- And, conversely, when we read a comment like yours, it sounds like someone who's afraid of computers, would maybe have decried the bicycle and automobile, and really wishes they could just go live in a cabin in the woods.
(And it's fine to do so, just don't mail bombs to us, ok?)
- I'm probably the same age as you, and similarly counting on past skills - it's what lets me use AI to produce things that aren't slop.
- I like a lot of 4GL ideas. Closest I've come was working on ServiceNow which is sort of a really powerful system with ugly, ugly roots but the idea of your code being the database being the code really resonated with me, as a self-taught programmer.
Similarly, Lisp's homoiconicity makes sense to me as a wonderfully aesthetic idea. I remember generating strings-of-text that were code, but still just text, and wishing that I could trivially step into the structure there like it was a map/dict... without realizing that that's what an AST is and what the language compiler / runtime is already always doing.
- I'm cursed with having a good wide palate - your salad sounds delightful - but nothing ever seems to make me feel full until it makes me feel Too Full and then I wish I hadn't overeaten. Normal plain satiation, where are you?
- I have a fantastic keyboard, but I'm not taking pictures of it, changing the keycaps, posting about it. It's a tool, not a fetish; that's how I differentiate these things.
- Well, for the sake of being an aspiring contrarian, more power to him. Last thing I want is billionaires all being unified around one opinion.
- > there are so many ... and yet many incidents take place every year
If there weren't so many of us, it would be a lot harder to accept the losses.
- What's the minimum threshold for that, I wonder?
- Well, at some point in time, his workflow produces a landing page where you can express interest in funding his projects
- This was always the case. People obsessing over keyboards, window managers, emacs setups... always optimizing around the edges of the problem, but this is all taking an incredible amount of their time versus working on real problems.
- Well, if you've ever cooked down a cabbage or spinach or whatever, you'll see it basically takes up no space whatsoever... so yeah, kale on its own will take a while to fill you up.
- > How is it useful to you that these companies are so valuation hungry that they are moving money into this technology in such a way that people are fearful it could cripple the entire global economy?
The creation of entire new classes of profession has always been the result of technological breakthroughs. The automobile did not cripple the economy, even as it ended the buggy-whip barons.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?
There will be advantages to lower-power computing, and lower-cost electricity. Implement carbon taxes and AI companies will follow the market incentive to install their datacentres in places where sustainable power is available for cheap. We'll see China soaring to new heights with their massive solar investment, and America will eventually figure out they have to catch up and cannot do so with coal and gas.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?
Temporary problem, the demand for personal computing is not going to die in five years, and meanwhile the lucrative markets for producing this equipment will result in many new factories, increasing capacity and eventually lowering prices again. In the meantime, many pundits are suggesting that this may thankfully begin the end of the Electron App Era where a fuckin' chat client thinks it deserves 1GB of RAM.
Consider this: why are we using Electron and needing 32GB of RAM on a desktop? Because web developers only knew how to use Javascript and couldn't write a proper desktop app. With AI, desktop frameworks can have a resurgence; why shouldn't I use Go or Rust and write a native app on all platforms now that the cost of doing so is decreasing and the number of people empowered to work with it is increasing? I wrote a nice multithreaded fractal renderer in Rust the other day; I don't know how to multithread, write Rust, and probably can't iterate complex numbers correctly on paper anymore....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?
This is only a problem in places that have poor water policy, e.g. California (who can all thank the gods that their reservoirs are all now very full from the recent rain). This problem predates datacenters and needs to be solved - for instance, by federalizing and closing down the so-called Wonderful Company and anyone else who uses underhanded tactics to buy up water rights to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there.
Come and run your datacenters up in the cold North, you won't even need evaporative cooling for them, just blow a ton of fresh air in....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?
Now you've actually got an argument, and I am on your side on this one.
- I think perhaps for some folks we're looking at their first professional paradigm shift. If you're a bit older, you've seen (smaller versions of) the same thing happening before as e.g. the Internet gained traction, Web2.0, ecommerce, crypto, etc. and have seen your past skillset become useless as now it can be accomplished for only $10/mo/user.... either you pivot and move on somehow, or you become a curmudgeon. Truly, the latter is optional, and at any point when you find yourself doing that you wish to stop and just embrace the new thing, you're still more than welcome to do so. AI is only going to get EASIER to get involved with, not harder.
