fabianholzer

In corporations no good deed ever goes unpunished.

> I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?

The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.

Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.

I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.

I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems

I think the website of James Sinclair has some great typographical choices, see the colophon for details: https://jrsinclair.com/about/

Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.

I did not yet have a positive "oh shit" moment, but when the corporate manager types that could not deliver a "Hello world" if their live would depend on and would have had a sour look on their face when asked to pay license fees for a proper IDE a 10 to 15 years ago started pushing it hard, way before any but the resume-driven engineers: that has flipped a bit in me.

I was researching frameworks for building progressive web apps and stumbled over "Hacker News as a PWA" (https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas).

> What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button.

A sincere thank you for this metaphor.

> I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.

Speaking as a German with children: Completely apt image. Yet I would name several dozen of policies that are more serious "rakes in your face" than this. This is merely squeezing a little bit more out of the working population. Everyone knows that social security in the current state is a Ponzi scheme and what ever is collected is immediately redistributed.

This is nothing particularly new. People above a certain age without kids are paying a higher percentage from their income into the social security since 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor, and that's more than twenty years ago.

What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.

I use IntelliJ at work on a daily basis, and I assume that holds for a significant chunk of folks, who use Java in a professional capacity.

Be that as it may, the jurisdiction I am living in has an explicit right to refuse to testify against a spouse. It is wild to me that one can construct a crime out of that, let alone one that warrants a decade of incarceration.

Probably to be a high-church Anglican/episcopalian?

I do not want to distract from the content of the article, which is highly relevant for folks who built UIs with frameworks that are conceptually based on signals, but the way that the reading experience is designed really great, in particular the guided reading flow through the instructive code path is something that I rarely have seen done at all, and this even works pretty well on mobile. It's a delightful reminder on how a dynamic medium can be more than the simulation of print on screens.

Plenty, but few of them can be solved by writing and deploying an app somewhere. Some of them are actually made worse by the latter. And how to make money is mostly orthogonal to solving the problems of the world.

I find this knee-jerk reaction, that everything that shows certain stylistic choices is put under the suspicion of "might be generated", to have become a tedious cliché.

Unless the author had live-streamed the writing process, how could we know? Humans have been exposed to LLM generated texts on nearly all channels for more than three years, so by now it would be a surprise if there had not been a reciprocal reaction. Writers imitate what they read, the tools we shaped might have started to shape us.

> It can be gutted or extended at the discretion of a user.

Something that would give a user meaningful agency. You, sir, are a hopeless romantic. ;)

Mine doesn't meet the criterion on HN points, but well, maybe someday:

https://holzer.online

> I wonder at what point these countries will loose any moral ground against the likes of Russia, China etc.

When arbitrary extrajudicial killings happen at some scale on a regular basis?

That is an argument to authority. There is a large enough segment of folks who like to be confirmed in either direction. Doesn't make the argument itself correct or incorrect. Time will tell though.

> nobody serious is promising that

There is a staggering number of unserious folks in the ears of people with corporate purchasing power.

> Am I wrong to feel this?

Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are under no obligation to produce clean training material, much less feel bad about this.

The iron curtain wasn't so iron from the beginning. The Berlin wall was built in 1961, that is 12 years after the east German republic was founded. 16 years worth of able workers draining from the soviet-occupied part to Western Germany.

Shall we put a reminder in our calendars to talk again in 2037?

> Well, at some point you'd learn by maxing out your credit card on your cloud bill, or getting hacked and losing all your users' data, or...

...go to jail?

If I use the same codebase and the same compiler version and the same compiler flags over and over again to produce a binary, I expect the binary to be the deterministically be the same machine code. I would not expect that from an LLM.

> It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice.

The bland platitudes of corporate management were mindbogglingly boring drivel already in the era before LLMs went mainstream. What we get nowadays is just more of it. That stuff should be skipped anyways. What was not worth writing is not worth reading.

Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.

> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.

A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(

[0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...