skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The AI arms race is going to destroy software engineering forever
The last few months have seen a massive shift in attention to LLMs obviously, and the AI arms race seems to have officially broken out of its research labs into the "real" world.

There has been tons of ink spilled on how this will affect and change the world in general, but before AI can do any of that it's going to cause a massive, relentless distraction for every software engineer currently employed, and every place that produces software products.

At first, AI adoption may look like a value add, with battle lines being drawn between the haves and the have not.

But with significant proliferation and deployment, it's likely that the building of black boxes that nobody truly understands with become the norm.

During the deployment phase, attention and resources will be diverted from software development teams doing coding to specialized consultants, who will not reveal their methods or maybe even their source code to maintain leverage over the competition.

This will inevitably lead to the discreditation of software engineers and software engineering itself. The software industry will experience a prolonged dark age where writing code will be scoffed at, bot maintainers will be scarce, and things may work but they will always be slightly wrong with no verifiable results that anyone can observe based on input.

Prompt engineers will be everywhere and paid something close to minimum wage once handwritten code is shunned.

Software shops will start to resemble their historical predecessor: the typing pool, and could become what was once considered "women's work" again.

The disturbing features of all of this pale in comparison to the end game scenario, because there likely be no way back for software engineering.

In this case the "haves" will have so much concentrated power in relatively few hands, that AI overlords will not be able to resist enslaving entire masses of people who will be powerless to stop them, as government control structures are infected with for profit private systems, which cannot be escaped.

Because content sources aka books will no longer be trusted, people will ignore them, making the maintenance and belief in legal systems obsolete, leading to anarchy, and reactionary govt controls implemented at all levels of society.

Individual emotional experiences will become muted or cease to exist. Words such as "fun","love" and "friendship" will fall out of use as they will no longer be experienced.

AI powers will eventually go to war with each other using AI itself to do the fighting, and the planet earth will be systematically destroyed leaving nothing but nuclear winter.

The end.
I like that you're thinking about the second order effects of this phrase. That said, I might be wrong, but it seems to me that your argument depends on taking the phrase at face value rather than core value.

I might describe the core value differently: know your audience and focus on their needs, not yours (showmanship, looking busy, ego, etc.). By showing respect for your audience/user, you're helping them be better and more effective. Reduced to a phrase, it means that the audience/user shows up knowing what they want (even if they think they don't), so don't make them suffer for it.

The advice is about interface design, which is principally transactional. It's not social policy so, you know, it works.

When it comes to Google, I think it's important to distinguish the Larry/Sergey/Eric era from the Sundar/Ruth Era.* Old Google was decidedly not evil. One might dislike some of their choices, but they weren't evil.

* Having been there during both, I find it hard to reconcile them as a single company. Changes that started in 2015 only became obvious to many Googlers in the past year or two. It's the late afternoon for them and the morning's hangover is wearing off.
Megabots provides State-of-the-art, production ready bots made mega-easy, so you don't have to build them from scratch
I'm soo excited for this. I thought it was years since they flew SN15 but it was only a year wow. They are developing at an unbelievable speed
Iraq's ancient treasures sand-blasted by climate change
I mean thats one dark way to look at hotel loyalty programs.

Another way to look at them is they are a gamified & transparent method of becoming "a regular" at a hotel/airline and generally get in return, commensurate better product/treatment/service, especially in cases of adverse events like short notice changes, delays, cancellations, etc.

Just like if you go to the same pub/restaurant in your hometown over & over, you'll get recognized as a regular.. and maybe on occasion get some free apps, access to a table when they might otherwise say they are full, and friendlier treatment. Except at a national/global scale across a brands properties/planes/airports/etc.

It is interesting to me that travel is one of the few remaining places where customer loyalty is in any way rewarded. And why shouldn't it be?
It’s funny how in Sweden it’s exactly the other way around: Coming back as a (self-employed) contractor is like hitting the jackpot, you typically double your pay. Companies here even have policies to prevent employees switching over to contracting (for the same company). You have to work for some other company for at least a year.
> The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us

The vast majority of liberal democracies are “forced birth” by your standard. Virtually none embrace a “rights”-based approach to abortion. Denmark will force women to give birth after the fetus has a face. Abortion is still technically illegal in the UK and Germany, though there is a defense under certain circumstances in the UK and it’s decriminalized in Germany.

