frank_nitti

The incentives are there. I know reddit and HN it seems like lots of people are using models/harnesses from scrappy competitors, but IME at the enterprise level I’m in the extreme minority who is even aware of them. Virtually everybody uses Anthropic and OpenAI tools and models, with Copilot getting some scraps because of its forced inclusion in Microsoft/github ecosystem

There is no question about the benefit when things go right; a wary engineer responsibly guiding agents to build orders of magnitude more than was possible before, and always skeptical and critical of the vendor, knowing the vendors’ incentives.

But that’s not the majority, and the people approving absurd token spend are too far out of the weeds to see what’s happening - people burning 6 figures in tokens and still end up with broken systems that keep them over the weekend, but now they hardly understand what they’re troubleshooting (if at all).

This is a dream scenario for the fat-cat vendors, so there is incentive to have CC/Codex write more code, overly-complex designs. When users get upset, they jump to OpenAI to spite Anthropic, or vice versa, but always getting further locked in to the duopoly

Joomla!

I understand what you’re saying now, basically boils down to “might is right”.

It’s not a particularly helpful paradigm for solving predicaments without excess violence and suffering, but the model makes sense insofar as it’s consistent

Perhaps you’re considering a very select subset of the rich for whom you can argue their wealth was entirely earned through value they delivered to society.

Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances.

In most cases, it’s very hard to argue that society “owes them” anything.

I would say that debt would be much more appropriate for people like Nikola Tesla who wanted his inventions shared with the world at no cost, or the inventors of insulin who sold the patent for $1 to benefit the common good. Not for the telecom and pharma CEOs who become billionaires by extracting the maximum value from exploiting others’ ingenuity!

When billionaires make the decisions about what roads get built, they build roads that help them more efficiently exploit the world around them. This has been observed in many developing countries when their industrialization is driven by private capitalist interests: roads emerge from the plantations to the refineries, to the factories and distribution centers. Roads for the local populations are built to get them to/from these places because capital needs them for labor; roads are not built for them to get to and from their e.g. churches or places of recreation where there is no direct value to be extracted by capital.

When roads are built for the common good, it’s only when government acts on behalf of the working class to compel taxpayers to fund it; it must coerce the billionaires to contribute under the implicit threat of force.

I’d love to believe that humans become generally more collectivist when they amass great wealth - and much credit to those who do - but they are much too few and far between for us to rely this as a society

Interesting, my experience in classes using set theory was the opposite, where ∋ only meant “such that” and ∈ only meant “is a member of”.

Learning programming syntax at the same time made it frustrating to learn that math symbols were less strictly defined and less universal, that it was best to write proofs/derivations/etc in plain English in many cases instead of the neat symbols

In my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end.

For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially

This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.

Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.

It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world

Not my comment, but I’d venture to guess they’re referring to the likes of DeepSeek et al, who are/will be able to host their top-tier inference infra more efficiently

I would argue they are also cheating other students in their chosen field, and any future employers who place high value on prestige of applicants’ university, no?

If the only tangible, marketable value of graduating from a prestigious school was the raw knowledge and skill, I would agree with you. But it’s not.

Having worked with people who clearly got preferential treatment in hiring based on their school’s prestige, over more capable applicants from lower-tier schools, I absolutely lose respect for staff at universities who turn a blind eye to cheating.

My plan is to follow and hop on this train, hope it’s available in other countries also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214645

Interesting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers.

Here and on AI tech subreddits (ones that aren’t specifically about local or FOSS) seem to have this dynamic, to the degree I’ve suspected astroturfing.

So it’s refreshing to see maybe that’s just a coincidence or confirmation bias on my end.

Seems to me the commenter was asking: what observations led us to conclude that original affirmative statement that “the AI did this entirely on its own”.

Given that this is a common technique and not a novel invention, it’s probably present in the training set.

The “surely” reads like it’s referring to the presence of that information in the training set. But your response casts it as saying “surely the AI has not invented something on its own”.

