CM30

Yeah screw this. When this change goes live, I'm gonna stop contributing to Reddit at all. I already refuse to login on mobile, and if I can't even access the site there, there's no reason to help them on desktop either.

I genuinely hope an alternative becomes popular soon, ideally a federated or decentralised one that doesn't have any of these risks associated with it.

Feels like the obvious reason is that you don't have the mental map usually created by figuring out and writing the code yourself. So, not only is it annoying to debug AI generated code, but you're left trusting that the system didn't sneak something in that you don't know about.

You can definitely help limit this issue by having clear instructions for how the AI should work, but there's just a feeling you're telling someone else what to write, while being left on the hook for it if anything goes wrong.

That and a lot of developers like programming, and vastly prefer to it to the alternative process of "acting like a virtual manager".

Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.

I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.

I think one look at video games throughout history should probably shoot down the idea that software is uniquely bad nowadays compared to how it was in the past. The Atari era had enough poorly made games that the industry basically crashed in North America, and its revival in the 8-bit era didn't really change as much as expected. The fact the internet is full of YouTube reviewers akin to the Angry Video Game Nerd should be evidence that incredibly bad, often blatantly non functional software was a common occurrence throughout history.

There were games released in a pre-alpha state (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing), games that were basically released in a normal alpha state (Superman 64, Action52, etc) and there were games which literally didn't work because of major programming issues (SQIJ! had a player character which couldn't move due to the game only looking for lower case inputs while leaving the caps lock on).

And that's only the most extreme examples. Plenty of games had broken features and mechanics, or were outright impossible to complete due to poor level design and a lack of proper testing. Fan games, mods, ROM hacks and indie game scenes from the earlier days were just as notorious for works that were barely functional.

Generally games are at least now functional nowadays, with even the worst tending not to outright crash to a black screen or leave you with a player character that's completely unable to move. In many ways, the baseline level of competence arguably seems to be getting higher, with the march of AI meaning the worst is probably better than it might have been previously been.

Outside of games, it's worth noting how deeply insecure and flawed many older websites and programs were. There was a time where storing passwords in plain text was more of a norm, where input validation and sanitisation was often forgotten about, and where sites getting hacked was just as common an occurrence as today. Many Perl devs probably recoil in horror after hearing the term "Matt's Script Archive".

Are some things worse? Sure, performance seems to have become increasingly ignored in recent years, with web page sizes getting incredibly bloated and latency going through the roof. In some places there's more bad software overall, since the ability to vibe code it means non-programmers are building software more than ever. And some big companies that used to be respectable have let standards slip a lot (see Epic Games, Microsoft, etc).

Sturgeon's Law/Revelation held back then, and still holds today: 90% of everything is crap.

Nice! Digital Ocean was definitely not a great owner for the site, and it clearly wasn't treated as much of a priority under their ownership. Hopefully Geoff will give it the attention it deserves, especially given he's already the most active contributor there.

Might not even be that long all things considered. There's already a port of the game to MacOS:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/114175/zelda-tears-of-the-kin...

As well as a WIP port to PC.

I mean it's not like it's a different group of people now. Out of the development team for the original game, only one person definitely doesn't work at Nintendo anymore (Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo CEO that retired in 2002 and died in 2013), and possibly I. Marui (who doesn't have much info online in general). And Eiji Aonuma has been producer since Ocarina of Time in 1998.

So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.

I have to question if things are less creative, or whether we're just getting more 'uncreative' projects released on a regular basis. There's a flood of software being released now that AI models have become 'good' enough to build basic stuff without any prior technical knowledge, and since most software is being built by folks looking for a quick buck, it's probably not going to be all that original.

Original software is still being made, it's just buried under a flood of AI generated slop.

The average person or company's idea for a piece of software is an unoriginal spin on a likely already overdone concept.

Add this to the more technically original projects perhaps not being posted on Hacker News as often (many folks here would say the site's experienced its Eternal September moment, and a fair few of them have almost stopped using it altogether), and well, you're just seeing what moderately technical people are making with the tools of the moment.

Wouldn't you still be able to learn from the resources you created with LLMs? I've not found it that difficult to figure out how an LLM coded a program or website when requested, or to manually make changes based on its output.

If I use an LLM to create something in a programming language I'm not an expert in, I still have a reference point for later use. And that reference should drastically speed up the process of learning how to use said language myself later.

I mean this is true of most communities really. People dislike blatant self promotion, no matter the medium. If you're not already a valuable contributor to a community, advertising your work there will get you seen as deeply suspicious at best.

It's just that most marketers seem to be incredibly short sighted, and wrongly assume that doing nothing but marketing their own product/service is somehow the way forward.

Also any forum or subreddit dedicated to self promotion isn't really worth bothering with. Your audience won't be there, just other marketers trying to promote their own stuff.

