fzeroracer

I think if the ethos of hackernews has become supporting the MIC because they create nerd shit or to be contrarian then this site has long since lost the way.

I came here to say the same thing. ModRetro is like if Palantir decided to start selling board games. The company is poison by association and Palmer Luckey certainly doesn't hide it (the drone part, for example).

Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient.

It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.

I've colloquially coined this as the contentification of everything. The goal isn't to actually engage with something, whether it's the writing style, flavor, or artwork on display. It's purely about consumption, and the most optimal way of consuming something is distilling it down into a short, bland summary.

It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.

There's been multiple 'unslop' contests [1] with a focus on AI 'writing' and I agree with the OP that AI writing makes me want to vomit. It's all hollow, bland writing that has zero zest to it.

[1] https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results

> Gamedev is a good example of where AI shines, since the risks of fucking things up are not so big

Hi, professional game dev here. No it's not. Thank you for reading.

AI IS the system; the speed with which the rich and wealthy have embedded it into every aspect of our lives and the way it has been trained off the stolen work of millions without care is only possible because it is directly entwined.

You couldn't just characterize them that way, they are using literally the exact same setup that Enron did in order to hide the massive amount of debt and liabilities they had that eventually sunk the company. People jumping in to defend this as being totally legit or not-fraud seem quite insane to me: companies should not be trying to hide these things to pump up their stock prices or to entice investors that otherwise might not see it.

Their own users voted for this.

Seems fine to me. It was decided by a community vote; it's their site and their rules. The people complaining about those damn ideologicsts or whatever seem to be missing the point in that they are equally as ideological just in a different direction.

We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.

> how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea

Why don't you just use whatever LLM you have on hand to summarize every book you could read instead of reading it? The idea that ai slop is 'better' because you can distill the idea is an insane point to me because it treats books as a pure consumption-based concept, where the goal is strictly to finish a book and move on.

I think even the worst book is more valuable than whatever garbage an LLM writes because you can at least learn from the intent. Where and why the author failed, where they got stuck, the points they failed to make. LLM writing is a void, there's nothing to be learned.

> I’d say that, in all the ways that matter, I understand the code. Sure, if I had to hand-edit it now, there’d be a serious learning curve. But I won't have to. And more importantly, I can reason about the system, share perspectives with my colleagues, and guide agents on future work.

If there's a serious learning curve to editing code then you don't understand the code. We used to call that 'on-boarding' when you brought a new engineer on the team as they got up to speed as to how the codebase worked.

I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.

I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.

I don't think this is surprising at all. I'm pretty sure I've saved my employers similar amounts in the past, because what happens is something gets configured months or years ago, the dev leaves, everyone forgets and assumes things are how they are.

I've had to delete some really silly code that would slow things down or just force waits as a result of either dealing with legacy APIs or some other arcane reason. Not without testing or making sure it wasn't there for a reason mind you, but these inefficiencies can sometimes be hidden big problems.

There are some incredibly strange equivalences going on in here that make me think the person in question is indeed quite out of date.

The people pushing for the destruction of privacy and attested software integrity ARE the tech bros. I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity. They're building up their moat in real time because not only does it let them kill that pesky FOSS, but also it means they can legally gather even more data from individuals in question.

It also goes hand-in-hand with the increasingly authoritarian bent a lot of those same people have taken and these resources will absolutely be used to crack down on minorities and things they don't like.

I think your head would have to be firmly planted deep underground to somehow not connect the two dots. As another poster here said, they're literally lobbying for these age verification laws because it benefits them.

I'm sitting at about a decade of experience and it feels equally bad here. Honestly right now I'm mostly waiting for either AI to blow up and companies to scale back massively or for other engineers to deskill themselves into oblivion so that skilled engineers get the edge again.

If neither gambit pay out then I'll just go find some other career and keep software as my hobby. I'm not going to let this billion dollar industry ruin the thing I enjoy.

> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

I see few people actively engaging with the thesis of the article so lemme restate it in another way:

We can agree that the invention of the car revolutionized transit, but when you optimize around cars it creates perverse incentives that warp society. American society for example is rife with these issues: Cities and towns that are fundamentally unwalkable, cars that are increasingly large and hazards to public safety and lower and lower expectations for drivers.

