377
points
pil0u
Joined 1,341 karma
shiponrails.com
- Yes, it is an unpopular opinion around here, but pretty much in the tech world.
I think this is because most of the users/praisers of GenAI can only see it as a tool to improve productivity (see sibling comment). And yes, end of 2025, it's becoming harder to argue that GenAI is not a productivity booster across many industries.
The vast majority of people in tech are totally missing the question of morality. Missing it, or ignoring it, or hiding it.
- The real gods of humanity.
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
- I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe.
I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally.
Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.
Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
- In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved.
I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.
I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
- I agree that tooling is maturing towards that end.
I wonder if that same non-technical person that built the MVP with GenAI and requires a (human) technical assistance today, will need it tomorrow as well. Will the tooling be mature enough and lower the barrier enough for anyone to have a complete understanding about software engineering (monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics)?
- Yes, I agree with you. Silence, when you do not have an opinion, is totally fine. And yes, not having an opinion on everything is absolutely fine, probably sane even.
I was answering a comment about a vote that would put you in a torture camp, so a vote on which you are certainly opinionated about.
In other words, don't self-censor when you think something is not right.
- Agreed. Your example could sound like exaggerated, but silence is a form of opinion, of vote, of approval. Even in a professional context, because work is part of the society we live in.
This whole "DHH situation" with Rails has put my mind in weird position. I admire the Rails creator, the business man, the speaker. I admire what he builds, how passionate he is about his work and open-source software. But I very strongly disagree with his vision of immigration, nationalism, parenting, well most of his vision of society.
I was made aware about these opinions because people talked about it. Thanks to these people, I read and listen to him with more nuance, more critical thinking. That does not necessarily mean I would discard Rails, cancel the dude or write shit about him, but that surely means that I will be more careful about how the opinions of this 1 person could impact mine, the ecosystem I work with and the larger ecosystem I live in that is society.
- This article was the most nuanced I found while everything was still hot. https://archive.ph/SEzoV
- This submission's link is https://old.chronotrains.com/
There is now with a search feature https://www.chronotrains.com/
- Past discussions:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=42530332 8 months ago - 648 points - 412 comments
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=32537382 Aug 21, 2022 - 80 points - 42 comments
- 1 point
- Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
- Maybe I haven't found the right tool yet, but every time I see a product trying to solve data analysis with AI, the first example often deals with aggregated revenue over time or something similar.
This can be solved by a student after 3 days of learning SQL from scratch.
The article, while technical, remains pretty vague about implementation and what real, business problem they managed to solve with such a framework.
Of course building on top of a semantic layer is good for LLMs, but that assumes 1. this semantic layer exists 2. it is not a freaking mess. While tools like dbt helped with 1, I'm yet to see a clean, well-documented, lineage-perfect semantic layer.
- 4 points
- I got scammed similarly (although $10, because I tested first), because 1. it was on YouTube, on a channel called "SpaceX" with verified logo 2. with hundreds of thousands of viewers live 3. with a believable speech from Mr. Musk standing next to its rockets (and knowing his interest in cryptocurrencies).
This happened as I was genuinely searching for the actual live stream of SpaceX.
I am ashamed, even more so because I even posted the live stream link on Hacker News (!). Fortunately it was flagged early and I apologized personally to dang.
This was a terrible experience for me, on many levels. I never thought I would fall in such a trap, being very aware of the tech, reading about similar stories etc.
- 646 points
I mention this because I was put off by Matz's voice in the English audio, it's not his voice!