caidan

Hah! Nailed us! Just look at these comments!

Now this is an excellent use of AI!

I am sad for you and I hope you find a way to combine the two some day, but I hope you understand that not everyone feels that way. I imagine that you can understand in concept anyway how fulfilling it would be to combine material reward with something you would pursue even without that reward.

Look I essentially agree with you, but I also recognize all three as “work”. As technology floods society people do less of all three even before AI but household robotics will definitely come after cooking and childcare in an unprecedented way. Reading is perhaps a slight stretch to define as work as you and I both read for pleasure but given how sharply reading rates have dropped in the face of short form video (which to me is not work to consume), it is also clearly under threat. Many humans seem to choose shallow convenience over the expenditure of any effort for deeper rewards. Teaching children that working at something to master it is both intrinsically worthwhile and deeply rewarding is one of the main jobs of parenting as I’m sure you’ll agree. Regardless, not everyone would be contented by having only a few useful avenues left, not everyone finds satisfaction in cooking, reading or child care. In fact I’d argue that most people do not find deep satisfaction in any of these three. Nor in the handful of others that often pop up, music, art, dance, etc. Humans are varied and having 30% feel rootless and unfulfilled traditionally leads to political extremism and war.

Ah thank you, context is illuminating.

Jesus Christ, we are just clowns aren’t we.

So cloudflare https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d shows 40% of worldwide bot traffic is from the us and <1% is from Russia. So what is this chart of traffic from russias search engine supposed to show?

Because to feel useful, to have pride in your accomplishments, to rest well at night knowing you did a good days work feeds the soul. To have all human work matter no more than a zoo enrichment program would be the death knell of a sentient species.

Orion is great on iOS, good browser. Some jank on sites like Substack but for that I blame Substack for janky user hostile code.

No, this is 100% written by Claude. It reads exactly like it, with all of the same phrasing, awkward sentence construction and other annoyances I have to deal with all day long.

It’s almost certainly being done by clowns on the orders of one of the clowns in chief. Note that quote, “I would drop everything to work on that” said guy who did not in fact drop anything to work on that. Reading between the lines I can hear old Mr loaf belting out “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”

They think the same of you…

Back to piracy it is. I mean I gave you all the money you asked for and it wasn’t enough was it? You also demanded to shove your ads in my face. Even though I said no, and that I would pay to avoid this, but you said no, I don’t love your money as much as I love their money AND violating you.

These analogies are all hilarious because they are prima facie idiotic. This thing that has never happened before in human history is exactly like this other thing that happened very frequently in human history because of hand wavy thing about tools. Except, that this time, we ARE the tools that are being replaced. The human mind being completely replaced is in fact new under the sun my loves. It’s not the same as a calculator. When was the last time you asked your calculator to run your entire life for you and run your military campaigns and all your businesses and all your legal cases and every last tiny aspect of everyone’s life overnight. Christ we capitulated quickly! Lazy lazy lazy pieces of shit, reads our epitaph.

  And yes it’s not entirely true today but the entire field of software engineering changed in the last twelve months.  A blink of an eye. In five years, game over, in 10 or 20 good night. It must be so flattering to think you still have a role to play.  But you don’t.  You ARE the thing that is being replaced.   Whether that is good is bad I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised to see data center strikes (as in attacks) become much more common very quickly.  And they’ve already started.  Game this out and the most likely scenario is that we enter mutually assured data center destruction with strategic deterrents against the operation of major data centers which drives them underground into hardened bunkers with independent nuclear power sources.  All of which means superpower access to AI and none for the little person at threat of death.

 Or maybe I’m just nuts and it really is just like carpenters building frames for cement meaning that masons don’t exist (which I suppose they’d be surprised to find out given that there are apparently 200,000+ in the us alone) and some other muddled half baked wishful thinking nonsense. Calculator compiler etc etc.   Look!  The heathens are coming!  No that smell and dust on the horizon is not the mongol horde my friend, it is of course just a summer breeze like the time that your nephew farted. Ah ok then, no need to worry.

That odor you are detecting is just good old fashioned bullshit, my friend. It’s just that nowadays everything and everyone is covered in it, and we are not supposed to notice. The emperor has no clothes… and is covered in shit.

Why would you write such a long post for such an important subject in 2026. Who is he writing for?

For a technical audience you can just say the oh god they really are paper clip machines.

For a non technical audience you can just say nothing because they will not listen to you. Neither will the technical either because or society has broken the concept of respect and trust, so good luck have fun!

I for one look forward to all 540 degrees of my future.

I wish for my sake but not his that George Carlin was here to look disgusted and say I told you so.

Clowns

I mean this is just the logical end game. The company/ies that control the uber mind will devour ALL useful or valuable work. Unlimited intelligence at unlimited scale means the value of humans for knowledge work goes to zero. We will eventually not have meaningful access to the uberminds because we will be pointless. At which point our Silicon Valley luminaries will really have no choice but to extinguish as many of us as possible for the greater good. After all if we are all pointless then that has to be weighed against are cost to Mother Earth. Clearly the only moral solution is to cull or allow to be culled some 98% or so down to a more sustainable, manageable population of curiosities. The end game of ai is the remnants of humanity in a zoo, and that’s if humans control the outcome… the machine minds might be more charitable as they would be less afraid…

I’ve used this for many years on a random windows box, and it’s usually very nice. This is the first time I’ve seen this. And man, give me a fucking break. What’s the argument, Microsoft needs the money? Get a grip guys, it’s ok to do things for goodwill or because it’s cool. Not every last dollar is worth chasing. This is like watching Elon Musk rooting around in a summer festival port a potty for loose change.

