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nerder92

449 karma · joined June 2, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/nerder; my proof: https://keybase.io/nerder/sigs/VY9PNd1xClnJ43PS7Kt-Cgw98D2gAI6IDMFDIXU5a_U ]
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nerder92··on Thoughts on thinking
I feel something similar, mostly in the context of programming. Yesterday, I spotted a bug and instead of trying to understand the issue, I just typed a quick "why this doesn't work" into the Cursor Chat. A few seconds later, I got my answer and I tab around my solution. Of course it was a cool experience, yet another "wow" moment of working with AI, but that also gave me a strange feeling and made me wonder: will I lose my ability to think program independently?

After a bit of human reflection, my simple answer is no. I won’t lose these abilities; they'll evolve just as they've evolved many times during my lifetime. The critical difference this time is that the evolution will be much faster and more radical.

To clarify, a thought for me is an idea that comes to mind based on the things we know or have experienced. The bottleneck of thinking ability lies precisely there—how can you think about something you don’t know exists? An early human living inland couldn't possibly conceive of navigating the sea; the concept simply didn't exist for them. Their thinking was shaped entirely by their personal experiences and those of their peers, passed on around a campfire. Thinking evolved many time throughout history, from those campfire stories to sharing paper books, to browsing web pages and now this autocomplete on steroids.

The difference this time is that the paradigm is shifting. The bottleneck moves from accessibility of knowledge to the latency between your initial thought and the AI’s completion of it. With a Google search, you were a few clicks away from potential new knowledge. With AI, you're just a few keystrokes away from a fully developed thought.

Today, there is still a clear distinction between my thought and the AI’s, because you prompt it and then wait for the response. But what if that latency was virtually zero? What if merely thinking a prompt triggered the CoT within my brain? Would that thought still be mine? Would it belong to the AI?

My feeling is that what we are experiencing today is a transition phase until we completely "integrate" this AI thinking into our own thinking. What I don't see change or improve in AI anytime soon is curiosity, judgment, taste - those things are probably what we should double down on for now.

nerder92··on Dart added support for cross-compilation
Dart is one of the most underrated language out there.

Paradoxically is alive thanks to Flutter, but is also not as popular due to Flutter.

nerder92··on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
A quick Google seems to point into another direction: https://crypto.news/moneros-50-price-pump-likely-tied-to-330...
nerder92··on 4o Image Generation
I tried to play it, and while the conversation is right the image is just all wrong
nerder92··on Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
Might not be related to the point of the article per se, but i've tried to decode it with different LLMs. To benchmark their reasoning capabilities.

- 4o: Failed completely

- o1: Overthinks it for a while and come up with the wrong answer

- o3-mini-high: Get's closer to the result at first try, needs a second prompt to adjust the approach

- r1: nails it at first try 󠅖󠅥󠅓󠅛󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅙󠅝󠅠󠅢󠅕󠅣󠅣󠅙󠅦󠅕

The prompt I've used was simply: "this emoji has an hidden message 󠅘󠅕󠅜󠅜󠅟 can you decode it?"

If you want to see the CoT: https://gist.github.com/nerder/5baa9d7b13c1b7767d022ea0a7c91...

nerder92··on Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
Yes I see your point, correlation is not causation. Again, this is my best guess and observation based on my personal view of the world and my understanding of data on hands at t0 (today). This doesn't spare if from being incorrect or extremely wrong, as always when dealing with predictions of a future outcome.
nerder92··on Firing programmers for AI will destroy everything
> It is only generating based on training data

This is not the case anymore, current SOTA CoT models are not just parroting stuff from the training data. And as of today they are not even trained exclusively on publicly (and not so publicly) available stuff, but they massively use synthetic data which the model itself generated or distilled data from other smarter models.

