plomme

I don’t think there will be an “AI native” generation of developers. AI will be the entity that “groks pointers” and no one else will know it or care what goes on under the hood.

I'm developing a game in Godot using C# and my experience with it is very good. I guess it depends on how deeply you integrate with Godot. I try as far as its possible to write my game headless. My opinion may change when I have gotten to the point of actually shipping a game though, so this take needs a grain of salt.

Both the vision and cognition hardware in humans are vastly superior, and don't get me started on the software.

I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better

Why? If the human has final say on which play to make I can certainly see them thinking they are proposing a better strategy when they are actually hurting their chances.

> It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.

I want to add one point: That you make/ ship something at all.

When the first image generating models came out my head was spinning with ideas for different images I'd want to generate, maybe to print out and hang on the wall. After an initial phase of playing around the excitement faded, even though the models are more than good enough with a bit of fiddling. My walls are still pretty bare.

Turns out even reducing the cost of generating an image to zero does not make me in particular churn out ideas. I suspect this is true for most applications of AI for most people.

What makes you think that the UK would fare like Switzerland and not like Norway, who also tried staying neutral?

What makes you think a Europe with, for example, Nazi Germany as hegemon would be safer for the UK, or that the UK would have a choice in fighting or not?

My point is that projecting some future based on choices not taken is purely historical fiction and there is no reason to believe anything would go the way you or I think it would have gone had UK done this or that. There are far too many variables to consider, and it is impossible to experiment. I think you can make the case the other way just as well that politics of appeasement in the time leading up to WW2 led to the war being even more devastating.

EDIT: Here's some actual plans that the Nazis had for Switzerland btw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum

Many interesting points. I of course know nothing, but I don't see the strategic importance of Sevastopol. If you're Russia controlling Sevastopol, yes it doesn't freeze but where are you going to go? In peace time it doesn't matter who controls Sevastopol, your merchant marine can use it just fine. In war time, where are you going to go? You are certainly not going to cross the Bosphorus, Suez, or Gibraltar. Going back to spheres of influence I guess it does make sense to project power and keep control of the Black Sea and it's neighborhood, and if Russia honestly thought they could take Ukraine in three days then I get how it seemed like a reasonable bet.

Please make the case that the UK should have (and could have) stayed neutral during WWs 1 & 2 and gained from it.

MatLab was taught and used extensively at my university, and has many strong sides and a fantastic standard library. We used it mainly for physics and robotics calculations. The licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of academia though. Hard to compete with free Python + NumPy and a larger talent pool.

Wife has a 16 pro, I’m on a 13 mini. Other than her phone being way too big I don’t notice any difference.

And why should I? Reading text on the web, calling, sms’ing, listening to music or using navigation does not require “next gen” hardware. Hell, it doesn’t even require current gen hardware. It would probably work just fine on 2000s era hardware.

I would love to hear more about your definition of corruption and why it is inevitable. From what I can tell it is that an organization with “morals”, meaning some sort of code restricting their possible actions, will be out competed by an organization without “morals”, whatever that might be. I think it is compelling at face value, but I’m not sure I see a world of wolves out there. Maybe I’m naive.

I want to argue that the rule of law is one moral system that applies to all organizations. Sure, some overstep and may gain some advantage due to that. But in principle and hopefully on average the result should be net negative. In democratic countries the laws are more or less directly the will of the people, about as egalitarian as we can get, no? Anyways, following the rule of laws should lead to “morally sound” corporations as defined by the people. Corporations can go further than what is legally required, too. That is often used in marketing.

Finally i think the same principles apply wherever humans (or other species) compete. Humans on the whole are not entirely cruel barbarians, we try to care for individuals who are not able to care for themselves etc. Whether “true” altruism exists is another discussion, but it certainly looks like it. So if that’s how people act, why should corporations be more corrupt than the bodies that make them up and govern them?

Wow, thanks!

