skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0]

With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague.

So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance.

So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself?

In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse than just laziness, it's fear of getting fired too, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further.

And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline.

[0] GPT-4.5
True. Taking a helicopter is way more impressive. The Everest was climbed in 1953 and the first helicopter to go there was in 2005. It is way harder thing to do.
If you want to solve a serious generational problem you should look into dry eye syndrome.
Sounds like 'Daddyy! Do this for mee!' level.

Otherwise I recall an old saying: 'Robots will take the job of engineers as soon as being able to figure out and make what the client needs, not what the client asks. I think we are safe'. Along this, I hope AI becomes a good tool, subordinate, or maximum a colleague. But not a father figure for big infants.
"if they want" and "lazy" are the load-bearing phrases in your response. If we take them at face value, then it follows that:

1) There are no idiots who want to do better than AI, and/or

2) All idiots are lazy idiots.

The reason we're even discussing LLMs so much in the first place, is AI can and does things better than "idiots"; hell, it does things better than most people, period. Not everything in every context, but a lot of things in a lot of contexts.

Like run-of-the-mill short-form writing, for example. Letters, notices, copywriting, etc. And yes, it even codes better than general population.
It's amazing how Elon's destroying American institutions in broad daylight and no one can or will stop him.
Are you saying that black holes don't share any information? xD
That's one way of looking at it. To me this UI seems like both a useful tool and an advertisement.

There's another way this could have gone. DuckDB Labs might have published the extension as providing official HTTP API for all to use. Then simultaneously MotherDuck would announce support for it in their UI. Now with access to any and all databases whether in-browser, anywhere through official HTTP API or in their managed cloud service.

I for one would like HTTP API for some things that now necessitates doing my own in Python. I don't see yet much need for the UI. I'm not looking for public, multiuser service. Just something that I can use locally which doesn't have to be inside a process (such as Python or web browser). There's such API in the extension now, but it's without docs and in C++ [1]. There's also the option of using 3rd party community extension that also does HTTP API [2]. Then there's one that supports remote access with Arrow Flight, but gRPC only it seems [3]. But official, stable version would be nice.

[1] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui/blob/main/src/http_serve...

[2] https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserve...

[3] https://github.com/Query-farm/duckdb-airport-extension
The AI Innovator's Dilemma
Exactly the reason I still write most of my code in emacs. I’ll use visual studio when I need to do GUI work, but I feel like I’m at a casino with a thousand flashing lights all vying for my attention. I also find swapping back and forth between keyboard and mouse to be a slowdown. I know some of the VS keyboard shortcuts but find many of them to be more convoluted than emacs (and I won’t even comment on the VS faux emacs bindings!)

Luckily I spend a lot of time building libraries, where I can keep my hands on the keyboard and focus on the problems I am trying to solve
GP post cites Collins defining "fix a gaze on"! https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fix-a-g...

Yes Collins knows about it.

Even this lesser-known site knows about it:
https://texttospeech.io/thesaurus/gaze

> Definition of gaze: (n): a long fixed look; "he fixed his paternal gaze on me"
The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.
"I have seen this construction before" is not a very high bar for communicating well.
Not outdated. If you know the answer on how to implement Fibonacci, you are doing it wrong. Inferring the answer from being told (or remembering) what is a Fibonacci number should be faster than asking an LLM or remembering it.
It'll happen when these AI companies start trying to make a profit. Models will become unavailable and those remaining will jack up the prices for the most basic features.

From there these proompters will have 2 choices, do I learn how to actually code? or do I pay more for the AI to code for me?

Also it stops working well after the project grows too large, from there they'd need an actual understanding to be able to direct the AI - but going back and forth with an AI when the costs are insane isn't going to be feasible.
To use the car analogy, if you want to buy a car, and you can choose between 2 models (and from all the features and prices and luxury and build quality they're equal), and it's a choice between a Tesla and a Ford, which would you choose, at this moment?

What if the Tesla is slightly better?
Yeah, I'm surprised and relieved that they haven't set off to write their own OS.
Show HN: List Combiner – generate all combinations of text lists
ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website
I don't know if many people will find this useful, but I've wanted this site for years, so I finally decided to make it.
It is truly astonishing how bad things have become, so quickly. Just the other day, I found myself debating someone about a completely fabricated AWS API call.

