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Lines of code got a better publicist
171–180 of 309 posts
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The non-technical people are in charge and they're not tethered to reality in the same way that engineers are. Objective reality will win in the end, but that doesn't prevent damage being done in the short term.
IDK, I do think a lot of it is LLMs enable people who were not in our community to come into it (in an eternal september kind of way) and they are going through all this from first principals and ignoring their elders, but I've also seen technical people suddenly measuring themselves this way. The most optimistic read of this is that they _feel_ productive, and that feels nice, and they want to share how that feels,…
> The most optimistic read of this is that they _feel_ productive
In addition to "feel productive", two other feels I think are flying under the radar:
1. You get a parasocial relationship with a "friend" (or at least conversation partner) who seems to "understand" you.
2. You get some form of gambling entertainment when you pull the lever and the output keeps landing on different sides of the jackpot you want.
While #2 has some overlap with classic creative struggle, I think it can at least be seen as a kind of junk-food verson, where the frequency is different and the health-promoting parts aren't present.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#173Weird baseless push for AI on the end, with no reasoning, no goal, no claim of gain. "Just go and use AI, people, developers must adopt new things." It's not the first article I've read recently that is an ad for AI after a short context pretending to criticize it, with nothing connecting them.
AI is the new cloud. There's no market for people or companies who aren't committed to it. If you're a dev who refuses to use AI, no company will hire you; and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs). Their investors and big-ticket customers will also think twice before signing off on major commitments. So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and…
Or, don’t. Do what you want, don’t listen to random people on the internet telling you what to do.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.
Feels doubly so for Anthropic. There's just unbelievable level of glaze, and insane upvote velocity for "blog posts" that are essentially fluffed up feature documentation. Somehow everything boris says has become the word of God. The dude is just an engineer, like you and me, who gets unlimited tokens for free.
Yeah, I sometimes catch these posts minutes after they were submitted and they're full of highly upvoted glowing reviews that maintain their momentum on the top of the page.
And this is hacker news. A place where famously the most upvoted comment is the one critical of the post.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#175If your A+ senior developer spends 8 months working on a feature that ultimately doesn’t get shipped or a MVP that gets killed, then you wasted that A+ senior developer and their productivity was the same as the other two B+ engineers that also worked on the project. This is actually a very common issue and usually ignored when it comes to things like hiring or assigning resources to a project. AI won’t change that i…
I think engineers tend to over index on this kind of thing being "waste". You didn't waste that investment, you paid for the option to ship that feature or MVP and the research into the question of whether it made sense to ship it.
put simpler, you learned what not to build.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly expanding this point for the joy of debating. Granted, grandparent comment used _charged_ words. Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in. Is that not a fair assesment of the real world? Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"? What exactly is the beef with grandparent comment? Is it just the negatively charged words? I…
> Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in. I'd rephrase that: labor is used to provide the owners the maximum amount of money they can manage to extract from the people doing the labor. A technology 10x's worker productivity? That means 9x more goes to the owners, and 0 x (zero) more goes to the workers. Maybe the workers get even less , because now you can fire some. >…
> A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.
I fully agree, and remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.
That's certainly a way to look at it. And that repo contains a "third party" directory which itself contains Linux, LLVM, and much of the rest of the open source world. But I would suggest that the largest of those thousands of applications probably has a transitive closure of hundreds of millions of lines of code.
I'm aware. I worked on that specific project (assuming we are talking about the same one) back in the day. :-)
There are certainly very large applications in that repo in the hundreds of millions of lines of code. But comparing the entire repo to single applications is not an apt comparison.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#178Many mid size to large companies are hilariously inefficient and the executives have no idea how work actually gets done. This means you can (in theory) fire a decent percentage of your workforce without affecting your output. You can then claim they’ve been replaced by AI without anyone ever challenging that assertion. I’m not making a pro or anti AI claim here, just saying that you won’t know whether you were wrong about it until/unless things start to go really badly.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.
Feels doubly so for Anthropic. There's just unbelievable level of glaze, and insane upvote velocity for "blog posts" that are essentially fluffed up feature documentation. Somehow everything boris says has become the word of God. The dude is just an engineer, like you and me, who gets unlimited tokens for free.
Upvoter here. Nothing special -- I like Claude a lot. I found it more ergonomic to work with, and I think its models are state of the art. I believe I'm more productive especially in legacy crufty codebases.
I may not be representative of the universe or have a controlled, randomized study to back it up, but that's not what upvotes are for are they?
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality distortion field is strong around anthropic. Anthropic posts tons of equally bullshit blog posts, written entirely by AI, saying absolutely nothing, to the front page and they consistently average many hundreds of upvotes.
I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.
HN is astroturfed. Not just AI and also before AI took off. It's so easy and so valuable to astroturf HN