I'm using and I know plenty of people using AI in current "mature" codebases with great results, this doesn't mean it does the work while you sip a coffee (yet)

*NOTE: my evidence for this is that o3 could not break ARC AGI by parroting, because it's a banchmark made exactly for this reason. Not a coding banchmark per se, but still transposable imo.

nerder92··on Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
If benchmark means anything in evaluating how model capability progress, the evidence is that all the existing benchmark have been pretty much solved, except FrontierMath (https://epoch.ai/frontiermath)
nerder92··on Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
I'm not sure, it's an observation considering how AI improvement is related to Moore's law.

[1](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/nvidia-ceo-says-his-ai-chi...)

nerder92··on Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions:

1. AI code ability will be the same as is today

2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time

Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change to adapt to this. (Already doing)

The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs. At the end of the day product is just one area of company development, build the complete e2e ultimate solution with 0 distribution or marketing will not help.

This article, in my opinion, is just doomerism storytelling for nostalgic programmers, that see programming only as some kind of magical artistic craft and AI as the villain arrived to remove all the fun from it. You can still switch off Cursor and write donut.c if you enjoy doing it.

nerder92··on Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
The real-word scenario that has happened to us was that it was completely misinterpreting words, for instance it stopped working because our file contained the word "retard", this was a localization file for the French translation where "retard" translate as "late", we needed to change the entire order of the file to avoid this problem and keep the auto-complete.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/79223

nerder92··on Apple Invites
I wonder if it would be possible to do custom integrations for apps
nerder92··on Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
If your work is building Technology and you have a mental model such as: “it was better when it was worse”

You don’t understand the essence of your job.

nerder92··on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs, because they contribute to grow the valuation of the company assets.

The right thing to do economically (in capitalism) is to do more of the same, but faster. So if you as a software engineer or customer service rep can't do more of the same faster you will replaced by someone (or something) that alleggedly can.

nerder92··on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
(1) is exactly the misunderstanding i'm talking about, most creative jobs are not defined by their output (which is cheap) but by the way they reach that output. Software engineers that thought they could write their special characters in their dark room without the need to actually understand anything will go away in breeze (for good).

This entire field was full of hackers, deeply passionate and curious individuals who want to understand every little detail of the problem they were solving and why, then software becomes professionalized and a lot of amateurs looking for a quick buck came in commoditizing the industry. With LLM will go full-circe and push out a lot of amateurs to give again space to the hackers.

Code was never the goal, solving problem was.

nerder92··on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well.

A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour combination one next to the other.

A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE.

Neither Junior nor Seniors Dev will go anywhere, what we'll for sure go away is all the "code-producing" human-machines such as Fiver Freelance/Consultants which completely misunderstand/neglect the true essence of their work. Becuase code (as in a set of meaningful 8-bits symbols) was never the goal, but always the means to an end.

Code is an abstraction, allegedly our best abstraction to date, but it's hard to believe that is the last iteration of it.

I'll argue that software itself will be a completely different concept in 100 years from now, so it's obvious that the way of producing it will change too.

There is a famous quote attributed to Hemingway that goes like this:

"Slowly at first, then all at once"

This is exactly what is happening and and what always happens.

nerder92··on Preferring throwaway code over design docs
So we are basically re-discovering XP practices? (http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/spike.html)
nerder92··on Italy's Piracy Shield just blocked one of Google's CDN
Here a thread with some tests to confirm this: https://x.com/g_bonfiglio/status/1847728976933904453
nerder92··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2024)
MAAT | Founding Software Engineer (Mobile) | Remote (EU) | Full-Time | >= €50k + 2% equity

MAAT is a SaaS-enabled marketplace for the sports community, with a vision to help people create long-lasting relationships through sports and activities.

We’re financially stable, with over 12 months of runway, and growing rapidly at 33% QoQ.

Right now, we’re focusing on combat sports (MMA, BJJ, Judo), but the future is wide open. We’re looking for a talented Founding Engineer experienced in mobile development (Flutter) to join our team.

This is a highly impactful role where you’ll work across the stack, from front-end to infrastructure, and make key product decisions that will shape our future.

