81–90 of 96 posts
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There are lots of MLM and pyramid schemes worth billions of dollars. Doesn’t means they aren’t scams.
Crypto projects don't define their price, only their emission schedule. One doesn't buy without an understanding of the schedule. There are laws that are enforced against crypto rugpulls. Fundamentally there is no scam with the large crypto projects.
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I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if…
My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the…
I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch.
My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.
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As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
Honestly. I want the AI news. I wish HN would add filtering features. I know they want us to all see the same homepage, but it’s time to let us have our tables. Pro-AI-era should be able to have a cohort thread, and anti-AI should be able to avoid it, or have a ring fence for their anti-AI discussions. We end up with some good threads on HN in both directions, but there’s a weight to early voices that can bend a post…
Any articles about running AI are mostly talk about something that is not explained, not predictable, and constantly changing.
A good litmus test for post is: is something in it actionable. Can I retain these several pieces of information, walk away, and do something, and then obtain results like the article said?
Most AI articles are not like this, or even if they are, they have a short expiration date.
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An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all. I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful thin…
> An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. Just to nitpick, because this was my first computer. The Apple ][+ from 1982 featured an 8- bit 6502 processor capable of addressing max. 64 KB. If I remember correctly, the base model shipped with 16 KB and could be upgraded.
(Probably the first card like that was the Language Card which had not RAM, but a 16 kB ROM providing Wozniak's Integer Basic, which would replace/overlay the Microsoft-developed Applesoft Basic.)
RAM cards featured more than 16 kB and could provide access to it via bank-selecting I/O registers.
A friend of mine had a 128 kB card. It was used by disk copying software to snarf floppy into RAM. His board had a row of 3 LEDs on the PCB to indicate the bank currently selected: as the disk copying software was running, you could see the LEDs counting from 0 to 7 in binary.
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As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
It's like saying "we no longer need to be able to read and write because Friendly Company Man provides each of us with an assistant that will always act with our best interests in mind." On a technical level, it's wrong and sloppy, on a societal level it's suicidal. So I'd say whoever wants to follow the pied pipers can do so, when someone tries to drag you off your property for some promised land, stand your ground. If I'm wrong, the Luddites will wither away so why worry. I think the worry actually is that they might be right, and to attempt to not have a control group, because if everything is slop, nothing is slop. If nobody can think, everybody is perfectly fine. If everybody is a slave, all are free.
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My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the…
Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process. I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week…
For me, the main thing, the only thing really, is the pushiness.
To put a point on it: I think the wine is poisoned. So what? Are you offended? Or is it that you are so scared that I, some random stranger you never cared about and never offer to help with something I actually want, might miss out on some fine wine? Then let me miss out.
It's the fact that it gets so pushy and insulting and full of gibberish, that it sets my spider senses tingling, yeah. So I would even say: what if I hold on to the skepticism regardless of ability? That even if it cures cancer, I still want to be able to use tools without a black box in-between? That at most we can have a "fully AI" world after we have dealt with the people, I would even say dudes behind curtains, that for whatever reason just cannot let that happen? Fuck the dark enlightenment and the dumb dorks it consists of, is what I'm trying to say, and where that is agreed on, we can discuss earnestly. Where that is a "deal breaker", I want separation, because I have trust issues and intend to keep them.
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As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.
I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
95% of the frontpage is completely uninteresting to me at this point. AI press releases, basic posts on AI advances, and AI-generated slop. A sad fate for a once-great forum.
Honestly. I want the AI news. I wish HN would add filtering features. I know they want us to all see the same homepage, but it’s time to let us have our tables. Pro-AI-era should be able to have a cohort thread, and anti-AI should be able to avoid it, or have a ring fence for their anti-AI discussions. We end up with some good threads on HN in both directions, but there’s a weight to early voices that can bend a post…
Ask AI to filter them for you.