Swizec

> Real ones are oncall for the systems they build.

Yes! This is devops, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Coincidentally I’ve found putting engineers oncall for their stuff really does wonders to ensure they check their AI agents’ code and know how it works.

> 'a glass of wine a day is healthy' because of antioxidants... or something. Except it isn't, at all

Also, in America, the kind of people who have a glass of wine a day (but not more) strongly correlate with those who can afford healthcare.

Similar for mediterranean diets. Turns out it’s the universal healthcare available in all the mediterranean countries both on the european and the african sides.

> But phones still get bigger

Yep I'm sad about this too. Consumers want big screen. Especially when a phone is their primary, often only, computing device

> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?

Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?

Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.

If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.

Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.

Slovenian: Dežuje.

One word (rains) is the full sentence. Because nothing else needs to be said.

> So frameworks of the future should be focused on constraining an agent to develop properly, or designing what is and is not permitted.

Frameworks have always done this. Make it easy to do the right thing, add friction to doing the wrong things. Swapping s/programmers/agents/ doesn't make this some brand new earth shattering idea.

If anything agents make the job of designing frameworks or leading architecture easier because they at least have the patience to read the docs even if they don't always have the working memory to follow it all. As opposed to most humans who both don't have the working memory and don't even bother to read.

> Why? If you can live 500 years just focus 20 years on compound interest hard, then retire for 400 years?

The first version of this technology will only be available to billionaires. So if you reach 70 when it’s invented and are not a billionaire, you’ll never get to try the 500 years of compounding trick

We’re likely to see this stuff get invented in our lifetimes (I’m 38), maybe practical, but we’re def all too old to see it become widely available.

Then again, life extension will not be a singular technology. You could argue antibiotics and vaccines were the first big step and those became affordable within a few decades of invention

> Something most modern (and expensive cars) don't have because of endless cost cutting on the mechanical side.

No it's because Citroen had super nifty _non-independent_ suspension back then. Pushing the front wheel up would push the rear wheel down making the car feel like it's floating across bumps. Present in various forms on several models in the 70's.

Turns out linked suspension isn't great for handling and road feel at higher speeds. Modern cars are fast and heavy so these systems have fallen out of favor.

https://www.hotcars.com/extraordinary-suspension-of-citroen-...

The "Frog" (can't remember official name) had a similar system but with hydraulics.

The Citroen 4 had this but with twisting rods instead of springs. You could easily get it up on 3 wheels with spirited cornering.

> has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?

Yes! Lots.

It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff

For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration

Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.

> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?

Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?

It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).

Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.

> even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI"

I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.

We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.

And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.

edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great

> Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead.

Not even the first time this happened. When I was in high school you could make great money building websites for small businesses that nowadays just have an Instagram account and no website. The number of CMSes I've built in my career is too damn high

> Today it would just be screens on a wall, industrial carpet floor, drop-tile ceiling with LED lights, a few Steelcase cubicles for the operators and little else.

Or do we only look at old things that were pretty? I bet in 100 years nobody is going to look at our drab utilitarian offices, they’re gonna share photos of the beautiful offices with great interior design (they exist) and wonder why they don’t build them like that anymore.

> How is that not taking responsibility?

The penalty for "unauthorized access to a computer system" is 1 to 20 years in prison[1]. Holding corporations accountable would include sending the highest person in the chain-of-command that caused the Hugging Face incident to jail. Or at least start with some charges and then let the judicial system do its thing.

[1] 18 U.S. Code § 1030 - Fraud and related activity in connection with computers https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

> short period from which you matured and and were able to appreciate adulthood

My high school and early college years were pretty rough (depression, suicidal, some substance abuse (couldn't access anything super serious)), but ho boy do I miss having time to casually build a compiler over a week of school holidays, spending all my afternoons fiddling with weird little coding things, and having zero concerns about any of it being fit for purpose or even useful and basicaly never feeling tired.

Being an adult is great but every year brings more accumulated responsibilities and that part kinda sucks. The days where I can get sucked into something interesting and forget time exists are becoming fewer and fewer. And the space of things that feel new and interesting diminishes surprisingly quickly too. The novelty wears off the more things you learn about

Yes it turns all that work of building a classifier into an api call. This is hugely valuable for prototyping and while you iterate on what the product should even do.

