Barrin92

>Qt required special packaging skills to ship to the end user especially if third party libraries were involved

How outrageous to demand that a software developer possesses the 'special skills' to ship a Qt application. It's not surprising that people think AI is killing programmers when this is the level the average 'programmer' has been operating at for 15+ years.

Imagine going to a chef and he tells you he can only warm up microwave lasagna because cooking the steak correctly requires special skills. The special skills are your job

in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.

If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install

The Guardian wrote about a similar phenomenon a while ago 'free birth' social media groups of apparently hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who have sworn off all medical assistance in birth, have cult like leaders and ostracize each other when they seek external support.

If you look at the numbers these kinds of groups do, 25 million views on YT, 5 million podcast downloads, half a million group members, this stuff is sending us straight back to the dark ages. We need some sort of mass education campaign or something.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22...

There's a difference between data and knowledge. Knowledge is what's extracted and made intelligible from data. Production and storage of knowledge was so expensive and scarce that if you find something from Iraq 3000 years ago there's a high likelihood there'll be some knowledge in there.

Most stuff produced today is not only not knowledge, as of now the majority may not even be human. If you're living in the metaphorical Wall-E garbage mountain filtering and disposal are much more important skills than accumulation

>It's clear that American capitalism and AI are now fully intertwined.

in what world is that clear lol, American capitalism will do just fine, if the AI companies go down before they can offload all their crap on retail investors the lion's share of the losses will go to the private investors currently writing checks.

The broader banking system isn't exposed, the housing market isn't exposed, the average American would take a 10% hit of on their retirement account but that'd be it. It'd wipe out a fair amount of the tech sector but they're all sitting in California and don't win anyone elections so no point to bail them out

>The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.

the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:

"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."

thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.

we're not in the mysterious AI ocean, we're in the artificial swimming pool where the surfers and the guys selling wave-making machines are mostly the same people.

The person whose comment we're discussing literally has a sponsorship from an AI company on top of his blog that just raised 50 million bucks lol

>that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure.

Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:

https://archive.ph/B3mMG

>Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough videos, but it’s sort of like Amazon, in that it will suggest the exact same content/topic.

I've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.

I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"

I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this

>What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums

I find it surprising that the thing that's missing from the list is to me the only thing that matters, the creation of an identity and social graph. I don't think the algorithm or technical details are that important, the qualitative difference is that on social media you are someone. You have a persistent profile, you have "friends", you invest in building rapport and status, you have followers or are a follower.

On social media you interact with people, not with topics. There are creators, not discussions. On HN you could for practical purposes shuffle everyone's username each morning and it wouldn't matter for 99% of us, and that eliminates most of the dynamics associated with social media today.

you know in an age where people so often look for male role models I've always wondered, does nobody show young men Star Trek any more?

Picard was deeply affectionate and learned when it came to history and culture but free from nostalgia or chauvinism, anti-authoritarian in leadership, tactical and intelligent rather than brash and violent, effectively everything you see less of among the ever more brutish and philistine people in charge around the world.

>It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.

who cares? As long as the number of dorks is larger than zero, and it is, you can build your own community. People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?

The very place you're living in right now was created likely by some complete nutjob who thought reality was too boring. There's always a 'life outside' because that's quite literally the nature of life. There's no box tight enough life can't get out of.

>Does it open the door for compromising on the core XP

in some applications yes, in Emacs I'd say no because Emacs itself is extensible and let's people utilize its own core functions and is itself almost like a mini OS. For example the completion framework is enhanced rather than replaced by plugins like Consult.

There's a systems thinking aspect to Emacs plugin development. People make plugins always with Emacs itself in mind and to improve Emacs rather than merely the plugin. It's very anti-Unix philosophy in that way. Org-mode or Magit are good examples of this, they work well, and really only well, within Emacs.

It's what I've struggled with every time I tried out NeoVim where I ended up with ten plugins all loosely held together by tape and always something broke when something else was updated.

>Spamming is already illegal but so commonplace

here in Germany commercial cold calling carries fines of tens of thousands per call and I have received one in 20+ years.

The overwhelming majority of spam is advertisement. Someone by definition cannot advertise themselves without making themselves liable, so just up the penalty beyond the expected value of the spam and it works perfectly well.

>absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't.

Yes, there is. Read Coase's seminal paper, The Nature of the Firm. Companies function by replacing market mechanisms with bureaucratic administration. That finds its end when internal coordination or misallocation of resources incurs more cost than it saves in transaction costs.

