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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#271

Post by sarchertech »

VorpalWay wrote: post #199
mckn1ght wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software packages are more complicated than you make them out to be. Off the top of my head: - license restrictions, relicensing - patches, especially to fix CVEs, that break assumptions you made in your consumption of the package - supply chain attacks - sunsetting There’s no real “set it and forget it” with software reuse. For that matter, there’s no “set it and forget it” in civil engineering either, it also requi…

I have talked to colleagues who wrote software running on microcontrollers a decade ago, that software still runs fine. So yes there is set and forget software. And it is all around us, mostly in microcontrollers. But microcontrollers far outnumber classical computers (trivially: each classical computer or phone contain many microcontrollers such as SSD controllers, power management, wifi, ethernet, cellular,... And…

Ignoring the actual useful reasons to connect something to be internet, the subscription business model is just too damn tempting.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#272

Post by nostrademons »

wholinator2 wrote: post #254
jimbokun wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. They are pretty much legally obligated to act in this manner.

Has it always been this way? If not, did it used to be better? If so, how can we get back?

The legal doctrine that a company's primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value dates from the 1970s. It started with Milton Friedman with a 1971 essay in the NYTimes [1] and then gained a lot of currency throughout the 70s stagflation and economic malaise. The final death-knell of the corporation as a social enterprise came during the 1980s era of corporate raiders and PE buyouts.

Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way.

Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#273

Post by galbar »

kerblang wrote: post #128
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…

Engineering is two things: 1. Applied physics - Software is immediately disqualified. Symbols have no physics. 2. Ethics - Lives and livelihoods depend on you getting it right. Software people want to be disqualified because that stuff is so boring, but this is becoming a more serious issue with every passing day.

Software is applied mathematics, though

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#274

Post by chickensong »

jimbokun wrote: post #202
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

> But it's largely done now

Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#275

Post by einr »

abletonlive wrote: post #212
metobehonest wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CO2 concentration continues to climb year after year, at an accelerating rate. The world hasn't ended yet because it's still 2026 but it doesn't mean it won't. We're on a hothouse earth trajectory. All signs point to you not being aware of serious climate research and hanging on to a naive Steven Pinker "everything is always improving" outlook.

> The world hasn't ended yet because it's still 2026 but it doesn't mean it won't. All signs point to you being a doomer that is excellent at moving the goal post. "If it doesn't happen tomorrow surely it will happen the next day." You can do this until the end of time. A waste of brain cycles for anybody with a real job. This is the exact same pattern for every single kind of doomer and they are all wrong in the exa…

> All signs point to you being a doomer that is excellent at moving the goal post.

All signs point to it being really easy for you to dismiss "doomers" as wrong and "scientists" as right retroactively. If someone was wrong about the direction of the climate crisis 20 years ago they were a doomer. If they were right they were a scientist. Easy!

You can apply this to anything that went to shit with the world in the past, not just the climate. If someone predicted the financial crisis of 2008, they were not a doomer, they were a particularly savvy financial analyst. All the others who keep predicting crises are wrong, until they're right, and then they're not a doomer, so your point always stands no matter what. Super convenient!

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#276

Post by emporas »

Towaway69 wrote: post #266
emporas wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is so low entropy that smaller and more economical models will be up to the task the same as gigantic models from big providers are today. No worries there, the huge improvements we see today from GPT and Claude, are at their heart just Reinforcement Learning (CoT, chain of thought and thinking tokens are just one example of many). RL is the cheapest kind of training one can perform, as far as I understand. Plea…

> the open source invisible hand makes everything completely free. In this case the limitation is the compute. Very few people have the compute required for AI/LLMs locally or for free (comparable to the performance of Claude). So yes, there are plenty of Open Source models that can be used locally but you need to invest in hardware to make that happen and especially if you want the quality that is available from the…

>In this case the limitation is the compute.

I agree with most of your points, but computation can be transferred from a place where energy is cheap to a place that is expensive. Energy for cooking cannot be transferred that way.

See for example Amazon-Google datacenters in the Gulf region. We've also got a whole continent, Australia, to put as many solar panels as we desire. Australia got dark for half a day, every day? Put solar panels to the opposite side of the planet.

