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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#71
post #3

> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act NSFW blog content on HN? Really?

He has an article for that

https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n...

> This is, to be clear, a bad solution. MaxMind’s free database is not particularly precise, and in general IP lookup tables are chasing a moving target. I know for a fact that there are people in non-UK countries (like Ireland!) who have been inadvertently blocked by these lookup tables. Making those people use Tor or a VPN sucks, but I don’t know what else to do in the current regulatory environment.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#72
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official declaration came about in a team-meeting. We're a tiny startup, 3 full-time eng with the CTO co-founder driving the AI transformation. We have scheduled onboarding meetings to get the entire company finding automation opportunities with specifically Claude (CC, Cowork). For eng specifically, there is "acknowledgement" that we all may have different setups, but we should all be unifying our prompts, strat…

I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.

You made my day with this line =P.

tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation:

In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE.

So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely.

What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness.

But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents.

You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better.

Just needs more pop!

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#73
post #10

> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…” May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

Thanks for the recommendation, the premise of the show sounds great!

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#74
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shall wait your collected thoughts. I’ll suggest The Mythical LLM Month as a title.

You made my day with this line =P. tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation: In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything sof…

Man, I completely agree with your thinking here. I've been trying to be more active in online communities, to try to discuss this exact idea.

LLM code can be leveraged, but pretending that tokens are just going to turn into money printers at some point is not productive. The primary source of software's value to an end user is the thought that was placed into it. Where does that go for the AI-natives? As you say, they are seemingly brute forcing software engineering, at least so far.

One thing I have been considering is how LLMs primarily change the "build vs buy" calculus for a fair number of software niches, particularly things like developer tooling and small libraries and packages. Partially due to a projected increase in supply chain attacks, and partially due to the changing standards of engineers. There's no longer anything stopping someone from working with an ugly or clunky syntax, presuming it's a well documented standard. So many "developer experience" tools are going to hit this - Tailwind primarily comes to mind.

It's a sort of "erosion" of niches in the current landscape - although to me this does not really work out for the worse in the long term, since again, the thinking in the process will need to just go somewhere else.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#75
It's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#76

Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

reminds me of the college scene in the movie Tomorrowland where all the teachers going on and on about about the things that would end us and when she asked "Can we fix it?" and teacher is like "What?" "I get things are bad but what can we do?" learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. Al…

Find others likeminded locally and cooperate where opportunities present themselves.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pettifogging Off-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand my vocabulary.

Nice word. I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the point of being intolerable. Right up there with "narcissist" and "gaslighting".

The problem isn't so much overuse as misuse, as "gaslighting" gets thrown around for almost any kind of falsehood.

Another example would be "Ponzi scheme", which I've seen abused for any situation the speakers seems unsustainable, even when there isn't any records fraud.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.

The application layer has way more gravity than the networking one right now. You'd need to fork that for anything to happen.

It's (mostly) not the networking layer where people pay to target us. It's the application layer that would most benefit from being forked.

Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#79
post #75

It's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.

Is it? The observation seems patently obvious if one has even the most superficial understanding of how LLMs work? Why is this not common knowledge?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture

#80

Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

A learned helplessness as a diagnosis implies that there are things that can be done. But I can't see any. It may be because of a learned helplessness of course, so my inability to see what can be done can be a fact about myself, not about the world around me, but still... It is a catch 22, isn't it? Maybe not, but it is a self-reinforcing uncertainty loop. I'm not buying it.
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