skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.

Hard disagree. Let's take a very simple example, Wikipedia[0]. Took way too long to build in a dark mode and when they do they have the options "light", "dark", and "automatic". YET the default value is "light". WHY THE FUCK IS THERE AN AUTOMATIC IF THIS ISN'T THE DEFAULT!? Obvious stuff like this is everywhere.

I find a lot of interfaces INFURIATING. My car wants to do things with touch screens while I want to feel because I want to keep my eyes on the road. My iPhone won't capitalize the letter I and will change not just the word I'm typing but the word previous to it making swipe style texting painful to use. Speaking of the iPhone, it's 2025 and there's no universal back. I still don't know how to exit the YouTube popup asking me to activate my free trial of premium other than swiping close the whole app and reopening[1]. Or I scroll through an app with threads (e.g. Twitter) and I move slightly left or right and bam I'm on a different tab and when I move back I'm not where I left off but somewhere completely new.

You may say "well that's a 'you' problem, I'm happy with the way things are" and my point is that humans are all different. There's no one size fits all. Maybe that swiping thing happens because our thumbs are different sizes or our phones are different sizes. Maybe you like light mode and don't open any websites with the lights off. But that difference is what makes us human. The problem is that things are converging to things that are bad for everyone. Design matters a lot and getting used to a design is very different than designing things around people. A well designed product needs no instructions (obviously not absolute), just see the "Norman Door."[2] We shit on backend developers for making shitty UIs (as a 'backend' person, I agree, this deserves criticism) but I don't think the front end people are at all concerned with design now a days either. There's a special irony with Apple, considering the magic was the interaction between Jobs and Woz. The magic is when the good backend meets good frontend. Yet now we're just doing both like it is a competition of who can create the worst thing the fastest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

[1] I now use Orion browser. The video quality is lower but it is better than dealing with this bullshit.

[2] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
People, who know how to write, use spell checkers as assistants. People, who don't know how to write, use spell checkers to do everything for them effectively replacing one errors with other errors.
And clean air for many of us.
> No one has mentioned China's uptake of coffee drinking

yes, and North Korea's, and Rusia's, and Iran's... /s
Zlib-ng is between a couple and multiple times away from the state of the art[1], it’s just that nobody has yet done the (hard) work of adjusting libdeflate[2] to a richer API than “complete buffer in, complete buffer out”.

[1] https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/issues/1486

[2] https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate
The Government's Adaptability Problem: Why Federal Services Remain Slow
To be fair, this person wasn’t claiming they’re making a trade off on quality, just that they prefer to build things quickly. If an AI let you keep quality constant and deliver faster, for example.

I don’t think that’s what LLMs offer, mind you (right now anyway), and I often find the trade offs to not be worth it in retrospect, but it’s hard to know which bucket you’re in ahead of time.
Yikes, maybe we can take a step back? I'm not sure where this is coming from, frankly. One anodyne summary of my comment above would be:

> Let's think and communicate more clearly regarding intelligence. Stuart Russell offers a nice definition: an agent's ability to do a defined task.

Maybe something about my comment got you riled up? What was it?

You wrote:

> What you're doing, with this whole "let's make a bullshit word logical" is more similar to medieval scholasticism, which was a vain attempt at verbal precision.

Again, I'm not quite sure what to say. You suggest my comment is like a medieval scholar trying to reconcile dogma with philosophy? Wow. That's an uncharitable reading of my comment.

I have five points in response. First, the word intelligence need not be a "bullshit word", though I'm not sure what you mean by the term. One of my favorite definitions of bullshitting comes from "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt:

> Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false. - Wikipedia

Second, I'm trying to clarify the term intelligence by breaking it into parts. I wouldn't say I'm trying to make it "logical" (in the sense of being about logic or deduction). Maybe you mean "formal"?

Third, regarding the "what you're doing" part... this isn't just me. Many people both clarify the concept of intelligence and explain why doing so is important.

Fourth, are you saying it is impossible to clarify the meaning of intelligence? Why? Not worth the trouble?

Fifth, have you thought about a definition of intelligence that you think is sensible? Does your definition steer people away from confusion?

You also wrote:

> We never would have been able to create science, if it weren't for focusing on the kinds of thinking that can be made logical.

I think you mean _testable_, not _logical_. Yes, we agree, scientists should run experiments on things that can be tested.

Russell's definition of intelligence is testable by defining a task and a quality metric. This is already a big step up from an unexamined view of intelligence, which often has some arbitrary threshold.* It allows us to see a continuum from, say, how a bacteria finds food, to how ants collaborate, to how people both build and use tools to solve problems. It also teases out sentience and moral worth so we're not mixing them up with intelligence. These are simple, doable, and worthwhile clarifications.

