skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are multiple conversations happening that are tying to converge on one.

On one hand, LLMs are overhyped and not delivering on promises made by their biggest advocates.

On the other hand, any other type of technology (not so overhyped) would be massively celebrated in significantly improving a subset of niche problems.

It’s worth acknowledging that LLMs do solve a good set of problems well, while also being overhyped as a silver bullet by folks who are generally really excited about its potential.

Reality is that none of us know what the future is, and whether LLMs will have enough breakthroughs to solve more problems then today, but what they do solve today is still very impressive as is.
That 90 minute number includes investments, which doesn't make any sense. Do we blame the CO2 emissions of SpaceX on Elon Musk, which would be included in that, or do we blame NASA/Americans and worldwide Starlink subscribers for paying for something that has CO2 as a byproduct?

It's the collective us that's the problem, not wanting to give up our standard of living. Shoot the developed countries into the sun and you save the world.
> But it still ought be acknowledged that the motivations are closer to the reason

Since this isn't true, no acknowledgement required, it doesn't need to be a "major" profit center to magically become a benevolent feature
TBH, they produce trash results for almost any question I might want to ask them. This is consistently the case. I must use them differently than other people.

LLMs produce midwit answers. If you are an expert in your domain, the results are kind of what you would expect for someone who isn’t an expert. That is occasionally useful but if I wanted a mediocre solution in software I’d use the average library. No LLM I have ever used has delivered an expert answer in software. And that is where all the value is.

I worked in AI for a long time, I like the idea. But LLMs are seemingly incapable of replacing anything of value currently.

The elephant in the room is that there is no training data for the valuable skills. If you have to rely on training data to be useful, LLMs will be of limited use.
Strongly in agreement. I've tried them and mostly come away unimpressed. If you work in a field where you have to get things right, and it's more work to double check and then fix everything done by the LLM, they're worse than useless. Sure, I've seen a few cases where they have value, but they're not much of my job. Cool is not the same as valuable.

If you think "it can't quite do what I need, I'll wait a little longer until it can" you may still be waiting 50 years from now.
> It gets big for maybe 1 second and goes back to normal.

That sounds like the "shake to locate" behavior and I would be totally lost(heh) without it since I have 2 4K monitors plus the onboard display, and that black cursor gets lost very easily. Shake the mouse, get big cursor, find cursor, be happy

It appears that one can disable it if it bothers you enough to comment about it: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/make-the-pointer-ea...

And while there, I learned that I can change the pointer color, so hopefully everyone has learned something valuable today :-D
Nvidia close to acquiring AI cloud provider Lepton AI in nine-figure deal
Perhaps you have already paid off your mortgage and saved up a million dollars for retirement? And you're not threatened by dismissal or salary reduction because supposedly "AI will replace everyone."

By the way, you don't need to be a 50+ year old nerd. Nerds are a special culture-pen where smart straight-A students from schools are placed so they can work, increase stakeholder revenues, and not even accidentally be able to do anything truly worthwhile that could redistribute wealth in society.
I wish that articles like this didn't have such a US-centric limited view of the world. It's possible that knowledge work is booming elsewhere in the world, yet this is not explored or considered.
It is difficult not to think your country is perfect when you can't make good money anywhere else in the world...
When looking for meaning in correlations, its important to understand that a correlation does not mean that there aught to be correlation, nor that correlation mean causation. It only mean that one can calculate a correlation.

Looking for correlations between sellers name and used bike prices is only going to return a proxy for social economic status. If one accounts for social economic status the difference will go away. This mean that the question given to the LLM lacks any substance for which a meaningful output can be created.
I think people confuse the power of the technology with the very real bubble we’re living in.

There’s no question that we’re in a bubble which will eventually subside, probably in a “dot com” bust kind of way.

But let me tell you…last month I sent several hundred million requests to AI, as a single developer, and got exactly what I needed.

Three things are happening at once in this industry…
(1) executives are over promising a literal unicorn with AGI, that is totally unnecessary for the ongoing viability of LLM’s and is pumping the bubble.
(2) the technology is improving and delivery costs are changing as we figure out what works and who will pay.
(3) the industry’s instincts are developing, so it’s common for people to think “AI” can do something it absolutely cannot do today.

But again…as one guy, for a few thousand dollars, I sent hundreds of millions of requests to AI that are generating a lot of value for me and my team.

Our instincts have a long way to go before we’ve collectively internalized the fact that one person can do that.
Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
Totally relate to that! Article looks interesting :)
Not that I disagree with you. But Humans have a tendency to do things beyond their comprehension often. I take it you've never been fishing before and tied your line in a knot.
The environmental impact of running prompts through (most) of these models is massively over-stated.

