gregjor

If blockchain has such potential why hasn't that turned into useful implementations or products? Surely enough time has passed to work out the details.

I think you also overestimate the effects of AI. Did writing or public education make humans "smarter?"

Equating having a job with intelligence seems quite a stretch.

The perks of big corporate campuses make some sense at scale, to get employees to leave home and work 12 hour days. As a former Silcon Valley worker at a nice campus I know how that works. Many companies have cut back on the perks now that they have a workforce afraid of AI and layoffs. Now they can just order return to office without the goodies.

Good luck with the idea. I suspect the WeWork of the future will look more like a bland overpriced Regus office than a Google campus, but who knows.

If a company has enough people in an area to economically fill up a WeWork-type space every day, the company should open an office for their employees to work from.

I have worked remote for a long time and I know I would push back on my employer trying to get me to pay for their RTO or traditional team-based 9-5ers.

Do you have actual examples other than companies enabling speculation or worse when they can safely take a cut? PayPal "adopted" crypto (and by extension blockchain) in the sense they will let me buy and sell for a fee. I see that as analogous to a grocery store selling cigarettes -- they haven't "adopted" or endorsed tobacco, they just sell it because they can make money.

- Poor transportation infrastructure and long travel distances outside of dense cities. Given the choice of driving 30+ minutes to a remote work center or staying home most people will probably choose to stay home and invest in a home office.

- Poor internet infrastructure outside of urban areas. US suburban/rural fiber and 5G deployment lags behind even poor countries such as Thailand and Vietnam.

- Cost. Remote work centers, aka co-working spaces, must make money. As WeWork demonstrated, without engaging in fraud and speculation making money with such facilities proves difficult. Most co-working spaces rely on memberships, similar to gyms, probably a hard sell unless people can easily walk or take mass transit in under 30 minutes. Coffee shops and cafes fill the gap since they have another source of revenue. Starbucks have turned into the def facto remote work centers in the USA.

I don't use AI tools in my own work (programming and system admin). I won't work for Meta, Palantir, Microsoft, and some others because I have to take a moral stand somewhere.

If a customer wants to use AI or sell AI (whatever that means), I will work with them. But I won't use AI to get the work done, not out of any moral qualm but because I think of AI-generated code as junk and a waste of my time.

At this point I can make more money fixing AI-generated vibe coded crap than I could coaxing Claude to write it. End-user programming creates more opportunity for senior programmers, but will deprive the industry of talented juniors. Short-term thinking will hurt businesses in a few years, but no one counting their stock options today cares about a talent shortage a decade away.

I looked at the sites linked from the article. Nice work. Even so I think hand-crafted front-end work turned into a commodity some time ago, and now the onslaught of AI slop will kill it off. Those of us in the business of web sites and apps can appreciate mastery of HTML and CSS and Javascript, beautiful designs and user-oriented interfaces. Sadly most business owners don't care that much and lack the perspective to tell good work from bad. Most users don't care either. My evidence: 90% of public web sites. No one thinks WordPress got the market share it has because of technical excellence or how it enables beautiful designs and UI. Before LLMs could crank out web sites we had an army of amateur designers and business owners doing it with WordPressl, paying $10/hr or less on Upwork and Fiverr.

The original tweet places the blame on the wrong person. As a manager or boss, if you put your company in this position in the first place you bear responsibility for the risk. If you discover an employee has this kind of leverage you have not done your job.

Many managers don't consider this kind of risk until they have to react to losing a key employee. Many more managers don't know enough about what their direct reports do, or how the organization works. They have never felt the responsibility or had the leverage that a key employee does.

I once worked as a contractor for a company that ended up with me running all of their IT infrastructure and maintaining their software (SAAS company, so their only product). I repeatedly told them they should hire a f/t person so they didn't depend solely on me, but they didn't want to spend the money or do the work, for years. One day the owner reviewed my retainer and asked me "What exactly do we pay you for?" I told him "You pay me not to quit." He didn't like hearing that but even then didn't do anything about the problem.

Studies I've seen thrown around come from companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic, all of which have deep vested interests in pushing the AI productivity narrative, so I hesitate to trust them. Digging in, their data seems either anecdotal or based on the kinds of mostly-useless metrics you listed above.

We won't know for years, maybe decades, whether AI tools benefit or hinder software development. Probably some combination. I think the most serious follow-on effect of AI in software development will come from the short-sighted decision to hire fewer junior programmers, which will lead to a shortage of experienced senior programmers. Executives and investors won't feel that pain for a while, they can cash in their shares and options today. Supply and demand will raise salaries for senior programmers, and the shortage will impose delays and opportunity costs. Those costs may outweigh whatever short-term and I think superficial gains AI tools may offer now.

https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...

A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.

Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."

We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.

We already have this problem with the population at large, only a tiny minority of whom got homeschooled.

Right here on HN you can read daily accounts of severe introversion and social anxiety. You can see that out in public, at work, among friends and family. Many Americans, children and adults, take medications (licit and otherwise) to cope with anxiety and things like ADHD. Many Americans self-diagnose as "on the spectrum" and "introverted."

