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bauldursdev

42 karma · joined January 21, 2025

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bauldursdev··on Ask HN: Are there any serious efforts to organize tech labor now?
I'm not advocating for not having unions, but the idea some people have and corporations push is based on a hypothesis that companies will try their best to minimize costs.

Unions do have these real benefits for the workers who are a part of them, and these benefits come at the cost of the corporations who have to pay more and implement better practices.

This increases the cost of human labor, so when doing a purely greedy analysis of costs vs revenue, the costs go up for processes which requires human labor, which drives down the profit, disincentivizing investment or even the continuation of processes that require unionized labor. Overall, there winds up being less demand for human labor and more demand for automation.

I'm not here to speak on the truth of this, I think of it from this perspective: Information asymmetry (not understanding the opposing argument) benefits the party who has the information, so understanding their argument is necessary if you want to counter it.

bauldursdev··on AI is too expensive
"I know these facts, they just go to a different school. I'd bring you to them if your Mom would let you leave the neighborhood, but you're just a little boy".

I mean surely to make this claim, you aren't just making it up, surely you've done the research. In that case, what's so hard about sharing facts which you already know? I'm not asking you to put in a bunch of effort pulling financial statements and analyzing everything, I assume you've already done that because I doubt you'd make the claim otherwise.

bauldursdev··on AI is too expensive
I'm not really an AI-futurist or anything, I think the truth is between the extremes, but it seems like a lot of people who are ideologically against AI just move the goal posts whenever a new development is made. They also seem to operate under the assumption that whatever the current state of the technology is is as good as it will ever be. "it can't even do x today, so it'll never be good".
bauldursdev··on Slopinator: Attack AI training with poisoned GitHub repositories
Ya I feel like these AI companies have the ability to be somewhat selective about their training sets. They don't have to add everything. I guess the idea is the filters wouldn't catch it, but if the junk is indistinguishable from the real stuff, then won't the platforms just be ruined by a bunch of junk?
bauldursdev··on Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
Well, now's probably a good time to release something...
bauldursdev··on Ask HN: Is anyone seriously considering a career change?
I'm in my early 20s. Many people here have much shorter time horizons to me.

Well... my timescale is 20 years. Many people reading this now are older than I will be in 20 years. So how will things look in 2046?

Can't say, but I find it worth thinking about.

To me it seems like the sentiment has already shifted among developers on what the scope of change we'll see with AI will be. It seems like at any point in time there's a lot of skepticism that it will ever be able to get over whatever the current big limitation right now is. But when thinking of careers they don't play out over 5 years or even 10 but 20 30 or more years.

bauldursdev··on Ask HN: Should AI credits be refunded on mistakes?
I think it would be expensive to check. For a coding task any reviewer would need to understand programming (these people aren't cheap), the domain context, cultural differences (e.g. American "cookie" vs British "biscuit"), and make a determination.

If the AI companies just paid all of that out of the goodness of their pocketbook I'd be fine with it, but in reality I think they'd just pass on the costs. The same way that basically every business passes on spoilage, theft, return rates, etc.. So I think the value would be risk mitigation rather than cost (as in, you know if you pay for $10 worth of tokens, it will $10 worth of good tokens, but the individual token cost would need to account for all the tokens that the company doesn't get paid for)

bauldursdev··on Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era?
You don't have to think the AI is better than yourself. Many coding tasks are just repetitive boilerplate... pretty simple stuff. Sometimes you have to set 20 fields on an object, refactor 10 functions to return a default value, write a generic SQL statement that returns data in a specific shape, center a div, or any number of relatively simple tasks. I wouldn't use it for the high level architectural decisions. Just a fancy context-aware autocomplete. Even though I can spell just fine, I use autocomplete on my phone all the time just to save time. I think it's a similar thing for code, if you use it properly. Of course many do just offload all the thinking and do not critically review it's work, but I think that is the wrong approach.
bauldursdev··on Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era?
I agree... I think the process of coming to a conclusion yourself is different than having that solution proposed to you and accepting it.
bauldursdev··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
It's not a fixed size of PhD candidates competing. A future PhD candidate may choose to not become a future PhD candidate because of changes. For example, a high school or undergraduate student might read all these articles and statistics about how funding is getting pulled and research is becoming more difficult and choose to take another path. They are no longer a competitor to be a PhD candidate, they do not bid down the prices.
bauldursdev··on Is it possible to get a Jr. developer job in Elixir?
I'll try it out and get back to you :)
bauldursdev··on Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees
We already have the concept of "tree", "grass", etc. it would just need to be formalized
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