prmph

All these are cope-outs. None of the stated reasons make much sense to me.

If I am distributing an app that uses the installed SQLite, you expect me to build a special version of SQLite and bundle it with my app?? Or require some weird extensions?

Unicode is about 300,000 characters at most.

Indeed, that's what I also thought this would be about; What a bummer.

Someone should post that article instead, lol. I'd love to discuss why I am able to comprehend and read a language almost fully but cannot speak it.

You comment is a bit unclear as to its point.

These new batch of people are not randomly selected; they are thought of as more suitable to rule due to their being academics and scientific/technical experts, rather than lifetime politicians. Same as the old politicians who were cut from a certain cloth.

The cloth is now different, but a cloth it remains.

Have you noticed how vicious the politics is in academia?

They were very competent at genocide and propaganda.

Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just as vulnerable to these things.

I've had the thought that: "known to the state of California to cause cancer"

Should probably be: "known to the state of California to be a class N carcinogen"

Both are high-speed trains regardless of whether they are in motion or not.

High-speed is a descriptor of the type of train, not their current speed.

Just like a racing cars is still such even when stationary.

Why are high speed trains often crashing in Europe??

You rarely hear of such in Japan.

I always wondered if there is not a market for old-school travel using such liners, not just for recreation.

Many people hate or fear flying. Some might also just prefer the laid back, retro, travel style. Not all are in a mad rush to get somewhere.

But I guess the market might be too small for regularly scheduled trips.

Can they handle rogue waves?

Although, I guess rogue waves can appear anywhere deep and rough.

Like a sibling comment replied, you can set "showdead" to "yes" on your profile and click update" so see flagged comments. Not sure why they were flagged.

The coding is hard, unless by coding you mean slapping together CRUD forms. Many businesses are undone or fail to grow properly by neglecting this. This refrain that everything about starting a software business is hard except the coding needs to die.

If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.

Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.

See these comments of mine, which I added exactly for cases like these where someone asks for evidence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50220976

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50165791

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159827

The first links shows a basic failure of reasoning, which would have gone unnoticed if I was just vibe-coding.

The second link shows weak architectural sense and an inability to see the big picture.

The last link in particular is telling: the agents worked with me (over weeks to months) to implement a db abstraction layer without ever bringing up the fact that as it stands, that would have never worked with any indexes at all. I did not constrain them to my choices, but they never stopped me with that design. It took my eagle-eyed attention to their offhand comments to notice this problem, which then required a lot of rework to fix.

> Architecture and what to avoid are also strengths of AI.

Absolutely not at all. Every single day that I work with Claude, there is abundant evidence that AI sucks at these. Ask me for examples if you need them.

This does not apply in all cases.

Case in point: I am building a digital files archive organizer platform.

This is simply not the kind of product you do a quick prototype of, get it to market quickly, and iterate on based on any failures or issues.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to get the product wrong, in a technical, architectural, and business/market sense. It requires a lot of deep thinking and internal prototyping to even get at what would actually be useful and address the walled-content-silos problem tech vendors love to foist on us. it requires careful implementation to not mess up user data. It requires a ton of architectural and UX design to get a performant product that is easy to understand. I have mulled over architectural decisions for months and thrown them out totally after mounting evidence they were not right, without a single user yet (except myself).

Just quickly coding up the first ideas that come to mind in this space is almost guaranteed to be wasted effort, because I could try a 100 approaches in the market and all could be bad. Do not let the users do your work for you. Make sure you actually understand what you are building and why it is important. Then let the user's experiences tell you how to tweak it to be better.

Exactly, and a lot of times when I step back and discuss alternative approaches and architectures with the LLMs, they keep going back to say: "the code does not use this (currently), therefore this is fine to throw away", or "the code does this (currently), so this approach is not compatible" They are bad at stopping to ask "what should the code be doing"? It's like they love being constrained by current choices, even if there is nothing unchangeable about those.

Such low level grunt work is what AI is good for, no one denies that.

What some of us are saying is that AI is poor at figuring out what to build, how best to architecture it, and what to avoid.

But if you paid someone else to carry your luggage, then you're no longer "macho", no?

I still hand-wash a lot of my stuff. I do not find such washing to be tiresome in any way.

There is a method to it that produces good results (definitely better than the machines) with little effort. To start with, I pre-soak the clothes in good washing powder. I also do not let clothes pile up. I wash a bit at a time.

OK, but not only that. People learn quickly that in most contexts, expending effort to create a high quality work is not noticed much less rewarded.

It's like anything goes in most human endeavors. Society is winging it; duct-taped solutions abound. Most people lack taste or a keen eye for quality, and only notice when there is something seriously wrong. Even then, politics and all sorts of other concerns skews how people respond to things. This is why we complain about AI slop in the fields we know about, while the public at large think AI is the best thing after sliced bread.

Faced with this, unless someone is really passionate about their work, they eventually kind of tune out, and then look for how to expend the least effort possible to get whatever (uncertain or politicized) reward they can in their endeavors.

I don't know, the set of problems that remain very hard but worthwhile to solve still massively dwarfs the set of problems that has become easy to solve with the help of AI, even in a restricted domain like software engineering.

It is a failure of imagination to think that there is no longer much challenge. But I guess all humans have a problem with tunnel vision, to various extents.

No, it is not more clear.

What is happening is this: the AI does not know when to be a more verbose in service of clarity, and when to be brief, again in service of clarity. There is no simple relationship between expression length and clarity; it all depends. And when they are verbose, it is usually a lot of words that actually say little.

That's the problem; there is some higher level reasoning they are incapable of when it comes to language usage.

The think I don't understand is: why did the models become so much worse with time?

I seems to remember a distinct time during which Claude for example became incomprehensible and weird with its writing, whereas before it was reasonably OK, even if still not that good

No, the model will not notice.

How do I know? It several times present deep architectural decisions to me, where each options may seem plausibly good. I rely on my deep architectural knowledge and experience, and knowledge of my vision for the product to steer it to the right option.

Well, I just used a contrived example to illustrate my point.

You would be well served to review the code. I don't usually need to do much of that since I work with models edit by edit, with every single line they write approved by me.

You would be surprised at all the errors even Claude Opus 5.5 commits. Not syntax or even basic logic errors, but more insidious errors that betray a lack of being able to see the bigger picture, or serious architectural errors.

If you want example, I have them in abundance. These models still need serious supervision. Unless you are spot checking the code deeply, you won't notice.

Interesting. I'm actually from Ghana, I guess our criminals have not advanced to that level yet. Nigeria may be a different matter though.

Mostly agree with you, but:

> My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever.

It is always interesting to me how people equate getting old with becoming dumb. I know there is definitely some age related decline that's inevitable, but if a person has grown up with computers, and maybe more importantly, has had a hacker and curious mindset while younger, it is not likely that they will suddenly become so naive and vulnerable, even when like 80.

What usually happens is that people lose interest in learning new things and keeping up. My own mom (who passed at 73) could never be convinced to use Whatsapp messaging, thinking it is something complicated for the young ones, and yet I currently know people in their mid 70s and even much older who are still as sharp as anything and use all the cool apps.

How do you check, from examining behavior alone, that the code does not contain stuff like this:

if (date == <some random future date>) { crash_and_burn_the_world() }

??

Yep:

> The relation between them always has to be supplied, and supplying it is what the system’s logic is.

100% sure this is Claude's recent writing style at work