lbrito

This is great

Say I open a premium lemonade stand. I buy Walmart lemonade for $1 and resell it for $2. I have around 10 customers a day, but 2 of them buy 1,000 litres of lemonade each. The rest just buy a single cup. I'm making amazing profit.

There's just one detail: those 2 high-volume customers are buying my lemonade and re-selling them at a loss for $1 at another neighbourhood. Supposedly some high-profile Japanese bank is financing their lemonade purchasing expenses for eye-wateringly high interest rates. I've heard its well into the double digits. But that's not important, because the future is right around the corner - I can feel it - and in the future everyone wants lemonade. Thousands of litres of it. So even if those two customers go away, things will be fine!

It will all work out in the end. This is a totally sustainable business model. In fact I'm even thinking of going public.

>I do expect SpaceX to face consequences in the years to come.

Why?

That's the gameboy advance intro though

Apologies for my subpar manic traits, I pledge to be better next time

Is that a serious answer?

This is supposed to be The technology that will colonize the universe, and you're saying "Games are being remixed" is the happening we're supposed to be excited about? That's the hockey stick inflection point?

>We are at the bottom of a science, knowledge & art hockey stick chart, we're staring up at it and the steep bit is labeled "the future".

I've never seen so much faith outside of a religious setting. Do you have any proof of this at all, or is it a faith-based system?

Its been 4 _years_ since GPT 3.5's release. Where are all these marvels people keep saying are just around the corner?

That's not the point though. Why do AI boosters keep moaning about how "AI is already is will be better than everyone in field X in Y months" continuously for _years_? Don't you see the incongruence in claiming that continuously over long periods of time?

Why aren't we there yet?

I've been hearing this bullshit for 3 years. Its always x months away. Are we fucking there yet?

"[Linus] ends every session with a lengthy cleanup pass that takes a couple of hours to run, executing tasks like ensuring that the code matches the comments. That amount of work cannot be done with a free LLM account. I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world."

There's this trend in the last couple of years of very successful software engineers heartily endorsing AI usage - I can think of Matz, dhh, Linus, uncle Bob. Probably a lot of other people I don't follow too closely.

I can't pinpoint a common motivation for all of them, other than the obvious (the tools are great and are the future, if you think otherwise you're a loser (paraphrasing dhh) etc).

I think at least at some level, these people are at a point of their careers where they have "been there, done that" (coding) and are happy to go do something else.

All of them have in common not having written code in a long time, instead reviewing patches from others, so the AI thing isn't really too different from what they've been doing for a long time.

Here's Linus' diatribe if you haven't seen it - https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/10/13/3242

>Since no one likes identifying themselves as a slimy businessperson with a potential personality disorder,

Eh, you'd be surprised.

The secret is to stop caring.

You can go and live in cardboard boxes right now for free. Why aren't you? Being technically legal or not is besides the point - there are places where it is tolerated.

This analogy hinges on the economic argument (that a robot costs 200x less than a human), but far from being an established fact, that notion is more or less entirely based on vague, misleading and exaggerated claims from the token peddlers.

The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.

Soon enough the clankers will automate that part too. I'm eager to see how "liberated" those people are going to feel then.

Travel agents still exist though; while I couldn't find employment numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if there were more today than 20 years ago (something something's Paradox)

Now, what you're describing is really about the "culture of convenience". People prefer Expedia to human travel agents because it reduces friction (of interacting with people). Same goes for Uber, Waymo and so on. Good piece on it - https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/cult-of-convenience-9.7371392

I'm glad someone else called out Matz on this.

He started being ambivalent about it maybe two years ago, and reached metastasis in the latest Rails World fiasco, with dhh telling him to his face that his life's work (Matz's terms) is irrelevant now.

What a great phrase!

>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.

I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.

Token peddler says best way to do something is using more tokens.

This is not HN-worthy

That's factually incorrect, and shouldn't be allowed here.

>"and this might raise the baseline for the jobs..."

That's a bizarre non sequitur, pure wishful thinking. Its like saying Maybe getting cancer is good, because it will cure my arthritis.

>driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world

Agreed. So lets build dense cities and efficient mass public transit, right? ...Right?

Excellent.

No one wants that. People pay other people to do things well. No one wants to need to discuss orthodontics with a bot, they would rather pay someone to know those things and think about them.

It says the 70B figure "was based on _information shared with investors_ in an attempt to create a more direct comparison to rival Anthropic".

That's a different thing from what you said, that the 70B "was based on a comparison to Anthropic". It wasn't, or we can't say that using the source material. The 70B was based on an anonymous source, which used the different metric (including cloud revenue etc) supposedly to make a comparison with anthropic, which does those things, easier.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like this is "not news"

"The $70b estimate was based on a comparison to Anthropic" -- Can you prove that? All I could find were major outlets (Reuters, Yahoo Finance) citing an Axios report, that itself cited "sources familiar with the financials tell Axios.". I haven't found anything similar to what you are claiming.

73% signers from Brazil, heh

The letter is nice and all, but "sign this petition" is beyond useless

The person controlling the salary