(I say "most" because GPT-4.5 is 1000x the price of GPT-4o-mini, which implies to me that it burns a whole lot more energy.)
The pollution from customers shouldn’t be counted, but investments on startups involve real world resources being used.

Blue Origin for example has 11,000 employees yet still depends on Jeff Bezos to keep the lights on. For years it looked a lot like an hobby, let alone all the other even less successful rocket companies.

Also, Billionaires start up companies for their super yacht’s making them technically investments even if they’re only used by the billionaire themselves it makes sense from tax standpoint. When you have that kind of money the line between hobby, investment, and donation get blurry.
I'm dead right now.
Seems all the sufferers of this have come out in this thread. I really wonder how much of this is cultural. It's considered polite in many east asian cultures to eat and slurp loudly - it means you appreciate the food.

I have to imagine the occurance of eating misophonia is much lower there.
Oh, neat. I had no idea it was intentional but I can see how that would be a useful feature. It felt like a bug to me because it felt disconnected from any intentional cursor movement on my part.
why can't I upvote the story? Also this posting must be burried 100 pages down. It's non-existant. So if I understand the discourse, anything critical of (His You-Know-Whoness) get's automatically down ranked and flagged?
Haha I feel like the right reaction to "vibe-*" is to cringe. I cringe a little bit every time I see someone promoting a vibe-coded app at the moment, but I think back to how I got started in coding (I was constantly annoying people on old ActionScript forums to fix my code) and I see so much potential in people being able to get started quickly in any domain. I hope that our autorouter (and others that follow!) will similarly allow people to ship their first electronics without needing tons of guidance or formal education.

That said a good autorouter should also be useful to professionals! So hopefully we help with that as well!
I’ve followed your blog for a while, and I have been meaning to unsubscribe because the deluge of AI content is not what I’m looking for.

I read the linked article when it was posted, and I suspect a few things that are skewing your own view of the general applicability of LLMs for programming. One, your projects are small enough that you can reasonably provide enough context for the language model to be useful. Two, you’re using the most common languages in the training data. Three, because of those factors, you’re willing to put much more work into learning how to use it effectively, since it can actually produce useful content for you.

I think it’s great that it’s a technology you’re passionate about and that it’s useful for you, but my experience is that in the context of working in a large systems codebase with years of history, it’s just not that useful. And that’s okay, it doesn’t have to be all things to all people. But it’s not fair to say that we’re just holding it wrong.
This looks interesting, I would suggest adding some screenshots in the docs of what a final output looks like (counter app for example).
It seems like so much has been said about climate change, with such comparatively miniscule action by the powerful.

Imagine being one of the optimates, the financial ultra-elite. You are at the pinnacle of power in our civilization. You have children, perhaps even grandchildren. You can subvert the rule of law to a huge extent and get away with it. The sheer power of your wealth can take on its own dynamic, allowing you to spend vast amounts on the most ludicrous ideas and still come out OK by sheer artificial demand. Thus, you can will a lot of things into existence.

What do you choose to do about climate change? Invest in many potential breakthroughs? Bring the smartest and most capable people in R&D together and partner with government to bring the best solutions to fruition at scale? Make your mark by moderating the impact of climate change and allow your children to live at least in a similar world to what we have today?

Nope. Instead, you choose to invest in pollution. The future be damned.

The above is actually happening, right now, at enormous scale. I'd urge people to remember this when our culture communicates that the worth of a person correlates with their net worth; it does not.

In the rotten competition for more and more, Seneca's words come to mind:

"The better man may win. But the winner is bound to be the worse man."
Seems like you're dismissing the uv single file setup approach without fully understanding it. I'd recommend giving it a try. It's indeed simpler and snappier than any other package manager to date.
I think it's ridiculous to say LLMs are NOT "incredibly useful and valuable", but I 100% agree that it's "highly dubious to think they can be trusted with actual critical tasks without careful supervision".
And even if you are logged in, good chances you get redirected to some other useless page rather than the image you were trying to view. Or if you're not logged in, by the time you do get logged back in, you lose the original link and you're dumped on a random feed.
This just sounds like a normal day for someone who does research and analysis in 2025.

Where do you think expert analysis comes from?

Talk to experts, gather data, synthesize, output. Researchers have been doing this for a long time. There's a lot of grunt work LLM's can really help with, like writing scripts to collect data from webpages.
I put together a similar setup in 2020/2021, but had to tear it all down. I got too many jokes about being a Twitch streamer, and the teleprompter made me look like one of those dudes who stares directly into your eyeballs at all times as a power move.

