GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire • Hacker News Board

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#151

Post by chaboud » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #143

chaboud wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been quite happy with thinking of agentic IDE operation as being akin to a highly energetic intern. It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance. That said, I get my answers back in minutes/hours rather than days/weeks. For the cost, for things that would otherwise be delivered by an int…

"intern or college-hire" It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out. "It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance" This describes a team of juniors.…

We hire folks who make slop so we can form them into folks who turn that energy into elevated output. However, I expect that the junior engineer crop will teach us a thing or two about assisting coding techniques, and we'll owe it to them to level up their system design and abstraction skills.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#152

Post by johnecheck » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #141

johnecheck wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand. The analogy wouldn't be Napster with networking code disabled. The analogy is Napster on a LAN. Only those on the LAN can access it so it's not open to the world, but nonetheless you've still got a p2p file-sharing client. And yes. I'm using the engineering definition. I don't believe in letting a gaggle of marketers and scammers define my terms. A blockchain is a specific technology. It doesn't me…

On reflection I was incorrect to mention Napster, which (at least in its most-popular incarnation) was still centralized for indexing and searching, with P2P only for bulk file data. Please pretend said "Gnutella" alone. > The analogy is [the P2P application] on a LAN. The analogy is the P2P application where regular clients can only discover a Special Master Client that must be running on a fixed IP, which only perm…

This is a debate over semantics, let's conclude by presenting our competing definitions.

A blockchain is ledger shared between multiple computers. Entries in this ledger contain the cryptographic hash of the previous entry, creating an append-only data structure where existing records cannot be modified.

While blockchains are generally used in p2p and open networks, this isn't a requirement. Bitcoin was a blockchain when Nakamoto was the only node. Popularity and openness are not required to meet this technical definition.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#153

Post by msgodel » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 5:39 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #136

inkyoto wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. Consider a leaf commit (or a leaf which is a subtree of commits). I am a person with nefarious intentions, and I delete the leaf commit, forcefully expire the reflogs, or force garbage collect them. At that point, there is no longer remaining evidence in git that the commit ever existed. If git were to be used to record a history of criminal offences, I would be able to single-handedly delete…

If you're running a blockchain on a single node, it's exactly like running Git on that single node. You can mutate the data locally, even with something as simple as reverting to a backup. Voila, it never happened. If you're running Git on multiple nodes, it's exactly like running a blockchain on multiple nodes. You can mutate your own local copy, but that doesn't mutate mine, and the set of commits is functionally i…

The problem I think you two are running into is not having a good definition of the process which decides the canonical commit set.

That is the real magic with bitcoin (and derivatives.)

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#154

Post by palmotea » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #115

palmotea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Article doesn't understand that cutting "between five and 20 percent of support and admin processing" is really valuable, instead it seems to want to dismiss that as a dull failure. To whom? From the customer perspective, it sounds like a shittier level of service is coming, which is a kind of failure.

Massive cost savings vs slightly more shitty customer service means it was probably worth the trade off. Nothing usually comes without tradeoffs.

> Massive cost savings vs slightly more shitty customer service means it was probably worth the trade off. Nothing usually comes without tradeoffs.

You're taking a different perspective. I'm a customer, not the business owner. I don't care about their "massive cost savings" if I'm getting shittier service.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#155

Post by inkyoto » Sun, Aug 24, 2025, 4:00 AM UTC

msgodel wrote: post #153

kstrauser wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running a blockchain on a single node, it's exactly like running Git on that single node. You can mutate the data locally, even with something as simple as reverting to a backup. Voila, it never happened. If you're running Git on multiple nodes, it's exactly like running a blockchain on multiple nodes. You can mutate your own local copy, but that doesn't mutate mine, and the set of commits is functionally i…

The problem I think you two are running into is not having a good definition of the process which decides the canonical commit set. That is the real magic with bitcoin (and derivatives.)

Yes, that is the problem that is impossible to address with git due to its decentralised nature, which is a feature.

A typical scenario that disqualifies git in certain scenarios is as simple as a master repository and a few local copies of varying degree of vintage. Then the master has had its commit history changed, reflogs purged and GC'd, and the local copies will never have the knowledge of what the master could have had in the past.

git is perfectly acceptable in many scenarios, but if the immutability has to be enforced, in regulatory WORM requirements (SEC 17a-4, ISO 14641 or similar) with

  1. Certified write-once, read-many retention, legal holds and tamper-evidence anchored to trusted time sources are mandatory;

  2. Authoritative time and ordering – git commit timestamps are user-supplied and easily forged;

  3. Granular access control and selective disclosure – git tends to replicate whole histories and the ledger can provide the proof of single record only;

  4. Structured queries and point-in-time views at scale – git has no native time-travel queries, secondary indexes or ACID multi-record transactions across millions of records with consistent snapshots;

  5. Independent third-party verification – if external parties (e.g. state auditors) must verify recorded events, verifiable receipts or Merkle proofs that stand alone are needed. git commits and optional signatures are not receipts and are hard to validate without access to the repository.

  6. Consensus or anchoring needs – if integrity must be prove against a hostile or nefarious party, anchoring or consensus is required. git has no native consensus; ledger databases can anchor state hashes to public chains or quorum-backed authorities.

… git is not a really option.

git can be hardedned, though, by signing commits and tags, forbidding force-pushes server-side, mirroring to append-only storage and periodically anchoring repository state to a public timestamping service. It still will not meet strict ledger-grade assurances, but it can raise the bar for internal use. The sheer amount of work required to accomplish that makes a solid case for a dedicated ledger database.