If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.

Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:

- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes - Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman - Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history - Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.

The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.

That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.

Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".

Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.

Yes to the first question, no to the second.

Yes there are more employees than founders, because there are more employees than founders in society. If Hacker News was just founders, it'd be about a hundredth of its current size.

But the negativity is likely because it's just harder to impress people here than on a site like say Twitter or Reddit. If you've been in tech, startups, etc for years, you've seen loads of crazy ideas get proposed, get tested and fail miserably. Loads of startups try these things and fold in about 6 months or so due to a lack of demand.

So, there's probably a bit more scepticism here. You've seen enough massive failures in the tech world that you're probably a little jaded towards another 'world-changing' idea seemingly unfounded in reality.

100%. A lot of the time the people who understand a problem the most are the people who work in that field/industry every day, not the tech folks that often do the work/startups that try to 'revolutionise' said industry.

The vibe-coded product the actual users put out will probably be nowhere near as good as a professionally built one tech wise, but will actually be built to solve relevant pain points.

This has always been a really important point:

> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.

A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.

Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.

The conclusion doesn't follow the rest of the article:

> It’s astonishingly simple. If you can’t prove you’re a human, you can’t upload your music. This would get rid of 99% of slop and streaming fraud overnight.

No. No it wouldn't. Most AI artists have human identities tied to them.

Like sure, there are probably some bot networks automating all of this stuff. But a lot of the posters want to be seen as musicians without actually learning to make any of the music. They want their name associated with their AI-generated songs, not hidden away behind a label.

Also not a huge fan of the support for gatekeepers either. Feels like society is better when people don't need to get third party approval to distribute their work to the world, and when artists don't need to abide by predatory contracts from labels.

This advice is good though. All platforms should make this a thing:

> Legacy catalog tracks must be reviewed by humans before being taken down.

> Artists must be granted a mandatory notice and appeal window with human customer support.

> Wrongly removed music must be restored with stream counts and royalties left intact.

We need to make it illegal to have AI moderate content without human involvement, in the same way it shouldn't be allowed to act as a police officer or judge.

Eh, I don't think it'll be the end. Note two things:

1. A lot of AI coded products and services are also open source. In many fields, the number of open source projects has arguably exploded since AI driven development took off.

2. Not everyone builds open source projects because they want to monetise them, restrict how others use them or become popular for their efforts.

So, I think the effects will be... somewhat more limited. Hobbyist fields will be mostly unaffected, but there will likely be a huge drop in the number of commercial ventures making their work open source. If you're trying to sell people on an SaaS, then AI is likely terrifying to you, and making your work open source is just gonna be seen as a way to encourage more competitors. If you're working on a video game mod, then it probably won't change much at all.

I think this is definitely one of the bigger risks here, and the only way AI could 'kill us all' in the foreseeable future:

> 3.4% named existential risk, and the most common answer was malicious use, at 10.6% (UCL).

The danger isn't about sentient or human level AI, it's about how AI gives everyone capabilities beyond their wildest dreams, often without the knowledge or experience necessary to use those capabilities responsibly.

Forget Terminator, the two risks I can see being the most important here are "major security risk/system failure due to incompetent engineers/maintainers using AI without knowing how things work" and "criminals/terrorists/rogue states use it make their crimes easier and more efficient".

The latter seems especially bad when political stability is down across the board and a lot of people seem frustrated or outright furious with society at the moment.

Still, I feel the risks are still on the manageable side, simply due to both automated systems and malicious actors being constrained by logistics and a human driven society.

100% agree. Including the original date an article was posted makes it a lot easier to track which software/framework/OS/whatever versions might have been in use at the time, and to see if the info is still relevant.

Not just bloggers either. One look at the average YouTube video, and you'd think most people making those things had never heard the word 'brevity' in their life.

This is by far the biggest challenge you'll encounter writing a tutorial, video game walkthrough, recipe, etc:

> “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing”

Because as the article says, it's hard to know what your audience already knows, and far too easy to take 'shortcuts' when helping them by forgetting how many things you've assigned to muscle memory.

Teaching people is difficult, and it's really easy to leave a lot of crucial information out if you're not careful.

That said, I do have one more antipattern (and one more recommended design pattern) worth considering here too.

For the antipattern, it's when the tutorial doesn't work anymore because of updates to the subject in question. I remember this being a big issue when I was trying to learn Angular a few years back, since the official tutorial was clearly written for a long obsolete version of the framework that functioned very differently from the current one.

The number of times I've had issues like that is far too high online, and it's usually because the person that wrote the tutorial didn't check back in on it whenever the language, framework or relevant dependencies got a major update.

So, if you write about a topic and things change significantly, go back and check your work from before. If you can, update the article, and if you can't, at least put a notice at the top saying the article is now obsolete and should be skipped.

