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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#51

Post by brightball »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #39
kemiller2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction. Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”. The people that make bridges and building…

I was won over by this distinction from another senior some years ago. I think he said…

“Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.”

I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#52

Post by margalabargala »

abletonlive wrote: post #28
guzfip wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to move on from bullshit jobs. So are you aiming for death poverty? Once those bullshit jobs go, we’re going to find a lot of people incapable of producing anything of value while still costing quite a bit to upkeep. These people will have to be gotten rid of somehow. > and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve. There will be plenty of problems to solve. Li…

Name a single time doomers were right about anything. Doomers consistently overstate their expected outcome in every single domain and consistently fail to predict how society evolves and adapts. Again: The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

Climate change would be a big one.

Also, there have been plenty of awful things caused by technological progress. Tons of death and poverty was created by the transition to factories and mechanization 150 years ago.

Did we come out the other end with higher living standards? Yes, but that doesn't make the decades of brutal transition period any less awful for those affected.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#53

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

vardalab wrote: post #46
jaffee wrote: post #16

> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

It's not really malware, but it's a mess. It installed so much shit and it interfered with your git hooks and stuff. It was kind of messy. I kind of gave up on it. I just went back to using built-in claude code todowrite tasks.

It managed to throw itself into a global file for me that Claude used which caused beads to appear in random projects on my machine. Because of how it was there the agent attempted to re-install beads after I already removed it because the guy hook errored.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#54

Post by bdangubic »

pixl97 wrote: post #20
ketzo wrote: post #6

I think the core idea here is a good one. But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong! It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” Yes, there are still iss…

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever

Air Traffic Controller software - sure. 99% of other softwares around that are not mission-critical (like Facebook) just punch it to production - "move fast and break shit" has been cool way before "AI"

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#55

Post by ge96 »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #39
kemiller2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction. Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”. The people that make bridges and building…

I'm similar except for me reason is no degree. So some jobs eng others just developer... although my current job I'm a "technology specialist" which is funny. But I'm getting paid so whatever.

Most recently I wrote cloudformation templates to bring up infra for AWS-based agents. I don't use ai-assisted coding except googling which I acknowledge is an ai summary.

A friend of mine is in a toxic company where everyone has to use AI and they're looked down upon if they don't use it. Every minute of their day has to be logged doing something. They're also going to lay off a bunch of people soon since "AI has replaced them" this is in the context of an agency.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#56

Post by no_shadowban_3 »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

Just another reason we should cut software jobs and replace them with A(G)I.

If the human "engineers" were never doing anything precisely, why would the robot engineers need to?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#57

Post by api »

guzfip wrote: post #47
abletonlive wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a single time doomers were right about anything. Doomers consistently overstate their expected outcome in every single domain and consistently fail to predict how society evolves and adapts. Again: The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

> Name a single time doomers were right about anything. - NFTs - Surveillance schizos - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and…

I was thinking the other day about why a "global pedophile cabal" would be a thing. I still think that phrase overstates it a bit, but not that much.

Committing a crime with someone bonds you to them.

First, it's a kind of shared social behavior, and it's one that is exclusive to you and your friends who commit the same kinds of crimes. Any shared experience bonds people, crimes included. Having a shared secret also bonds people.

Second, it creates an implied pact of mutually assured destruction. Everyone knows the skeletons in everyone else's closet, so it creates a web of trust. Anyone defecting could possibly be punished by selectively revealing their crimes, and vice versa. Game theoretically it overcomes tit-for-tat and enables all-cooperate interactions, at least to some extent, and even among people who otherwise don't like each other or don't have a lot in common.

Third, it separates the serious from the unserious. If you want to be a member of the club, do the bad thing. It's a form of high cost membership gating.

This works for other kinds of crimes too. It's not that unusual for criminal gangs to demand that initiates commit a crime and provide evidence, or commit a crime in front of existing members. These can be things like robbery, murder, and so on. Anyone not willing to do this probably isn't serious and can't be trusted. Once someone does do it, you know they're really in.

It naturally creates cabals. The crime comes first, the cabal second, but then the cabal can realize this and start using the crime as a gateway to admission.

Every mutual interest creates a community, but a secret criminal mutual interest creates a special kind of tight knit community. In a world that's increasingly atomized and divided, that's power. I think it neatly explains how the Epstein network could be so powerful and effective.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#59

Post by anthk »

SoftTalker wrote: post #29
badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.

In Europe they are. Call yourself an Engineer without a degree and your company and you will be sued with a big fine, because here you must be legally accountable on disasters and ofc there are hard constraints .
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