The original question stands IMO, the burden of proof is on whoever is asserting that the AI has invented something on its own, with or without training data that surely already mentions this approach

So perhaps this is just semantics - when we say that “coders have been completely replaced”, to me that means all humans capable of reading/writing code are replaced. In the bridge analogy this is the Licensed Engineer who actually understands and can critically evaluate a system design/implementation in depth.

If the only point being made by “all coders are replaced” is that humans aren’t manually typing the code from their keyboard anymore, I don’t think there’s much interesting to argue there, typing the code was never the hard part.

Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when handling users’ sensitive information?

If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot read/write code (as “all coders have been replaced”), does Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users for systems its tools/models build? I assume not.

How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn’t want to drive on an “autonomously-generated bridge may contain errors. Use at own risk” because all human structural engineering experts have been replaced.

After asking this question many times in similar threads, I’ve received no substantial response except that “something” will probably resolve this, maybe AI will figure it out

In terms of demand, anecdotally-speaking I can certainly see this influencing some decisions when other circumstances permit. Many people I know are both excited for new and better games, and equally exited about running LLM/SD/etc models locally with Comfy, LM studio and the like

Jenkins not looking so bad anymore..

Hmm well I certainly inferred the same from their comment: it casts “big tech” as the victim of the government, because the latter forced as “overpriced and shitty solution”

It’s possible they’re not a capitalist and just extremely sympathetic to Apple and/or Google specifically, but that seems more of a stretch than what that commenter (to whom you’re replying) has inferred IMO

Every single place I’ve stayed in Europe had no shower door, and nothing to prevent the water from spilling out. Occasionally I get lucky and the floor is constructed sufficiently concave so at least the water flows into the drain

I love it! And yeah .NET Framework is still critical for some workloads, most notably C++/CLI and WCF for certain apps where deep win32 APIs make their net8.0+ alternatives too much of a headache :)

To temper my comment, the resistance I faced as the new guy brought in to modernize is natural for these engineers who knew their tools and systems well, in their defense. Eventually they warmed up from full pushback to friendly banter “Mr. Linux and command line over here” and accepted that running my little scripts helped address the confusion/frustration of Visual Studio disagreeing with Jenkins/GitHub Actions automations and runtime behavior in Kubernetes.

If they’re in a team similar to some I’ve worked with, engineers are barely getting comfortable with the shift away from .NET Framework (!)

There are legions of developers for whom Visual Studio on Windows is the only place they have ever been comfortable. And upgrading between versions of .NET is a point-click exercise between the various UIs (Visual Studio Installer, “Get New Components or Features”, and the NuGet package manager)

The advent of .NET Core happened to coincide with initiatives to adapt:

* toward the cloud and away from IIS and Windows Server

* toward Git and away from TFS

* toward remote CI/CD and away from “drag my files into inetpub”

* toward SPAs and away from ASP.NET XAML programming (Blazor notwithstanding)

* toward a broader toolkit where the familiarity with OSS and open specs is advantageous, and away from Visual Studio as the center of the universe (though it still arguably reigns supreme in its class of IDEs)

Coming from the Linux/Docker world before going deep in .NET, I was both resented and leaned on heavily for these teams’ transitions. Most of my teammates had never read the contents of their .csproj or .sln files, or run a build command from a terminal and read its log output. They were annoyed by my requests to do so when helping them troubleshoot; some just rejected the idea outright (“there’s no need to look at VS internals here”, “we shouldn’t need to run DOS commands in today’s world, VS should hable this!”)

I can definitely sympathize with developers who were sold on what seemed like a promise that deep VS/IIS/etc knowledge would be the rock-solid foundation for business software for the rest of their careers. During the uprooting process, other promises like “netstandard2.0 will be forever for your core libraries and all future .NET runtimes!” end up with asterisks the following year.

I am 100% in agreement that .NET dev team is doing an amazing job, but it’s precisely because of their continued shakeups when they see major opportunities to improve it from the ground up, and probably the same reason that others feel wary of it

Police that I’ve spoken to will readily confirm this. They consider profiling, not necessarily racial, an important part of patrolling. If they decide you look the part, they will find a way within several minutes/miles of watching.