On a different note, a good pattern to keep in mind is that you don't need to be chained to a specific format. Way too many people assume that because they're providing a written tutorial, there's no place for images or video content there.

But the truth is that in many cases, an image is literally worth a thousand words. In other cases, showing people how a step should go in video or GIF format can be more helpful than just providing a list of bullet points.

So, take that into account. Provide all the information in your chosen format for sure, but provide relevant images and videos when the info is clearer in that format, or for when people need a visual cue. That way, you can check them if you're struggling with the written instructions, and figure out whether your setup is wrong (or the tutorial has left out some crucial information) based on how similar the author's screen is to your own at that point.

Just because you're using text doesn't mean you have to treat your guide like it's going on GameFAQs in a .txt file in the mid 90s.

Yeah the whole "if it bleeds it leads" mantra has caused a lot of damage to society in its own right too. Almost all the paranoia about crime and terrorism and social collapse for the last 50 or so years has likely stemmed from those things making the headlines in the papers and people assuming that means they're more common than they used to be.

Humans seriously struggle to understand the difference between "more common" and "more documented".

And yes, the media has definitely gotten worse too. Outrage and anger gets attention, so inflammatory content and blatant clickbait run wild online.

I feel like the design of many social media platforms is having a bigger effect than the concept itself. Like on a certain level, social media existing has had a lot of benefits. Every hobbyist community I'm part of is going through a golden age due to the ease of communication between people in said hobby, and how quickly discoveries are getting out there.

The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction. Recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll, provocative posts being rewarded overall, length restrictions that kill nuance, echo chambers created by said recommendation algorithms and the ability for any rando to register as many accounts as they want are what's damaging democracy and people's mental health.

Unfortunately, many of those features are also exactly how they're so good at distributing information for people with an interest in any particular niche or sub field. The same algorithms that trap us in echo chambers are also the same ones surfacing awesome new frameworks and programming techniques, tricks for video game speedruns, artwork of whatever you're interested in seeing more of and crazy mods that put N64 games on the SNES.

The challenge is that we really want to surface the best creative works and finds and information about our interests, while not getting caught in a negativity spiral or trapped in a fake news filled echo chamber.

I remember this legend because it was one of the main plot points in Paper Mario: The Origami King. The villain wants to fold a thousand cranes to get their wish to destroy all Toads granted, and decides to use the player character as the final crane after having already folded the other 999 of them.

I mean a lot of it is just that many features that would have been nice to use decades ago have only just been implemented. For example, now we have some great modal options built into the browser in the form of the dialog element and popover attribute.

But for years, those didn't exist, and people got used to that. The former was added to certain browsers in 2022, and the latter was added in 2023-2025. If you've building modals with divs and JavaScript for years, it can take a bit to realise you don't need to do that anymore.

Eventually I suspect we'll be in a place where self-made solutions for common UI issues aren't needed anymore, but that's still sadly a way off, especially given how slow browsers have been to add fully customisable select elements and other form fields.

Location: London, UK (UTC)

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Yeah I know I don't exactly have the fanciest career so far, but I'm always willing to learn new languages and frameworks, and am happy to continue my career with a more junior role if need be.

The issue is that there isn't economic demand from that audience for approximately 90% of companies operating today. Maybe Disney can succeed by going upmarket, but can all the animation/filmmaking/TV/theme park companies they compete with?

The number of millionaires/billionaires/etc feels low enough that there won't be demand for dozens of companies in every possible industry. The ones that have the biggest fanbase/cultural footprint maybe stick around, but the majority would presumably just go under.

The point about political views made me think of a similar situation I hypothesised based on this announcement. Creators using A/B testing to decide which viewpoints most appealed their audience.

Like I can see a video comparing two games getting variations where each option wins, then the creator using A/B test data to decide which of those views most appeals to their audience. Feels like a slightly sad way for creators to literally pander their views to their audience, regardless of their own beliefs on the matter in question.

The issue is that it's very rare that a 'benevolent' dictatorship stays benevolent. There are plenty of examples through history where a good leader (either hereditary, elected or promoted through other means) did well for decades, only to see their efforts undone by an idiot or tyrant that came afterwards.

Also doesn't help that the people who most want power are those least deserving of it. See many CEOs, and many politicians in general.

Does Singapore work well so far? Sure, by some definitions of working well. Same with China.

But it definitely feels like they're rolling the dice with their systems of governance, and hoping the next leader is someone that actually cares about the health of society rather than a would be authoritarian ruler.

This just feels unreal to me. Like, the very idea of a 3D platformer running on the SNES just didn't seem feasible beforehand. If this had been a real game in the 90s, it would have genuinely changed the industry.

Does it run as well as the original? Of course not. Are the graphics as detailed? Absolutely not.

But in a world where the original Star Fox was revolutionary, this would have just blown everyone's minds.