In practice abortion isn’t about whether the state can force a woman to give birth. Almost every country recognizes that it can. In practice it’s about legislative compromise, and moral judgments as to stages of fetal development.
Kind of ignores income inequality and that any benefits are going to top income earners.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The article claims income-tested benefits have doubled since 1979 and that incomes for the beneficiaries has increased. At the same time, earned income as a share of the economy has decreased - those folks need the extra benefits because they are unable to earn it, not for lack of trying. Life is good at the top an is going sideways or down at the bottom, for a long time. The current situation has a lot to do with Reaganomics and tax policy aimed at 'trickle-down' economics or generally allowing people with money to invest to keep more of their earnings than people who earn money from labor.
I majored in computer engineering and skipped algorithms so it was pretty intense studying for a couple of months before I felt comfortable. Overall I really enjoyed learning it but I made it through so many successful years of software engineering without learning it that I don’t think it’s relevant to most people. Even now I write an O(n) algorithm to merge sorted lists and people comment on my PR just tell me to throw everything in an array and use the sort function.
Linux News #3 First Intervirw with Linus( 1992)
Okay, they didn't release elsewhere. The 8.253MM was from Canada.
Vanishingly few people did so. "Righteous Among the Nations" maybe isn't the best proxy, but the highest per capita rate is the Dutch, with 1 out of 700.[1]. More relevantly, Fry is one of only five Americans do designated.

Notably, Fry was forced to stop in 1941 by both US and French officials.

Check out Dara Horn's book People Love Dead Jews, there's a good discussion of this in there.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Righteous_Among_the_Na...
Why bother when the source has previously shown itself to be biased and unreliable? That's what happens when you pretend to be a journalist without applying journalistic standards: people will stop taking you seriously, and with good reason.

As an aside, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but it's interesting how many comments in this thread read like they were written by ESG Hound him(?)self.
That thing might help you with recoil, but it doesn’t see through walls and auto aim.
The European approach makes a lot of sense in other stable industries (Automobile/Steel). But in a fast moving quick changing (e.g. Tech) industries, all it does is prevent new risky companies from starting and making it harder for them to adapt. Maybe it is a good thing. But only time can tell that. So far to me it seems like the American approach is winning economy wise.
What I do is delete all but a few characters after “code” in the URL, then reload to get an empty playground. It’s annoying but it works.
Dairying supported prehistoric occupation of the highland Tibetan Plateau
> however, as multiplication and division of positive numbers always gives a positive result.

Depends on what you do with subnormals and underflow, etc.

> There is no grand convention that all RPG games follow here

Computer RPGs have shown 0/812 for dead for ... forever.

> The players all know that fractional HP damage exists

I think most players will be confused. And for what, to make it "safe" doing floating point operations in the wrong order? (I doubt it's still safe, overall).

> I am likewise serious about Smaug; there is no way that combat makes any sense if Smaug has a large number of hitpoints or that any weapon at all can damage him.

Common mechanisms: an armor class that makes it hard to hit; a fixed amount of damage reduction so that a needle does nothing; a lot of hitpoints.

> and sensible internal organs;

It gets excessively complicated and annoying. Battletech is already excessively complicated, and doesn't go quite as far as you're advocating for here.
Wrong. They’re not losing that much money because of theft.

They thought they could come into these neighborhoods and profit and it turns out they were wrong. They’re the bad guys, go look up how much these stores were not wanted by its residents.
Yeah almost everything is iterative.

WotC is more like SEGA in this scenario though because they only bought out D&D.
It's never been perf for me.

I still use my msi gx66 with a hd5870 (2010) for some on the go gaming-ish, every now and then. I was trying to use a Vaio P (shitty atom) in 2016 but even after sinking money in couldn't get it to live on battery (should try again with a USB-c pack & fixed barrel jack output cable!). I just bought another 5 year old Samsung Book 12 detachable.

If you ignore the fact that I buy repeats sometimes, be cause a) they're cheap (under $300) b) I like having one wherever I go rather than toting & re-setting up, I'm around 4 years. But it's because I want something different in form, some capability I have unserved. I went from ultraportable to affordable-value to gaming to detachable to bigger detachable with oled.

With steam play, it's kind of awesome that I never need to consider buying a gaming laptop ever again. With 5g latency really did drop a lot. A while ago I'd done the dance & setup an aws based gaming machine & that was fun, showed me that if I do want to play FPS and am physically far from home, I can set up a cloud box that will again have good latency.
but it would be nice if they spent a bit of time documenting themselves a bit more, same as you would want from any coworker at a big company. this isnt just marketing its good developer hygiene .
Right, and as a hotel/airline, if given the choice between upsetting two paying customers.. who do you upset: someone who has done 100 nights/flights with you this year, or the guy who got a last minute rate from an online travel site and picked you because you were $5 cheaper?

