skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s simple, as soon as it can write code faster than you can read it you can’t trust it anymore. Because you can’t verify it: Trusting trust.

If it keeps you busy reading code, if it keeps all of us busy consuming its output. That is how so will conquer us. Drowning us in personal highly engaging content.

Stop using llms, if they can solve your problem than your problem is not worth solving.
Yes, you are totally correct, but I believe this term is omitted from the cross-entropy loss function that is used in machine learning? Because it is a constant which does not contribute to the optimization.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The author suggests the opposite, at least for McDonald's - the employees do care and are attentive to the needs of the people in the restaurant, and that's part of why the community springs up there. I'd expect McDonald's corporate policy is to hustle people along, and it's inattentiveness to that policy that enables the public square, not inattentiveness to the people in the square.
If you drove with a very very bad driver that crashes every 50k miles (average is every 500k miles), you would have exactly the same feeling and you would also be tempted to take a nap.
> That's not an assumption that I am personally making. That's what experts in the field believe.

People invested in something believe that throwing money at it will make it better? Color me shocked.

"eat meat, says the butcher"

The rest of your answer amount to optimistic assumptions that yes, AI future is rosy, based on nothing but a desire that it will, because of course it will.
His little bike helmet is adorable
Your chronology does not fit.
LLMs are great for simple, common, boring things.

As soon as you have something less common, it will give you widely incorrect garbage that does not make any sense. Even worse, it APPEARS correct, but it won’t work or will do something else completely.

And I use 4o and o1 every day. Mostly for boilerplate and boring stuff.

I have colleagues that submit ChatGPT generated code and I’ll immediately recognize it because it is just very bad. The colleague would have tested it, so the code does work, but it is always bad, weird or otherwise unusual. Functional, but not nice.

ChatGPT can give very complicated solutions to things that can be solved with a one-liner.
Solution is for NVIDIA to buy the CAD company, then everything is legal.
Kling AI Studio
Always go to the funeral!

It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.
I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had.
Let's Encrypt 2024 Annual Report [pdf]
yes, the long tail of difficult event is exponentially more difficult to handle. That's why I said above that people "feel" it is ready but it is nowhere to be even close to ready.

The average crash rate for human is one every 500k miles.
It’s also a matter of regret minimization.

9+ times out of 10 when I’m on the fence about going to a major life event and go, I’m glad I did. Can’t think of the last thing I regretted going to.

I’ve certainly missed some like graduations I regret not making it to.

Funerals are towards the top of the list of big life events and I’ve never regretted one.
> Not parent poster, but I imagine it will be a bit like the horror stories of companies (ab)using spreadsheets in lieu of a proper program or database: They will use an LLM to get half-working stuff "for free" and consider it a bargain, especially if the detectable failures can be spot-fixed by an intern doing data-entry.

When I read things like this I really wonder if half of the people on HackerNews have ever held a job in software development (or a job at all to be fair).

None of what you describe is even remotely close to reality.

Stuff that half works gets you fully fired by the client.
The critical objective either of these approaches is aimed at achieving is helping you _think deeply_ about the problem; how that is best done largely depends on the software engineer.

I feel design docs are a way to ensure that you indeed think through a problem as much as they are a tool for peer review. If you wen't through a fairly standard educational system, it's not unfamiliar to use writing as a way of thinking more deeply about a problem and communicating those thoughts with others (namely your teacher) -- a design doc is no different. This can fail when design docs are written as templated box-ticking exercises and address more superficial technical questions than the core problem of course; it actually needs to address the problem and that is very contextual in my experience.

However some folks are just better at solving problems with a more hands-on approach, in which case throwaway code may be more effective. If that is you then go for it, though its likely you'd need to still need to write _something_ to either document changes or communicate your decisions/trade-offs with the rest of your team.

Fundamentally just do what allows you to solve problems best and take into consideration how to best work with your team. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to _thinking_ and broadly no-one cares how you work (I believe, I mean I certainly don't) if you're efficient, communicate well and get the job done to a high standard.
> Also JS now has BigInt types and the JSON decoder can be told to use them.

The parser needs to know when to parse as BigInt vs String.
Subway is also an optimization in franchise virality and typically doesn't own its own real estate.

I.e. they will let you open a Subway franchise today and me another one across the street tomorrow.
This is a real thing. LLMs are tools, not humans. They truly do bring interesting, bigger problems.

