems great to me. I don't feel like it's making me dumber. Using LLMs to produce code seemed to make me lazy and dumber though, so I've largely backed off. I'll use it to scaffold narrow implementations, but that's it.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-05-14 23:24:28+00:00
Had to dive into MetaPost (and MetaFun) because of ConTeXt, and turns out it's the most closest thing to programming with prose language that I know. You can do pretty cool stuff without needing to dive in into complicated syntax - and do some pretty complicated stuff that at least would require a lot of mouse action with a graphics/vector editor.
by apitman | 2025-05-14 23:25:20+00:00
> What apps in Google's ecosystem have the "all files" permission?

The system itself[0] has capabililities that aren't provided to app developers. iOS is similar. Contrast this with Windows and GNU/Linux where AFAIK you can do pretty much everything the OS can given the proper permissions. Not sure about macOS.

[0]: https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9149304?hl=en&co...
by aurizon | 2025-05-14 23:25:39+00:00
Watch for Chinese coin fakers. They have a huge presence on Ebay with coins that look good, but some have huge errors, wrong years, wrong mint marks. They also do it with other old coins. They are into the $10-$50 coins. The Tungsten coins that are all over China now are so valuable that few buy on Ebay. Sonic chirp meters detect them. On youtube = fake gold china will give hits. One good method is a scintillation detector. Few old gold coins or Roman/Celtic coins have any nuclear isotopes from WW2 or the atmospheric test era. Geiger counters are usually not good enough. The modern fakes are easily spotted with the correct scintillation detector, which has a fair sized scintillation stone. The low cost ali-express radiation detectors are a lot less sensitive
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-05-14 23:25:59+00:00
> Story goes, the Celtic druids relied on oral tradition and rejected writing, because they figured relying on writing was a crutch that made them weaker. They're gone now and, because of that choice, most of their culture with them.

Can you help me complete this analogy? By failing to rely on "writing" (read: LLMs), what will fail to be recorded and therefore remembered? Is the idea that if knowledge isn't encompassed by an LLM, in the future it will be inaccessible to anyone?
by zahlman | 2025-05-14 23:26:01+00:00
> more would choose vegan than if it wasn't more expensive.

If?

Getting protein from vegan sources can already be done much more cheaply than getting it from steak, though the quality of the amino acid profile may be lower.

Getting protein from "the vegan option to a steak" - i.e. something marketed to be a direct substitute for a steak, with its vegan nature as an explicit selling point - is a different story.

I presume that, generally, people eat steak because they subjectively enjoy the experience of eating steak, and perhaps because they don't enjoy a carefully planned out plate of legumes and whole grains in the same way. But some seem to be much more extreme about this than others.

I personally eat meat (and dairy) regularly - but probably overall less than the local average, and usually not beef.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-14 23:26:48+00:00
You can still do that if you want to. Most people don't.

Back before I got a cell phone, I had many many phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone with a contacts list, I just stopped. Now I have my parents and my wife's phone numbers memorized, and that's it.

URLs are much the same. On most websites, if I can see the domain is the one that I expect to be on, that's all I really care about. There's a few pages that I interact with the URL directly, but it's a minority.
by karaterobot | 2025-05-14 23:26:48+00:00
> No one lamented the advent of calculators.

It's interesting that he lists a number of historical precedents, like the invention of the calculator, or the mechanization of labor in the industrial revolution, and explains how they are different than AI. With the exception of chess, I think he's wrong about the effects of all of them.

For instance, people did lament the invention of calculators, saying it would harm kids' ability to do mental arithmetic. And it did. People also said that GPS navigation would hurt people's ability to use a map, or create one in their heads. And I'm old enough to say: it absolutely did. People (in aggregate) are worse at those skills now.

Fortunately for us, we replaced those skills with technology that allowed us to do something analogous to them, but faster and more easily.

The question is: what are the second- and third-order effects of losing those skills, or not learning them in the first place? Is it crazy to think that not memorizing things because we can access printed (and digitized) material might have larger, unforeseen consequences on our brains, or our societies? Could mechanizing menial labor have induced some change in how we think, or have any long term effects on our bodies?

I think we're seeing—and will continue to see—that there are knock-on effects to technology that we can't predict beforehand. We think we're making a simple exchange of an old, difficult skill for a new, easy one, but we're actually causing a more far-reaching cascade of changes that nobody can warn us of in advance.

And, to me, the even scarier thing is that those of us who don't live through those changes will have no basis for comparison to know whether the trade-off was worth it.
by rvz | 2025-05-14 23:27:45+00:00
Exactly. The industry has encouraged mediocrity and in-efficiency with over-abstraction and abusing technologies in areas where it doesn't make sense for basic software.

This is what you have seen with the rise with some of the worst technologies (Javascript) being used in places where it shouldn't because some engineers want to keep using one language for everything.

Which is where you have basic desktop apps written using electron taking up 500MB each and use 1.2GB of memory. It doesn't scale well on a typical 8GB laptop on a user machine.

Not saying it should be in assembly either (which also doesn't make sense), but the fact that today's excuse is that a SWE is used to one language is really a poor excuse.

