skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At their current scores, LLMs will not replace software developers. They might automate away some of the mundane tasks, but that's about it. LLM also makes good developers more productive and bad developers less likely to ship. They generate lots of code; some of it is good, some of it is bad and lot of it is really bad.

Now this assumes that LLMs plateau around their current scores. While open models are catching up to closed ones (like Open AI), we are still to see a real jump in consciousness compared to GPT-4. That, and operating LLMs is too damn expensive. If you have explored bolt.new for a little while, you'll find out quick enough that a developer becomes cheaper as your code base gets larger.

The way I see it

1. LLM do not plateau and are fully capable of replacing software developers: There is nothing I can or most of us can do about this. Most people hate software developers and the process of software development itself. They'd be very happy to trade us in an instant. Pretty much all software developers are screwed in the next 3-4 years but it's only a matter of time before it hits any other desk field (management, design, finance, marketing, etc...). According to history, we get a world war (especially if these LLMs are open in the wild) and one can only hope he is safe.

2. LLMs plateau around current levels. They are very useful as a power booster but they can also produce lots of garbage (both in text and in code). There will be an adjustment time but software developers will still be needed. Probably in the next 2-3 years when everyone realizes the dead end, they'll stop pouring money into compute and business will be back as usual.

tl;dr: current tech is not enough to replace us. If tech becomes good enough to replace us, there is nothing that can be done about it.
If we're "lucky" (in an AI-optimist sense) we'll need the nuclear plants despite efficiency increases.
I hadn't guessed. Good for your employers I guess. Or are you somehow double-covered?
The question is how those jobs will pay. That seems like something that might not be able to demand a living wage.
So many great memories of playing Alley Cat in CGA on the old 286 Epson clone.
Are we setting up nuclear plants for AI data centers? If so, I see that as a win all around. We need to rely more on nuclear power, and I'll take whatever we can get to push us in that direction.
> Shall we therefore conclude that syntax highlighting is not useful, that developers who use syntax highlighting are just part of the IDE hype train, and that anecdotal reports of syntax highlighting being helpful are counterbalanced by anecdotal reports of $IDE having incorrect syntax highlighitng on $Esoteric_file_format?

Yes. We should conclude that syntax highlighting is not useful in languages that the syntax highlighter does not support. I think basically everyone would agree with this statement.

Similarly an llm that worked 100% of the time and could solve any problem would be pretty useful. (Or at least worked correctly as often as syntax highlighting in situations where it is actually used does)

However that's not the world we live in. Its a reasonable question to ask if llm is good enough yet where the productivity gain outweighs the productivity lost.
Schools love nothing more than wasting money on unnecessary trash they get sold by their distributors, choose your own reasons for why that is in spite of ever-loudening complaints of budget constraint. How else could not just one but multiple full length textbooks on Algebra 1 get written, published and distributed every year?
You can download the APK/IPA file from TikTok’s website, I suppose.

They’re just removing the app from the respective app store. The domain and its underlying IP address aren’t blocked.
Jevons paradox says as things get more efficient, usage goes up. In this case, even if AI data centers don't pan out, I think we'll still find use for the electricity they generate.
No, as the things using that power get better (newer models keep getting less garbagey) and cheaper (faster hardware and more efficient use of power), people will keep coming up with more things to use them for.
The Kardashev Scale isn't pseudoscience, but it is pseudo-psychohistory.
ConnectRPC is very cool, thanks for sharing. I would like to add 2 other alternatives that I like:

- dRPC (by Storj): https://drpc.io (also compatible with gRPC)

- Twirp (by Twitch): https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp (no gRPC compatibility)
Short term defense is learning about, and becoming an expert in, using LLMs in products.

Longer term defense doesn't exist. If Software Engineering is otherwise completely automated by LLMs, we're in AGI territory, and likely recursive self-improvement plays out (perhaps not AI-foom, by huge uptick in capability / intelligence per month / quarter).

In AGI territory, the economy, resource allocation, labor vs. capital all transition into a new regime. If problems that previously took hundreds of engineers working over multiple years can now be built autonomously within minutes, then there's no real way to predict the economic and social dynamics that result from that.
I don't want to argue with you about whether it's authoritarian, I just want to say "Nazi" is overblown and ridiculous in this context.

> "the right groups"

It's not about which groups, it's about how the groups are defined that makes the analogy so broken. Attacking in certain ways based on any nationality is worth a Nazi comparison, while attacking based on mundane choices is not in the same category.

> If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.