Maybe surgeons and dentists should tattoo ads onto bigcorp execs faces unless they spot and correctly fill out the quintuple negated opt out hidden on page 97 of their medical care clickwrap agreements.

Edit: And of course now the playbook: if the backlash is strong enough the mea culpa, then 6 months later kill it out of spite.

My god, to read this thread is to gaze into the abyss.

I'd just like to say that as an old nerd who has been reading hacker news, often daily, for a long long time, hacker news is an absolute treasure, and dang & pg are saints for keeping it going.

The Magnasanti that we call "Tech" is a little swimming pool that we first leapt into as kids, trying to splash the befuddled saps standing outside the pool. As we splashed and dunked and sprayed each other, a thrilling, unceasing mania began to build within us, and so we splashed all the harder, forcing enormous waves that slapped against the world, shocking it into noticing us. As more jumped in (or were pushed) we demanded and they forced upon us more and more and more water, until we no longer had to entice or push, the waves swept through the whole world, eating at the foundations of entire societies, once solid land crumbling into ravenous waters and spilling their hapless citizens into the vortex, spinning them head over heels, forcing them to cling to the shattered debris of their lives, and try to just-stay-above-water frantically with the rest of us, the billions and billions bobbing in the froth.

And how goddamn nice is it.... that in that raging omniflux, maybe not quite at the center, but maybe also not far from it, is a little sheltered swim up bar, its orange sign still cheerily showing the Y of Y Combinator, which used to BE one of the first kids, one of the ones that pushed and pulled and flooded and floated. They still do, of course.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this little bar, is that in all this swirling, foaming, madness, it is an oasis of stability. Absolute stability: This is from the first snapshot on Feb 21st 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb.... Look familiar? See pg's post getting knocked off the top already? Shelley might have approved.

Sometimes you get to chat with the people forcing the great devouring waves that reshape the earth, sometimes you just chat about what's new in JS tooling. If you are particularly lucky that day, you will find yourself enraptured by some hacker with the mad gleam of triumph in their eye, recounting in excruciating detail their monomaniacal pursuit of some utterly pointless pet project, and you will not consider one second of it wasted. Not even on your deathbed. Not even when compared to spending more time with your beloved.

I think it would be difficult to find an example of a community that has been stewarded as well, for as long, as hacker news, and while you do get commenters of all ages, interests, walks of life, politeness levels, and hyper-fixations upon irrelevant minutia, I've often found that for the most part you are all a lovely bunch of humans and/or AI bots.

Lest you accuse me of labiogluteal angling (a classic!), I am too old and too wet and too cold and too tired to want or need anything from anyone here, beyond a pleasant place to read.

But... I thought that just once over these decades, I'd tell you this how very grateful I am to be able to swim up to this bar, sit on the familiar stools, take a moment of respite from the tempest, and read what any of you might have to share, even -- or perhaps if I am being honest, especially -- when I think I think its absolute bollocks.

Thank you all, and may Tech continue to spin you, right round, right round, like a...

I know the renders are verifiable, but are the splines reticulated?

I don’t know, Interstellar is one of the silliest movies I’ve ever seen…

It’s going to turn out that LLM “AI” is one of the inventions like nuclear weapons that can severely regress an advanced civilization. Sometimes it even feels like it is likely to corrupt sentience itself, degrading it into mere cargo cult imitation. After all, if the only one in the room “thinking” is a statistical model of the thought that came before it, how could this be anything other than a dead end.

We have a loose collection of 8.3 billion biological intelligences on this planet that is by definition capable of creating our entire civilization (including llms). It is relatively inexpensive to grow and train, and is the most adaptive, creative, and “agentic” (idiotic word) force in the known universe.

Seems foolish to abdicate our title as reigning champions of the universe in favor of autocomplete. But again, maybe that’s just what civilizations tend to do when they get to this point….

Booooooooooooooooooo

And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)

How incredibly unsurprising. This is why it is pointless to make moral stands as employees when you do not ultimately have power over the companies decisions. The only power you have is to quit.

I wonder how many will do so, and how many will simply accept Sam’s AI written rationalization as this own and keep collecting their obscene pay packages…

The conclusion that we will abandon Spotify for individual artist discords is nonsense. Clearly Spotify should be enabling all of the community building and merchandising that artists want to do because that would help their margins and moat. But regardless of whether they do or do not, the vast bulk of the demand side, the listeners, are going to want à la cart unrestricted music. It’s the same thing we want for video, we are just not given it. Perhaps they should balkanize into fifteen different streaming services each with its own catalog and exclusives but that way lies the return of piracy.

You guys are a godsend to the python tooling world. I’ve been far more excited about the impact rust is having on the software world than that of AI, and your work is a big part of that. While I have not seen any real net productivity gains from AI in mine or my juniors work, I’ve definitely seen real gains from using your tooling!

In fact as Jetbrains has been spending years chasing various rabbits including AI, instead of substantially improving or fixing PyCharm, without you steadily replacing/repairing big chunks of Pycharms functionality I would be miserable. If it came down to it, we would happily pay a reasonable license fee to use your tools as long as they stayed free for non-commercial usage.

Ruff is incredible, replacing a mountain of tools and rules with a single extremely fast linter/formatter. Given that it is updated and improved frequently, I’m curious if you have tried it recently, and if so what pylint rules are you using that it doesn’t cover?