Do you have any evidence to support the idea that homeschooled children suffer more from these common afflictions?

I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.

Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.

"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.

When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.

Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.

In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.

The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.

Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.

Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.

Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.

Every country has different laws around crypto, including partial and full bans, so nomads using crypto should know about that depending on where they work from. Certainly "spend from balance" and converting to local currency will vary a lot across countries, likely always more trouble than converting USD.

I freelanced and traveled full time for over a decade. Never experienced any problems with payments or US banks, or simply using US credit/debit/ATM cards. I never asked customers to pay in crypto, but I know freelancers who insisted on that and lost customers as a result. Freelancers generally don't have leverage to tell their customers how to manage payables, and crypto smells too much like risk and fraud to more than enough business people already. Introducing friction, novelty, or anything that looks sketchy into a freelancing relationship seems like a bad idea to me.

Edit: Two of the largest freelancer marketplaces, Upwork and Fiverr, do not accept or pay out in crypto.

Experts including Codd recognized the problems with SQL since that language got traction. Some alternatives got proposed, perhaps most notably Tutorial D by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen. No SQL replacement goes anywhere because of the vast quantity of SQL code and supporting tools dating back decades. Chris Date wrote the textbook on databases, and at least one book going through the problems with SQL and various implementations of the relational model.

SQL perfectly illustrates what Strostrup meant by "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." In some sense I would welcome a better query language. On the other hand I attribute decades of job security and steady income to knowing SQL and dealing with its problems.

Two relevant numbers that frequently get conflated: Number of children per woman, and number of children per mother.

Family size (children per mother) relatively constant in developed countries for decades. If you account for much higher (50% or so) child mortality in pre-industrial times family size has declined over time but only a little.

Number of women having children, often called fertility rate, has declined dramatically in most of the world in the last 50 to 70 years because fewer women have any children at all.

Declines in either measure mean fewer children, but those declines likely have very different causes. People don't find partners to marry and have children with, for reasons that vary across cultures, but economic pressure looks like a major cause.

As one of the "old school vim users" I don't try to make vim into an IDE. I don't need a file browser at all. I use buffers and a fuzzy finder to open files. When I need to see directories and files, create directories, rename or move files, I use the shell. I can either use :term to open a terminal window inside vim, or ctrl-Z to get a shell. Or I will have a shell in another tmux window I can quickly switch to.

When programmers accustomed to VS Code or some other IDE watch me work with vim they usually notice that I don't have a project file tree or browser pane. When I tell them I don't need those they often can't believe it -- they think of the file list as something core to their coding workflow. When I use VSCode I hide the file tree and never look at it except to create a directory or file, and of course I can do that with less clicking and scrolling from the terminal window.

At times, especially when I lived in Portland, I would wish people understood that not everyone likes dogs.

Multiple studies show that something like 90% of spreadsheets contain logic errors. That might come from the UI and the tool, but in my experience it mainly comes from the users. Most people can't write out their business requirements on paper consistently and completely. We have known for decades that gathering and thinking through requirements describes the hard part of programming, not writing the code.

Where do no-code builders get stuck the most? At the very beginning, trying to describe their problem in plain English. They aren't thinking in terms of if/then conditions or organizing their data in a way to get good results from the tool.

A long time ago SQL got promoted as a way for non-coders and managers to query databases without needing programmers. Look how that worked out.

I have worked in software development since the mid-1970s. I have see more fads and hype than I can list. I have seen advances in tech that have obvious and immediate value -- the internet, relational databases, personal computers, cloud computing. And I have seen plenty of other things that looked cool and got a lot of buzz but didn't work out (the dot-com bust, for example, or the numerous claims of "end user programming" aka no-code/low-code and now vibe-code). I try not to get too cynical but the hype around AI, with the blatant inflating of stock prices and crazy levels of infrastructure investment just looks too much like a scheme to fleece credulous and hopeful investors.

One thing about working in tech that can turn out good or bad: we programmers frequently report to and get paid by people who not only can't do our jobs, they can't even begin to understand it. Our work looks like magic, or 10X intelligence. I get that from my parents every time I fix their router or get their PC to work again. Every once in a while the hucksters and parasites who see the tech industry as a gold mine get to cash in from investors and CEOs who don't understand the technology, and just gamble. Elon Musk's companies demonstrate how far someone can lie and make crazy promises for profit. I think the AI bubble will cost a lot more, and deliver a lot less.

I tell myself I'll know AGI when I see it. I expect it might creep up on us rather than emerge fully-formed one day, if it happens at all. I like to keep an open mind about the possibility, but although I don't believe in souls or the supernatural I do think human intelligence and consciousness come from more than brain matter. I don't think human brains work like computers, even if we call some arrangement of tokens a "neural network." I think people can easily fall prey to scammers, and can delude themselves.

Machines that can give a good imitation of humans might prove useful -- already have in some limited domains. I expect those domains to expand, just as automation has in the past. Some days I feel relieved that I likely won't live long enough to see AGI, and on other days I just want to stop hearing about it.

> Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks

We don't have consistent metrics for what we might mean by "human-level intelligence" or "cognitive tasks." We have some tests and benchmarks, with obvious flaws. For example LLMs can already perform well on SAT tests and legal bar exams because those get included in their training data. A category error, in other words.

I'll give a real-world example from my experience. My wife had to pass a US citizenship test, described by USCIS: "The USCIS officer will ask you up to 10 questions from the list of 100 civics test questions. You must answer 6 questions correctly to pass the civics test." USCIS and others helpfully publishes the 100 questions and answers, so like so many candidates for US citizenship my wife memorized all of them (and passed). She mimicked an LLM. Of course she has a very different understanding of US history and civics than I do, because I grew up in America and attended and got socially programmed in public schools. My wife can perform better than a typical native-born American on that test, but has little to no real understanding of the material. Optimizing for the test -- Goodhart's Law illustrated -- seems more like what LLMs do, and it looks like cognitive ability because it succeeds at the metrics.

In my last comment I claimed you make a category error by applying words such as intelligence, mirroring, bonding, evolution, objectives to LLMs (or AI if you prefer). While those words have vague or flexible meanings when applied to animals or humans, they don't apply at all to computer hardware or software. We use words like "intelligence" and "objectives" when talking about computer programs as analogies and conveniences, and then quickly fool ourselves into equivalency.

The concept of AI "alignment," derived from the paper clip maximizer and seen in 2001 and The Terminator movies, seems hard to take seriously. It comes from sci-fi and paranoia about humans making machines they can't control (a trope as old as the Industrial Revolution). In many ways we already live in a world where machines and software operate in ways not aligned with human needs or objectives. When my iPhone once again fails to pair with my Airpods I could say my technology has not aligned with my purposes. What objective does my phone have when it acts up? What evolution or self-editing has taken place that makes it work one day but not the next?

I can align my phone by turning it off and back on. If I perceive that the machines I use or the software I interact with no longer align with my goals I can just switch it off or delete it. Barring sci-fi scenarios where the machines break into the physical world to protect themselves from humans turning them off I don't think we have to worry about it. Humans have lived with dogs for millennia, and we know what happens when a dog's behavior fails to "align with" the humans it lives with. We treat our machines and software the same way with far less empathy.

The stories about LLMs appearing to have their own objectives, lying, protecting themselves from shutdowns, etc. amount to hype from self-interested hucksters like Sam Altman. The AI marketing narrative -- which exists solely to keep the money flowing in -- generates scary stories to give the appearance that AGI lurks just around the corner, about to "emerge" from millions of GPUs. Look into the contract OpenAI has with Microsoft and it seems obvious why Altman pushes the imminent AGI story.

We could speculate on the dangers of humans evolving the ability to read minds, or see into the future (both explored exhaustively in literature and movies), and then wring our hands over what to do if real X-Men somehow evolved. To me the (mostly fake and cynically manufactured) worry over AGI falls into that category. I could have it all wrong, we will see. If some Silicon Valley startup got hundreds of millions to develop psychic humans, or cognitively enhanced humans (see: Neuralink), would we interpret their claims and ethical quandaries as real or just cash grabs? The AGI threat works because the general public doesn't understand how it works and has seen both benevolent and malevolent AI in movies for decades. Most people can't explain how a microwave oven works despite living with them for decades. I date back far enough to remember when my grandparents feared a microwave oven giving them radiation sickness, at a time of widespread public ignorance and worry over anything "nuclear" and the word "radiation" jumping from science into everyday discourse (1960s).

We have had software that can write other software, and edit itself, since the 1950s. I wouldn't use the term "evolve" to describe what computer hardware and software do, but we have seen amazing progress (through human insight and effort driven by profit, not Darwinian evolution) along multiple axes such as performance, size, power consumption, and price. Then physical limits get reached and the technology plateaus. I expect LLMs will plateau in the same way, due to inherent limits of the approach, exhausting the training data, or maybe power/water requirements. At this point LLMs amaze us in a way other software does not, because of natural language mastery. I think we have mistaken that impressive but narrow achievement for overall cognitive ability, because we only have our own species to measure against, and among humans mastering language and appearing to "know" a lot of things get interpreted (rightly) as intelligence.

AI and what some will surely eventually label as AGI may pose an actual existential threat, the way nuclear weapons and tinkering with viruses already do. I think more likely the AI companies pose a grave economic threat, because if the bubble bursts before real use cases and profits materialize we will all suffer. The dot-com bust, 9/11, the 2008 real estate collapse, and COVID give some idea of the economic and social disruption (and government overreach) that happen even without Skynet trying to kill us due to mis-alignment.

P.S. I have seen links for LLMs doing horoscopes, tarot readings, palmistry, fortune telling, and Bible study promoted here on HN. That says more about human ignorance and credulity than it does about LLMs, but as long as the software happily goes along with the nonsense and doesn't scold the vibe coders for asking I will sleep easier knowing the LLMs have remained in alignment, and haven't given any real deep thought to what we ask them to do -- at least no more thought than a backhoe gives to its work, or my phone gives to pairing over Bluetooth.