kenferry

Most people making this argument aren’t saying they were incapable of doing the project without AI, they’re saying the cost benefit equation was unfavorable because it would take too long.

Ok, but not what this article is about at all. Six figures is for undergrads. The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students, who are typically fully supported.

I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.

> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.

I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.

Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.

(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?

(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.

This has existed since the first version, except it needs to be signed with a valid apple cert.

A .pkpass file is a zipped directory that has a json file and some assets. There's no need to have a more limited version, a pass is already very limited.

The issue is spoofing. Major event ticketers are unwilling to publish passes if there's nothing to stop someone else from publishing a pass that is indistinguishable from their's and thus is an avenue for fraud.

The difference with events is that an ics file is not something someone's going to try to sell you or that you'd want to buy. But anyway, all Apple would have to do is stop checking the signing.

I imagine you're saying the capital return program is a mistake because they should reinvest the money in R&D etc.

I think the issue is there's diminishing returns to spending, and in some cases it can be outright negative. For example, one major thing you can do with money is hire more people. Hiring more people than you can handle is a great way to grind everything to a halt. You're basically making a bet when you hire that the additional capacity outweighs the danger of coordination failure.

Perhaps you could invest more money in fabs or something like that. I don't know, I'm a software person. But I did work at apple on software for 15 years, and I do not think throwing more money at software is particularly effective. The biggest teams at apple are often the least functional.

I think you can reframe this and better understand the point these mathematicians are making.

The vast, vast majority of mathematics DOES use infinities. That's the standard perspective. The question is whether there is good, interesting, useful mathematics to be explored by disallowing that concept.

The way I see it, Gödel's, Turing's work and complexity theory come out of this line of thinking about _effective_ computation. This is an argument for exploring the mathematics that arises when you don't think of actual computer math as an imperfect approximation of the real numbers, but rather as a mathematical object in its own right.

I would guess (?) it's more interesting for floating point math and related than for integer math, because for integer math it's already well explored in group theory.

Well, if you're asking if apple execs use that setting, the answer is probably that they don't.

I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.

I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.

Yeah, I mean it's true to an extent, I agree. As scientific research though it's not very well thought out. A grant agency would not fund this. There's too much potential for causing harm and it's not clear what benefit or action we derive from the results. They tried this before with a vending machine, it failed, apparently all they concluded was "hm, models got better so maybe we should just try it again". How is that worth anything scientifically?

Re: not my money, true. It's just frustrating even to me to see people do stuff like this, and I'm not struggling to get by. My frustration mostly derives from feeling like I'll get lumped in with techies who have more money than sense. I already deal with enough tech hate in my life.

When people buy a super fancy car they don't (usually) blog about it, and instagram wealth influencers are also frustrating, yes.

This kind of thing must be SO frustrating to people struggling to get by in the world. "We gave AI $100k that it will almost certainly squander, yolo!! Hopefully it doesn't abuse people too badly in the process."

I… guess the bet is that what they learn is worth $100k? Seems rather questionable. Or that having this on the resume is a great shock tactic that will open doors in the future?

You're talking about funeral costs; the author generalizes _a_lot_ from funeral costs to "kinship societies are bad". That's the leap the comment you're replying to is discussing.

The factual material about funeral spending costs is very interesting, but when it gets into "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" it seems rather… unsupported? That's a sweeping statement that actually requires understanding the whole picture, and the whole picture is not being presented. Is there reason to think the author truly has all the context to make these claims?

There's a ton of sanitization of attachments. It just isn't foolproof.

On iOS messages attachments are decoded in a separate, heavily restricted and sandboxed process, and the decoded sanitized results are sent back to the UI process. It just isn't perfect.

Hm, I wonder.

I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden?

Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.

The author wants to say that atms are a stand in for in person banking experience, while the iPhone changes the paradigm entirely.

Why? Seems like basically the same paradigm to me, I can just do it without going anywhere.

…why would you assume that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Coal, with any available technology, is more polluting than any renewable energy source. Full life cycle including plant installation included.

Is HN being astroturfed? What’s up with all these pro-coal comments?

This kind of mental model only works if you think of things as made huge shadowy blobs, not people.

dyld has one principal author, who would 100% quit and go to the press if he was told (by who?) to insert a back door. The whole org is composed of the same basic people as would be working on Linux or something. Are you imagining a mass of people in suits who learned how to do systems programming at the institute for evil?

Additionally, do you work in tech? You don’t think bugs appear organically? You don’t think creative exploitation of bugs is a thing?

The part I do not understand is why you then DO buy MAHA. Why is completely making things up better?

If you think nutritional science is too unreliable, I can see that perspective. The conclusion then should be “I don’t know” not “trust the people who argue with psychological techniques instead of science”.

Er, how does putting your faith in literally vibes (MAHA) follow. Just complete rejection of expertise and science.

I agree with you re: abstraction - one of the author's only points where I didn't totally agree.

But also worth noting that whenever you make an abstraction you run the risk that it's NOT going to turn out increase clarity and precision, either due to human limitation or due to changes in the problem. The author's caution is warranted because in practice this happens really a lot. I would rather work with code that has insufficient abstraction than inappropriate abstraction.

The bigger hit than performance is usually user experience quality and “write once debug everywhere”.

Seems like engagement bait or a thought exercise more than a realistic project.

> "But I need to debug!"

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

Folks can get away without reading assembly only when the compiler is reliable. English -> code compilation by llms is not reliable. It will become more reliable, but (a) isn’t now so I guess this is a project to “provoke thought” (b) you’re going to need several nines of reliability, which I would bet against in any sane timeframe (b) English isn’t well specified enough to have “correct” compilation, so unclear if “several nines of reliability” is even theoretically possible.

Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.

They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.

Uh, yeah, he clearly would prefer it didn’t exist even if he was compensated.

Well, that’s because you don’t use it I guess!

I basically only swipe back. This aligns web pages with iOS nav stacks.

Modern marketing emails, yes… not emails written as correspondence. I don't think this post is talking about marketing emails.

Their point is the reverse.

Forcing standardization and interop is obviously good for interop, but it's bad for companies trying to innovate, because it ties their hands. The moment apple ships a v1 they have to ship an API, and then they have to support that API and can't change it. When it's private they can figure it out.

The communal house scene in San Francisco isn't predominantly women.