grayhatter

> Conspiracy? If that's a conspiracy then virtually any protest that involves any planning whatsoever could also be twisted into a conspiracy.

Yes, that's what a conspiracy is. In other news, the sky is blue.

Conspiracy, to conspire.

Conspire, to make plans, usually in secret.

The reason conspiracy is a more serious crime is because it's worse; it's one thing to go to a protest with a bunch of friends, and then decide in the heat of the moment, when everyone's emotions are raging, I don't wanna leave yet. It's completely different crime to decide before the protest starts, in a secret group with a bunch a friends. There's nothing they can do to make you leave. And when the cops show up, and when they say you have to leave you're gonna throw a frozen water bottle at them.

In this case, they planned to actively stop someone from receiving the medical care. Do you feel that's reasonable? Should I get to decide what medical care I think you should have? Only on days I'm free to go out and protest, obviously.

Somewhat related, after reading florkbork's post, I'm excited to hear your reply about if you think crushing someone's hand in the door counts as protesting?

I feel like you completely missed the point of the rhetorical question.

a pet peeve of mine, (along with people brigading on issues/threads e.g. posting them to unrelated news sites... op....) is woefully incorrect language.

> at day 66 all our jobs started randomly failing

if there's a definable pattern, you can call it unpredictabily, but you can't call it randomly.

You don't think those same things traumatize the dog too? There's a reason why all reputable dog trainers advocate exclusively positive training methods. It's because training with exclusively positive feedback is not only most likely to get the behavior you want. It critically avoids destabilizing the dog. Negative reinforcement learning does works, but it also leads to anxiety, and "reactionary outbursts". i.e. the dog learns to become afraid, and is more likely to bite you. Only abused dogs bite their pack in fear. Just like only abused humans attack their community.

> Power is concentrated; checks and balances are minimal or nonexistent.

Is power concentrated? What power do maintainer of FOSS projects have over people who would like to use that project? How can they compel people to do what they want as it relates to the project?

> It's a drive-by response to shut-down a complaint in a way that treats the complain as illegitimate, suggesting that person is wrong for wanting something different from what's on offer.

It can't possibly be suggesting that the person is wrong for wanting something different. The "drive by", "fork it" comment is saying. If you want something different, then make the different thing exist, no one will be able to stop you from making the thing that you want.

Unless you feel that the different thing is the person who is complaining, is entitled to having other people do what the complainer wants, instead of what the maintainer wants?

On the internet; if you wanted to suggest that someone's complaints or suggestions are illegitimate, you wouldn't say "fork it" you would say, "no, that's stupid, you're stupid, how could you suggest such a dumb, stupid, crazy, insane thing?!" surely followed by a series of extra expletives, or angry rage posts.

Or the just fork it comment is from a maintainer. Who has decided that they do not want the suggested changes. In which case, it's still not saying the changes are illegitimate, it's saying that the maintainer objects to them; so they're offering the only remaining solution for the complainer to get the changes they want.

If the author fundamentally misunderstands the social and technical implications around the topic. Then yes, it's good that all the comments are correcting the misunderstandings of the post.

The blog post makes a lot of arguments, that sound like they might be good. Only until you try to apply them to reality, when they fail. So yes, it's a good thing that examples that would encourage the debate to shift from critiques of the faulty arguments, to heated exchanges over internet drama requiring popcorn.

> Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation?

American culture is unfortunately permeated with examples, and habits, and expectations around punishing the behaviors you'd want to see. I see subtle things like that all the time. So while I doubt anyone who stopped to actually think about the concrete implications of their behavior, more specifically their unconscious habits; wouldn't be able to describe how insulting people, or really, how discouraging people is likely to have a negative outcome. The catch being, most people don't stop to consider anything. Thoes who do, are exceptionally rare.

As an example, someone posted a comment providing context, and encouraging people to be curious and grow their skill set with techniques that will help them with dogs, (and yes, these do translate to humans as well.)

Which invited a negative comment from you attacking people who aren't perfect every single moment of every single day, who might benefit from a reminder that how they treat others matters. Also indirectly attacking the person you replied to.

(See what I mean about the culture of punishing the behavior, you want to see? Or did you intend to discourage curiosity?)

> Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog. Just because humans are also, in addition to those able to do a lot more, and learn in an astronomically larger set of ways, doesn't exclude the techniques that work best with dogs. You forget this at your own peril. I.e. if the way you behave wouldn't encourage the behavior you want from a dog well, it sure as hell wont encourage the behavior from a human. All humans, including you, are not that special, get over yourself. rhetorically speaking

They don't. I don't know what they're talking about, but I've had fewer problems with linux on my framework than weird stuff on my OSX work machine. And I'm running Alpine on my framework, so if anything should be wonky it's this one.