In that sense the AI craze is exactly the same. Even if you believe that AI will or has revolutionized coding (a take I firmly disagree with), the resulting craze is creating perverse incentives that are warping tech. Access to computing is becoming narrower and narrower as prices sky rocket, applications are becoming more unstable and unsecure by the day and more and more of our economy is reliant on AI gains that will likely not be realized. Not all tools reshape society for the better, much like how advertising was a tool for attempting to gain eyes on your product now it has become a dystopian weapon to sell your users as the product.

This is without getting into the actual issues AI has directly, just the way it's warping things around it.

The article really sums it up perfectly. It's incredibly see to see topical reasons why people fucking hate everything tech touches. You can't buy a TV without it being an embedded advertising device that forces you to see ads every time you turn it on. You can't buy a car without needing a touchscreen that if it breaks you're SOL. People who actually like computers increasingly can't even afford to buy one

If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.

Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...

I've found this to be more consistently the case than not. People almost never post their project and in the rare cases that they do, it's usually some shambling mess that doesn't actually function. They put together a keyword soup post that sounds good on an AI generated resume but falls apart upon investigation.

'humans trained to talk like an AI' is just LinkedIn and I would hope that the last thing anyone wants is for HN to become the utter void that is LinkedIn posts.

I can't say I agree, I think it's more about the death's you're exposed to. Doctors get to experience the full brunt of how the medical system treats patients, the good and the bad. So they opt out of it when it's close to their time so they can die a peaceful death.

But a peaceful death at home is rarely real in my opinion. My father was pretty badly traumatized by his mother who had oral cancer, got a bit through treatment and then refused to continue. His last days with her were spent as she slowly starved and went through terminal dehydration, barely conscious through the drugs hospice used to try and make the passage easier. It's something we tell ourselves post-hoc to try and make ourselves feel better because they died at home with family.

This doesn't mean dying in a hospital is much easier and often family keeps people in a state of semi-torture so that they can have more time. But that I think sometimes we have this 'ideal' of how we want to die, and the reality will always be much messier than that.

I don't agree with the critical comment at all, particularly because the OP is incredibly guilty of making drive-by comments in their very recent post history that don't actually add anything to the conversation. People will complain about the site 'becoming reddit' while making inane posts that are clearly against the rules or don't actually bring anything to the conversation. People don't practice what they clearly preach.

In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.

It's really quite sad to see people think this is a 'great' idea in a world where the US literacy rates are falling rapidly and people graduate out of highschool barely able to function. Slashing both the bottom and top end of education aid isn't going to suddenly make things financially viable or improve education; it's just going to further narrow education and turn college into Highschool 2 which it slowly is already becoming.

If you wanted to tackle the problems of education you'd start by improving our failing highschools and then ensuring higher education is free and easily accessible so that the earnings gulf isn't as wide.

Then this falls into the exact same pit the OP mentioned, either you need to blindly trust that the LLM is generating tests that actually work, or you need extensive test coverage for your tests to ensure that your tests are actually testing.

Blog on site by company pushing AI adoption and AI finance products advocates that AI does not hurt hiring and that you should keep integrating it. In other news, forks frequently found in kitchen and other surprising facts.

Speaking from my side of the industry (the gaming industry), we are seeing a massive increase in the number of games people are making. Above the growth that was already there.

The distinction is that the games being made are garbage, and I mean worse than shovelware garbage. It's actively made things much harder as someone that fancies himself an indie game curator because you gotta dig through more and more games to find stuff with actual people behind it.

> I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself

In many respects this reflects the growing K-shaped nature of our economy. Average consumers don't matter because you really just need a small cohort of wealthy individuals to be hyper-invested in your product, 'regular' consumption is therefore just a way to keep things relatively on rails rather than the actual economic driver.

All of these AI-first companies don't actually have any market fit, so what they're doing is selling an imaginary product so that they can get investments and loans. As you said the company is the product.

> Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy.

As someone that actually lives in Seattle, this is so funny to read. It comes across as someone that pretends to live in Seattle and there sure are a lot of people that love to pretend they live here.

Seattle has far more energy than Austin does for example and it doesn't really take much digging to get involved in the various scenes we have here. The food scene here does suck though, that's universally true.