His justification was that some AI had endorsed it as the correct method. There are already out there salaried professionals supporting such flawed logic.
> With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague.

That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results without actually doing the work yourself in the first place.

That's literally the entirety of human technological advancement, in a nutshell. We'd ideally avoid all effort that's incidental to the goal, but if we can't (we usually can't), we invent tools that reduce this effort - and iterate on them, reducing the effort further, until eventually, hopefully, the human effort goes to 0.

Is that a "basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance"? Perhaps. But then, that's progress, not a problem.
"fix one's gaze on" is not the construction used in the article.
There is one such client architecture. It’s called the web. You are describing the present state.
... to make *completely* sure that they forgot how to program?
Ah.. I got the same. But I think I got really lucky.
Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Mozilla

/s
I think we already saw this manifestation a few decades ago, with kids who can't program without an IDE.

IDE's are fantastic tools - don't get me wrong - but if you can't navigate a file system, work to understand the harness involved in your build system, or discern the nature of your artefacts and how they are loaded and interact in your target system, you're not doing yourself any favours by having the IDE do all that work for you.

And now what we see is people who not only can't program without an IDE, but can't be productive without a plugin in that IDE, doing all the grep'ing and grok'ing for them.

There has been a concerted effort to make computers stupider for stupid users - this has had a chilling effect in the development world, as well. Folks, if you can't navigate a filesystem with confidence and discern the contents therein, you shouldn't be touching the IDE until you can.
Almquist Shell (Ash) Variants
> S3 buckets should be private and encrypted by default and devs should need to actively choose to switch those things off

Yeah, that's the case right now. There's multiple screens you have to go to, that almost scream at you that you're making EVERYTHING PUBLIC. Also, in the overview, it distinctly says "!! PUBLIC".
> We are no longer bound to stake/poorly written docs.

from what i gather, the training data often contains those same poorly written docs and often a lot of poorly written public code examples, so… YMMV with this statement as it is often fruit from the same tree.

(to me LLMs are just a different interface to the same data, with some additional issues thrown in, which is why i don’t care for them).

> I think we have a lot of old timers ramping up on their version of "I walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways". Not a good look. We old timers need to do better.

it’s a question of trust for me. with great power (new tools) comes great responsibility — and juniors ain’t always learned enough about being responsible yet.

i had a guy i was doing arma game dev with recently. he would use chatgpt and i would always warn him about not blindly trusting the output. he knew it, but i would remind him anyway. several of his early PRs had obvious issues that were just chatgpt not understanding the code at all. i’d point them out at review, he’d fix them and beat himself up for it (and i’d explain to him it’s fine don’t beat yourself up, remember next time blah blah).

he was honest about it. he and i were both aware he was very new to coding. he wanted to learn. he wanted to be a “coder”. he learned to mostly use chatgpt as an expensive interface for the arma3 docs site. that kind of person using the tools i have no problem with. he was honest and upfront about it, but also wanted to learn the craft.

conversely, i had a guy in a coffee shop recently claim to want to learn how to be a dev. but after an hour of talking with him it became increasingly clear he wanted me to write everything for him.

that kind of short sighted/short term gain dishonesty seems to be the new-age copy/pasting answers from SO. i do not trust coffee shop guy. i would not trust any PR from him until he demonstrates that he can be trusted (if we were working together, which we won’t be).

so, i get your point about doom and gloom naysaying. but there’s a reason for the naysaying from my perspective. and it comes down whether i can trust individuals to be honest about their work and how they got there and being willing to learn, or whether they just want to skip to end.

essentially, it’s the same copy/pasting directly from SO problem that came before (and we’re all guilty of).
I’m looking forward to when the job market recovers, but I’m not looking forward to the prospect of a significant amount of future demand being in the realm of having to scale and maintain the AI slop code that’s being generated now.
Author here, thanks for posting!