Mine already is... it's so nice not to be disrespected every time I turn on my laptop.

I recommend it.

> Nice. But it deters people like me who aren't totally confident in sending reports, trading false positives for false negatives

There's no such thing as a reasonable "false positive" on a security report. There is such a thing as a false positive on a bug report. (A real bug, that happens to have no security impact, is still a true positive, just without a security risk)

If you can make it crash, or behave incorrectly, or have some repeatable, weird behavior; but you have no idea how you could exploit that for an articulable advantage, or access to the system you shouldn't have. What you have is a bug, not a security issue. You can, and should submit a bug report.

Then, critically; "if you waste our time" seems to be an important part of the statement.

If you don't know, you suspect it's a security bug because you shouldn't be able to do this, and it is leaking information that you think is suspicious, and you can easily demonstrate that you can make it happen on demand. And you report that bug, and make it easy for them to understand and either confirm the security, or reject because [reason]. You haven't wasted anyone's time and this wouldn't apply to your bug.

Kagi uses Brave search index? huh, TIL... that's very disappointing. And it's the kinda thing that would prevent me from ever paying for Kagi. Brave's crawler, is agressive, dumb (it doesn't appear to back off if it hits a number of 503s), and critically, it ignores robots.txt. They even admit they choose to ignore it. To top that off their crawler doesn't identify itself, instead masquerading as a real browser. I've had to ban the entire Hetzner ASN from my site to get them to stop.

On one hand, I really want Kagi to succeed. They very often, do seem to care about the parts of the world and internet that I care about. But on the other... to me, willingly associating, and financing a company that willingly brags about ignoring consent, is a non-starter for me.

> We are paid to solve business problems and make money.

> People who enjoy writing code can still do so, just not on a business context if there's a more optimal way

Do you mean optimal, or expedient?

I hate working with people who's ideas of solving problems is punting it down the road for the next person to deal with. While I do see people do this kinda thing often, I refuse to be someone who claims credit for "fixing" some problem knowing I'm only creating a worse, or different problem for the next guy. If you're working on problems that require collaboration, creating more problems for the next guy is unlikely to give you an optimal output; because soon no one will willingly work with you. It's possible to fix business problems, and maintain your ethics, it's just feels easier to abandon them.

You haven't provided a sample either... But sure, lets dig in.

> Antirez

When I first read his recent article, I found the whole article, uncompelling. https://antirez.com/news/158 (don't buy into the anti-AI hype) But gave it a 2nd chance; and re-read it. I'm gonna have to resist going line by line, because I find some of it outright objectionable.

> Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career.

Setting aside the rhetorical/argumentative deficiencies, and the fact this is just FUD because (he next suggests if you disagree, just keep trying it every few months? which suggests to me even he knows it's BS). He writes that in the context of the ethical or moral objections he raises. So he's suggesting that the best way to advance in your career, is to ignoring the social and ethical concerns and just get on board?

Gross.

Individual careers aside, I'm not impressed by the correctness of the code emitted, by AI and committed by most AI users. I'm unconvinced that AI will improve the industry, and it's reputation as a whole.

But the topic is supposed to be specific examples of code, so lets do that. He mentions adding utf-8 to his toy terminal input project -> https://github.com/antirez/linenoise/commit/c12b66d25508bd70... It's a very useful feature to add, without a doubt! His library is better than it was before. But parsing utf-8, while something that's very easy to implement without care, or incompletely, i.e. something that's very easy to trip over if you're careless. The implementation specifics of it are fairly described as a solved problem. It's been done so many times, if you're willing to re-implement from another existing source, It wouldn't take very long to do this without AI. (And if you're not, why are you using AI? I'm ethically opposed to the laundered provenience of source material) Then, it absolutely would take more time to verify that the code is correct if you did it by hand. The thing everyone keeps telling me I have to ensure that the AI hasn't made a mistake, so either I trust the vibes, or I'm still spending that time. Even Simon Willison agrees with me[1].

> Simon Willison

Is another suggested, so he's perfect to go next. I normally would exclude someone who's clearly best know as an AI influencer, but he's without a doubt an engineer too to fair game. Especially given he's answered a similar question just recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192 I've been searching for a counter point to my personal anti-AI hype, so was eager to see what the experts are making.... it's all boilerplate. I don't mean to say there's nothing valuable or that there's nothing useful there. Only that the vast majority of the code in these repos, is boilerplate that has no use out of context. The real value is just a few lines of code, something that I believe would only take 30m if you wrote the code without AI for the project you were already working on. It'd take a few hours to make any of this myself (assuming I'm even good enough to figure it out).