Nothing wrong with using high-level compiled languages to write native desktop apps that compile to an executable.
by pizlonator | 2025-05-14 23:28:13+00:00
It’s true that the Fil-C approach focuses on having a memory safe userland with no exceptions, which means no FFI to unsafe code (aside from the Fil-C runtime itself, which is just syscalls wrappers and a small handful of other things).

I have considered what FFI to native could look like, and have so far rejected it because it hurts the “no unsafe code” purism.

You’re right that this limits me to those OSes where the syscalls themselves are an adequate ABI. Linux isn’t the only such OS. It just happens to be the only OS Fil-C supports right now.
by NathanKP | 2025-05-14 23:28:24+00:00
Why wouldn't you be able to do identify the 10% that you need to fix?

AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain. I find it ironic that many people complain that they have a hard time identifying the hallucinations in LLM generated content, and then also complain that LLM's are making LLM users dumber.

The problem here is also the solution. LLM's make smarter people even smarter, because they get even better at thinking about the hard parts, while not wasting time thinking about the easy parts.

But people who don't want to think at all about what they are doing... well they do get dumber.
by BearOso | 2025-05-14 23:28:42+00:00
> However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.

I would say it's slightly worse. Wayland's intention was to explicitly prevent the implementation of those features in the name of security. To implement a protocol with enough flexibility to allow voice control of the general interface would necessitate walking back limitations that were heavily evangelized.

On the other hand, I'm utterly impressed how much more stable Wayland through Gnome and Plasma are over the last year or so, to the point I've switched to it as a primary desktop. They've also been adding protocols like xdg_toplevel_tag_v1 that were seemingly taboo until recently. I'm optimistic about this current batch of programmers. I think they'll manage to sort out accessibility pretty soon.
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 23:28:49+00:00
I struggled with this one for a while in the design, and didn't want to be hasty in making any decisions that lock us into a direction.

I definitely want to support sub-trajectories. In fact, I believe an absolutely killer feature for this system would be decomposing a large trajectory into smaller, more repeated sub-trajectories.

Jeff from trychroma.com often talks about agent engineering as being more like industrial engineering than software eng, and I'd agree.

One part of the original spec I wrote for this included a component I call the "Compactor", which would be a background agent process to modify and compress learned skills, is similar to Letta's sleep time agents:

https://docs.letta.com/guides/agents/sleep-time-agents

My fear with this is it goes against the `No hidden nondeterminism` design value I stated in the launch blog. There's plenty of things we can throw background agents at, from the Compactor to parameterizing trajectories, but that's risky territory from an observability and debugability stance.

For simplicity, I just decided treat every trajectory as distinct, even if portions of it are redundant. If a cached trajectory fails a check halfway through, the agent proceeding from there just makes its own partial trajectory. Still unclear if we call that a trajectory for the same named task, or if we annotated it as a task recovery.

We can always increase cache-hit rate over time, worst case is the agent just does redundant work which is the status quo anyway.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-14 23:29:11+00:00
Great read. Touched on Korea's aging population - urgency is a great driver of innovation. Thoughtful discussion of automation's impact on people and their perception of work. Reads like the shaky start of something that could be huge. "the kitchen is calm during a rush" - which restaurant can say that!

No matter how much gets automated we humans need autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Robots won't be accepted long term unless they are repairable by those who lose money when they stop; tweakable down to movements, ingredient quantities etc. so recipes can be made exactly as desired. Restaurateurs need to own the outcome, soup to nuts. The whole thing lives or dies on having extremely good product people at the robot vendors - people who truly care.

Bring on the vibe fooding :)
by firejake308 | 2025-05-14 23:29:26+00:00
> GPS. It’s so reliable that I’m fine being unable to navigate. I’ve never gotten in a situation where I wish I had learned to navigate without Google Maps beforehand.

I feel like the possibility of having a dying and phone and needing to get back home from a new place late at night is certainly possible, so I think it is worth having at least a basic knowledge of the major highways in your locality and which direction each one goes.
by buyx | 2025-05-14 23:29:33+00:00
I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.

I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-14 23:30:53+00:00
The exception is when you're sending emails to people who don't have the same background knowledge or assumptions as you do.

Imagine:

Write a coherent but succinct email to Ms Griffin, principal of the school where my 8yo son goes, explaining; - Quizlet good for short term recollection - no point memorising stuff if going to forget later - better to start using anki, and only memorize stuff where worth remembering forever
by NathanKP | 2025-05-14 23:30:55+00:00
This isn't a bad thing at all. It just means that AI utilization doesn't have quite the exponential impact that many marketers are trying to sell. And that's okay.

I personally think of AI tools as an incremental aid that enables me to focus more of my efforts on the really hard 10-20% of the problem, and get paid more to excel at doing what I do best already.
by zahlman | 2025-05-14 23:31:41+00:00
... Would it help you to know that I don't even use Rust (although I'm interested in picking it up), and in fact have complained on HN before about program performance and other features being invalidly attributed to "it's written in Rust"? Especially in the Python ecosystem, that being my primary programming language?

I'm not making anything like the argument you seem to think I am. I'm only making a pragmatic observation about what real-world coding is like, based on my own experience.
by tptacek | 2025-05-14 23:31:43+00:00
The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor).

Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is authoring files, linting them, compiling them, and iterating when it spots problems.

There's more to using LLMs well than this, but this is the high-order bit.