Would be interested if anyone else sees these dynamics playing out. It seems there’s a really powerful combination of larger players starting later and a rising tide of AI improvements that mean the smaller shops can leap frog ahead, in ways that I haven’t seen before.
Building higher-touch AI products that are applicable across the entire customer base of an existing enterprise SaaS provider on release does feel impossible.

It's very obvious when you look at the AI companies that have 'exit-velocity' in this space that they are playing in that they are either one of the following:

1. Targeting a need within that org that's narrow enough to be MVP-able enough across a diverse customer base

2. Targeting IC work directly

As we add more complexity here, it's going to be a long, long slog to market - even with model advancements.
If some interviewer asked me what recursion was or how to implement it, I'd answer, and then ask them if they can think of a good use case for a duff's device.
Indeed, the construction gives the feeling that the shrine itself might float away without her gaze, such is the intensity of her watching it. That is purposeful. It comes from the common phrase "she fixed him with her gaze" which means, not as much that her gaze was fixed on him, as that he froze when he saw her looking at him.

I think it was a conscious and valid choice to use this in relation to a static holy object in this context.
That's because the content provider is forced to pay Apple, and they are doing it with your money of course.
That’s great advice! A virtual office hours!

The brain is not a muscle, but it behaves like one with abilities you no longer use: it drops them.

Like speaking another language you once knew but haven’t used in years, or forgetting theorems in maths that once were familiar, or trying to focus/meditate on a single thing for a long time after spending years on infinite short content.

If we don’t think, then it’s harder when we have to.

Right now, LLMs tend to be like Google before all the ads and SEO cheating that made things hard to find on the web. Ads have been traded by assertive hallucinations.
Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.
Looking for Sales Partners or Clients
Touchbar is very fun to use, that alone makes it a great feature (thanks to mountains of work done to get amazing integration across system and many apps)

It's sad to see all that work going to bin.

Did you know that you can get touchbar on ipad that you connect as a second monitor? Excellent way to keep it alive, except, oh, it does not work, unless you drag the window to the ipad first... I mean... Somebody went and designed it to work like that, on purpose...

From the security perspective, having some UI that cannot be controlled by apps (a led, a touchbar, whatever) is very important for signalling app privilege levels. oh well
> After all that, there's always room, in C, in Rust, whatever, to make non basic non obvious mistakes.

Correct, I guess. The number of relatively obvious mistakes should decrease with experience. And it stands to reason that eventually it settles near zero for some part of developer community.

How close to zero and which part of community? Statistic is scarce.

> C has seatbelts and OSHA - valgrind, et al tools abound for sanity checking.

Optional tools with no general enforcement. That is more like elective vaccination or travel advisories. That is, no, no seatbelts and no OSHA.
You don't need a CMO, you need us
FTC to pursue Amazon Prime case after delay request due to constraints
Brains Use Social Shortcuts to Master Complex Group Dynamics
They aren't afraid of hurting MacBook sales they're afraid of breaking the app store chains. You can get software outside of the app store on the MacBook.
Haha, I can see the strings you're attaching if you had his money.

Of course we all believe "But what I think is best for them is a good thing!".
But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit.

Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research
> Visually appealing, sure.

It's not even.
Ah, I see Claude has trained a lot on internet resources.

This made my day so far.
The ARM7500FE is considerably slower (in terms of clock speed) than a StrongARM, but the FPU apparently makes StarFighter 3000 run very well.

StrongARM with an FPU would have been incredible, however no FPU option exists for the RiscPC. There was a commercial software package that would allow the FP capabilities of the 486/586 copro to be used from RISC OS, but I'm not sure how effective it was.
Disney trying to appease Trump? 538 was pro-Democrat.
Time is always scarce.
I did the same thing a long time ago, though I cant brag about using as long a list of frameworks, source is https://github.com/DusteDdk/fileswithafriend so you can host it youself, announcement post and link to site where it can be used is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39622511

In my version, the entrypoint is not uploading your file (where would it go??) but establishing the connection between two devices, then bidirectional transfers between them.
We are talking about 'fixing smth with a gaze' and not 'fixing gaze on smth'. The verb, the object and the subject are different.
Conversely, it's easier than ever to read said source material.
I totally disagree. Having a single vendor with that much power is a bad idea. If the PSF were able to focus on tooling rather than their current focus, they would be great stewards of this sort of thing. Sadly I doubt that will happen, in which case I think many options is the best approach.
Looks exactly like Greece!
The answer on how to implement Fibonacci is so simple that it is used for coding interviews.

