- satisficeI like this guy. I want to know more about him.
- If you are not required to rigorously test the claims made about AI capabilities, then those claims about how they can do X or Y are more or less barroom bragging.
If you want to be a responsible engineer, instead of a nihilist, then you don’t just make a space shuttle and declare it to be safe until it blows up a couple of times and you shrug and move on to other things.
AI tools have serious problems, today. These problems aren’t secret. They are widely discussed. The fanboys laugh or shrug. I can’t bring myself to do that, because I am a responsible adult.
I do make use of Claude Code to create throwaway tools. It’s great for that. In my circle of friends we have a shorthand for discussing our AI-aided work:
level 0: Slop. Untested, barely tried, unreviewed output. “I slop-coded a tool to track RAM usage”
level 1: Plausible. Sanity checked. But not deeply reviewed. “I created a plausible tool with Claude Code for monitoring RAM usage.”
level 2: Provisional. I trust it for use in my own work, based on reasonable testing and review. “I have a provisional RAM usage monitor that I created with Claude Code.”
Level 3: Validated. Tested to the point I can recommend it to others. I stake my reputation on it.
- Speak for yourself. Maybe get a job that involves intellectual achievement. Then you’ll discover the importance of curiosity.
You are technically correct that no one is directly paid to be curious. But it is also true that no one is directly paid to sleep. Nevertheless, if you don’t sleep when you are away from work, your mind will not function when you ARE at work.
Curiosity is an evolutionary adaptation that enables the discovery of heretofore unknown resources.
- Yes, it’s silly. It’s verbal hyperinflation. Cheap signalling. Similar to the overuse of exclamation points.
- A lot of moralizing for someone who “doesn’t believe in morality.”
- The “it’s no worse” argument seems to ignore the headline, which literally reports that it is worse.
- I would like to see an article that belongs to this title. This article should have been titled “My HTML Decrapulator”
- This article is premised on a shallow notion of testing. Because of this, the author lacks a conceptual toolkit to discuss product risk. He speaks of the most important part of the testing process (human thinking and judgment) as if it were “the most boring job in the world” and then later contradicts that by speaking of “testing the tests” as if that were a qualitatively different process (it’s not, it’s exactly the same cognitive process as what he called boring).
The overall effect is to use the word “test” as if it were a magical concept that you plaster onto your work to give it unearned prestige.
What the article demonstrates is that vibe coding is a way to generate orders of magnitude of complexity that no one in the world can understand and no one can take real responsibility for, even in principle.
I call it slop-coding, and I am happy to slop-code throwaway tools. I instruct Claude never to “test” anything I ask it to create, because I need to test it myself in order to apply it responsibly and feel close to it. If I want automated output checking (a waste of time with most tools I create), I can slop-code a framework for that, a la carte.
This way it burns fewer tokens of silly shallow testing.
- I assume this is a collaboration between the History Channel and Pornhub.
“You are a literary rake. Write a story about an unchaperoned lady whose ankle you glimpse.”
- For years I thought that Hacker News has no moderators. Apparently it does, but they seem to keep a low profile. I have no idea what their protocol is and I don't see any help menu that mentions them.
I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.
I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.
Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.
Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.
- Whether it's a feature or a bug, it's mysterious. Hence the question.
- I agree. A child is a million small datapoints. My son established a strong personality early on that defied our attempts to modify it. Meanwhile he was raised in a relaxed environment that certainly provided no environmental explanation for his fixations.
I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.
- AGI will never happen for one simple and obvious reason: there will never be a consensus about what AGI is.
This has always been the issue. This is an argument I made more than 20 years ago. AGI, whatever it is as a technical problem, is mainly a TESTING problem. If you don’t solve that, then AGI is remains a matter of faith. A cult.
- Us testers have been dealing with that crap forever. Every non-tester thinks they know how a professional tester should work, and imagines our work is just writing test cases.
- That’s what you always say.
- So, HN won’t change its look?
- Only if they also do a google search, provide the top one hundred hits, and paste in a relevant Wikipedia page.
- ARE you the author? Or did you prompt AI to get this?
- Does it also work for people not on the Australian spectrum?
- You want a world where the streets are safe and clean, not choked with homeless people and corpses thereof. So, this “tough love” bullshit is not going to fly.
The slums of Mumbai are just a taste of what’s to come in America, at this rate.
Billionaires, take heed.