Have people seen some of the recent software being churned out? Hint, it's not all GenAI bubblespit. A lot of it is killer, legitimately good stuff.
A couple of years ago, I lived in an apartment and made a doorbell repurposed from an Amazon Dash button. Basically I have a daemon that sends a message each time a button press is detected to my homebrew mqtt server.

Then I have a bash script that runs on the raspberry pi board that has a speaker installed, something of this sort to play the doorbell chime:

while [ true ]; do
mosquitto_sub --exit-after-first-message /my-topic
play_wav my-file.wav
done

One day, when I was out and about, I got a call from my neighbor saying the doorbell was making noise non-stop and bothering him. Turns out the mqtt server crashed, the mosquitto_sub command exits right away... We had a good laugh about it as we are both software engineers.
> Technically I am already there, just trying to find the courage to quit my current (and last) job.

Given all the people who seem to be making you miserable at work, and how much you seem to hate the job overall, what's keeping you from just walking out the door tomorrow and never returning?
What makes you think that viewers wouldn't be watching AI generated content? Considering the possibilities of fake videos, I'm sure that it can be very engaging. And the costs are zero.
I don't think these consequences are unintended.
Was just there last week frantically trying to find the display as the museum was just shutting down ;)
This is an interesting read, I kind of feel like the author is capturing something interesting about what Mickey D's has become in the last decade or two, but also laying it on a little too thick with the "what does it all mean for America". They're a franchise and huge corporation that keeps a lot of storefronts clean and open, employs a lot of people in thankless low-paying jobs, and puts out pretty middling food that I swear was so much better back in the 90s.

I'll share a quick personal story of my relationship with the restaurant. About 15 years ago I was struggling to find any jobs after college, my bank account was bone dry, and I felt fat from my habit of eating too much fast food. I went to a McDonald's and got some 20-piece chicken mcnugget special (I think it was less than $5). I ate one piece and suddenly felt overwhelmed at all these thoughts and threw the rest of it out. I felt like I was at the bottom. I didn't eat at a McDonald's or any other fast food for another 5 years, lost a bunch of weight and got my career moving. On the rare occasion I go there anymore (usually because someone else wants to go), I feel like I'm eating bland nothing food and some deeper part of me feels sick.
> This is ego speaking.

It absolutely isn't. I have yet to find an area where LLM-generated code solves the kinds of problems I work on more reliably, effectively, of efficiently than I do.

I'm also not interested in spending my mental energy on code reviews for an uncomphrehending token-prediction golem, let alone finding or fixing bugs in the code it blindly generates. That's a waste of my time and a special kind of personal hell.
Yupp, been saying the same. I think the Ruby Team did the right thing to focus on performance for Ruby 3.
That is precisely what would happen if there was infinite competition for job openings.
> is a ultimately an unmaintainable

Does it need to be maintainable, if we can re-generate apps on the go with some sort of automated testing mechanism? I'm still on the fence with the LLM-generated apps debacle, but since I started forcing Cursor on myself, i'm writing significantly less code (75% less?) on my day-to-day job.
Or someone paid someone $5 and got thousands of stars
I call them the four pigs at the trough:

-insurance companies

-doctors and hospitals

-drug and device and medical supplies companies

-trial lawyers

Each of these four pigs has any major component to the exorbitant cost in US healthcare.

And just like this particular article, one of them would just point at one of the other three or all the other three to blame when questioned.

Insurance companies have gigantic management structures, because insurance companies can't show high profits.

So the sociopath MBAs flooded into their management structure to suck up the excess revenue as bonuses.
> Reduce AI GPU Infrastructure Bills by 50%

Ok so how does #2 help me do this?
In the early days of UEFI being on PCs, I had to coach a TON of IT admins on the changes that were happening. Lots of them assumed that if you just dunked a drive image onto a machine, it would Just Work:tm: without having to add anything into the boot menu or other such things.

Watching Norton Ghost from 2002 run on a brand new Skylake laptop was something else. Ghost still doesn't support EFI systems properly, but EFI systems became a lot less hardass about their boot menus after a while.
The short answer is that it appeals to managers who are not themselves developers and believe that software can be reproduced through a factory process, like other supply chain goods. Scrum also produces lots of metrics and artifacts which these managers, lacking an understanding of code, use to judge progress and product performance.

