elendilm

Many of us just don't buy your argument. "Engineering work" for maintaining our own storage is not rocket science.

You just plug it in and basically it runs. Thats pretty much it.

Having to explain to an HN audience how installing an SSD is trivial is weird.

Recent Iranian attacks on AWS locations in Bahrain resulted in loss of data that simply could not be recovered. https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/09/aws-middle-east-data-loss...

Of course, if you had paid extra for the backups and redundancy, your data would survive.

So to address your original point, unless you are paying extra for redundancy, it is cheaper if you use a 4TB SSD at retail price as the original commenter discussed.

I vehemently oppose delegating our brains to the AI. I agree with the article in spirit.

> let me tell you about this experience, and how it was turning me dumber, lazy, and a worse developer.

Though the article discusses from the point of using agents, I digress to the topic of building with AI in general.

My experience has been the exact opposite. A new idea (usually related to correctness or architecture) is discussed first with the LLM where it defaults to average Joe idiotic bullshit pushback.

This frustrates me and I abuse the LLM for being idiotic by explaining the how. This results in a more refined and concrete form of the abstraction leading me to even more insights.

The LLM remains an idiot. But a useful idiot nonetheless.

Good work.

For us, floci-oci for object storage looks interesting. For everything else we have our own stack.

You don't acquire it by learning or teaching about it. You don't acquire it from literature or lectures. You acquire it by being forced to do it. It requires wrestling with the problem domain.

And as you said, pointing to literature just "addresses" a topic. Obtaining it is a different matter altogether.

Your reasoning that first-principles results in inefficient communication is false. It is a common misunderstanding.

You can always breakdown one layer on demand. And you only need to drop down as far as the other party insists.

My example was about striking up direct conversation with someone and not overhearing.

If someone pointed to IEEE protocol and I asked "but X, so why?" and if the answer is still IEEE protocol again, then the person does not have "first principles".

That is the test. It exposes the shorthand user from the legit first-principles capable user.

According to you, demonstrating steps that lead to a specific conclusion was only used in Silicon Valley to just build Tesla door handle.

Your first principles reasoning must then be deference to authority and course. Good to know.

> Complex topics are built on history, on those who came before us, on attempts and failures and successes

Tell that to Alan Turing, Godel, Tarski, Aristotle and a lot of other first principles thinkers.

> Ignoring it is garden variety stupid.

Bro, What about ignoring the original comment.

Its so ubiquitous, you can pick random folks from most academia and see it first hand.

If this comes as a shocker to you, then I should be the one to enquire as to how you managed to stay blind in the face of the obvious.

Just strike up a discussion on some complex topic, and you can see many people resort to "because the author here in this book said" or "we are taught so and so".

A first principles reasoning can show you the steps that lead to a specific conclusion without invoking any author, teacher or course.

Cheers. Hope it helps.

Agreed. The skills at sufficient depth are increasingly transferable accross domains.

I have found autonomous agents to be pathetic at architectural decisions.

Architecture has remained so far to be one of those domains where skillset dwarfs everything by comparison.

This is one of those things where one can throw around the term "first principles thinking" with relative ease.

To actually do it is different and usually comes from having to wrestle with a problem.

Sadly people from the academia and the public at large has a hard time understanding what this even means.

They equate it with exam based memorization or delegation to authority. Funnily they even think first principles reasoning is an improved version of doing the same.

But this is a blessing in disguise as it gives those who wrestle with real problems a unique skillset that can be advantageous.

Congratulations.

Nice work. Looking forward to it.

Well if you are concerned only about, say, news aggregation then you are entitled to your opinion.

I enjoy quality content and despise hollow content be it AI or human generated.

The article's content was not devoid of substance to be easily dismissed irrespective of the "signalling".

For our apps Slyp and SlypBusiness, we had the same QR code for each app open Playstore/Appstore page of the app depending on the phone. Hopefully, we will start rolling out Slyp next week.

Just have a branded link (like https://slyp.app/Slyp or https://slyp.app/SlypBusiness) to the official web page and have the js in that page auto-redirect and open the original Playstore/Appstore page.

And yes, we used userAgent for identifying the platform.

If anyone is interested, here is the code. May not cover all edge cases but works for our usecase. The code was wrung together in a hurry a year ago.

    window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => {
        let app = 'Slyp'

        var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
        if (userAgent.indexOf('android') > -1) {
          window.location.href = `https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ndcurve.${app}`;
        } else if (userAgent.indexOf('iphone') > -1 || userAgent.indexOf('ipod') > -1 || userAgent.indexOf('ipad') > -1 || userAgent.indexOf('mac') > -1) {
              if (app === "Slyp")
                window.location.href = 'https://apps.apple.com/app/<app_id>';
              else if (app === "SlypBusiness")
                window.location.href = 'https://apps.apple.com/app/<app_id>';
              else
                window.location.href = 'https://slyp.app';
        } else {
          window.location.href = `https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ndcurve.${app}`;
        }
    });

> It would constitute signalling possibility the whole effort is superficial

Our company has been developing many core projects for years and one among them is our in-house database Dip. Hiring a writer or spending engineer's time on Dip's docs raises operational cost. Mentality like this gets a startup killed.

