epicureanideal

> Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?

Well, small projects being repeated is one thing, but because they're small there's only so much waste there.

I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years, in which it may be important to emphasize the contributions of, and a particular way of understanding the contributions of the many stonemasons and lesser artisans, as opposed to the leadership of the project and the architects.

Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.

Perhaps let's brainstorm ways to solve this. How can we incentivize joiners to projects? How can we both appreciate the founders and starters, and the later joiners who are necessary for the project? Perhaps if we encourage our own community (tech) to give serious weight and appreciation to all contributors, that will move things in the right direction.

Also, the creators of projects can do their part by sharing the praise their projects receive with their contributors.

What other ideas do folks have to encourage joining rather than starting?

Maybe assigning specific "ownership" (responsibility for, overall credit for) of some portion of the project to long time contributors over time?

> The open challenge is how to prove it!

It could be proven by Anthropic backed credit cards with terms that protect users if it’s leaked or an agent misuses it.

Could call this “reserving” perhaps rather than purchasing, or maybe the purchase would be auto confirmed if under a certain dollar amount or combination of amount and waiting period.

Vendors could provide terms by API, MCP, or just in writing on the page where agents could read it, how quickly a confirmation is needed or what the terms of the reservation or purchase are.

Perhaps services could permit buying things with special AI credit card numbers that link to a special account that the user needs to manually approve by some period of time or else the order is canceled? Works differently though than normal payments where they can just ship the product or deliver the service based on receiving the credit card number.

At some point though, won't someone be able to extrapolate the demand growth curve, and invest some colossal amount of money into making and selling more RAM chips?

I wonder if we work backward from this smell, from the chemical that causes the smell, would we find some fundamental cause of aging that we could try to develop medicines for?

They shouldn’t be able to redefine common terms when closer terms like lease or license are available. It’s misleading.

If there is a severe shortage of labor, that'll happen. I think I remember reading about teachers being paid big bucks in Switzerland?

> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.

Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?

Would be great if they'd add:

Reverse human aging.

(Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)

I’m kidding but.. it’ll be great if in 10 years we look back on this and your joke has become a prophecy.

If it happens, that’ll be proof enough for me that LLM assisted science is giving economic returns!

Based on my experience, even the models we have now are a huge benefit when properly used. And we probably have a decade or two of significant gains we can make just with harnesses, skills, heuristics, etc. even if no further progress were made on models.

Only the front matter of the 50 skills would be loaded, right? 40 MCP tools would be a much larger use of context, right?

The good news is if there are multiple frontier AI models from multiple countries with non overlapping sets of restricted answers, we can just use a couple of them to get open answers.

One way to make legal services more affordable and accessible would be to put the burden of ensuring the AI legal services are accurate on a private-public partnership with the government.

If a person using the service is given inaccurate legal advice and acts on that advice, the person can't be charged with a crime, can't be given any civil penalties, etc., as long as the law in question is non-obvious.

Obviously if by some exploit, some fundamentally obvious crime (murder, theft, obvious fraud, etc.) is said to be legal, that wouldn't apply, but of course the service should try to prevent those kinds of exploits anyway.

Could limit this to something like business regulations to begin with, or even specifically for small businesses, or contracts within some time limit and dollar amount that would otherwise be coverable by small claims court, etc.

I also wonder about JS only, Python only, etc models.

Maybe the future is a selection of local, specific stack trained models?

Does this possibly demonstrate the limits of usefulness of using LLMs to explore new ideas or predict things?

> If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy.

Most people in this conversation on HN seem to just be talking about a regular house and a lifestyle that would’ve been normal for a manual laborer 60-70 years ago.

Thanks for sharing! Seems to show that both are doing poorly relative to earlier generations, and it doesn’t seem Gen Z is greatly (or much at all) outpacing millennials.

And to steel man your position, when the Russian revolution happened the bolsheviks promised peace, an end to the war.

Source for the latter occurrence?

And for a lot of AI transformation tasks, for a long time I've been using even clever regex search/replace, and with a few minutes of small adjustment afterward I have a 100% deterministic (or 95% deterministic and 5% manually human reviewed and edited) process for transforming code. Although of course I haven't tried that cross-language, etc.

And of course, we didn't see a massive layoff after the introduction of say, StackOverflow, or DreamWeaver, or jQuery vs raw JS, Twitter Bootstrap, etc.

Unless you're desperate to feed and house your family and anything that shortens your search by a day might keep a roof over your head?

In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.

It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.

Although I tend to think we overwork the working class such that they have no energy to keep up their health, so this would basically be taxing them because they're poor in many cases.

Maybe so, but personally it seemed to be referred to as a "specification" or "spec" for a long time, and then suddenly around maybe 5 years ago I started to hear people use "PRD". I'm not sure what caused the change.

Absolutely. Imagine being able to look at 100 years of street view history, or several hundred, at some point in the future.

> Yeah, it is over for several roles, especially frontend web development

Only if the front end was super simple in the first place, IMO. And also only for the v1, which is still useful, whereas for ongoing development I think AI leads people down a path of tools that cost more to maintain and build on.

It may be that AI leads to framework and architecture choices best suited to AI, with great results up front, and then all the same challenges and costs of quick and dirty development by a human. Except 10x faster so, by the time anyone in management realizes the mess they’re in, and the cost/benefit ratio tilts negative even in the short run as opposed to the obvious to engineers long term, there’s going to be so much more code in that bad style that it’s 10x more expensive for expert humans to fix it.