forgetfulness

Hackers never had a very cohesive and consistent ideology or moral framework, we heard non stop of the exploits of people funded as part of Cold War military pork projects that got the plug pulled eventually, but some antipathy and mistrust of the powerful and belief in the power of knowledge were recurrent themes nonetheless

So why is it a surprise that hackers mistrust these tools pushed by megacorps, that also sell surveillance to governments, with “suits” promising other “suits” that they’ll be making knowledge obsolete? That people will no longer need to use their brains, that people with knowledge won’t be useful?

It’s not Luddism that people with an ethos of empowering the individual with knowledge are resisting these forces

Never a git history rewrite after a declined pull request, pure “index.html_previous_3” bliss

Able to make changes preserving correctness over time

Vibecoding reminds me sharply of the height of the Rails hype, products quickly rushed to market off the backs of a slurry of gems and autoimports inserted on generated code, the original authors dipping and teams of maintainers then screeching into a halt

Here the bots will pigheadedly heap one 9000 lines PR onto another, shredding the code base to bits but making it look like a lot of work in the process

He’ll have pissed off a lot of very rich and powerful people once they’re forced to accept that they’ll still need us plebes in the end, does he have a way out when that happens?

Great way to fight the allegations that EU politicians are corrupt and unaccountable, there

100 billion a year, with math that’s downright delusional.

So, back of the envelope math, the US GDP is 27.72T USD, 80% (22.18) corresponds to the tertiary sector.

Let’s say that this is a 15% increase over a 10 years period, because YoY a boom like the computer revolution itself looks like 2% increases a year.[1]. This amounts to about 1.5% increases each year.

Let’s just make the huge leap that you can just scale the productivity up of all this just by making typing out reports and emails a faster activity, and summarizing information for which you’re not facing liability if the bot gets it wrong.

Yes, including the nurses, cleaners, truckers, teamsters, all of it.

1.5% of it is a cool 330 billion.

How much of a cut of that productivity increase could AI companies take? 30%? That’s 100 billion in one year there.

So with pie-in-the-sky math, they could break even if their obligations throughout the decade don’t amount to 1 trillion (since those 1.5T in bonds issued this year mature in longer periods)

1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivit...

Many of those things were already at a “good enough” level since GPT-3.5.

There’s probably a good business usecase there for companies wanting to have smoother communication with offshore teams.

Could that be a game-changer? I wouldn’t discount it, but it does sound like something that has to operate at a very low margin and that doesn’t merit a lot more investment.

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs

A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching.

That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring trillions of dollars into these things thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work.

Edit: I forgot their other niche, that of generating homework and school test answers

Israel hasn’t gotten fire bombed or nuked. What’s the parallel with the WW2 Axis Powers here?

Notes and Reminders are extremely good at what they do, and the synchronization with their iOS equivalents is flawless from what I can tell… and fat chance you get to uproot such a thing to a non-Apple OS.

Third party apps other than for media editing seem to be rare, I think Apple has gobbled or rug pulled much of its independent software vendor ecosystem.

This sounds just like a typical startup or small consultancy drunk on Ruby gems and codegen (scaffolding) back in the Rails heyday.

People who don’t yet have the maturity for the responsibility of their roles, thinking that merely adopting a new technology will make up for not taking care of the processes and the people.

What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has

Becoming someone who can do the thing is how you get to do a lot of things

Not what your boss and your bosses’ boss wants you to do, instead of doing other things you can do to maximize value for shareholders in some arbitrarily chosen amount of time

But thinking of how you wouldn’t have permission to get ready to do the thing in a business context, also, isn’t doing the thing

He “learned” long ago that if people don’t celebrate you for putting down someone else (or themselves), you can just remind yourself how big of an intellectual you are to give yourself that ego boost, and rationalize everything as you experiencing a more authentic life than others.