Does this describe what happened? What is the "one bad tool"? I hope you don't mean "authoritarianism" because that's a circular argument.
This is super interesting:
> sq aims to be safe by default. One way it achieves this is not by having good defaults, but by avoiding defaults when it is not absolutely clear that one option is and will remain much better than the alternatives. sq also avoids do-what-I-mean (DWIM) interfaces. At the beginning we feared that these design decisions would decrease usability. In practice, tab completion hides most of the additional typing, and being explicit appears to reduce confusion.
> It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code

They produce mostly working code, often with odd design decisions that the bot can't fully justify.

The difficult part of coding is cultivating a mental model of the problem + solution space. When you let an LLM write code for you, your mental model falls behind. You can read the new code closely, internalize it, double-check the docs, and keep your mental model up to date (which takes longer than you think), or you can forge ahead, confident that it all more or less looks right. The second option is easier, faster, and very tempting, and it is the reason why various studies have found that code written with LLM assistance introduces more bugs than code written without.

There are plenty of innovations that have made programming a little bit faster (autocomplete, garbage collection, what-have-you), but none of them were a silver bullet. LLMs aren't either. The essential complexity of the work hasn't changed, and a chat bot can't manage it for you. In my (admittedly limited) experience with code assistants, I've found that the faster you move with an LLM, the more time you have to spend debugging afterwards, and the more difficult that process becomes.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you feel there should be some higher, ideal-based reason for the ban. But this is happening in the anarchic environment of international relations. The USA’s goal is to reduce the potential for its citizens to be engaged by enemy propaganda. Yes, they are more worried about the influence of Chinese propaganda than domestic propaganda, why shouldn’t they be? This isn’t about ideals, it’s about power. And probably also lots of lobbying from X and Meta.
TikTok said it wasn't exfiltrating data and turned out to be lying.

I don't really understand the argument that this is a First Amendment issue. TikTok was asked to protect its users from CCP surveillance. It didn't. Now the US is forcing it to cut ties with the CCP.

TikTok can continue to operate if it complies. Its owners and users have lost no freedom to speak either way.
Yes. $30k in compliance costs from a pissed off ex-employee and malicious gdpr requests.
Are lambdas guaranteed to be warm on the first request to serve in single digit milliseconds?
Sorry, what am I missing here? Your link talks about average weight and BMI increasing, not muscle mass. You couldn't safely draw a conclusion about muscle mass from BMI.
Have only watched 2 minutes, but this looks like actual evidence that a) harmful sites may exist, and b) people may use them and be worse of from their access to them. I'm not sure it will convince me banning access to information is a good idea, but really appreciate you sharing it, as it's the most promising evidence provided yet.
No, not really. AWS getting more power and space efficient chips didn't reduce total power demand, they just added more cores.

Even if the data centers didn't keep up with available capacity, energy demanding industry move to and expand with sources of power, like aluminum production.
I would argue that pretty much any mechanical watch isn't about quality as a timepiece these days. Quartz watches work really well for keeping the time, honestly better than any mechanical watch ever will. But that's ok - I still love my mechanical watches out of sheer appreciation for the craftsmanship and engineering that goes into such things. They have their own appeal.
> His solution was to remove administrative detections

And replace them with what? There is no easy way to handle that scenario that doesn't create perverse incentives if you're managing police by statistics (and getting away from that is not something you simply do). If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. If you allow the police to just write them off without recording any details, they'll slip serious crimes through the same process. Frankly, administrative detections do "solve" the "crime" in every meaningful sense - the problem is treating "percentage of crimes solved" as a meaningful statistic in the first place, and shocked-pikachu-facing when you tell the police to solve a higher percentage of crimes and they respond by allocating more resources to crimes that are easier to solve.
What does it mean to be a software engineer? You know the syntax, standard library, and common third party libraries of your domain. You know the runtime, and the orchestration around multiple instances of your runtime. You know how to communicate between these instances and with third-party runtimes like databases and REST APIs.

A large model knows all of this as well. We already rely on generative language model conversations to fill in the knowledge gaps that Googling for documentation (or “how do I do X?” stackoverflow answers) filled.

What’s harder is debugging. A lot of debugging is guesswork and action taking, note-taking, and brain-storming for possible ideas as to why X crashes on Y input.

Bugs that boil down to isolating a component and narrowing down what’s not working are hard. Being able to debug them could be the moat that will protect us SWEs from redundancy. Alternatively, pioneering all the new ways of getting reproducible builds and reproducible environments will be the route to eliminating this class of bug entirely, or at least being able to confidently say that some bug was probably due to bad memory, bad power supplies, or bad luck.
No he couldn’t have not signed it because that would mean aid was not passed. I literally spelled it out for you.

