3,127 karma · joined August 3, 2011
Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.
I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.
AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.
Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
There are multiple real examples of both, even in America.
There’s no reason that the cost of something you need “must be recouped” in future by you having and using that thing.
UK list, for example: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/uk-airshow-calendar-202...
Rest of Europe: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/european-airshow-calend...
As I said, I believe people have a right to "adversarial interoperability", so I respectfully disagree
They should have no rights to control how people use hardware they bought. ToS for hardware should simply be unenforceable.
People should have full rights to adversarial interoperability, even if it means modifying proprietary software or hardware.
It always surprises me when people (on this site particularly) are more interested in the law as it stands than how things could or should be.
I wonder whether tech has become so exploitative partly because so many of us have lost track of (or never understood) how important civil disobedience has always been in the process of democracy and securing our rights.
As an individual you really don’t have to follow the terms of service! You certainly don’t have to support the [ab]use of ToS, DRM and related tech to screw you at every opportunity!
Sounds like a feature, not a bug
I've managed to get OpenCode setup such that I can have a productive discussion about the design or an issue / change then leave the LLM iterating for long periods while I do other work. It's instructed to maintain test coverage and treat quality very seriously - as a result there are over 5000 tests (some I suspect are useless...) and it's pretty rare to get a regression.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of significant bugs and gaps, but also that once found it seems like all of them will be fixed pretty quickly by the LLM.
I just have to avoid looking at the code...
I used to give up somewhere around the type system, too, but this time I’m approaching something vaguely useful. It even has a basic LSP.
It’s been both enjoyable and enlightening, and LLMs turn out to be an excellent pair designer as (in addition to implementation) they’re really good at summarising the impact of various decisions.
> the reason you will fail for sure, is the inability to restrict the scope of the project
This will be the reason, for sure. But then the scope of every project like this tends towards building an OS with it then replacing every piece of software, including all embedded devices :)
It's one of the dullest, most mediocre languages out there and despite a nice toolchain and the fact it's undoubtedly a "safe" choice, I just have zero interest.
I am watching people who can't code build and deploy dashboards and sites with Claude Code (desktop app - they don't use the CLI), then go cap in hand to developer friends to get it hosted on a domain (rather than some Vercel or whatever URL).
Those people absolutely want to risk letting an agent buy and set up the domain.
This is not necessarily as blindly stupid as you might think. Many of these people know that this workflow is no good for writing code that does anything serious (i.e. storing data for people, taking payments, etc.) but there are a huge number of projects that are just websites, dashboard, data visualisations, etc. with static content and public APIs (Twitter is awash with them) and domains are cheap.
A decent minority of these are even quite cool or interesting.
So a lot of people want to put their vibe-coded weekend project behind a nice domain. Why not?
We should build more toys
A lot of engineers now describe the problem, discuss the outline of the solution with the LLM, and then get it to write and test most of it ahead of their review. They tell me it usually takes the same approach they would anyway and even when it doesn’t, it’s often faster to explain what’s wrong and give the LLM another try.
Very little (and even then, only simple internal tools) gets written without a human owning the code and reviewing it thoroughly, but even with that overhead the productivity boost is impressive.
Even so-called UX and product experts get stuff wrong all the time. Going from idea to prototype to feedback in hours or days rather than days or weeks feels like a superpower, at least in the very customer facing parts of what we do.
The biggest downside is the feeling that people sometimes turn their brain off and aren’t even doing basic checks on some of the slop their LLMs produce.
Backends handling tens to hundreds of thousands of messages per second with extremely high correctness and resilience requirements are necessarily taking a different approach to less critical services that power various ancillary sites/pages or to front end web apps.
That said there's a lot of very open discussion around tooling, "skills", MCP, etc., harnesses, and approaches and plenty of sharing and cross-pollination of techniques.
It would be great to find ways to better quantify the actual value add from LLMs and from the various ways of using them, but our experience so far is that the landscape in terms of both model capability and tooling is shifting so fast that that's quite hard to do.
- Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools).
- Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps.
- Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards.
- Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using Replit or any of the others) is the new Excel for non tech people.
- Every time someone has any idea it's accompanied by a multi page "Clauded" memo explaining why it's a great idea and what exactly should be done (about 20% of which is useful).
- 80% of what were web searches now go to Claude instead (for at least a significant minority of people, could easily be over 50%).
- Nobody talks about ChatGPT any more. It's Claude or (sometimes) Gemini.
- My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code (both my personal and corpo accounts) and OpenCode (also almost always Claude, via Copilot) busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities.
We (~20 people) are probably using 2 orders of magnitude more inference than we were at the start of the year and it's consolidated away from cursor, ChatGPT and Claude to just be almost all Claude (plus a little Gemini as that's part of our Google Whateverspace plan and some people like it, mostly for non-engineering tasks).
No idea if any of this will make things better, exactly, but I think we'd be at a severe competitive disadvantage if we dropped it all and went back how things were.
I think governments should invest in their economies - mostly by investing in research, education, infrastructure, health and wellbeing of citizens, etc. but also putting capital into the later stages of expansion would make sense.
I certainly don't think people should not be able to start or own or profit from companies. But I do see a reason to limit their scale and/or make them more publicly owned beyond an certain scale.
I quite like the idea that "public" markets should become truly public, e.g. by some ratcheting percentage of public companies becoming owned by society at large over time (there would be several ways this could be done). This somewhat happens with the largest companies via index funds but only for those big enough to be in the indices and the distribution in unequal.
Maybe there are other/better ways, but it's pretty clear to me that big companies have a lot of negative impacts that aren't properly accounted for and so they are a very significant way in which a few people get richer at the expense of everyone else.