phailhaus

The fact the author thinks every topic can be fit onto a rollercoaster tycoon-style analogy leads me to think they do not actually understand these topics very well.

That's because you're trying to snarkily jump into a conversation you don't understand.

User `flanked-evergl` is asking why do you need a whole new format for this instead of just using json. And the answer is because everyone needs to agree on how to specify the format in the json, which `crote` suggests is as simple as doing `{"schema": ..., "data": ...}`.

There's your format. If you want everyone to agree on the `{"schema": ..., "data": ...}` pattern, you can no longer accept just `[]` as a return type. Every response has to include the `schema` and `data` keys.

> So your argument is that no solution could satisfy your new requirement

No, read my comment again. They could do it but it would absolutely destroy the responsiveness of the app.

Are you serious? Do you honestly think that I am talking about a schema for passing empty lists around?

If you are passing around lists of structured objects, I need you to send me what those objects are supposed to look like even if the list is empty sometimes. If you say "ok so sometimes I'll give you an object with a schema key and a list of data, other times I will just give you an empty list because I don't feel like it", everyone will hate you.

And there you go, just `[]` is no longer valid, so you need a new format.

My new requirement is NOT physically impossible. I did not mean "immediately" as in "zero milliseconds", it meant strong read-after-write consistency. It makes facebook so slow and unscalable as to be unusable. Facebook deliberately decided that stale reads are worth it for responsiveness and scale.

Completely untrue. Every design can be destroyed by a single poorly-thought out requirement. I can take down Facebook's design just by saying "any edit must immediately be visible to all users".

"Quick scan"? It's a few paragraphs. You can't read a few paragraphs? What's the point of replying when you don't even know what you're replying to?

Your theory is that he found "very dark stuff" that is accessible to any MIT student? Schwartz didn't "hack" anything, he connected to their student network and downloaded articles that they had access to but the public didn't.

Nobody expects the scroll behavior to be different on a webpage, so it's always a surprise when a page does something like this. Then, you have to learn to adapt to how it expects you to scroll so that you don't screw up its animations or overshoot.

It's the kind of UI that works if you scroll a specific way. A lot of people probably do. But if you don't, it's all very tedious. I consider that to be poor design.

Look at the HN comments and you'll see many saying they don't get the point

The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in 100. You've doubled the efficacy.

There is simple correctness but there are also second order effects to consider. How does this particular implementation allow you to grow, and in which directions? What does it prevent? If you don't already have an opinion about this, then the LLM is going to do something and you're going to have to live with it, because it has no idea that it is "making a decision". And now, neither do you!

This is why LLMs do their best work at "leaf nodes", building on existing infrastructure but not designing new patterns on their own.

LLMs can't introspect, reason, or build internal models of the world. You can get very far without that, but there are some subtle ways it will bite you, and it's a fundamental limitation. Hallucinations are one: they are the feature, not a bug.

This is why I get worried about the hatred for income taxes. No, you want the government to want you to be richer. If all they raised was property taxes, then they don't care if you get priced out of your home, as long as someone's buying.

The setup may be simple, but what about the maintenance?

That was the fearmongering, which made no sense because advertisers can't put a dollar value on "the AI will kind of sort of mention you", and because every conversation needs an ad. If ChatGPT always snuck in a brand mention even on the simplest questions, everyone would hate it.

Ad technology is really old. They're just going to use the same proven tech that has a track record of creating billionaires: intersperse content with sponsored blocks.

Using FizzBuzz as your proxy for "unreviewed code" is extremely misleading. It has practically no complexity, it's completely self-contained and easy to verify. In any codebase of even modest complexity, the challenge shifts from "does this produce the correct outputs" to "is this going to let me grow the way I need it to in the future" and thornier questions like "does this have the performance characteristics that I need".

No, because they are not blindly passing on the briefing to the board. It's a starting point, and presumably they're going to tweak it.

How many documents can be used to prove your citizenship? How many times do people have to go back to the DMV because they forgot something or another? Now imagine that everyone has one shot to get that right on voting day.

> Each board director could ask for a particular thing they require, or a briefing themself, eliminating human intermediary

You are missing the point of board briefings. The CEO serves as a critical filter of information, deciding what to tell the board and how to frame it. If you take the CEO out of it, you're giving the board full access to the company's state. There's enough going on day-to-day that each member can tell themselves the story they want to believe. The CEO is there to advocate for the company and present a unified front, you can't take them out of the equation.

Voter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of voting as well?

I didn't say that there wasn't a reason. I said it was absolute trash to use. It's so bad that the moment I need even the slightest bit of complexity, I will switch away from bash. Can't really say that for any other language.

Uh, reading a bash script shouldn't be as hard as doing your taxes. Bash syntax has to be simple because bash code is going to be read and reasoned by humans. Reading just a simple if statement in bash syntax requires a TON of knowledge to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. That's a massive failure of usability just to save a couple of keystrokes.

This is like saying "what's wrong with brainfuck??? makes sense to me!" Every syntax can be understood, that does not automatically make them all good ideas.

Oh lord, yeah this convinces me even more that this is a bad idea. I can't even tell at a glance if those do the same thing. Just pick one and move on, you're requiring everyone to pass around sourcemaps literally everywhere they go, one for every single pair of syntaxes. You can't even talk about the code with the same language with each other. Is Bean a "class" or a "datatype"? If I'm using one syntax, how do I tell you to fix a bug in your syntax?

Bash syntax is anything but simple or logical. Just look at the insane if-statement syntax. Or how the choice of quotes fundamentally changes behavior. Argument parsing, looping, the list goes on.

Those are both formatting examples though? You're suggesting totally different syntaxes, which means you can't even point to the same line in a codebase when talking about a PR. This throws up massive hurdles around communication when you could just agree on one standard and move on.

This is a Very Bad Idea. Two people working with the same language will be unable to reason about each other's code, because it requires understanding their bespoke syntax and its nuances.

I depend on the community to vet libraries that I add to my stack. The community of people.

When I use AI to write code, I have absolutely no guarantee about what it just did, so I have to read through it all carefully.

I love TRMNL for this exact type of usecase! Only ~$150, and you can self-host if you want.

When I write the code myself, I'm not worried that I snuck a `git reset --hard` somewhere.