441–450 of 522 posts
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haha! do you know details, what domains?
Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.
i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.
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There is demand for non scalable, not committed to be maintained code where smaller issues can tolerated. This demand is currently underserved as coding is somewhat expensive and focused on critical functions.
What are some examples of when buggy code can be tolerated?
[Edit: DanLuu "one week of bugs": https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ ]
All the decades people tolerated blue-screens on Windows. All the software which regularly segfaulted years ago. The permeation of "have you tried turning it off and on again" into everyday life. The "ship sooner, patch later" culture. The refusal to use garbage collected or memory managed languages or formal verification over C/C++/etc because some bugs are more tolerable than the cost/effort/performance costs to change. Display and formatting bugs, e.g. glitches in video games. When error conditions aren't handled - code that crashes if you enter blank parameters. Bugs in utility code that doesn't run often like the installer.
One software I installed yesterday told me to disable some Windows services before the install, then the installer tried to start the services at the end of the install and couldn't, so it failed and finished without finishing installing everything. This reminded me that I knew about that, because that buggy behaviour has been there for years and I've tripped over it before; at least two major versions.
Another one I regularly update tells me to close its running processes before proceding with the install, but after it's got to that state, it won't let me procede and it has no way to refresh or rescan to detect the running process has finished. That's been there for years and several major versions as well.
One more famous example is """I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you’re leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.""" - Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP. I've a feeling that was admitted about 37 Signals and Basecamp, it was common to restart Ruby-on-Rails code frequently, but I can't find a source to back that up.
The interesting thing nobody's talking about here is that cheap code generation actually makes throwaway prototypes viable. Before, you'd agonize over architecture because rewriting was expensive. Now you can build three different approaches in a day and pick the one that works. The real cost was never the code itself. It was the decision-making around what to build. That hasn't gotten cheaper at all.
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> YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting. Ah, the old "you suck at prompting" angle again, isn't it? If you're going to shill this hard, at least come up with something new and original, this is sounding more than desperate.
Most people suck at playing the piano. Most people suck at prompting coding agents. If you practice either of those things you'll get better at them. I really don't understand the "stop telling me I'm holding it wrong" argument. You probably are holding it wrong! Is this born out of some weird belief that "AI" is meant to be science fiction technology that you don't ever need to learn how to use? That would help expl…
It would be funny, if by now I weren't convinced you are pushing these false analogies on purpose. The key difference between a piano and LLMs being, the piano will produce the same sounds to a same sequence of keys. Every single time. A piano is deterministic. The LLMs are not, and you know it, which makes your constant comparison of deterministic with non-deterministic tools sound a bit dishonest. So please stop using these very weak analogies.
> I really don't understand the "stop telling me I'm holding it wrong" argument. You probably are holding it wrong!
Right, another weak argument. Writing English language paragraphs is not a science you seem to imply it is. You're not the only person using the LLMs intensively for the last years, and it's not like there this huge secret to using them - after all they use natural language as their primary interface. But that's besides the point. We're not discussing if they are hard or easy to use or whatever. We are discussing if I should replace the magnificent supercomputer already placed in my head by mother nature or God or Aliens or whatever you believe in, for a very shitty, downgraded version 0.0.1 of it sitting in someone's datacenter, all for the sake of sometimes cutting some corners by getting that quick awk/sed oneliner or some boilerplate code? I don't think that's a worthy tradeoff, especially when the relevant reports indicate an objective slowdown, which probably also explains the so-called LLM-fatigue.
> Is this born out of some weird belief that "AI" is meant to be science fiction technology that you don't ever need to learn how to use?
No, actually it is born out of the weird belief which your sponsors have been either explicitly or implicitly promoting, now for the 4th year, in various intensities and frequencies, that the LLM technology will be equal to a "country of PhDs in a datacenter". All of this based on the super weird transhumanist ideology a lot of the people directly or indirectly sponsoring your writing actively believe in. And whether you like it or not, even if you have never implied the same, you have been a useful helper by providing a more "rational" sounding voice, commenting on the supposed incremental improvements and progress and what not.