Any difficult problem will take the focus out of coding and into the problem itself.

See also fizz-buzz, which it is even simpler, and people still fail those interview questions.
Disgruntled former employees with financial problems are also prime targets for foreign spies.
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You don’t need to memorize how to compute a Fibonacci number. If you are a barely competent programmer, you should be capable of figuring it out once someone tells you the definition.

If someone tells you not to do it recursively, you should be able to figure that out too.

Interview nerves might get in your way, but it’s not a trick question you need to memorize.
> Inferring the answer from being told (or remembering) what is a Fibonacci number should be faster than asking an LLM or remembering it.

Really?

If I were to rank the knowledge relevant to this task in terms of importance, or relevance to programming in general, I'd rank "remembering what a Fibonacci number is" at the very bottom.

Sure, it's probably important in some areas of math I'm not that familiar with. But between the fields of math and hard sciences I am familiar with, and programming as a profession, by far the biggest (if not the only) importance of Fibonacci sequence is in its recursive definition, particularly as the default introductory example of recursive computation. That's all - unless you believe in the mystic magic of the Golden Ratio nonsense, but that's another discussion entirely.

Myself, I remember what the definition is, because I involuntarily memorize trivia like this, and obviously because of Fibonacci's salad joke. But I wouldn't begrudge anyone in tech for not having that definition on speed-dial for immediate recall.
i’m around 10 years as well and i can’t even remember how the fibonacci sequence progress off hand. I’d have to wikipedia it to even get started.
Ruby's bundler had already invented the correct model many years ago. It only took time for others to accept that.
It's ironic to see people say this type of things and not think about old software engineer practices that are now obsolete because overtime we have created more and more tools to simplify the craft. This is yet another step in that evolution. We are no longer using punch cards or writing assembly code, and we might not write actual code in the future anymore and just instruct ais to achieve goals. This is progress
That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
> Reminds of the robot arm in Iron Man 1.

It's an impressive demo but perhaps you are misremembering Jarvis from Iron Man which is not only far faster but is effectively a full AGI system even at that point.

Sorry if this feels pedantic, perhaps it is. But it seems like an analogy that invites pedantry from fans of that movie.
Django REST Framework versus Django Ninja (2024)
I'm missing your point at the moment but likely Ford due to parts/service center access if they're equal. Depending on how slightly better it is and whether I plan to keep it long term to where I might need to get things on it repaired I might hop over to the Tesla. Can you elaborate a bit on where we're going with this?
> this is nothing like SO

Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers.

While you can ask the AI to give you additional explanations, these explanations might be hallucinations and no one will tell you. On SO other people can point out that an answer or a comment is wrong.
The differences in opinion here may be because we're comparing #6 in a cold ambient environment to #5/#6 in a warm ambient environment. Still, #6 is no grease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Maritime_fuel_classif...
moving from a cloud in the US to one in NL is the most futile endeavor.

NL is the most complicity nation to both five eyes and economics agreements woth USA. there's a reason all eu offices from silicon valley companies are there.
Hah, that's typical Sonnet v2 for you. It's trained for shorter outputs, and it's causing it to be extremely lazy. It's a well known issue, and coding assistants contain mitigations for this. It's very reluctant to produce longer outputs, usually stopping mid-reply with something like "[Insert another 2k tokens of what you've been asking for, I've done enough]". Sonnet 3.7 seems to fix this.
This is so cool! Are you guys taking any interns?
School lab RiscPCs tended not to look as good as this one though - the 'Rocketship RiscPC' with integrated pizza oven and kitchen sink:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050305122925/http://www.d1.dio...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050207161844/http://www.worldo...
It's okay - 99% of the video files I download have to be opened in VLC, though :/

But still, being able to almost immediately stream, even if through VLC, is pretty nice.