The tone on HN used to be that “Hacker” was synonymous with “VC backed startup founder”, there used to be whole discussions centered around the founder persona and its nature, the more traditional definitions of “hacker” got paid lip service.

I’d say that LinkedIn speech was born right here.

I did like famous visionary CEO Steve Jobs used to advice, and it read well enough

I held my phone sideways

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that catastrophic conditions like those make you _less_ intelligent, they’re feared and loathed for good reasons.

I also don’t think all that many people would be seriously content to lose their minds and selves this way, but everyone is able to fear it prior to it happening, even if they lose the ability to dread it or choose to believe this is not a big deal.

Just consider the context window

Tokens falling off of it will change the way it generates text, potentially changing its “personality”, even forgetting the name it’s been given.

People fear losing their own selves in this way, through brain damage.

The LLM will go its merry way churning through tokens, it won’t have a feeling of loss.

Unlike the friendly bot, if I can’t find credible enough sources I’ll stay with an honest “I don’t know”, instead of praising the genius of whoever asked and then making something up.

You see people (business people who are enthusiastic about tech, often), claiming that these bots are the new Google and Wikipedia, and that you’re behind the times if you do, what amounts, to looking up information yourself.

We’re preaching to the choir by being insistent here that you prompt these things to get a “vibe” about a topic rather than accurate information, but it bears repeating.

I was expecting to see achievements, gambling and speculative markets for loot boxes.

Any minute you spend in a job interview defending your application server + Postgres solution, is a minute that you will lack to talk of follow up questions about the distributed system that interviewer was expecting.

Yes, it’s nonsense, stirring up a turbulent slurry of eventually consistent components for the sake of supporting hundreds of users per second, it’s also the nonsense that you’re expected to say, just do it.

A queue and a database are more shots on the architecture golf though.

A truly committed pessimist would accept this dark omen.

Anyway, this definition of optimism

> or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes

Isn't what one colloquially means by it.

Though it is eye catching that it will make a positive impact even if you don't, actually, control important outcomes, like by not smoking

> These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

Rage-engagement, something I never needed, and that I knew I needed out of my life, I just didn't know how much of a positive impact it would have to get off it. Sorry Zuck and Spez, but I know you'll be fine without a hatebuck or two.

The transcript doesn’t seem to be finished, the part that the author uses to support their thesis is this excerpt in the article

"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."

“Hooke had some proto-liberal views” would be a more grounded interpretation.

Up until a few years ago, they were buying products, signing labor-intensive contracts, laying off people, burning out the ones that remain, and not investing in its products

In 2021 they spun off the consultancy business and now seem to just sell software and hardware.

The spin off, Kyndryl, is burdened with unprofitable contacts and is still slashing and burning its workforce.

IBM doesn’t seem to be making a comeback in SaaS or whatnot, they seem to just have split their problems down the middle but not solved them.

Does it give you tools to change what you can change, though?

I’ll be reading “Meditations” soon enough, but emphasis on the means to accept things you are helpless about, and not the opposite, can lead to learned helplessness.

If young people take up on these ideas, they just can’t know better at their stage in life, one where they can be, for the most part, helpless.

These architectures were for were high end machines at the time, universities and government agencies would indeed been the only ones buying these, and they probably migrated to commodity hardware long ago; if migrating to a PC-compatible architecture had been off the table for them, so had been keeping these things running after their EOL.

(In my second-tier university at my developing country, the Sun workstation hadn’t been turned on in years by the late 2000s, and the the minicomputer they bought in the 1980s was furniture at the school)

Edit: As for big businesses, they have support plans from IBM or HP for their mainframes, nothing relevant to Debian.

All I find searching for “embedded m68k Linux distro” is people looking for, or coming up with, alternatives, as Debian was already “too big” fifteen years ago.

I don’t get the fuzz around the “retro computing” verbiage. I doubt anyone is actually running Debian on these devices out of necessity, someone who plays baroque music in reconstructed period instruments won’t balk at being called an “early music” enthusiast.