America and any citizen can want a dictatorship. That doesn’t mean it was part of the founding principles. That’s a logical fallacy you’re making.
Ah, you’re totally right; I badly misstated that. I’ll update it tomorrow accordingly. Thank you for the correction. Your last comment before the edit is one part of what I was trying to get at; the other was that Drop itself must uphold the relevant constraints in its own operation. Like I said, great clarification/ correction and I’ll be glad to fix it!
Part of the problem, though, is that winners of the popularity contest get more support from the rest of the ecosystem, which doesn't take that long to turn into a moat.
> efficiency

State of the art for both gzipped json and protobufs is a few GB/s. Details matter (big strings, arrays, and binary data will push protos to 2x-10x faster in typical cases), but it's not the kind of landslide victory you'd get from a proper binary protocol. There isn't much need to feel like you're missing out.
Lossy doesn't necessarily imply that it is non-deterministic, just irreversible.
That's how https://github.com/KusionStack/karpor did it. It has a resource-syncer component to synchronize resources in real time to Elasticsearch, and then allows users to search for K8S resources through SQL and natural language through a search bar on a web UI.

In fact, recently it is preparing to integrate Cyphernetes as a new search method. I believe this will be a new start!
My extended family has money and I expect they’ll have to pay for my family for a few years until I can reskill as a carpenter. I don’t expect to be doing software again in the future, I’m fairly mediocre at coding.
FYI your website shows me a static image on iOS 18.2 Safari. Strangely, the progress bar still appears to “loop,” but the bird isn’t moving at all.

Turning content blockers off does not make a difference.
The DNA strand is a double helix, but it also “supercoils”. Imagine a rope thats stretched taught. Even the straight rope has twisted braids. Thats akin to the DNA double helix. Then imagine twisting the rope until it starts to bunch and twist up on itself. That’s the supercoil. Of course the superstructure of DNA even more complex and dynamic than that
In general, the internet has shifted away from this "laissez-faire" line of thinking.

A site that helps people live with these disorders means more people dealing with negative effects of eating disorders like hair loss, ruined teeth, suicide/mental illness, and cardiovascular damage. These effects in turn increase healthcare costs for the government via the NHS.

Bombarding anyone with these disorders with information to get better is far better for society. If people can't change, then this strategy is better for the people who can, who would otherwise get stuck in a community supportive of unhealthy behavior.

You can't call it unequivocally good or bad, but the doctor's treating the disorder can. The government bean counters have. The studies that these groups produce do (simple search brings up dozens). The politicians fighting for these bills have and will call it good.

(I liked the more free internet, but it doesn't exist anymore and here we are.)
Part of the issue is parents are picky about who watches their kids.

I’m religious. I want my kids to have a religious daycare.

A friend of mine isn’t religious, but is an immigrant and wants her kids watched after by someone who can teach the kid their parent’s language.

Childcare is Gemeinschaft, not Gesellschaft.
No, I understand the chilling effect argument perfectly. Chilling effects are sometimes very real, but more often are invoked as pure hypotheticals that are intentionally structured to be unfalsifiable. They're also often used in places where there's no actual evidence to support such an effect.

Your claim and subsequent lack of concrete examples are a prime demonstration of this. Many of the sources you cited in your last comment contained more rhetoric than logic, so it's somewhat ironic that you're trying to claim to be a rational person whilst being swayed by such arguments.
Not in your case as a business but for majority of people being banned on facebook and other social media could be a blessing in disguise.
If you don't mind me asking, what type of major results do you see? Reduced fat percentage? Faster muscle gain?
> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.

What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.
In my experience it's pretty bad at it. The replacements have really bad repeating patterns/textures that aren't even part of the image. 6-year-old Photoshop content-aware fill was so much better on 10-year-old hardware.
The retailer has to pay a lot in shipping and stocking that a digital storefront doesn't. More importantly, the retailer doesn't prevent me from buying it directly for $1 or $2.
> LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior)... and even more important traits.

I'm totally conflicted on the future of computing careers considering LLM impact, but I've worked at a few places and on more than a few projects where few/none of these are met, and I know I'm far from the only one.

I'd wager a large portion of jobs are like this. Majority of roles aren't working on some well-groomed Google project.

Most places aren't writing exquisite examples of a canonically "well-authored" codebase; they're gluing together enterprise CRUD slop to transform data and put it in some other database.

LLMs are often quite good at that. It's impossible to ignore that reality.
Peaceful protest that power doesn't like is a riot
Yes, but then it is no longer MLE, but rather MAP: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aarti/Class/10701_Spring23/Lecs/Lect....
Sorry what I meant was I don't depend on any dynamic discovery systems like inspecting ARP tables.
OpenModelica is teetering on the edge of something finally being good enough to replace Simulink without paying $20k+ per user per year.