Maybe I should have stuck with it and iterated! Sounds like you've dialed it in.
No, it lets good engineers parallelize work. I can be adding a route to the backend while Cline with Sonnet 3.7 adds a button to the frontend. Boilerplate work that would take 20-30 minutes is handled by a coding agent. With Claude writing some of the backend routes with supervision, you've got a very efficient workflow. I do something like this daily in a 80k loc codebase.
I think that to understand the diversity of opinions, we have to recognize a few different categories of users:

Category 1: people who don't like to admit that anything trendy can also be good at what it does.

Category 2: people who don't like to admit that anything made by for-profit tech companies can also be good at what it does.

Category 3: people who don't like to admit that anything can write code better than them.

Category 4: people who don't like to admit that anything which may be put people out of work who didn't deserve to be put out of work, and who already earn less than the people creating the thing, can also be good at what it does

Category 5: people who aren't using llms for things they are good at

Category 6: people who can't bring themselves to communicate with AIs with any degree of humility

Category 7: people to whom none of the above applies
This has answered a 25 year old question in my mind.
Developing in the open would make contributions from the community way more viable, would give the public the ability to see what's coming and prepare for it, would increase the likelihood that security vulnerabilities or other bad things are discovered and prevented early on. It would make the project more likely to serve the interests of its users.
Taking knowledge of the three extra pixels that are "more correct" as some kind of indicator of intelligence is silly. Pretending you're somehow above them is just sad.

Must be lonely at the top.
It is once you've maxed out what you can borrow and are now barely able to pay the mortgage and food.
Why doctors are so excited to use AI with their patients
I don’t think I have ever spent so long trying to understand the physics of destroying an invading alien spaceship.
https://archive.ph/XR1vq
How come the pipe is a method call? Does this really allow composing programs?
I block them, but I block most common health sites. When I'm searching a health condition, I almost always only want Wikipedia. But Wikipedia's search is pretty bad unless you know the exact name of what you're searching for.
When and how to do stop saying LLMs are predicting the nect set of tokens and start saying they are thinking? Is this the point?
They're not very good at identifying what's actually an "alternative". By way of example, some of their top alternatives to OwnCloud include Dropbox, MEGA, and Google Drive. (All of which completely miss the point - OwnCloud isn't just a file storage service, and one of its key features is that it's self-hosted.)
I saw long shader compile times for at least one game last month, might have been Deadlock. I have a Radeon RX 7600 & Ryzen 9 7900X3D for reference.

There is mention on the arch wiki about enabling multi-threaded compiles, but also I have read you perhaps dont even need to precompile them now and possibly get better performance as the JIT compiles via a different vulkan framework (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library).

I disabled pre-caching (which effects the compile too afaict) and never noticed any stuttering, possibly past some level of compute it's inconsequential. I also noticed that sometimes the launcher would say "pre-compiling" but actually be downloading the cache which was a lot slower on my internet.

Certainly on my (very) old intel system with a GTX1060, Sekiro would try to recompile shaders every launch, pegging my system at 99% and running for an hour. I just started skipping it and never really felt it was an issue, Sekiro still ran fine.
You’re on a software developer forum
Why not sell them directly, or via well known retailers, at the highest price point and with the longest warranty?

e.g. McMaster-Carr with a 10 year in-home repair warranty.

And you can still offer discounts via other lower price channels.
That's actually kind of funny. Looks like it's the result of HN's Unicode filtering rules, though; the original website has different characters in its <title> tag.
Mr Bringhurst is wrong. Em dashes have nothing to do with Victorian aesthetics.
If it doesn't cost much (time/money) to change, TypeScript everything.
I was previously a non believer in LLMs, but I've come around to accepting them. Gemini has saved me so much time and energy it's actually insane. I wouldn't be able to do my work to my satisfaction (which is highly technical) without its support.
Don't diss monte carlo.

10000000000 random guesses can be way faster than a clever calculation.

And maybe there is no clever calculation.
Well-meaning can vary if you don't put spaces around your dashes, and a well—meaning writer wants to ease the job of the reader.

ıt might simpıy not matter though, a miııimeter here and there, ı suppose.
> Prototaxites did not contain chitin, a major building block of fungal cell walls and a hallmark of the fungal kingdom. The Prototaxites fossils instead appeared to contain chemicals similar to lignin, which is found in the wood and bark of plants. ... best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes

So these are the ancestors of Groot? or Ents? and all manner of "animated trees"?
I’m always amazed in these discussions how many people apparently have jobs doing a bunch of stuff that either doesn’t need to be correct or is simple enough that it doesn’t require any significant amount of external context.
The existing tech giants will just hoover up all the niche LLM shops once the valuations deflate somewhat.