As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.

It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.

You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake

Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.

Oh definitely, many headaches untangling massive “variables.tf” files where the value is identical in 100% of the target environments, and would be nonsensical to change without corresponding changes in the infra config resources/modules as well.

My favorite are things where security policy mandates something like private networking and RBAC, and certain resources only have meaning in those contexts, for heavens sake why are we making their basic args like “enforce_tls” or “assign_public_ip” or “enable_rbac” into variable params for the user to figure out

These are great and succinct, yours and your teammate’s.

I still find myself debating this internally, but one objective metric is how smoothly my longer PTOs go:

The only times I haven’t received a single emergency call were when I left teammates a a large and extremely specific set of shell scripts and/or executables that do exactly one thing. No configs, no args/opts (or ridiculously minimal), each named something like run-config-a-for-client-x-with-dataset-3.ps1 that took care of everything for one task I knew they’d need. Just double click this file when you get the new dataset, or clone/rename it and tweak line #8 if you need to run it for a new client, that kind of thing.

Looking inside the scripts/programs looks like the opposite of all of the DRY or any similar principles I’ve been taught (save for KISS and others similarly simplistic)

But the result speaks for itself. The further I go down that excessively basic path, the more people can get work done without me online, and I get to enjoy PTO. Anytime i make a slick flexible utility with pretty code and docs, I get the “any chance you could hop on?” text. Put the slick stuff in the core libraries and keep the executables dumb

For me, it would be because the term AGI gets bandied about a lot more frequently in discussions involving Gen AI, as if that path takes us any closer to AGI than other threads in the AI field have.

Great insight and advice I need to take - your description captures my current situation almost to a tee, better than I’ve been able to understand it for myself, so thank you.

In addition to what you described, in my case this engineer quickly recognizes other highly-effective and/or important people, and aggressively tries to build that reputation by privately messaging and even privately demoing work where the recipient has some stake in the outcome.

I would onboard him to a project, sharing all of my tools, key contacts and personal insights, e.g.

“our manager Smith is hinting that there is a big customer interested in X capability, which I’ve discussed with their power user Wilson and product owner Flores informally in recent demos. I think we could use Y approach and want to start prototyping if we get the go-ahead”

This engineer would start messaging Flores, Wilson and Smith privately and schedule calls about X excluding me and other core maintainers to push the thing forward, often proposing Y in his own words.

This strategy worked wonders for him in terms of upward movement. He is a diligent and extremely responsive to important people. But the strong engineers from whom he has effectively stolen credit, or even the opportunity to have a seat at the table in critical early discussions, obviously resent it.

His direct manager is lackadaisical and basically just gets bombarded by this engineer asking for frequent, long 1-1 calls where he shares “his” accomplishments and ideas. I’ve watched this play out in person (we are a remote-only team except for big project-related events) — his manager clearly trying to leave the event after it concluded, keys in hand and facing his car door, everyone else has said goodbye and given space, and this engineer keeps him there talking for no less than 10 more minutes.

I’ve never met someone so comically ambitious and overzealous to be seen as the MVP He was promoted in record time, much to the frustration of stronger and more critical maintainers.

I am baffled by the whole thing, and just laugh at this point. My most charitable interpretation of manager’s actions are that they do recognize the dynamic, and just don’t care because ultimately their job is slightly easier for the meantime. But if any 2+ of the critical core maintainers split in frustration, the whole thing will suffer, badly

ETA: it seems to me that remote-only teams are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing getting out of hand, because the capacity for secret communication is immensely greater

Yes

https://youtube.com/shorts/nNfDr18C6H4?si=CKalCaG0DMUP3rZZ

This and my original comment apparently struck a nerve for some people, but I’m just sharing what I observe from the links I’ve included. I’d love to see some actual response to the content of these videos given Kirk’s apparent change of heart on Israel (especially if I’m off-base) as opposed to just downvotes with substance-free responses

Even Charlie Kirk, of all people, was talking about this (ignore the clickbait video title): https://youtu.be/3wUq3t9f6ug?si=nV_NukcsjHZgj0MT