It is, perhaps, only a few toolboxes away (Simulink Test, Simulink Coverage, Simulink Coder).
Yeah, I have better things to do with my life.

You're also making the (bad) bet that the disaster will be small enough to not wipe out the company but big enough that management notices.
This back and forth is so tiring.

I have built web services used by many Fortune 100 companies, built and maintained and operated them for many years.

But I'm not doing that anymore. Now I'm working on my own, building lots of prototypes and proof-of-concepts. For that I've founding LLMs to be extremely helpful and time-saving. Who the hell cares if it's not maintainable for years? I'll likely be throwing it out anyway. The point is not to build a maintainable system, it's to see if the system is worth maintaining at all.

Are there software engineers who will not find LLMs helpful? Absolutely. Are there software engineers who will find LLMs extremely helpful? Absolutely.

Both can exist at the same time.
> The naming system is not idiomatic Go.

Underscores are commonly used in names in generated code to avoid conflicts (this applies to all sorts of codegen, not just protobuf). You can easily have both Foo and FooBuilder messages in your protobuf. See also generated enum consts since day one of protobuf-gen-go.
They could license the test suite from SQLite (and a lot of tests are open sourced): https://www.sqlite.org/prosupport.html#th3
> The new Siri is awful. I don't know the old Siri very well, but it's just not good.

Yeah, don't buy into Apple's marketing, Siri is still crap. The only interesting thing that it gained is that it will usually work if you say "no actually I want that on Wednesday."
Here is a video of the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU
When it's "the largest community of any language by far" - which is true enough - having "some good stuff" is a very low bar. The dev culture around JS and Node is notorious for cranking out poorly written libraries.

And yes, you can find 10+ packages to do pretty much anything... of which 8 are abandoned and no longer work on up-to-date Node versions or depend on other packages with known vulnerabilities.
Some people certainly are scanning for them:

https://buckets.grayhatwarfare.com/
Working memory size, processing speed, fluid intelligence (novel problem solving / creativity), and crystallized intelligence (knowledge), are are all different components of intelligence that are pairwise not perfectly correlated.

Some person A can solve problem X in 1 minute and problem Y in 1 hour, while some person B can solve both in 10 minutes, even with the same crystalized intelligence.
I fundamentally disagree. Or atleast, LLMs are a development tool that will fit right in with LSPs, databases, and any other piece of infrastructure. A tool that you learn to apply where possible, but those with wisdom will use better tools to solve more precise problems.

LLMs can't reason, and they never will be able to. Don't buy into the AI hype wagon it's just a bunch of grifters selling a future that will never happen.

What LLMs do Is accelerate the speed for your wisdom. If you know how to make a full-stack application already, it can turn a 4 hour job into a 1 hour job yes. But if you didn't know how to make one in the first place, the LLM will get you 80% of the way there but that last 20% will be impossible for you because you lack the skill to implement the actual work.

That's not going away and anybody who thinks it is is living in a fantasy land that stops us from focusing on real problems that could actually put the LLMs to use in their proper context and setting
I think the provider's concern is that a) it will become a burden on the system if this usage becomes widespread, and b) it encourages people to engage in risky behavior in order to have their image captured on one of these cameras.

Both of these are valid arguments, which you seem to discount out of hand, as if the provider's concerns are inherently invalid.

Let me flip the question: should anyone who captures an image of you in a public setting be free to monetize your likeness? If you are arguing that the provider's concerns and wishes are irrelevant, would that not also apply to every person who leaves the privacy of their own homes? That they, too, would have absolutely no say in how their likeness in public settings is used?

I feel like we've already established a precedent that yes, you should have some say in how your likeness is used, even when it's captured in settings where you are freely putting it on display in public.

Why does this not apply to other resources that are just as freely given?
This is more or less my take. I came in on Web 1.0 when "real" programmers were coding in C++ and I was mucking around with Perl and PHP.

This just seems like just the next level of abstraction. I don't forsee a "traders all disappeared" situation like the top comment, because at the end of the day someone needs to know WHAT they want to build.

So yes, less junior developers and development looking more like management/architecting. A lot more reliance on deeply knowledgable folks to debug the spaghetti hell. But also a lot more designers that are suddenly Very Successful Developers. A lot more product people that super-charge things. A lot more very fast startups run by some shmoes with unfundable but ultimately visionary ideas.

At least, that's my best case scenario. Otherwise: SkyNet.
https://archive.md/6zmJO
In another language, much of what you go to npm for would be in the standard library.