Energy is a concern, for cooking, transportation etc. Energy for computation is not.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#277

Post by throwanem »

PaulHoule wrote: post #197
Towaway69 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.[1] This is definitely something that is happening with software systems. The question is: is having an AI that is fundamentally undecipherable in its intention to extend these systems a good approach? Or is an approach of slowing down and…

The other day I was thinking about how stupid little things in the Javascript ecosystem where you have to change your configuration file "just because" are a real billion-dollar mistake and speculating that I could sue some of the developers in small claims court. Right away I scoffed when I heard people had 20 agents running in parallel because I've been at my share of startups with 20 person teams that tend to brea…

> Seems folks have forgotten that Yegge used to blog that he owed all his success in software development to chronic cannabis use, like if wasn't for all that weed there wouldn't be any Google today.

I remember a lot of Steve Yegge's impressive claims from back when he and Zed Shaw were what I would call "fringe contemporaries" in the early 2010s - like all the time he spent gassing on about his unmaintainable, barely usable nightmare of a Javascript mode for Emacs. (I did like the MozRepl integration, for what that's worth.)

I don't particularly recall him talking about smoking pot, and I think I would have, if he'd been as memorably effusive there as about js2-mode. But it's been a lot of years and I couldn't begin to remember where to look for an archive of his old blog. Would you happen to have a link?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#278

Post by Hackbraten »

6510 wrote: post #226

I keep returning to this thought: Assuming our abstraction architecture is missing something fundamental, what is it? My gut says something simple is missing that makes all of the difference. One thought I had was that our problem lives between all the things taking something in and spitting something out. Perhaps 90% of the work writing a "function" should be to formally register it as taking in data type foo 1.54.3…

There's more to a function than just types. It's not sufficient to know that the function outputs a baz 42.0. You have to understand which one. The oldest? The latest? The one that matches the foo and bar input parameters?

I think that's the part where it remains difficult. Someone has to convey clearly what the semantics and side effects of the function are. Consumers have to read and understand it. Failing that, you get breakage.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#279

Post by markus_zhang »

mememememememo wrote: post #224
markus_zhang wrote: post #13

If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. Integration is the key to the agents. Individual usages don't help AI much because it is confined within the domain of that individual.

We reduce jobs every time we e.g. fix a bug. Where do you stop?

I think there is a line somewhere people need to draw, when a technology such as AI invades into ALL areas, threatening to reduce a percentage of jobs so quickly, without the potential to creating new TYPES of jobs that can feed many. It is different from computers, and it is different from trains.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#280

Post by abletonlive »

guzfip wrote: post #259
abletonlive wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking the wrong person. I haven't seen a single example of a doomer warning that came true. Can you provide one? It seems like society still exists when I look out the window and the impact that doomers assert are greatly exaggerated in every instance.

So are disingenuous or just stupid? Of course society exists still, but what society? Only the very dumbest think “doom” is some apocalyptic scene from a Hollywood film in which humans are nearly wiped out. “Doom” is instead when swaths of Roman citizens with rights amidst a powerful, civically and technologically impressive hegemony, over time find themselves reduced to unfree serfs. They and their descendants would…

> Only the very dumbest think “doom” is some apocalyptic scene from a Hollywood film in which humans are nearly wiped out.

So you're all just out here telling everybody they should stop what they are doing because of the doom, but the doom isn't that impactful in the grand scheme of things?

That checks out with my understanding of doomers. Just a bunch of useless whiners that produce a bunch of meaningless noise for everybody else.

> “Doom” is instead when swaths of Roman citizens with rights amidst a powerful, civically and technologically impressive hegemony, over time find themselves reduced to unfree serfs. They and their descendants would remain in that position for centuries until a horrific disease came through and killed so many of them that the serfdom became untenable.

And look at where we are now. Rome has been surpassed many times over. The quality of life for the average living person is FAR SURPASSED anything that anybody in Rome could dream of. Seems like it wasn't worth worrying about what happened in Rome. If you make "doom" some kind of local event that affects a small group of people in a short window of time while trying to tell everybody they should hit the brakes and pause - maybe you should reflect on how these two things contradict each other.

In other words, if the doom isn't that doomful in the grand scheme of things then your argument is just again, moving goalposts. There are clear examples for every doom scenario you're talking about where the world moved on and built bigger and better. I guess it's on you to wait until that's no longer true but until then the ball is in your court. Just realize that you should at some point reflect and realize that every swing and miss is just more evidence that doomers are consistently wrong about the impact of their observations.

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