apsurd

its a weird thing to wish for violence in this case. but i agree and just now France is in the news again for violent protests. They’ve seen the movie and they’re now vigilant.

USA has its comforts, that’s like the entire sell. Huge homes, huge lawns, huge plates, huge cars. Huge Walmarts. (the world cup brought some tourists and on X the Japanese shared their Walmart experience as basically a trip to Disneyland). Add movies, reality tv shows, game studios, and now gambling on anything because gambling in the stock market isn’t enough juice.

fuck we’re cooked.

it’s sinister because I believe most of us (by definition) think of ourselves as part of the people but as one has ambitions and becomes capable, the pull of “success” spares nobody.

Flock is dystopian. It’s also non ironically pitched as solving crime. it’s also our friendly neighborhood YC company.

the timeline we're in is various adjectives including sad. reality never hits how you envision when you're 10.

ahh makes me want to check it out. But my fb account is long abandoned. That's how they get you huh... ain't now escaping the grasp.

> And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win...

That's not consumer AI though. The whole "vs out of the box" is pretty much the definition of consumer AI. People don't want to fiddle with things. That's why UX matters. SOTA only matters in consumer if it translates to the UX. And no one has landed that yet. Many are working on it.

But that fits with the point that you’d have to already know the domain to be able to break it down into discrete units for steering the LLM.

I'm not who you're asking but for me I am right now going through the insanity of providing plugin/mcp/tool access across environments. This is in codex which as I mentioned is intentionally trying to provide mass-market ergonomics. But with that comes incomprehensible configuration that's also a moving target. chat/work/codex/remote/cloud are all different things. And each client exposes different abilities and hides others. And looks like only the web-ui is the most up to date because other targets need releases. As a developer I understand why it's in its current state, but that in no way excuses it as acceptable ux.

Like of course codex is the most powerful and "just" run `npx blah blah` but no, I'm not running randomly piped code on my personal computer and even if I didn't care about privacy it means I can only run this locally with my laptop on. "leave your laptop on and access from your phone" is not a good idea. It only adds to the surface area of confusion. Ux no good.

Claude Code is better than Codex UX. But as per the sibling response it's more a developer tool made by developers for developers. It does have a lot of niceties. Codex/openai on the other hand is more clearly trying to reach mass-market and it's a UX shit show because of it. Consumer UX is its own thing. So the original point is that raw ability of the tool doesn't magically solve ergonomics.

The product and UX of the tool is distinct from the raw ability of the tool.

the difference is it’s worse

That's fair but maybe it's a dangling carrot. Human taste will always be just out of reach for most, robots included. Avante-garde had it right all along.

> What makes you so certain that this 'way of developing software' cannot eventually be understood and practiced by AI?

That doesn't make it solved though. I also take issue with specifically "software engineering is a solved problem". Even Boris from Anthropic said it =( I thought he'd be the one to understand more deeply.

If we translate the criticism charitably "solving" anything is pretty aggressive with regard to the long tail of nuance and care and effort and mastery and such. I think that's what we should focus on. When we proclaim that a discipline that people have spent large parts of their lives mastering is "solved" it doesnt' feel so great. That doesn't prove otherwise, but at least let's get to the root of the meaning. I don't think it's solved. If we understand that software is really about solving human problems through technology, within real-life constraints, then AI isn't very good at that. It doesn't have "taste" is the soundbite. It is the root cause of why AI slop is called AI slop.

Good takes but you say that like it's NBD. Western civilization most definitely derives meaning and purpose from work. That in itself is a problem yes. But feel like you're shrugging and saying "told you so". Probably not so helpful.

I've been overhauling my parent's backyard. Mostly it's cleaning up decade's worth of clutter. From there there's regenerative visions for mulch, native plants, and intentional areas for life humans and critters alike. I'm learning a ton. What a great displacement for my creative energy with the added benefit of being physically demanding.

I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.

Your last paragraph loses me. Agree that "infinite ideas" is as flippant as "everything is already done". Context is vital. But for every thing that turns toxic and unwanted doesn't that create the opportunity space for corrective measures? We're fucking up our climate and I am not uber accelerationist but the problem very much creates opportunity-space to contribute to the solution.

> When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.

Are you proposing stasis? Anti-growth? The problem with that is that growth is life. I don't see any realistic way that slowing growth makes sense. Not when our reality is biology.

yes the eyebrow is the tell. I never knew anything about eyebrows in design as I am not a designer. Now they are everywhere. Everything has an eyebrow. It is ridiculous but at least it is an AI smoking gun.

I hesitated to write that line because I don't know the math. So thanks for clarifying. Main point is the output is along some distribution and I'd say AI-evangelist themselves see "good enough" across everything and anything as a feature.

That's just picking a fight. Whatever we think about how amazing or terrible AI is, it's pretty reasonable to understand it is quite literally the weighted average of humanity's output.

Also reasonable: it's possible to hire a world-class ___ to do that job better than AI.

funny that i didn’t think about it till i read your comment. and then realized i read the entire thing. checks out.

on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.

that’s like the whole philosophical discussion. where on the line is this llm; closer to a rock or a human? a plant is closer. and a fly, a lizard. we still treat so many things terribly.

It does seem exceptionally silly that a collection of floating point numbers has immediately outranked animals and other living beings. That’s why i like the parent comment. They’re numbers!

edit: maybe easier to say collections of atoms though are not to be treated equally. That’s reasonable isn’t it?

They're different groups though.

I get what you're saying but it seems presumptions to compare a graph database to how our brains work. And also that LLMs <-> (the way they do memory) is the right analog to humans <-> memory.

I take the article's point more directly. It's just a straighter line to have clear communication through documentation than to fuddle around with the perfect memory setup.

you’re saying the only thing stopping a nuclear strike, all this time, has been a reasonable excuse?

and we’ve finally done it, it’s the semiconductor factories?

You are right. We should also hold other threats to humanity: war, meteors, pandemics.

I'm obviously pointing out the (unsubstantiated) exceptional threat that we're all seemingly worried about: that ASI requires alignment because it'll otherwise cause the end of humanity.

This take sounds like engineering not "getting" what product even does. OpenAI has a company to run and a business to build.

The frontier companies are scrutinized heavily for their trillion dollar valuations all without a clear mass-consumer use-case. They're trying stuff.

anecdotally I think this applies more specifically for 0-1 side-projects. They can be serious attempts at startups, but they start small and with AI the feedback loop should be rapid and fierce. For this you want lightweight infrastructure that the agent can reason about and not create a mess. So an edge network with sqlite is pretty killer.

Agree. supabase is a great product for prototyping. Their free tier is really helpful. But the value of instant access to a real postgres db is also where inevitable pain comes from. A prototype is fun until it's not and I've never managed to maintain app-based side projects longer than a few months. Only static deployments survive.

Supabase was really early in the "throwaway full-stack environments" space. Very helpful but I find myself moving to edge networks with sqlite in spite of my dislike for javascript.

i’m replying to the comment saying how good this format would be for improving education.

a good way to frame one of AI’s limitations. my answer: because AI has no will. that also conveniently answers why AI won’t (can’t) end humanity. it’s indifferent if you can even call it that.

i got a few pages in and it was pretty tedious, not because it’s poorly made but because i don’t think a legitimate audience exists.

it’s a child’s story with the fable arc thats supposed to bake in adult wisdom. it lands in that sense, but how hugging face works is hardly the fire that lights a child’s imagination and morality.

and as an adult that knows I’m being infantilized… tedious.