Conglomerates therefore have a ceiling in size, and it's the reason why unwinding them generally increases market value for the sum of its individual companies (in finance parlance: "conglomerate discount"). It's also why the Soviet Union didn't run very well, and very large conglomerates are usually the consequence of political/economic arrangements.

>today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that

User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.

As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.

>whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track

you can do that, in fact I know that Austria still has a mid 19th century train in regular operation (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_alt_23)

if you're looking for commuter trains a lot of early 20th century ones still operate around the world.

>but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone

Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.

And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.

>but if you think it hasn't affected CRUD feature work you would be wrong.

the mythical man month lesson holds for CRUD apps as well. I'd be careful to equate churning out lines of code with the health of a piece of software down the road, even a relatively straight forward one.

Keep in mind in any real world software what matters is maintenance of a system, not just how many features you can add, regardless of human or machine generated code, some badly glued together codebase that's rapidly growing is going to haunt you.

Which is also why replacing sound dev tooling and with a magical prompt genie is incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted. You could cheaply produce code by outsourcing it years ago.

>which are government officials, like for example ambassadors and other diplomats are as well.

No. Kushner in this second term, unlike in the first, isn't a government official of any sort. He is now purely a private citizen which the government itself has argued this month when a watchdog group sued Kushner exactly because he's exercising authority of diplomats and ambassadors, which requires approval by the U.S Senate which he hasn't got and which would indeed subject him to ethics rules.

https://apnews.com/article/jared-kushner-crew-lawsuit-trump-...

I also feel people are missing the forest for the trees in that discussion in that Jared Kushner is a private citizen and the son in law of the president who somehow is negotiating with foreign heads of states despite having no mandate from the American people to do so. Forget a hacked phone, why is a nepo baby running around negotiating on behalf of a country without holding any office

You're likely thinking of Origen although people question whether it's true.

>Maybe that's the smart thing to do

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols:

"The Church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds: its practice, its “remedy,” is castration. It never inquires “how can a desire be spiritualised, beautified, deified?”—In all ages it has laid the weight of discipline in the process of extirpation (the extirpation of sensuality, pride, lust of dominion, lust of property, and revenge).—But to attack the passions at their roots, means attacking life itself at its source: the method of the Church is hostile to life."

also people shouldn't sleep on Housemarque. Both Returnal and Saros were fantastic. Don't want to spoil Returnal but the narrative and symbolism that tie the game together if you go through everything after you've finished it and have a grasp of the story is incredible. And the gameplay is extremely fun.

are you implying the fact that they proactively threw in a custom heap manager for a game is supposed to be a bad thing? The fact that almost any 25+ year old executable runs on Windows to this day is fantastic, they're seemingly the only guys who take backwards compatibility seriously.

Short-sightedness is quite literally the reason people are using these systems to begin with. If you care about the health and integrity of your code base years down the road you wouldn't be shipping endless amounts of slop you don't understand, Fred Brooks taught us this half a century ago.

>How are you handling this?

easy, don't write code with LLMs. If my job forced me to do so I would quit.

>I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs.

they don't need to be. Any scientist is already surrounded by tools that are better than they are at anything. A scientist from 200 years ago would have the same existential shock if they see how a modern scientists works.

But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge. And a tool by definition can only ever change how you do this, not that you do it because you understanding it is the point. When people say learning to program is now useless, what they really mean is it might not make them any money, or using the AI is faster as an instrument. But if you care about programming itself, about you understanding programming, nothing has changed, it never can. And the smartest AI in the world can always assist you, but only that.

> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.

I studied mathematics and don't agree with this at all, for several reasons. For one the entire point of maths is that it describes a formal system in which one can 'shut up and calculate'. Mechanizing maths goes back to Leibniz and Hilbert. Nobody should surprised that the big formalism with explicit rules you invented is the first thing to yield to automation, that's why it exists.

Secondly research, including maths for a long time has been a collaboration of people, institutions, machines and processes, even maths does not consist of Faustian heroes in caves having revelations.

And thirdly just because a machine produces a 500 page proof doesn't mean your job is done. Science produces knowledge. Knowledge is information made legible to understanding by people. So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand. Just like chess computers ultimately expanded human chess.

that seems silly, I'm not supposed to be able to rent an apartment or a movie? There should be transparency of course and no misleading labeling but I see no reason why people should be prevented from transacting money for whatever arrangement they please

with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.

You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future