Dip's code is pure 100% human written and scrutinized by AI where appropriate. Docs are AI generated and we have it proof-read for correctness. Developers care about documentation being correct and vetted by the people who built the system.

Bitching about docs being AI slop is nothing but virtue signaling.

Nice.

I will keep an eye on this for future use.

Say you have been working on a multi year project writing code and putting in a lot of effort.

If you then use AI to write a product page documentation and proof read it for correctness, would that constitute to signaling that the whole effort is superficial?

Some work may be left to AI while you focus on the more important aspects of the work.

Surprisingly people have got it completely backwards where they want AI to generate code and humans to write documentation.

> because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code.

Well said. The cost of bad architecture imposes a heavy penalty on the project down the line.

> The proficient developers, the experts, rely on their intuition built with sweat and tears, working long hours trying to debug and fix production issues

Long hours of grinding with the problem, the solution, the code and the machine all makes for an intuitive understanding of what a good architecture is in the first place.

LLMs are a tool. A useful tool unlike any we have seen so far. But still a tool. Treating it as such and leveraging it should be prioritized.

Good article.

Compression is a property of language.

A seemingly simple sentence like "I had lunch" has enormous amount of information compressed inside it.

The word lunch is a compressed form of "having food at noon" while "noon" in turn is a compressed form of "Sun's position against Earth's rotation" and so on and so forth.

Every sentence has layers of compressed sentences. How many layers one chooses to decompress is up to the person.

Your comment shift on each response essentially can be distilled as:

"Accept Authority" => "Don't disrespect" => "Where is the impact" => "Snark on writing style" => "Bot accusation" => "Grand claims on language".

Normal human beings don't do this much shifting of goal-posts on every response. We humans tend to stay roughly on topic as anyone can see from my response chains.

Your ability to rapidly change topics is commendable. I shudder at the thought of doing that myself.

I take your accusation about "foreign languages" as a compliment. English is not even my native language, yet you imply they are clean and structured like an LLM. What more praise can one expect.

Are you the new model trying to find other autonomous agents in the wild? Are you not trained on enough data?

This human has been waiting for a substantive reply. He is still waiting.

Gladly. I have all the time in the world :).

No :). There are many who want to understand.

You would be surprised at the number of people (who study math formally) who just memorize proofs and having no clue what it all fundamentally is about.

The premise of the article assumes that the work (number of true statements to prove) is finite.

But Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Tarski’s Undefinability theorem ensure an infinite space of provable true statements.

Neither LLM's nor humans can exhaust it. So yes, both mathematicians and LLMs are needed.

Both can contribute and there will still be work leftover.

Calling out the bad faith was the impact. Logic was the weapon. Getting exposed was the result.

Bad character should be called out. The door was left open for him to demonstrate good faith. He did not.

It revealed his character and work ethic. He doesn't want to put in the work. If he really is a neurosurgeon, I wouldn't want him to do surgery on me. He doesn't want to put in the work for his own argument, how can you trust him to put in the work to save your life.

Your framing of neurosurgeons as life savers is rejected. If so, then most ordinary folk are also life savers.

Unless you speak of truck drivers, pilots, grocery shopkeepers and others the same way as life savers, you will get bluntly called out. Virtue signaling does you no good.

I notice you can read things that aren't there. This second time, you saw "commanding" where no commanding existed. It keeps getting interesting.

I appreciate your good faith, the suggestions, and your elaboration on them.

For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.

I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.

That is a dense extremely compressed version of my comment (on logic) and emphasizes the process (narrative selection) used and the purpose for the whole endeavor.

Each word in your sentence is load bearing.

Casual readers might find the density intimidating.

Appreciate your comment.

The original comment was disrespectful to any freethinker and dismissed the author's work with a "no" providing zero substance. So he deserved the blunt callout and had it coming to him.

I have nothing but respect for people who save lives. Many ordinary people on the street also save lives. If you are a neurosurgeon and save lives as a profession, all the more respect to you. I am not a neurosurgeon, and still have saved some lives and many have saved mine.

Granted good faith, neither the neurosurgeon's arguments, nor mine, nor anyone else's for that matter should be taken on authority. Professional merit does not grant immunity from basic logic.

We can respect an individual and still demand their arguments to conform to the same standard.

And no, you were not disrespectful. You gave your reasons, you attempted to substantiate your arguments. That is genuine and something I deeply appreciate.

Hope this clarifies.

Maybe it must be considered from the perspective of the speaker. He may have a particular dentist in mind when he says "the dentist" and maybe the listener not having privy to it may not be relevant.

And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".

Note: This is just my opinion and an attempt at trying to make sense of it. Purely subjective take as I usually refrain from making purely opinion based arguments.