There's almost a negligible chance any one of these shops stays truly independent, unless propped up by a state-level actor (China/EU)

You might have some consulting/service companies that will promise to tailor big models to your specific needs, but they will be valued accordingly (nowhere near billions).
That is not at all what they are saying. If you seriously think that, you have serious reading comprehension problems.
It sounds like you're trying to use these llms as oracles, which is going to cause you a lot of frustration. I've found almost all of them now excel at imitating a junior dev or a drunk PhD student. For example the other day I was looking at acoustic sensor data and I ran it down the trail of "what are some ways to look for repeating patterns like xyz" and 10 minutes later I had a mostly working proof of concept for a 2nd order spectrogram that reasonably dealt with spectral leakage and a half working mel spectrum fingerprint idea. Those are all things I was thinking about myself, so I was able to guide it to a mostly working prototype in very little time. But doing it myself from zero would've taken at least a couple of hours.

But truthfully 90% of work related programming is not problem solving, it's implementing business logic. And dealing with poor, ever changing customer specs. Which an llm will not help with.
then Mac fails as hard as windows. there’s a reason search exists in the settings app on both MacOS and iOS. and there are plenty of settings that require “default write …” or editing some plist file or worse
I never heard of this concept until this post, maybe because I live in a sunny country (Brazil) but I can totally see the use case for countries in higher latitudes, as the sun setting at 3pm mist be quite depressing for people.
I wonder if you guys did any research on the effects of having your product in these countries. How much would the impact on well being be?
I'm genuinely just unimpressed by computers and space craft. Sometimes they just won't boot up, or blow up. I also just am unimpressed by wireless 4G/5G internet,... the printing press. (sarcasm)
Proof that health insurance premiums for men have been consistently subsidizing women's health insurance premiums for the last 200 or so years? Perhaps the practical non-existence of health insurance until the latter half of the 20th's century? Pretty tough to subsidize something that doesn't exist.

You also offered no evidence for your assertion in the first place.
They would be surprised because it's not true, those years-old bugs in the forums have been reported many times to the official bug tracker, with reference number sometimes posted in those very forums.
"Improper ideology" is the politically correct term for woke. Irony in its most ferrous form.
Yes, of course they did that. These things happily do whatever you ask them to. But did it spit out correct information?
The end of the article says,

> Two check marks appeared after they were sent.
Where I am, in British Columbia, the solution formoving even the biggest windows in single family homes is to use ten men and a boy.
We don’t create LLMs either. We evolve/train them. I think the comparison is closer than you think.
Can a publicly traded company be sued if they allocate more resources to QA? Could an activist investor argue that cleaning up Mac OSX is a waste of time because people will buy the computer anyway?
In other words, people preaching LLMs are noobs with no real stake in what they are doing. But you can't really call people noobs these days.
I live carless in NYC and primarily use a mix of public transit and cycling. That being said, infrastructure costs so excruciatingly much in the US that it would cost tens or hundreds of Waymos (company, not individual car) to replicate an NYC subway-tier system in most American metropolitan areas.

Forcing people to take public transit that is any worse than NYC subway will definitely and rightfully lose an election for that party. Building such a system at modern American construction costs will also lose an election. What is left to do but embrace autonomous driving as the first step toward retrofitting American cities to be slightly more people friendly?

Besides, this is the decadent west, we can afford for people to use more resources for more comfort. Even the well off in china have embraced cars as mobile living rooms.
Okay, but _can_ you use it as your default shell?

It's not much of a shell otherwise, is it?
I personally only snapshot Documents, Pictures, my git repo dir, etc.

Stuff like .cache and podman stuff stays unsnapshotted.

I just recommend to others to snapshot home since most people don't want to bother categorizing their data.
Quite a few years ago, I led a migration off from a legacy logging provider that offered little more than full text search over unstructured text.

Logging at the time was somewhere in the ballpark of 1% of our total common infrastructure spend and widely acknowledged as too expensive relative to the minimal value we got from it with that rudimentary feature set, but it also was nowhere near enough cost to justify doing something about it. We had other observability costs that dwarfed it.

What finally justified the overhaul was that security couldn’t really operate usefully on log data unless we pulled the data out somewhere else like Athena and processed it there. That slowed down security incident response times dramatically.

The migration ultimately benefited the whole engineering organization but it had to be security led to get any traction.