411–420 of 515 posts
I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…
I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that. The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code…
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> Able to review the code output of coding agents That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.
I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society? I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward inc…
We're already seeing this today. Every year, thousands of people are becoming essentially irrelevant to the economy. They don't own much, they don't invest much, they don't spend much money, they don't make much money, and they are invisible to economics.
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Because it's a bank and apparently a big one.
do you think the other big banks arent doing this? Bank jobs are pretty broad, theres a ton of code getting written here.
If anything screws up, that's people's lives being messed with, potentially in a way none of the engineers on staff know how to fix. If I were an actuarial in that environment I'd blow a valve.
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> people did stop walking everywhere. I didn't. Yesterday I walked 11 km for errands. Today I took a detour when walking to work, a more scenic route with less traffic. For me walking is not much slower than using public transport (you need to get to it , then from it to the point of your destination), and not much slower than a car (stuck in traffic, finding parking, not to mention the road rage). I'd be faster on a…
Have you been walking since you were a child? Or were you raised in a car-centric culture, and discovered as an adult that you prefer walking?
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I think what you're looking for is patents. I've said it before, but I think patents are the only protection left for innovative software and "the little guy." It always was, really, but it's blindingly apparent today. Unfortunately, that would be considered heresy on forums like HN, and people will continue to rail against AI and whatever it's causing and patents, instead of realizing that one is the only available…
I have a few patents, including one for a novel machine instruction, and I recall the attorney telling me that one cannot patent mathematics, only methods and systems.
Otherwise it's straightforward to say that the mathematics is being applied to achieve a practical goal via execution on a computer. (You'll see the term non-transitory computer-readable media" a lot in claims.) You now have a method and system. Now, caselaw frequently changes things, like the "Alice" decision in the US made it much harder to just patent things done "on a computer" but the underlying principle holds.
I'd also guess if your approach makes something faster or cheaper, it should be possible to show it is non-abstract, because resources like time and costs are not abstract quantities.
Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer! I've just worked with patents extensively.
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I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider. Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy. This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that…
The evidence that software development cannot be automated is we already tried to do it in the 90s with OOP, UML, and outsourcing. It didn’t work out for the same reasons vibe coding isn’t working out — because building the system is the same as specifying it, and that is a creative iterative process. We are at the point where sure ai can write code, but we could always do that; lack of code writing ability was not w…
To your individual points:
- OOP and UML are domain-specific abstractions. Aside from still being very much used in expanding niches [1], they have failed to automate much work because their proponents failed to cover enough cases to have a useful general-purpose abstraction.
- Outsourcing is a labor strategy. There's nothing technical that prevents another similarly capable person from doing your job, at least in the next town, if not another country. The obstacles were/are social and political, and the WFH movement shows that. Also, outsourcing is not going anywhere, it's just reduced and converted to nearsourcing due to backlash.
- By contrast, software is a general-purpose abstraction [2]. Databases are a type of software. You can see LLMs [3] as schema-less databases that contain millions of abstractions connected to each other. You can get a UML model or Python code or text by querying the LLM's query engine in a language much more flexible than SQL.
Vibe coding makes it seem like the funny intermediate bullshit is the end result of using LLMs, but it's not. Sure, I agree that LLMs don't make sense to use when a calculator is enough, but I don't see any functional limitations to improving LLMs. Maybe new algorithms or combinations are needed, but no matter how slowly, quality is expected to reach at least human level for the majority of current tasks (on which many jobs depend).
Which leads to my point: we need political, social, philosophical reasons to limit or integrate automation in our civilization, not just watch and hope there's a big enough technical obstacle so we can keep our current jobs.
[1] For example, model-based software engineering is still a growing; slowly, but growing.
[2] So is the organization of mechanical machines or analog computers, but it's faster to reorganize and orchestrate electrical signals.
[3] More precisely, foundation models, because it's far more than natural language processing.
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> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Jesus christ. "The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentiall…
> That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either... Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened. How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrele…
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Humans are still in the loop as the final signoff responsible for liability, and to do an audit you’ll need someone who knows what they’re looking at.
Liabilty will be waived in the terms of use.
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That only works if you assume that the exclusive value is in the object and not the labour. The reproduction of the object is essentially free in the internet, but the labour to produce it isn't. If I spent 3 years making my codebase, and you copy paste the git repo, yeah your access to the information is not going to replace the original. But your labour cost is 0 and you can undercut the 3 years of expense, loans o…
Labor doesn't have value inherently, it's about what is produced by said labor. These days even the labor to create something falls to zero via LLMs so I'm not sure the point is valid these days.
Almost nothing does. Value is largely subjective. You deciding it is irrelevant to you is as inherently worthless as the marxist ideal that labour is the maximal value of society.
The non subjective opinion is that there is a necesary amount of work/energy requiered to create things and that the created things can be consumed/used by others.
LLMs do not reduce labor to 0, the energy to power the GPU, the labor to create the gpus, the labor to train the models is all there, as well as all the labor to produce the original material the LLM is trained on. Even if the subjective experience of someone consuming the created thing is the same.