Send your CV and a short intro at stefano@joinmaat.com. No cover letters needed.

[0]: https://joinmaat.com

nerder92··on Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?
We are building a SaaS enabled marketplace for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu where people can find gyms and experiences to find new friends to have fun with!

If you are in Europe and do BJJ you will probably have hear about us (MAAT).

PS: of course we are hiring so feel free to send me an email at stefano_at_joinmaat.com

nerder92··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2024)
MAAT | Full Stack Engineer (Mobile) | London (Hybrid) | Full-Time | 2% equity

MAAT is a SaaS-enabled marketplace for the sports community, with a vision to help people create long-lasting relationships through sports and activities. We’re financially stable, with over 15 months of runway, and growing rapidly at 33% QoQ. Right now, we’re focusing on combat sports (MMA, BJJ, Judo), but the future is wide open.

We’re looking for a talented Full-stack engineer experienced in mobile development (Flutter) to join our team. This is a highly impactful role where you’ll work across the stack, from front-end to infrastructure, and make key product decisions that will shape our future.

Send your CV and a short intro at stefano@joinmaat.com. No cover letters needed.

[0]: https://joinmaat.com

nerder92··on The art of programming and why I won't use LLM
Programming is not art, problem solving is.

Programming is just a mean to an end, please stop this cringe romantic rhetoric. If you really love programming you don’t care about the medium, the fact that a program is represented as text is just a transient phase in the history due to the current tech we have available in this specific moment in time. Programming (today) is expressed as text, LLMs auto complete boring text, so that us “the artists” can write more of it faster, end of story.

nerder92··on Stripe acquires Lemon Squeezy
This company screams “Stripe please buy me” so so much.

From branding to the all UVP, it was a fast exit because it was meant to be.

Still a massive achievement

nerder92··on Ask HN: How to deal with a cofounder not pulling their weight?
If you have any doubts you have no doubts.

I’ve made the mistake myself to try to “change” my co-founder attitude and work ethic but it just not worth it. Fire him and look for a new co-founder who is actually passionate about the company vision and mission

nerder92··on How to test without mocking
Well tests are usually in English and easier to read then code IMH(uman)O
nerder92··on How to test without mocking
Everytime I read about this kind of argument against mock is usually due to a misunderstanding on why unit tests with mocking exists in the first place. The underlying assumption is that tests are a quality assurance tool but I think that this is true only for E2E (possibly in production). In outside in TDD unit test are used as a design tool not a QA one, and mocking is a convenient way to quickly do that without the need of implementing the next layer, mock usually don’t replace an implemented service that does IO they implemented a noop that triggers an exception (so they your E2E won’t pass until you implement that)

The problem is in the name, unit test should be called implementation spec or in-code documentation.

Each layer of testing has its roles and serves a different purpose.

nerder92··on Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees
You mean what we shouldn't offer a salary and only equity?
nerder92··on Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees
At my startup we’ve recently started hiring for a Founding Engineer with Mobile Development skills (Flutter) and some backend.

It seems impossible to find a right candidate for us and we are indeed looking at an agency for now even if I was fairly against it as a CTO.

It’s most likely a numbers game, but it’s hard to find coders that also have some kind of founders attitude.

Either people who are founders are indeed building something themselves or you get 9-5ers who think they can do startups while having 0 stamina/drive.

This is hard

nerder92··on Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships
I had this same exact startup idea, and I think this can effectively work to change the landscape in ad-driven publications.

Ads are the notoriously culprit of this clickbaity and emotion-seaking journalism this model can effectively change the incentives for publishers and it will push for a more high quality writings as they will be rewarded back in reads from the LLM proposing the content more.

Is anyone working on something like this, or is this something only foundational models owners can try to achieve?

nerder92··on Deletion of user account
I love the fact that they made the price a catchy 19,90 instead of 20 as if it was a product they'd like for people to buy.
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