Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 467 posts

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#291

Post by gherkinnn »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

No harm in running them in isolated instances and see what happens.

Feed an LLM stack traces or ask it to ask you questions about a topic you're unfamiliar about. Give it a rough hypothesis and demand it poke holes in it. These things it does well. I use Kagi's auto summariser to distil search results in to a hand full of paragraphs and then read through the citations it gives me.

Know that LLMs will suck up to you and confirm your ideas and make up bonkers things a third of the time.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#292

Post by erichocean »

reactordev wrote: post #258
friendzis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…

This has not been my experience as of late. If anything, they help steer us back on track when a SWE decides to be clever and introduce a footgun.

Same, I have Gemini Pro 2.5 (now 3) exclusively implementing new designs that don't exist in the world and it's great at it! I do all the design work, it writes the code (and tests) and debugs the thing.

I'm happy, it's happy, I've never been more productive.

The longer I do this, the more likely it is to one-shot things across 5-10 files with testing passing on the first try.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#293

Post by adrian_b »

DougBTX wrote: post #287
adrian_b wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients. Attempting to roast a full chicken or turkey is not the correct way to use microwaves. You must first remove the bones from the bird, then cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. After using a boning knife for the former…

> Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel It sounds like this is steamed meat, as opposed to roasted. Your cooking time seems to match a quick search for steamed chicken recipes: https://tiffycooks.com/20-minutes-chinese-steamed-chicken/

Neither "roasted" nor "steamed" are completely appropriate for this cooking method.

While there is steam in the vessel, it comes only from the water lost from the meat, not from any additional water, and the meat is heated by the microwaves, not by the steam.

Without keeping a lid on the cooking vessel, the loss of water is too rapid and the cooked meat becomes too dry. Even so, the weight of meat is reduced to about two thirds, due to the loss of water.

In the past, I was roasting meat on a covered grill, where the air enclosed in it was heated by a gas burner through an opening located on one side, on its bottom. With such a covered grill, the air in which the meat was cooked would also contain steam from the water lost by the meat, so the end result was very similar to the microwave cooking that I do now, also preventing the meat from becoming too dry, unlike with roasting on an open grill, while also concentrating the flavor and avoiding its dilution by added water or oil.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#295

Post by leetrout »

everdrive wrote: post #270
portanus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.

I lived without a microwave for a ~year and ended up buying one again because they are pretty convenient.

So maybe it's not high on the list based on the value you are measuring but it definitely has a convenience value that isn't replaced by anything else.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#296

Post by pjc50 »

vic_nyc wrote: post #294
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #289

The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:

Bitcoin

.. most of the coins are held in giant blocs by unknowns, and the price is largely driven by a couple of funds issuing tokenized dollars?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#297

Post by fleshmonad »

vic_nyc wrote: post #294
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #289

The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:

Bitcoin

Great joke. Truly a free and untraceable currency the plebs are profiting off right now. I am mining some too! I just cashed out my 50 dollars profit and bought myself a meal at my local trader Joe's, next time when I'm there, I will probably pay with chainlink though.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#298

Post by _aavaa_ »

everdrive wrote: post #270
portanus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.

Why are they terrible?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#300

Post by forgetfulness »

automatic6131 wrote: post #282
whstl wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a very interesting interaction in a few small startups I freelanced for recently. In a 1-year company, the only tech person that's been there for more than 3-4 months (the CTO), only really understands a tiny fraction of the codebase and infrastructure, and can't review code anymore. Application size has blown up tremendously despite being quite simple. Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more…

>Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends Oh, look, you've normalized deviance. All of these things are screaming red flags, the house is burning down around you.

This sounds just like a typical startup or small consultancy drunk on Ruby gems and codegen (scaffolding) back in the Rails heyday.

People who don’t yet have the maturity for the responsibility of their roles, thinking that merely adopting a new technology will make up for not taking care of the processes and the people.

Post reply on HN