I understand your pain, we're just a peak hype, I think people will learn to backtrack and use the tool in a more sensible way. It always happens. I remember when MongoDB and other NoSql databases came out, people went as far as to say that "SQL is dead" and refuse to use a normal SQL database for anything. Not even for the most obvious relational application. People would store everything as key-value pairs with no schema and do all the joins in the application layer. Fast forward 10 years and we're back to using SQL for most of our applications. NoSql hasn't disappeared, it has just been reduced to the nice where it's useful.
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
311–320 of 505 posts
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People who push dangerous neoliberal propaganda like carbon capture or "infinite growth on a finite planet is possible" Good thing we are not confined to a closed system in any practical sense. You act like we haven't already used space for economic growth. It's also a good thing that the concept of "growth" in this context is not limited by physical constraints. You're talking about growth of value, not growth in…
>You actually think the economy has reached the point of maximum growth due to the laws of thermodynamics? Of course it hasn't. The real problem is that the atmosphere is being poisoned beyond repair, at an increasing pace, and that is tied to economic growth. That will eventually un-terraform the planet into a place hostile to agriculture, be it in 50 or 100 years. We're nowhere near being able to reverse this in an…
> That will eventually un-terraform the planet into a place hostile to agriculture, be it in 50 or 100 years. We're nowhere near being able to reverse this in any way, and there are no signs of it slowing down.
yet another classic bullshit doomer prediction that never plays out where you'll conveniently not be around to admit you're wrong about.
> Oh, am I to believe space mining fantasies maybe?
You don't need to, we're already at the point where we are using space and resources outside of our for economic growth, so it's not some kind of fantasy. We also have this celestial body that is used throughout the planet called "the Sun" which already makes your closed system argument fall apart, unless your worried about us being close to peak utilization of the sun too.
> It actually is. The concept of "decoupling" of the economy from material resources has been debunked for a while now.
Hilarious how something can be "debunked" yet it's exactly how the metric for "growth" that you're talking about functions today. Again if you add up the combined valuation for every company today did you think it's based on material resources? It's obviously not. Your first clue is that the valuation of companies is calculated and expressed as a dollar which is not backed by ANYTHING material. If the thing that you're using to measure growth in an economy is already an abstract concept with no basis on material resource, then it follows that "growth" is NOT CONSTRAINED by material resource.
Or did you think every time nvidia announces their quarterly results and the market puts a valuation on nvidia that we are allocating materials to nvidia? Again, your model of reality sucks. It doesn't fit.
Your closest peer is that guy that's a diehard fan of a sports team from their hometown that keeps losing but it doesn't matter because being a fan and supporting the hometown is more important than performing the sport well.
That's you. Your model of reality fails every single day but it doesn't matter because you're a fan of your bad model. The worst part? You keep telling everybody around you to place a bet on your model with their life savings despite never being able to produce an example where your model was right
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#313I 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…
> 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…
Yeah here you go
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What value is left to provide for users? A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.
None of that is blocking money from being made
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were going to dismiss an argument because of who it comes from rather than its content, that is a flaw in your thinking. The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it.
> The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it. Yes, but we all have insufficient intelligence and knowledge to fully evaluate all arguments in a reasonable timeframe. Argument from authority is, indeed, a logical fallacy. But that is not what is happening here. There is a huge difference between someone saying "Trust me, I'm an expert" and a third party saying "Oh, by the way, that guy has a metric sh…
I think its kind of like technical indicators. Obviously they mean nothing but because other people believe them you have to take them into account. So when someone with authority says something assertively many critical thinking faculties go out the window for many people
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#316Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.
> “Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/141645-heard-joke-onc…
Good joke.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#317Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.
> “Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/141645-heard-joke-onc…
you get me
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#318I 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…
Agreed. I've been building software for 25 years+.
At some point I became so burnt out I couldn't look at an IDE or coloured text for that matter.
I found the way back by just changing my motto and focus... Find good people, do good work. That's it, that's all I want.
I don't care whether the 'property is hot' or what the market is doing anymore, I just build software in my lane, with good people around.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#319Once again I appeal: who is shipping code they don't understand? Those who do so are creating the problem, not the coding agent. I use agents all day, every single day. But I also push back, understand what was written, and ensure I read and understand everything I ship. Does it slow me down? Uh, yup. You bet. Yes, this article literally advocates for slowing the fuck down, but it also makes the coding agents out to…
i wrote the blog post and i also wrote pi.dev. i haven't written much code myself in the past 12 months. i'm not making coding agents out to be the problem. the entire last section keeps is basically "use a clanker for this and that".
i'm making specific usage pattersn out to be the problem, and explain why those patterns can't work due to the way agents work.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible…
The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…
Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain.
I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment.
(Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).