The 100 nights/flights guy is also probably a much lower touch customer as they are just in&out for work, and "know how things work" generally so doesn't have unreasonable expectations for what they have paid.
Fascinating, I knew my old man was not the first to do it, but who knew it was a tradition dating back so far.
i think your right, a modified cattle prod would probably outdo a taser
> Why would they double this person’s pay? This person no longer has a job and needs one!

Because he's contracting now. Contractors typically don't take jobs for salary level pay, let alone _less_ that salary level pay. The main reason we charge more is to cover costs for insurance, and all the other things a company would normally pay for — but it's also because we don't _need_ the job, _they_ need the job filled.
TL;DR America owes its success to a relatively young population with high immigration, flexible labour laws, deep capital markets, and a swift and efficient bankruptcy process. But sclerotic politics threatens to derail this progress, particularly given the threats of climate change and China. Please stay the course and don’t forget how you got so rich, basically.
A Firefox version please?
Poisoned Beauty
That attitude can work in the post WW II world when Africa/Asian countries were too new to even work out their government structure. When most companies start making things, all the European policies seem like a recipe for accepting a much lower standard of living.
Freedom (less government bureaucracy, regulation, and interference) is the major advantage America has over other nations. Politicians try to gain more power by scaring people, but the gov has a terrible track record of making promises it never keeps, but also never returning powers it has taken.
The Javascript issue never made sense to me. You are reading a non-free document to begin with, what difference does it make if it is running Javascript or not? If they wanna spy on you they can do that with HTML and CSS just as well. Even releasing the spying software under GPL wouldn't stop it from spying on you.

The party one should be angry about here is the browser, which provides little to no tools to show the user what is going on and provides no real means to stop it. This is quite a bit different from the early web days when every browser had a "Javascript off" and style sheet selector right in the main menu by default.

> Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago

Not far enough. Ever since the whole world moved to "software as a service" and your computer has become little more than a thin terminal to some Google/Facebook/whatever-service FSF started to feel quite out of touch. Sure, they tell you "don't do that", but while that isn't wrong, it's not exactly helpful either. Many service simply have to run on a computer that you don't own and we need rules to govern that. None of the Free Software licenses help here.

FSF never bothered to create any kind of licenses or best practices that deal with how those services should work. They are stuck in dealing with software freedom problems of the 90s, not the problems we face today. Luckily we do have the GDPR now, but the FSF had nothing to do with that and never provided anything similar.
I dont think that is accurate at all. Lawsuits often turn on quality docs specifically. A simple example would be be something like a memo that states a defective product can still be released to market that goes on to kill someone.
Another example would be a quality approved design document that shows infringement on competitor IP.

Most quality docs must be retained by law for the life of the company, even if they discontinue a product. So it isn't really judgement call from the legal department.
I don't disagree with you, certainly some "improvements" only have short-term positive effects. However, at least the A/B test was performed and data collected. Your assumption that it will eventually be "a massive negative" is pure speculation with no data behind it.
Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught, leak shows
Sometimes I want to use more common words but the right one to use just doesn't come, so I'm left using a less common word.

I find it odd that you're referring to yourself as "one".
To be fair to MPEG, they don't actually run the patent pools, they just make everyone promise to join one.

MPEG-LA is the patent pool that everyone was using and it was assumed that would be the case for H.265. HEVC Advance and Velos Media realized they could break this business structure by giving a few net-implementer companies (e.g. Samsung) a sweetheart deal on patent licensing if they moved their patents over to their pool. They paid for this by double-charging people who were already licensed through MPEG-LA for those patents.

Leonardo Chiariglione, co-founder of MPEG, tried to get ISO to change their patent policy to allow more scrutiny of patent ownership in standards. ISO responded by... denying Leonardo's petitions, cutting MPEG up into pieces, and pushing him out of the working group he built.

Funny thing is, MPEG actually knows royalty-free video encoding is a thing people want. They've tried building an ISO standard for that. Problem is, ISO's patent policy only allows removing patented technology from a standard if the technology is not licensable - not if the technology is too expensive. So their standardized royalty-free codecs[0] are not actually royalty-free and nobody uses them.

The underlying problem was pointed out by Leonardo on his blog: patent owners want to go back to the days of charging an arm and a leg for MPEG-2, and they are willing to suck the brains out of MPEG in order to do it, under the assumption that people were paying royalty fees for the ISO branding rather than for the technical superiority of the standard. MPEG is not the cause of this problem, they are a victim of it.

