At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work • Hacker News Board

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#881

Post by dabockster » Thu, May 29, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #460

dabockster wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.

In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based. It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses. Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a…

That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#882

Post by dabockster » Thu, May 29, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

billy99k wrote: post #299

dabockster wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way? Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But h…

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that…

Stallman has honestly done a ton of harm to our field. His “business model” reeks of ivory tower privilege and has ripped a ton of wealth and, more importantly, self-confidence, out of developers worldwide for at least 15-20 years now.

We all need to wake up to this.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#883

Post by dabockster » Thu, May 29, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

dragandj wrote: post #519

lvturner wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you. But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation? Maybe some people are getting some money,…

Sure, but if you have a strong copyright infringement case, couldn't you team up with a litigating company and take on Amazon? I am not sure that in any industry any tiny mom and pup shop can take on the largest corporate player without any cooperation from complementary interests...

In my experience, most law firms won’t go near big tech because of their litigious nature. Just the sheer amount of time and filings by big tech, legal or not, is enough to totally overwhelm an inexperienced legal team. It’s like a denial of service attack but through the court system.

The firms that will fight them are few and far between, and are priced accordingly.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#884

Post by dabockster » Thu, May 29, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #626

billy99k wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that…

But this is exactly why Stallman promoted not just Free Software, but specifically Copyleft software (via the GPL and then the Affero GPL).

Copyleft still removes the most common and available means for small inventors or businesses to get back *something* for their work.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#885

Post by dabockster » Thu, May 29, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

RossBencina wrote: post #315

lawgimenez wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just came out from a cave, what is this vibe coding?

A form of coding by proxy, where the developer instructs (in English prose) an LLM software development agent (e.g. cursor IDE, aider) to write the code, with the defining attribute that the developer never reviews the code that was written.

I review my vibe code, even if it’s just skimming it for linter errors. But yeah, the meme is that people are apparently force pushing what ever gets spat out by an LLM without checking it.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#886

Post by ModernMech » Thu, May 29, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

Flemlo wrote: post #876

ModernMech wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reinforcing the disparity that I'm pointing out in my original reply. My expectations for AI are calibrated by the people selling it. You say "AI progress is very fast" but again, I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing the same things I saw years ago when ChatGPT first came on the scene. If you go back to the hype of those days, they were saying "Things will change so rapidly now that AI is here, we will start seeing e…

Nope not marketing. I researched this topic myself. I'm not aware that Nvidia mentioned this. But hey it seems I can't convince you of my enthusiasm regarding ai. It's fine I still will play around with it often and looking forward to it's progress. Regarding your researcher: NotebookLM is great and you might need to invest a few hundred bucks to really try out more. We will see anyway we're it's going

Your enthusiasm for AI is just more hype noise as far as I'm concerned. You say you've "done research" but then don't link it for anyone to look into, adding to the hype. Brain compute performance is not a well-understood topic so saying some product approaches it is pure marketing hype. It's akin to saying the brain is a neural net.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#887

Post by ath3nd » Thu, May 29, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #873

ath3nd wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well. We are nitpicking, and you are wrong: https://therealnews.com/average-ceo-makes-339-times-more-tha... https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com... "In 2022, it was estimated tha…

Dude, your own link https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ says " We focus on the average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms (firms that sell stock on the open market) by revenue. "

These 350 largest publicly owned US firms employ a major portion of the US population. Just the top 10 companies by revenue employ 6% of the US work-eligible population. Imagine the total 350 companies!

So, while 350 seems to be a small number, these 350 companies employ the largest chunk of the US market, and that's why they are the most representative to do the study with.

And that's my point! If you select a random worker in the US, there is a HUGE chance they are employed by Amazon, Walmert or one of the big-s. And there is a HUGE chance their salary is 339 times less than their CEO's.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#888

Post by dd_xplore » Thu, May 29, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #769

littlecranky67 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are in a country with fire-at-will policies. In Germany you have a job security, you can't just fire people without a reason. The difficulty is actually proving their incompetence or unwillingness to work. Thus in my experience (working a self-employed contractor in Germany) this group is far larger than 50%. Also one of my reasons why no good software comes out of germany (and this includes SAP, as long…

Yes I work in the US but my company has extreme time wasting practices designed to have engineers explain every thing they do and why it's worth it. I never found this helpful and find it causes more problems than it solves.

Incompetent workers migrating to the US is a big issue.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#889

Post by 33hsiidhkm » Fri, May 30, 2025, 5:51 AM UTC

conartist6 wrote: post #867

33hsiidhkl wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your point. An LLM is loaded with a seed value, which is a number. The number may be chosen through some pseudo- or random process, or specified manually. For any given seed value, say 80085, the LLM will always and exactly generate the same tokens. It is not like stamped sheet metal, because it is digital information not matter. Say you load up R1, and give it a seed value of 80085, then sa…

WRONG lol. First you're assuming a brand new conversation: no context. Second you're assuming a local-first LLM because a remote one could change behavior at any time. Third, the way the input is expressed is inexact, so minor differences in input can have an effect. Fourth, if the data to be operated on has changed you will be using new parts of the model that were never previously used. But I understand how nuance…

Arguing with "people" on the internet... Nuance is definitely a word of the year, and if you look at many models you can actually see it's high probability.

Addressing your comment, there was no assumption or indication on my part that determinism only applies to a new "conversation". Any interactions with any LLM are deterministic, same conversation, for any seed value. Yes, I'm talking about local systems, because how are you going to know what is going on on a remote system? On a local system, a local LLM, if the input is expressed in the same way, the output will be generated in the same way, for all of the token context and so on. That means, for a seed value, after "hi", the model may say "hello", and then the human's response may be "how ya doin'", and then the model would say "so so , how ya doin?", and every single time, if the human or agent inputs the same tokens, the model will output the same tokens, for a given seed value. This is not really up for question, or in doubt or really anything to disagree about. Am I not being clear? You can ask your local LLM or remote LLM and they will certainly confirm that the process by which a language model generates is deterministic, by definition. Same input means same output, again I must mention that the exception is hardware bit flips, such as those caused by cosmic rays, and that's just to emphasize how very deterministic LLMs are. Of course, as you may know, online providers stage and mix LLMs, so for sure you are not going to be able to know that you are wrong by playing with chatgpt, grok/q, gemini, or whatever other only LLMs you are familiar with. If you have a system capable of offline or non-remote inference, you can see for yourself that you are wrong when you say that LLMs are non-deterministic.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#890

Post by idiotsecant » Fri, May 30, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

0xEF wrote: post #725

meroes wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to scroll back to see if the same poster calling OP adversarial was GP. And it was. Your > * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns* set the adversarial bar, and OP was just countering in kind.

Huge difference between me saying manufacturers will cut corners in any way they can (maybe you're taking this as consumer vs manufacterer?) and the person who replied to me saying I don't work a job that encounters "real" (read intentionally vague and diminutive) QC standars. One is a blanket statement that is backed by easily accessed and very public evidence, the other is personal attack. Please do not conflate th…

I'm not sure how it's a personal attack, it would be like someone who bakes bread for a living saying that the tolerance of products doesn't really matter, compared with a machinist who knows exactly how much it can matter. It's quantifiably true that serious QA is a thing, your industry just doesn't have it. If you choose to turn that into a personal attack I think that says more about your internal state than it does about the actual post I made.