Finally, I read your quote from Dijkstra. In my reading, Dijkstra's main point is that natural language is a poor programming interface due to its ambiguity. Ok, fair. But what is the connection to this thread? Does it undercut any of my arguments? How?

* A common problem when discussing intelligence involves moving the goal post. Whatever quality bar is implied has a tendency to creep upwards over time.*
Riight. I subscribed once, seeing they offered a download option. And it downloaded like a 720p terrible quality video... I unsubscribed.
It's not perfect and it's not quite finished yet. At the moment Canny.io has more features and is better known, but I prefer the simplicity of the tool and the price (10$ once and own it forever). It only has basic features right now, but feel free to request features you think it needs!
To be specific I believe it's naive to think that formally specified laws will be an improvement on the legal system.

I believe laws ultimately are subject to Godel's theorem. They can either be complete or consistent, but not both (and likely neither). We should recognize the difference. A complete legal system can render a verdict in every case. A consistent legal system has no contradictions. We prioritize the former.

What would it look like for a case to be presented to a judge and for them to respond, "We simply cannot determine if this is legal or not." What would you even do in such a scenario? Rather, we have judges render decisions and deal with the consequences that they are inconsistent and we have further cases to untangle those inconsistencies, in an ever growing patchwork of legal epicycles.
"Barely" or not is completely irrelevant. The fact is that it's measurably faster than the C implementation with the more common parameters. So the point that you're trying to make isn't clear tbh.

Also I'm pretty sure that the C implementation had more man hours put into it than the Rust one.
It’s exponentially better for me to use AI for coding than it was two years ago. GPT-4 launched two years and two days ago. Claude 3.5 sonnet was still fifteen months away. There were no reasoning models. Costs were an order of magnitude or two higher. Cursor and Windsurf hadn’t been released.

The last two years have brought staggering progress.
I've lived in a London suburb, populated by trains, busses, motorbikes, planes all roaring at any given time... but none of that disturbed me because it wasn't that much over the baseline background noise.

I've also lived in a quiet mountain village, and been woken up by chirping owls or bats, the odd cluck from a chicken, or a train passing all the way on the other side of the mountain. The baseline is lower, but you hear way way more.
So How Many Developers Can I Fire?
Lennox is terrible and won't even give you the service manual unless you have a government HVAC cert number.
I'm currently using Gnome and their UI may not be the most beautiful or complete, but they've gone all in on consistency. I don't mind software like Blender, Audacity, and others having their own design systems as their domain is much more complicated. But a lot of software only needs a few controls and the native ones should suffice.
How I've Run Major Projects
One thing I've thought about is whether observations in the present can influence past events. I'm thinking it must be so, though probably only on a microscopic level.
You mean the implementation is faster than the one in C. Because nothing is “faster than C”.
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Perchik: "Money is the world's curse!"

Tevye: "May the Lord smite me with it! And may I never recover!"
People would do the same if curl was publicly funded, that doesn't mean it would be a bad idea.
Wow! space.com does pretty much everything you can think of to "extract max value" from each visitor.

It's got a lot of ads, traffic arbitrage, floating unrelated videos and even back jacking...
Many apps have some sort of backend or server component to it though, for syncing or multiplayer features. Usually that part disappears when you don't have the option to eject and self-host.
The bad documentation I come across often shows every sign of having taken the advice from this article (and others like it) to heart.

The trouble is that the advice doesn't include ways to make sure your documentation actually covers everything it has to.

What this article says is that you should have « "API documentation" for every user-facing part of your project. »

That commonly leads to "reference" pages which are very little better than the autogenerated documentation the author dismisses. The main problems tend to be that behaviour that isn't controlled by a specific command or function or configuration setting doesn't get documented at all, and that commands with complex behaviour get described using terms that themselves need further definition which isn't provided anywhere.
It's... basically written in C. I'm no expert on zlib/deflate or related algorithms, but digging around https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/zlib-rs/ almost every block with meaningful logic is marked unsafe. There's raw allocation management, raw slicing of arrays, etc... This code looks and smells like C, and very much not like rust. I don't know that this is a direct transcription of the C code, but if you were to try something like that this is sort of what it would look like.

I think there's lots of value in wrapping a raw/unsafe implementation with a rust API, but that's not quite what most people think of when writing code "in rust".
As someone from europe, I am baffled by the ability to just fire everyone on the spot. Are there no job-protections for federal employees? This makes agencies really dependent on the political climate, right? Can he really just fire everyone? Isn't there even a 3 months notice or something?

A separate, connected thought is that I wonder why you would choose being a federal employee then. Here, the government promises job security but it usually means less pay and slower processes compared to industry. If you don't have job security, is then the government forced to be more competitive with industry positions in pay/processes?
Or maybe AI is enabling dumb people to program?
Seeing how people still seem to find a way to get the raw video data from the big paid streaming services (e.g. netflix), and the likes of bluray, I feel you are right.

Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.
Yes, but:

a) you'd need write permissions for the original remote

b) even if you did, that'd push the commit to the original repo with the tags
Why Europe is going 'car-free'
Perhaps with multiple vacuums attached on the bezels.
I’d like to visit Australia but I’m afraid of getting KO’d by a Kangaroo in boxing gloves.

C’mon, your friends are overreacting.
Fair point!

Love me some edge cases :D

Let's call it 100% of the time in 99%+ of scenarios.
>Automated sprinkler systems and smoke detectors shut down fires fast when they do arise.

aka building code. That's coordination.

Let's take the The Industrial revolution next.

Technology -> Living conditions for working families deteriorated and life expectancy fell.

Technology + coordination (unions) -> life expectancy increased, sustained rise in real income.

People had to coordinate real hard and die (They were shot at) until wages started to raise. Before that the benefits went upstairs.
Understanding assembler (or even just ABI) if useful.
I Destroyed My Wall to Build the Ultimate Home Assistant Display [video]
That is not a definition of "fluency" I'm familiar with. To me what you're describing is about "proficiency", and the latter is the term used by e.g. CEFR, I quote: "The CEFR organises language proficiency in six levels, A1 to C2".

"Fluency" is when you can easily speak without having to construct the sentence in your mind, not even for a moment. It just comes out. It _flows_, which is what the term originally meant. Being fluent does not imply that you can talk about anything and everything from philosophy to Bach, or whatever.

To hear "It is extremely rare for any child to be fluent in any language by the time they start school".. that makes no sense. Of course every single child is fluent in _at least_ their native language when they reach school! And long before.

Some are fluent in more than one language, but it's much rarer. Though I do know a family where all three children were fluent in three languages before they started school. Special circumstances though, and thoroughly anecdotal.
Both SGI (who had no hardware texture mapping at the time) and 3dfx were explored at the time DARPA SIMNET was being developed. Delta Graphics (Mike Cyrus' and Jay Beck's company - of the Cyrus-Beck line clipping algorithm fame), which did have hardware Z-buffer texture-mapping, were the incumbents, and was fielded. Gary Tarroli personally visited BBN for a chat, but I wasn't involved in that. If Abort-Retry-Fail is interested in the history of SIMNET (in addition to the first hardware texture-mapping fielded, first AI NPC, etc.), there is a lot of info available. Email me and I can provide the info.
For most of the article the author is focused on the descriptive side of these differences - he says so multiple times. He does briefly mention explanatory elements,

> I also believe that a truly mature, honest, and nuanced discussion of the origins of sex differences must recognize the deep influence of genetics and biology

Biology - that would include hormones right? The purpose of the article is not to explain the differences between sexes but to show that they do indeed exist and we should have honest and mature discussions about it. Unfortunately the topic is a bit of a landmine, culturally. At least in the West.
They were not specific in the letter. It's not clear to me what counts as infringement. Some of the claims are so obvious, like "cloud connected", it makes me wonder what that the point of the patent system is other than to grant monopolies to those with money.

There are earlier patents that look similar to me, but I have no idea what would convince a judge. The lawyer I talked with said they could provide their best legal advice (for lots of money), but that doesn't guarantee I won't get sued and have to defend myself (again lots of money).
To be fair, or not, Claude isn't all that great.

I was working on a project to get the historic data out of a bluetooth thermometer I bought a while back to learn about Bluetooth LE and it would quite often rewrite the entire thing using a completely different bluetooth library instead of simply addressing the error.

And this is after I gave up having it create a kernel module for the same thermometer (just because, not that anyone needs such a thing) where it would continually try to write a helper program that wrote to the /proc filesystem and I would ask "why would I want to do this when I could just use the example program I gave you?" Claude, of course, was highly apologetic every single time it made the exact same mistake so there's that.

I understand these are the early days of the robotic overthrow of humanity but, please, at least sell me a working product.
The chain isn't this:

Choice of how to measure -> History

it is,

Choice of how to measure + physical system -> Observations -> Interpretation of observations -> History

The choice of what and how to measure will influence the history you conclude, but that is true of actual "Caesar and Napoleon" history too, and in that case it's definitely not that past events are being changed, instead it is your knowledge of them. A really interesting principle is that any philosophical question that can be phrased without referring to ideas that only exist in quantum mechanics can usually be answered without referring to them.
By commit hash
... because by "C" we mean handwritten inline assembler.