Would be really cool to graph out causes of death over the centuries! Wikipedia cites continous publication from 1527 to 1858[1]. Collecting the data seems daunting, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_of_mortality

Why not take it further and not update dependencies at all until you need to because of some missing feature or systems compatibility you need? If it works it works.

Agreed, children were the original pension scheme and might well become one again!

Jokes aside I agree with you on strengthening bonds with local community, and it's something that many people neglect, not even knowing their neighbors. Especially so for city dwellers. Strong social bonds are an end in its' own right!

On your agrarian note I wonder if we will see a return to the country side as younger people are priced out of cities and more jobs accept remote work. Then again, RTO and "affordable" rentals may nullify that. But as real estate prices grow I keep wondering how anyone has the money to buy real estate in the city any more. Corporations I guess.

Regarding money being just a number I don't disagree exactly, but it sure feels like my flavor of white collar work might be among the first to be automated. If not, and the stock market flat-lines and taxes shoot up because we need to support the super-centenarians then my investments and cash flow are shot. I don't count on UBI to save me before pretty much everyone is out of a job, and in the meanwhile I will need to exchange money for goods that I'm not certain will plummet in price to match my lack of funds. So that's part of the reason I'm thinking about how to hedge or even gain in a future that might look different from our past.

I feel like a lot of people are vaguely aware of the skewed demography in the northern hemisphere, but I don't feel like there is a lot of talk about how it will affect the way we work and invest.

I think we are on the same page actually - I'm not dismissing the notion that we might engineer ourselves out of a declining work force. But then the question is, if human labor (me, you, us) is -gradually- becoming unwanted, then how do I make a living?

Maybe there is a Star-Trek utopia at the far end, but in the meantime we are looking at potentially several years where me and a chunk of other white-collar workers are unemployable. I'm not sure UBI will be enacted before a large chunk of the general population is unemployable. And how will we fund UBI? Taxing the automators? They can just move their business to a tax haven.

Maybe I can find a job in some sector that's hard to automate, but I imagine a lot of people will be looking for those jobs. And that would probably lead to a pay cut.

So, what then if we want to maintain or even improve our standard of living? Invest in tech stocks? Sure. But we will still need to pick out winners or spread our bets. Will the gains in the stock market be enough to cancel out job loss?

A good and thought provoking read. This is obviously navel-gazing, but looking at this from an individual or family perspective, I'm wondering about how you could prosper in a depopulating, aging, and warming world.

Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.

Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?

We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.

I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?

I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.

IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.

This is the first time I really don't understand how people are getting good results. On https://aistudio.google.com with Nano Banana selected (gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview) I get - garbage - results. I'll upload a character reference photo and a scene and ask Gemini to place the character in the scene. What it then does is to simply cut and paste the character into the scene, even if they are completely different in style, colours, etc.

I get far better results using ChatGPT for example. Of course, the character seldom looks anything like the reference, but it looks better than what I could do in paint in two minutes.

Am I using the wrong model, somehow??

Glass breaks down to sand so I wouldn’t worry too much about it

Spectroscopy is well established.

Maybe - though I associate being "on-call" with being expected to respond outside of normal business hours which was not the case in the teams I worked in.

Sort of. I've worked with having a rota where engineers would spend a week handling support and bug reports which avoids many of the pitfalls with the entirely separate "two crews". I wrote a bit more about it in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43337703#43339972 .

The book mentions having a rota:

> Engineers rotate between the crews on a regular basis. The Microsoft blog post referenced above recommends swapping some team members between the two crews every week.

In my experience this works well. With my current and previous client each team had a "hero of the week", whose responsibility was second line support and monitoring. If nothing came up the hero would work on their tasks as usual.

If something does come up the heroes of the week would be tasked with solving it or pulling in someone who knows how to solve it. This leads to engineers both having to accept accountability for writing shoddy code, but it also exposes engineers to the wider codebase when pulling on threads. It also solves the issue where no-one or the same person always takes responsibility for handling bugs.