- 200k+ tokens is a pretty big context window if you are feeding it the right context. Editors like Cursor are really good at indexing and curating context for you; perhaps it'd be worth trying something that does that better than Claude CLI does?
- Cursor's planning functionality is very similar and I have found that I can even use "cheap" models like their Composer-1 and get great results in the planning phase, and then turn on Sonnet or Opus to actually produce the plan. 90% of the stuff I need to argue about is during the planning phase, so I save a ton of tokens and rework just making a really good spec.
It turns out that Waterfall was always the correct method, it's just really slow ;)
- I have a few Go projects now and I speak Go as well as you speak Kotlin. I predict that we'll see some languages really pull ahead of others in the next few years based on their advantages for AI-powered development.
For instance, I always respected types, but I'm too lazy to go spend hours working on types when I can just do ruby-style duck typing and get a long ways before the inevitable problems rear their head. Now, I can use a strongly typed language and get the advantages for "free".
- Dare I ask, what happens to data brokers that don't care about Californian laws? Must be many such instances operating from outside the USA?
- Right? If I could get the same output by just talking to AI myself, what's the point of the human connection? Be something, be someone. Be wrong or a little rude from time to time, it's still more genuine.
- This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
- > it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
- How are we getting that out of a tree
- You wrote about the font and about stability. I commented about the font and my experiences with the product in question's actual observed stability in the field. Not sure what you missed.
- I strongly encourage you to do that. The selection of the material is key: you have to find something that she is going to find fascinating but could not read on her own due to missing vocabulary / context / idiom-and-allusion cultural awareness. Then you get to try to fill that in with asides as you go along, if she'll tolerate it. Good luck!
- Absolutely! Is there a name for the opposite of a "remix" - where you'd normally have the same lyrics but change the music - and instead keep the beautiful original music but put something a little more meaningful over it?
Ever look at the lyrics to Toto's Africa? We can start there, someone send a poet please
- I saw that one of my favourite electronic artists, BT, has embraced AI by making a ton of his own loops and samples and then training the AI on it so that it makes more of his music for him.
- Well, of course it's the people. I started online in '94 and it was exclusively the territory of nerds for a long while, even as everyday folks started to use the web and email for basic things. Truly, we should appreciate having places like Hacker News for still giving us a place to post like we always used to...
Plenty of forums still do exist, but I wonder about their future as we age out. Car forums in particular were absolute godsends for amateur mechanics - not just to look up info but to ask a self-selected group of interested folks who were happy to help for free out of a sense of community for fellow fans of their brand.
- I think the cDc made some effort to brand Back Orifice 2000 as a remote administration tool and in reality it really was pretty good for that; wonder what happened to those guys
- So true. I was one of those trolls, so I know it well; playing the role of a heel. People would know and remember you by avatar and custom forum titles and a huge garish signature... it cemented you as a person, gave you a face in a way that Hacker News or Reddit threads do not.
- > burn the hydrogen part of them
Could you elaborate
All I can tell you is that in my own lived experience, I've had some fantastic results from AI, and it comes from telling it "look at this thing here, ok, i want you to chain it to that, please consider this factor, don't forget that... blah blah blah" like how I would have spelled things out to a junior developer, and then it really does stand a really solid chance of turning out what I've asked for. It helps a lot that I know what to ask for; there's no replacing that with AI yet.
So, your own situation must fall into one of these coarse buckets:
- You're doing something way too hard for AI to have a chance at yet, like real science / engineering at the frontier, not just boring software or infra development
- Your prompts aren't specific enough, you're not feeding it context, and you're expecting it to one-shot things perfectly instead of having to spend an afternoon prompting and correcting stuff
- You're not actually using and getting better at the tools, so you're just shouting criticisms from the sidelines, perhaps as sour grape because you're not allowed by policy / company can't afford to have you get into it.
IDK. I hope it's the first one and you're just doing Really Hard Things, but if you're doing normal software developer stuff and not seeing a productivity advantage, it's a fucking skill issue.