And I do admit, 10m on BART vs 3-4hours on a weekend is a very significant time delta. But also, I like writing code. So what was I really gonna do with that time? Make share holder value go up no doubt!

> Linus Torvalds

I can't find a single source where he's an advocate for AI. I've seen the commit, and while some of the github comments are gold. I wasn't able to draw any meaningful conclusions from the commit in isolation. Especially not when the last I read about it, he used it because he doesn't write python code. So I don't know what conclusions there are I can pull from this commit, other than AI can emit code. I knew that.

I don't have enough context to comment on the opinions of Steve Yegge or his AI generated output. I simply don't know enough, and after a quick search nothing other than AI influencer jumped out at me.

Then I try to care about who I give my time and attention to, or who I associate with so this is the end of list.

I contrast these, examples with all the hype that's proven over and over to be a miscommunication if I'm being charitable, or an outright lie if I'm not. I also think it's important to consider the incentives leading to these "miscommunications" when evaluating how much good faith you assign them.

On top of that, there's the countless examples of AI confidently lying to me about something. Explaining my fundamental concrete objection to being lied to; would take another hour I shouldn't spend on a HN comment.

What specific examples of impressive things/projects/commits/code am I missing? What output, makes all the downsides of AI a worthwhile trade off?

> In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up

I remember reading something that when tested, they're not actually faster. Any source on this other than vibes?

[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

> Cards on the table: this stuff saps the joy from something I loved doing, and turns me into a manager of robots.

Pick two non-trivial tasks where you feel you can make a half-reasonable estimate on the time it should take, then time yourself. I'd be willing to bet that you don't complete it significantly faster with AI. And if you're not faster using AI, maybe ignore it like I and many others. If you enjoy writing code, keep writing code, and ignore the people lying because they need to spread FUD so they can sell something.

> But I don't get to put this genie back in the bottle.

Sounds like you've already bought into the meme that AI is actually magical, and can do everything the hype train says. I'm unconvinced. Just because there's smoke coming from the bottle doesn't mean it's a genie. What's more likely, magic is real? Or someone's lying to sell something?

> My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping.

Are you mad at them for playing the game, or mad that that's the game they have to play to advance at their company?

> Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons.

I don't know; I guess I hold people who post on twitter so they can self-promo, or who have attention because they work at $company, to a slightly different standard than I would hold a journalist writing a news article?

People make mistakes, it's not that deep. The correct incentive to encourage is admitting, and understand and forgiving when necessary because you don't want to encourage people to hide mistakes out of shame. That only makes things worse.

Especially considering forgetting the delta between yours and someone else's shared context is extremely common. And the least egregious mistake you can make when writing an untargeted promo post.

Best I can do is t'ree fiddy.

I can definitely be bought for much much less. But only because I'm pretty sure I could rave about some AI platform while still being honest about it. Why do you draw such a hard ethical line? I agree with your sentiment, AI is currently a net negative on the world that I care about. But I also believe people when they say it helps them. Despite their inability to articulate anything useful to me, or that I can understand.

> Having the ability to start OpenCode, give it an issue, add a little extra context, and have the issue completed without writing a single line of code?

Is this a good thing? I'm asking why you said it like this, I'm not asking you to defend anything. I'm genuinely curious about your rational/reasoning/context for why you used those words specifically?

I ask, because I wouldn't willingly phrase it like this. I enjoy writing code. The expression of the idea, while not even close to value I assign to fixing the thing, still has meaning.

e.g. I would happily share code my friend wrote that fixed something. But I wouldn't take and pride in it. Is that difference irrelevant to you, or do you still feel that sense of significance when an LLM emits the code for you?

> should still acknowledge that this is a massive leap in capabilities and our field is changed forever.

Equally, I don't think I have to agree with this. Our field is likely changed, arguably for the worse if the default IDE now requires a monthly rent payment. But I have only found examples of AI generating boiler plate. If it's not able to copy the code from some other existing source, it's unable to emit anything functional. I wouldn't agree that's a massive leap. Boilerplate has always been the least significant portion of code, no?

Why do you say it's the fastest and most accurate? I don't see any raw stats, just AI generated readmes.

you also don't compare it to the top result on Google https://github.com/Stranger6667/jsonschema was that intentional?

I'm not looking for a fancy webpage. I'm not looking for revolutionary output. I'm looking for at it's most basic level commits, that are, without a doubt meaningful. I'm looking for someone to say; "look at this" I claim that I couldn't have done this is the same amount of time without AI, it would have been harder without, and I'm proud of this.

Someone to claim, honestly. They've created something they take pride in, something they feel to them, is impressive. That they couldn't have done without AI.