Typical realworld C code uses \0 terminated strings and strlen() with O(len^2) complexity.
Tachyons?
For sure. But through writing we've been able to learn more, and through AI we'll produce more.
The fact that it's faster than the C implementation that surely had more time and effort put into it doesn't look good for C here.
I think there's an easy answer for Elon's motivation in particular: he wants to damage the US as revenge for ending South African apartheid (https://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=65793).
> (My favorite use of coding LLMs is to ask them to help me understand code I don't yet understand. Even when it gets the answer wrong, it's often right enough to give me the hints I need to figure it out myself.)

Agree, specially useful when you join a new company and you have to navegate a large codebase (or bad-maintained codebase, which is even worse by several orders of magnitude). I had no luck asking LLM to fix this or that, but it did mostly OK when I asked how it works and what the code is trying to code (it includes mistakes but that's fine, I can see them, which is different if it was just code that I copy and paste).
NeXT workstations and cubes on eBay are also quite ridiculous, compared to what they were 15 or 20 years ago.
I don't think the author is saying it's a dichotomy. Like, you're either a disciple of doing things "ye olde way" or allowing the LLM to do it for you.

I find his point to be that there is still a lot of value in understanding what is actually going on.

Our business is one of details and I don't think you can code strictly having an LLM doing everything. It does weird and wrong stuff sometimes. It's still necessary to understand the code.
Yes and business leaders ate it up. They only pushed back when it was rebranded as “work from home”.
It says absolutely nothing about the programming language though.
zlib-ng is pretty much assembly - with a bit of C.
There is this quote: but was not entirely fair because our rust implementation could assume that certain SIMD capabilities would be available, while zlib-ng had to check for them at runtime

zlib-ng can be compiled to whatever target arch is necessary, and the original post doesn't mention how it was compiled and what architecture and so on.

It's another case not to trust micro benchmarks
Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

With backend I find they're good at the really high level (give me the options for architecture and their pros and cons) and doing something small and precise (gimme a function `List (Maybe a) -> List a`). The stuff in-between I have to handle myself.
I cannot blame them. It is really too bad. I remember the days were to travel between the US and Canada only required some kind of ID. There were many times I was just waved through, no stopping. Most of the time I was asked for my name and then let through.

After 2001 you needed a special ID and now it is a PITA. I wonder how long before an official VISA is needed.

So much for the longest unprotected border in the world. That title probably goes to Germany and France, which is quote amazing considering their history.
Moreover, the HoL and the "ping pong" process actually gives the legislation a chance to be refined, as the lords are less motivated by party politics and more able to focus on getting good legislation through. I've heard a number of complaints about the current system that basically say that without the HoL, the quality of legislation would be significantly poorer, and that there needs to be more work done on getting bills written properly in the first place when they get proposed in the House of Commons.
This is one of the many many experiences in the tapestry of people figuring out how to use this new tool.

There will be many such cases of engineers losing their edge.

There will be many cases of engineers skillfully wielding LLMs and growing as a result.

There will be many cases of hobbyists becoming empowered to build new things.

There will be many cases of SWEs getting lazy and building up huge, messy, intractable code bases.

I enjoy reading from all these perspectives. I am tired of sweeping statements like "AI is Making Developers Dumb."
Count me as a biiig proponent and user of TriliumNext, it's in my mind and experience the most capable note taking and organising app there is, but I don't think I nor any of its developers would call it a "Notion alternative".
Maybe try something with instant feedback?

I'm not sure what precisely, but I'm picturing a split view with text on the left and the output on the right.

I do this in web dev, React + hot reload is wonderful. For games, I've done it with instantly recompiling shaders but not much else.
I agree with other commenters that it seems AI generated (patterns/noise in fine detail, nonsense text, and inconsistency in style, particularly in the faces of the "dolls").

The first few images are impressively well curated and consistent though. I think the "rotoscoping"/"compositing" helps quite a bit to make it feel more cohesive and intentional - certainly it's a step above the usual "blog post header image" slop.
The Evolution of the Interface (2000)
Canada should take up the issue with Trump, not with Americans. I didn’t vote for Trump. I know only a handful of people that did. I highly doubt most of the people attending GDC did. No need to be a fair weather friend, in four years Trump will be gone and normalcy will be restored.
Python's 'shelve' is useful for LLM debugging
> Over time, I started to forget basic foundational elements of the languages I worked with. I started to forget parts of the syntax, how basic statements are used

It's a good thing tbh. Language syntax is ultimately entirely arbitrary and is the most pointless thing to have to keep in mind. Why bother focusing on that when you can use the mental effort on the actual logic instead?

This has been a problem for me for years before LLMs, constantly switching languages and forgetting what exact specifics I need to use because everyone thinks their super special way of writing the same exact thing is best and standards are avoided like the plague. Why do we need two hundred ways of writing a fuckin for loop?