apsurd

also codex + sol is really good and quite fast.

life is what happens during all the waiting for life to happen.

I am taking an opportunity to learn how to make an iOS widget that can display dynamic text or an image from a URL.

It's because my dad always forgets exactly when and what channel his (our) sports team play. He has a phone but push notifications, texts, opening an app or website is too much friction, ultimately, for someone that can read yahoo, check email, and make calls, but not good with texting.

Anyway, a widget is the most immediate visual cue I could think of aside from a push notification but pushes are too fleeting. The idea is my dad just has to "swipe" to see today's games and I can curate it exactly to our teams and whether or not he can see it on the TV or needs to open streaming service X and so on.

---

Is this a good use of my time connecting with my dad? Is it better to call him instead of touching the keyboard? Should I be talking to him now rather than about him?

The sentiment is valuable but screens <-> family comparison bleeds too much into the polarization camp for shock value. "Time spent doing X" as opposed to Y will always have shock value. We sleep too much. Too much time reading on the toilet.

My main pushback is solitude. I don't actually want to timemaxx family interaction or any human interaction. I don't want to be the only one on the planet either, we need one another. But a life well-lived includes deep experiences in solitude if you ask me.

EDIT: and another thing! human interaction here focuses entirely on the living and the related. Why? Human connection can span all of humanity. And it should.

havent lived. “I didnt live long enough” means your life ended! past tense. hasn’t means its still going “have not (yet)”. I don’t know the formal rules behind it all though.

its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sentence sounds/feels more right to preserve that your life is still going on.

We like that you are still here with us.

It seems reasonable that a professional-tier of software developers will have tools distinct from everyone else. No matter what the percentage looks like, experts will still be a thing that needs different things.

Trust actually does work that way though, the implicit and collective fuzzy agreement of “having my name on it”. Of course that ambiguity needs enforced automated checks, but reputation and one’s own integrity is not for nothing.

Generative AI breaks that agreement. It took me over a year to realize my previous CTO actually didn’t care too much about the system design he shipped . And the expectation was actually to just throw it away, have AI reimplement “what wasn’t working”. Use AI to ship, AI to learn what shipped, and AI to fix what shipped.

I quit because of it. Hell is working on other people’s AI code.

made me sad reading this as a picture of the state of the world

I think if nothing else the technical facing value proposition should be human written.

Communicating is hard but that’s the point, takes a lot of effort to close the gap between a new and skeptical user and your vision.

Devs will not be able to bypass the PTSD of reading Claude prose.

You must not drink or like beer. Brewing something until it ferments into alcohol is the most basic thing ever. There is the very simple problem of taste that is the issue.

tangential but Google finance (stocks) turned unusable for me: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/CART:NASDAQ

I can't for the life of me understand how to use it, especially on mobile. Everything turns into an AI conversation. WTF I just want to see the ticker chart. It makes me feel old and out of touch. But also, it's just so horrible. Truly unusable. I went with apple and yahoo - tons of ads but at least I can see the chart.

There was always bad code. Extend that to the general challenge of a bad hire doing net-negative things for the company. AI is a new problem because it 1000x a bad hire's blast radius. Personally, I'd even state that AI tends to turn an average and sometimes-but-not-always-good hire into bad hires because finally they get to do the thing they've always wanted at lightning speed in a way that previously the company red-tape wouldn't allow.

lol - I guess, if I heard that in an interview that would be grounds not to continue.

    "enhance"

fwiw codex is very good. arguably better than the sonnet equivalent (value-wise). I use both daily, professionally. And "refactor this code spin up subagents" is hardly an expert-level "I wouldn't hire you" flex.

EDIT: agree with your comment updates. I'd just say it more positively leaning especially to people who are stressed financially. SOTA has advanced a lot so counter-intuitively being behind isn't really behind, it can almost be a way to leap-frog, lean on the Agents. But definitely you have to commit to putting in the reps and learning and not just mindlessly instructing AI to "fix it". Think that's where the discussion splits.

human level is much more manageable. at that scale, we’ve seen just how much steering AIs need.

And AIs have no will. That’s been my best response on the philosophical end. Without will, they’re bound by humans.

> … and assign them to create and scale production chains that go from natural resources to finished war machines…

so yes, you think claude’s gonna get a skill any day now to code up some nukes.

Your scenario assumes fully autonomous ASI. That’s just not what LLMs are. So then the discussion is more that ASI is inevitable. That’s much more interesting but very different from the point release of Opus.

This is all broadly covered in Sapiens. That book is great as it is unsettling. Its hard to deny.

in any case, how is one country/power with winning on their mind getting infinite manufacturing and raw resources to construct this robot army?

Claude’s gonna code up some nukes?

Ok yes robot killer dogs from black mirror are terrifying and possible - they’re gonna enrich uranium from gpus and assemble nukes at the local toyota dealer?

what are we talking about

as opposed to the meaning of absolute reality? oh boy you’ve got so much reading and movie watching ahead that you’ll enjoy very much.

it’s crazy to see right there in writing the prompt go out of its way to avoid the bootstrap effect with homogeneous templated results and then proceeds to produce fully homogeneous obviously templated AI results.

Yeah there’s a need for the distilled learnings of all past hard earned insights. But i think much of the value is in the distillation.

in my experience, even within a single project, the more agentic cycles, the more features and the more surface area the more cruft builds up. This is an obvious observation, but I suppose I’m at the point I think the move forward is to create a new project, keep only what worked from the preceding as modularized entities and intentionally wipe away all past of how we got there save for the API interface truths.

Implementation specifics aside, I increasingly think life and death cycles are preferable. The opposite of omnipotent context, I want cycles of clean slates so that baggage - of all kinds - does not weigh down the new.

I just watched The Odyssey this evening. Loved it! These stories were passed down in song over thousands of years. Humanity scale type stuff. Thousands of years of spoken and written language based connections.

And it’s all survived. Durable.

So I just sit here and think and laugh wow the ego on us. Call me aged out but im not so sure that your vibe coded app or that tik tok upload is gonna hit the same in 5080.

I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.

Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements.

So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.

It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)

> But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now.

This is what communication is. Words are representations for whatever it is that we're talking about. There is no other way.

Agree with you on what we're talking about, disagree on the stance. It's a discussion of value yes. vibe-coded software has less "I made this" value but still holds "does this have utility" value. They're different. Making things with AI is its own kind of making, but it is not the same kind of making as baking a cake from scratch, building a doghouse, or planting your own garden.

Plenty of comments already. "I made this" is a reserved concept for one's hands being in the clay. It's different. It is its own experience. And it is different from any other approach toward the end result. That's it.

features with theoretical use incur cost up front and yield no value. tech debt is only part of the cost, the other is opportunity cost of writing the OPTION. There’s really no good reason to create theoretical use features.

Thinking of software from finance and derivatives pov really blew my mind. here’s the article, it has AI smell but it’s short and the mental model is good: https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/the-cost-yagni-was-never-a...

it’s a breakthrough for me because i too like to build so it’s hard to not build. With options, i don’t get to build blindly but there’s still satisfaction in holding the option. collect the options, system design them, build on that layer.

ooh I like your site: https://webb.page

false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly:

> This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

damn, you all hate SF that much?

Your SF hate isn't a good look.

There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN.

TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties.

EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco.

> This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.