Because scrum aligns with the way managers think and produces output they like, it gets ordered into existence. It doesn't align with developer methods nor produce what devs want (working code), so therein lies the rub.
The idea you could make value judgements about a person based on the operating system on their computer was obviously crazy, even at the time. That said, I think some people genuinely believed Microsoft was evil and people who used/bought their software were irresponsible. A bit like the way environmentalists might look at someone who drives a 6 litre V8 around the suburbs I guess. I personally find it easier to understand the environmentalist and never could get too worked up about "M$ WinBl0wz" but I am pretty sure there were people who felt it was their moral duty to boycott interaction with Microsoft users. However crazy that sounds when written down.
> I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear

How does that make any sense? How is AI, and especially GenAI, something that is by definition fallible, better in ANY way than current frameworks that allow you to write CRUD applications deterministically with basically one line of code per endpoint (if that)?
I wouldn't say it ever had a great reputation, just that it lost what it had. Akin to how it's commonly considered unacceptable to let middle aged kids roam as much as they used to. It's not that letting a toddler roam around as far as they wanted was always viewed perfectly, just that the bar for what's considered taboo moved farther up the line.
>While they could, I'm pretty sure that's already illegal, probably in multiple ways

Heh, welcome to the internet where the perpetrator and the beneficiary can be in different jurisdictions that make enforcement on the original bad actors impossible.

For example, have a friend in China upload something terrible to a UK site and then 'drop the dime' to a regular in the UK. The UK state can easily come after you and find it nearly impossible to go after the international actor.
> In 1975, Paul Allen flew out to Albuquerque to demonstrate the BASIC interpreter that he and Bill Gates had written for the Altair microcomputer. Because neither of them had a working Altair, Allen and Gates tested their interpreter using an emulator that they wrote and ran on Harvard’s computer system. The emulator was based on nothing more than the published specifications for the Intel 8080 processor. When Allen finally ran their interpreter on a real Altair—in front of the person he and Gates hoped would buy their software—he had no idea if it would work. But it did.

So, the real unsung heroes here are the Intel engineers who wrote a spec that was so exact that software running on an emulator written based just on the spec would also run without a hitch on the actual hardware?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...

When iOS let users opt out of tracking 96% opted out. If people don't care about being spied on then why do so many opt out?
Zero chance it will be enforced like this.

The UK has lots of regulatory bodies and they all work in broadly the same way. Provided you do the bare minimum to comply with the rules as defined in plain English by the regulator, you won't either be fined or personally liable. It's only companies that either repeatedly or maliciously fail to put basic measures in place that end up being prosecuted.

If someone starts maliciously uploading CSAM and reporting you, provided you can demonstrate you're taking whatever measures are recommended by Ofcom for the risk level of your business (e.g. deleting reported threads and reporting to police), you'll be absolutely fine. If anything, the regulators will likely prove to be quite toothless.
Ah, I didn't know that. I try to avoid video watching myself, especially shorts/tiktok-style content. My wife, on the other hand, primarily uses her phone for that stuff, so my gut tells me you're right.
Nicely said.

> AI cannot replace people; AI augments people.

Here’s where we slightly disagree. If AI augments people (100% does) it makes those people more productive (from my personal experience I am ballparking currently I am 40-45% more productive) and hence some people will get replaced. Plausibly in high-growth companies we’ll just all be more productive and will crank out 40-45% more products/features/… but in other places me being 40-45% more productive may mean other people might not be needed (think every fixed-price government contract - this is 100’s of billions of dollar market…)
The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.

If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.

On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.

Which brings us back to the fundamental point here: the people who would need to implement the solution have no incentive model in place to motivate them to do so.
Canadian Eyecare Firm Care1 Exposes 2.2TB of Patient Records
I was wondering which cloud this was and from the screenshot, yep AWS S3. Especially these days you have to work hard to fail like this. I'm guessing this deployment had been rotting for years.
Thanks, that's the plan. To be precise - - I thought about getting the opener+battery from Overhead and ratgo/konnected.