And then for it to appear to anyone that looks, that the thing they're proud of is obviously, and meaningfully significant such that it' couldn't be considered by anyone half reasonable to be boilerplate. And then, ideally but not required; for me to not feel embarrassed by proxy for them, when they claim they're proud of the AI supported output.

Surely, if it's as helpful, and as revolutionary as the current fervor claims. Someone, or anyone, should be willing to say. Look at this commit. Look at this project, look at this repo. I'm proud of it, and I want everyone to know I'm proud of it. And I wouldn't have been able to to it with out the support of an LLM? At least someone would have created something, they wish to release into the open source world. And claim they take pride in it?

The answer is in the name of the law, copyright, the right to produce a copy. The original, ethical intent behind the law was to encourage people to create things. Someone could invest time and money into creating some art that had value, and then they were given the exclusive right to monetize it for some amount of time. You could create something, and I'm not allowed to copy what you created, and sell it without your permission, preventing me from doing no work but capturing all the money you could reasonably make off your work.

Want to create a song? You're the only person allowed to make, or authorize people to duplicate it. You're the only person allowed to control the supply of your effort. Eventually, the public good, and interest was supposed to take over, because in the end, you're right, it's just information. It was supposed to enter "the public domain" where anyone could freely use it. But then Disney got involved, and now it's a toxified weapon used mostly by unethical lawyers against curiosity.

No, it's also not illegal to train your brain. If you break into a store, and read all the books, you'll get arrested for breaking and entering. Not for reading the books. My (superficial) take on the argument is that they're hoping by saying "it's not illegal to read" no one will notice, and no one will ask how they got into the book store to begin with.

> Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF [...] concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible [...] notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

I agree with jkaplowitz, but for a different reason I still believe that your description feels a bit misleading to me. The FSF commissioned paper makes the argument that Microsoft's use of code FROM GITHUB, FOR COPILOT is likely non-infringing, because of the additional github ToS. This feels like critical context to provide given in the very next statement, you widened it to LLMs generally, and the FSF which likely cares about code, not on github as well.

All of that said, I'm not sure it matters, because while I don't find the argument from the that whitepaper very compelling, because it's based critically on additional grants in the ToS. IIRC (going only from memory) the ToS requires that you grant github a license as it's needed to provide the service. Github can provide the services the user reasonably understood github to provide, without violating the additional clauses specified in the existing FOSS license covering the code. That being from a while ago, and I'd say it's very murky now, because everyone knows Microsoft provides copilot, so "obviously" they need it.

Unfortunately, and importantly, when dealing with copyrights, the paper also covers the transformative fair use arguments in depth. And I do find those following arguments very compelling. The paper, (and likely others) are making the argument that the code output from an LLM is likely transformative. And thus can't be infringing compelling, (or is unlikely to be). I think in many cases, the output is clearly transformative in nature.

I've also seen code generated by claude (likely others as well?) to copy large sections from existing works. Where it's clearly "copy/paste" which clearly can't be fair use, nor transformative. The output clearly copies the soul of the work. Thus given I have no idea what dataset they're copying this code from, it's scary enough to make me unwilling to take the chance on any of it.

I believe LLM, (specifically code gen) has produced nothing of substance. I'm looking for evidence to disprove that assumption. You're welcome to share nothing, but when you brag about how it's fantastical, it's reasonable to ask. And then no one can never prove it... I can only hear that as; I could if I want to, I just don't want to.

If you don't want field questions about it, don't brag about it?

Equally, to your condemnation: the problem with AI enjoyers is they claim it's nearly perfect, and it can do everything, and it makes them so much faster. But every example is barely more than boilerplate, or it's a sham.

> It is not hard to win this game. If you spent a whole day playing it, shame on you. But what if you did not know that you are playing a game? I dug up this toy when I saw people talking about generating 'random' numbers for cryptography by mashing keys or shouting into microphones. It is meant to educate you regarding the folly of such methods.

I wouldn't trust a human to generate enough entropy for any kind of key material. But I'd happily feed their output, and more importantly, the metadata around said output (like the ns delay between key presses) into the seed of a CSPRNG, (much more importantly, along with plenty of other sources of entropy).

The primary characteristic of a CSPRNG, is the inability to predict the next output, from the previous output. Once you get sufficient entropy to seed a CSPRNG, nothing you (correctly) mix into the state, can decrease it's security.

There is no folly in using human interactions to help seed a random number generator. Assuming you dont use the characters they type as the only seed input.

Have you done anything interesting with this army that you can share and you're proud of? Specifically something concrete you can link to, not just something you can imagine or describe?

> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).

I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?

Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?

> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.

I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?

I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?

Most people, who adopt a different married name, don't do so because they consider their former name to be offensive or insulting.

If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.

> If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.

I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.

E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.

Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.

If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.

Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.

To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.

I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.

In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.