> difference between an instruct based re-ranker and laya/jev I just don't see it

Main difference is that laya/jev/et-al give you a zero-shot classifier that requires no training. You can prompt engineer your way to a quick fairly reliable cheap enough decision engine that you can use to iterate quickly (by prompt engineering).

Right now a lot of people are doing this with LLMs and it's too slow and expensive.

Imo the right iterative approach to productionizing these systems is something like:

    1. Build it with an LLM. Iterate on the prompt
    2. Start building a real-world dataset
    3. When the prompt works, turn it into a clear rubric for Jev or similar
    4. Keep iterating until desired accuracy achieved
    5. Use the real-world evals you've built to train a custom classifier fine-tuned to your needs

You now have a system that has produced useful results in production from the very beginning and by the end it's a reliable super cheap classifier that can make thousands of decisions per second.

> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.

Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.

> Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?

In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.

In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit

The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.

But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.

> IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.

It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.

For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.

Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.

It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.

Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.

Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.

Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.

The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo

> Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?

The standard of living was much lower and people’s expectations of reasonable income were lower too. It was common in those days for blue collar workers to do 12 hours of hard physical labor and live in cramped conditions with multiple people per room. What we would now consider worse than a homeless shelter.

In comparison just working a desk job was already a luxury. Even if you were barely making ends meet

Quick Google search says a newspaper writer would make $400 to $800 per year in Poe’s time. That is about $20k/year in today’s money, which is just above poverty level

Every snowflake is unique but snow is still just snow.

Life’s funny that way. You can’t predict what an individual will do and yet predicting what a crowd will do is so easy we have entire engineering and social disciplines based on manipulating crowd behavior.

That’s the best part! We’re all NPCs in other people’s stories _and_ the main character in ours.

You can do and be absolutely anything or anyone you want. Just gotta bear the consequences and that’s it.

Wanna live a homely life surrounded by loved ones? Go do it! Nobody is stopping you. Wanna galivant around the world having adventures with no roots? You can!

And when you meet a local npc bartender on your adventures, you’re just another rando tourist npc. It’s great

> The frequent rain and mud makes it to the rim brake shoes and diminish braking power

I'll never forget when I was a kid (13 or so) going for a ride in the city during a downpour, slamming on the brakes because a pedestrian stepped out in front of me (mixed pedestrian/bike zone, no cars, we both assumed no-one else was dumb enough to be out), and ... nothing happened. Damn near shat my pants. Luckily the pedestrian saw me and jumped out of the way.

In retrospect that was too much downpour. Could literally see water spraying out my brakes. The hot cocoa after was fantastic tho

> The most surprising thing my adult ADHD diagnosis revealed was that as I began telling friends that I had been diagnosed positive they told me they had known that since they met me. These were childhood friends.

As someone with peer reviewed ADHD but not official diagnosis, what are friends gonna do about it? They can tell you, you're always late and it's annoying but that's about it. At some point it becomes just who you are as a person, part of your character sheet. If you're not planning to change and it's mostly under control (have job, life, etc), does it even matter to put a label on the thing?

I feel like a diagnosis in my 20's would've been useful. Now it's like I got me my coping strategies and they work pretty well. If I do or don't have ADHD doesn't really change anything.

And for anyone else reading, the leading symptom of adult-diagnosed adhd is saying and thinking things like "I don't get it, ADD can't be real, that's just how everyone is"

> This is like asking if anyone in the Tour de France has credited training wheels for their success.

And yet every F1 driver credits gokarting for their career. Laying the groundwork in your early years makes a big difference. My career would be very different without Logo and Turbo Pascal

I hate that the overpriced polishing cloth was legit the best screen cleaning thing I’ve ever used. One wipe and my ipad was perfect.

These days I use the cheap microfibers I got for the motorcycle and yeah it works but scrubbing my device like an idiot for several seconds just doesn’t feel quite as magical you know

> For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy.

An old HN comment captured this perfectly, it’s my favorite analogy of entrepreneurship [1]

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076

> time "In this house, we believe in uv & PEP723. Also, no fucking localized imports, no just-in-case try/except."

My point is the all knowing all seeing big brain super bot should already know how to write good code. It feels dumb that we have to keep reminding it