[0] Fun fact: Google outright just submitted VP8 to MPEG as a candidate for MPEG IVC, but they decided against using it in favor of building their own royalty-free standard.
One of the effects this has on me is that I will use booking.com to find places (amongst other tools), but book directly with the accommodation. Only if the accommodation doesn't do its own booking will I use booking.com to book (about once every twenty places).
That's interesting! I don't have much experience with Clickhouse, especially not in the last two years. I'll have to try this out myself. That's a pretty incredible if it can handle batching internally.
Not even remotely. Wages would not have stagnated with low unemployment numbers were employment based on supply and demand.

See also “Nobody wants to work”
I wish I could have found the writeup, it did a much better job explaining it than I did. Including the rounding thing obfuscated things; they had cases where the paper rounded to one or even two decimal points and that number wasn’t achievable with the denominators they had. To re-work my original example, they had real cases where 71 observations would have reported percentages of 57.1%, which couldn’t be achieved with any kind of rounding.
Because it’s only logical that if company realized it made a mistake it would be cheaper to just hire someone back for more pay who’s already ramped up? But you’re right that most management is too incompetent to realize this
Sure, as an outsider curious about getting involved, a high level summary is exactly what LLMs are good at.

Why the negativity?
”Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.”

The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net.

The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam and Cuba have significantly higher average life expectancy than that.
Korean characters "stack" on top of each other. I wonder if an array-oriented language like APL could be coaxed out of such a "dense representation."

Examples:

* ㅇ, 아, 안
* ㅇ, 오, 왜
This is purely cosmetic and doesn’t save you anything. Also, Cairo API (and most C APIs in general) already use <lib>_<class>_<method> naming scheme. E.g. cairo_svg_surface_create(), gtk_container_get_children().
The Explosion
SpaceX and Elon Musk have done an amazing job of advancing humans into space once again!
> Because as it turns out, the reason that dumping lots of cash into prime contractors doesn’t result in what the armed forces need is because prime contractors are cash management machines who occasionally delegate grubby work to subcontractors dependent on them.

This isn't entirely fair. The author fails to explain just why there are only five major defense contractors. Sure, there was Clinton pressuring for a "peace dividend" in the 90's after the FSU's collapse, but 25 years have passed. Why don't the subcontractors, working for the major defense contractors, work directly with the Pentagon? If the financing is so easy and risk-free, the contracts are published publicly, and the prime contractors such poor partners (making late payments etc.), then why work with the primes?

The DoD should engage in a lot of navel gazing to make its procurement contracts easier for smaller firms to navigate. The truth of the matter is, the Big Five aren't just cash-management firms; they employ armies of their own: divisions of regulatory experts and legal teams and people with the right certifications that require years of experience at larger firms and people whose job it is to produce the reams and reams of paperwork that the DoD demands. That's the value-add they're bringing. They speak the DoD language when talking to the DoD, engineering language when talking to subcontractors, and banker language when talking to Wall Street.

Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics and their ilk will cry all the way to the Wall Street Journal at any attempt to turn off the spigot. Fair enough. But in an era where production is too slow, how does closing the spigot fix the problem? We should make financing more difficult in an industry where it's too easy? How is that going to fix anything?

Fix the real problem which is the reams and reams of Pentagon red tape that the Big Five depend on for their competitive moat to keep the subcontractors from working with the Pentagon directly.
No, it's AV1 that uses (up to) 16-bit fields for image dimensions. HEIF grids, which is the AVIF feature that combines multiple AV1 images into one, have 32-bit fields for dimensions so are limited only by what the decoder is willing to allocate.
The worst part is they could design a system with 99.9999% false negative rate and still have a few leaks a year.

That we don’t have more leaks is really a good question.
I'd like to open the floor, because many of us are coding away at a game engine someplace.

What do you do, if you write a 2d physics library, and someone makes a popular game. How do you retro-actively acquire the licensing?

Prudent thing is I guess to take the time to get your IP in order before launch. But it's extra difficult for cash strapped solo indies ;)
Nothing I'm aware of has nailed the form-factor/ergonomics and quality of the controls. It's a solid unit and has the feel of a finished product. Alternatives are typically bare circuit boards or lack quality input.

It seems like Pimoroni spent time to get those aspects right, and so while there aren't that many games (yet?) - the good quality ones are a joy to play feel-wise, eg Square Bros (which comes installed on a new unit).

The SDK is well thought-out and simple, and has a unified API - micropython or c/c++.

They are apparently working on a successor that plugs into a TV or monitor via HDMI. IIRC it will use two RP2040's.

EDIT: Yes, two chips:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pimoroni-stick-pi-gaming-c...
Mlb.tv offers radio subscriptions to all teams for $3 a month. Sadly you can't pay for a version with no advertisements