Since you mention those two manufacturers specifically -- do you know if there's something that disqualifies the Overhead company's one? One downside that I could think of is that I'd be vendor-locked in for parts when it croaks.
> what message can you want to send to a dead person

you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist"

so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
OSS Delta support deletion vectors. The problem is that the OSS Deltalake (based on Delta-rs) python library does not and this prevents engines like DuckDB and Polars from writing to suck tables. I'm pretty sure DV is in OSS since 3.1
> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output

This. Programming will become easier for everyone.
But the emergent effect will be that senior engineers become more valuable, juniors much less.

Why? It's an idea multiplier. 10x of near-zero is still almost zero. And 10x of someone who's a 10 already - they never need to interact with a junior engineer again.

> until eventually LLMs will become so good, that senior people won't be needed any more.

Who will write the prompts? How do you measure the success? Who will plan the market strategy? Humans are needed in the loop by definition as we build software to achieve human goals. We'll just need significantly fewer people to achieve them.
I don't want legislators to write new legislation, I want them to repeal existing legislation. I want 535 guys like Thomas Massie and Ron Paul but they fail your criteria.
As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.
As long as at least one option is exactly what you asked for throwing variations at you that don't conform to 100% of your prompt seems like it could be useful if it gives the model leeway to improve the output in other aspects.
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> In order to make that fix, we needed to access the Kubernetes control plane – which we could not do due to the increased load to the Kubernetes API servers.

Something that I wish all databases and API servers would do, and that few actually do in practice, is to allocate a certain amount of headroom (memory and CPU) to "break glass in case of emergency" sessions. Have an interrupt fired periodically that listens exclusively on a port that will only be used for emergency instructions (but uses equal security measures to production, and is only visible internally). Ensure that it can allocate against a preallocated block of memory; allow it to schedule higher-priority threads. A small concession to make in the usual course of business, but when it's useful it's vital.
I don't know if I'd go to the funerals of all 150 people in my set. Most of them are acquaintances rather than friends or family.

I go to much fewer than 2 funerals per year. But now that I'm 55 it will likely start picking up.
I life has to completely restart on this planet, there probably won't be time for things as complex as us to evolve again before the sun turns into a red giant.
It's ridiculous to say that a bad law is better than no law at all. If the law has massive collateral damage and little-to-no demonstrated benefit then it's just a bad law and should never have been made.

It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.

As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.
That's sort of where I've landed too. Protobufs would seem to fit the problem area well, but in practice the space between "big-system non-performance-sensitive data transfer metaformat"[1] and "super-performance-sensitive custom binary parser"[2] is... actually really small.

There are just very few spots that actually "need" protobuf at a level of urgency that would justify walking away from self-describing text formats (which is a big, big disadvantage for binary formats!).

[1] Something very well served by JSON

[2] Network routing, stateful packet inspection, on-the-fly transcoding. Stuff that you'd never think to use a "standard format" for.
> It's not that letting a toddler roam around as far as they wanted was always viewed perfectly, just that the bar for what's considered taboo moved farther up the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Yeah, it isn't elitism that makes my stomach feel horrible when I eat fast food.
> Ten years ago no one was ever going to drive again because self-driving cars were imminent

Right.. but self driving cars are here. And if you've taken Waymo anywhere it's pretty amazing.

Of course just because the technology is available doesn't mean distribution is solved. The production of corn has been technically solved for a long time, but doesn't mean starvation was eliminated.
Chris Arnade, who is the author of the article, has been writing about some of these topics for almost a decade now. He is worth checking out.
LLMs are not 100% correct 100% of the time. LLMs are subjective. Code should work 100% of the time, be readable, and objective.

We also already have "easier ways of writing software" - website builders, open source libraries, StackOverflow answers, etc.

Software builds on itself. It's already faster to copy and paste someone's GitHub repo of their snake game than to ask an LLM to build a snake game for you. Software problems will continue to get more challenging as we create more complex software with unsolved answers.

If anything, software engineers will be more and more valuable in the future (just as the past few decades have shown how software engineers have become increasingly more valuable). Those that code with LLMs won't be able to retain their jobs solving the harder problems of tomorrow.
Storing such data structure would be binding to a single access pattern, I agree. But a query to retrieve such structure is simply convoluted for no reason to the point of many people resorting to hacks like json_agg.
I've been building something in a similar space over at https://muted.io/. It's been just about paying out my rent and food in the past year.

I've been pretty impressed at Lightnote and how its executed and actually tried to reach out to the creator a couple of times for potential collaborations. Not sure if my messages made it through.