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If the code is being used by a small group of people who are willing to figure out and share workarounds for those bugs - internal staff, for example.
Aren’t you also paying internal staff for their time. Waisting their time is waisting your money.
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Most people suck at playing the piano. Most people suck at prompting coding agents. If you practice either of those things you'll get better at them. I really don't understand the "stop telling me I'm holding it wrong" argument. You probably are holding it wrong! Is this born out of some weird belief that "AI" is meant to be science fiction technology that you don't ever need to learn how to use? That would help expl…
> Most people suck at playing the piano. Most people suck at prompting coding agents. If you practice either of those things you'll get better at them. It would be funny, if by now I weren't convinced you are pushing these false analogies on purpose. The key difference between a piano and LLMs being, the piano will produce the same sounds to a same sequence of keys. Every single time. A piano is deterministic. The LL…
Most people suck at falconry. If you practice at falconry you'll get better at it.
Falcons certainly aren't deterministic.
> it's not like there this huge secret to using them - after all they use natural language as their primary interface
That's what makes them hard to use! A programming language has like ~30 keywords and does what you tell it to do. An LLM accepts input in 100+ human languages and, as you've already pointed out many times, responds in non-deterministic ways. That makes figuring out how to use them effectively really difficult.
> We are discussing if I should replace the magnificent supercomputer already placed in my head by mother nature or God or Aliens or whatever you believe in, for a very shitty, downgraded version 0.0.1 of it sitting in someone's datacenter
We really aren't. I consistently argue for LLMs as tools that augment and amplify human expertise, not as tools that replace it.
I never repeat the "country of PhDs" stuff because I think it's over-hyped nonsense. I talk about what LLMs can actually do.
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I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive. I chose this words because I don't think good code is nearly as expensive with coding agents as it was without them. You still have to actively work to get good code, but it takes so much less time when you have a coding agen…
> I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive. Which is nuance that will get overlooked or waved away by upper management who see the cost of hiring developers, know that developers "write code", and can compare the developer salary with a Claude/Codex/whatever subscrip…
Value of developer + Claude subscription: N * value of developer without Claude subscription where N is still the subject of intense debate.
They are right about new habits needed. And this is where everyone should start. Sometimes a quick prompt has killed 5 hours of meetings to discuss if it were worth it.
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> That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5). I mean it's inherently impossible, given the statistical nature of LLMs, so I am not sure are you claiming this out of ignorance or other interests, but again, what you claim is impossible due to the very nature of LLMs.
It's impossible, and yet I experience it on a daily basis. YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting.
Collaborating with someone/something else via natural language in a programming project inherently trades control for productivity (or the promise of it). That tradeoff can be worth it depending on how much productivity you gain and how competent the collaborator is, but it can't be avoided.
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> YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting. Ah, the old "you suck at prompting" angle again, isn't it? If you're going to shill this hard, at least come up with something new and original, this is sounding more than desperate.
Most people suck at playing the piano. Most people suck at prompting coding agents. If you practice either of those things you'll get better at them. I really don't understand the "stop telling me I'm holding it wrong" argument. You probably are holding it wrong! Is this born out of some weird belief that "AI" is meant to be science fiction technology that you don't ever need to learn how to use? That would help expl…
I can't speak for others, but from my end it really seems like there's no actual way to detect whether someone is holding it right or wrong until after the implications for LLMs are known. If someone is enthusiastic about LLMs, we don't see claims that they're holding it wrong. It's only if an LLM project fails, or someone tries them and concludes they don't work as well as proponents say, that the accusations come out, even if the person in question had been using these tools for a long time and previously been a supporter. This makes it seem like "holding it wrong" is a post hoc justification for ignoring evidence that would tend to contradict the pro-LLM narrative, not a measurable fact someone's LLM usage.