rglover

An app for tracking monarchs with these tags is here for iOS [1].

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/project-monarch-science/id6460...

Fear.

I live in the middle of nowhere and the local police have an MRAP. First time I saw it, I figured it was a display piece but nope, they use it for "SWAT" (in a heavily religious, sleepy, nothing but meth heads kind of low crime area). They've also littered ALPRs all over rural roads. I spot them constantly and they're always in strange "why there" places.

It's all ironic when you see the same people claiming "anti communism" and "low or no government" but then proceed to happily install the boot on people's faces. The cognitive dissonance is chefs kiss.

No.

Anecdotally, I remember far less frustration and far more enjoyment from software 15 years ago than I do today (what led me down the path to being a developer to begin with).

Today's software isn't even software. It's just a bunch of poorly made extraction machines backed by utter delusion that "it works" when a lot of it most certainly doesn't (or if it does, at best, it works as an efficient extraction machine and torture device with no real utility).

It seriously feels like we've been huffing gas for the last 15 years.

Calls too. My local cleaning business has been getting hammered with automated "your Google listing..." spam for weeks (virtual number w/ routing to our cells) now. Already hung up on 3-4 this morning/afternoon.

"Cheap" is up for debate, but the models themselves are great. Kimi K3 (and now 3.1 Pro) was the first open model I played with and didn't think to switch back to a frontier model. Now it's my daily driver and I have zero complaints.

The frontier labs are in a tough spot. It's hard to justify their cost when you can get something that's easily as good for cheaper (and anecdotally, more reliable/accessible). I do HITL so my perspective will be different than a fully-agentic setup, but as soon as I started using open stuff regularly, I realized that any moat the US labs had built is drying up.

Have we considered how things might improve if we try to be less ambitious?

You won't get magical productivity gains from a workforce heavily conditioned to following orders and a pre-packaged process (the Henry Ford model and its various bastardizations). In order to extract value from an LLM, you have to be able to think and ideate so that the inputs are of higher quality.

It should be of zero surprise that the rush into AI has yielded limited results (if we're honest, both in and outside of tech)—you won't get a bunch of artists or creative thinkers out of a pliant, ironically agentic labor force. That's why most people say "it doesn't work": it's because they lack the skills and knowledge to use it properly (but corporations want to delude themselves into thinking they have a genie in a lamp).

Using it now via API (3.1 Pro on Open Router) in a HITL setup (Cline in VSCode).

Off-hand it's quite good. I've been using K3 for the past few months almost exclusively for coding work and have been stunned by how good it is. Excited to see how far 3.1 Pro can be pushed.

Prednisone is nuts. I had to take that as a kid during Leukemia treatments and my mom would find me rifling through the kitchen cabinets at 7am eating my brother's single-serving pasta buckets on the floor like an animal.

> I mean is this not most of human existence through history though?

That's not a good thing. It means we're failing to progress as a species. If we keep repeating history (with now, unfettered access to it), we're devolving, not evolving.

> Nobody but me has it and it is great!

The zen of this position is severely underrated.

> What happens when each organization has its own entire stack though?

My personal opinion is that all hell breaks loose due to continuity issues, time and money waste (excessive token spend to simulate competency), and a general air of malaise to the point where problems are tolerated far longer than necessary because "the bot will get to it eventually."

> I get what you mean, but with how easy it is to get a gun (especially in red states)

Have you tried? I live in Tennessee (aggressively red) and own multiple firearms. Mandatory background checks and a mandatory 3-day wait [1] are the standard. Even online transfers from an FFL require submission of an ATF registration form.

Tangential, but it's not as easy as one would think. Also, there are a shocking number of posers down here. Stars and bars and "don't tread on me" but not a lot of commitment to "the mission." There are far more grown men driving lifted trucks with glow lights on them than serious threats.

[1] https://www.stateregstoday.com/politics/gun-control/firearm-...

> What do we have, no programmers, no one knowing what’s going on inside the test passing slopy black box, except a caretaker guy who’s kept their skills sharp by not using AI—with their time taken up trying to understand constantly rewritten code?

That's where we're headed but I'd say the smart teams will have that 'caretaker guy' use judgment to know when and when not to apply AI. That describes one of my businesses perfectly [1].

[1] https://lattice.engineering

It's already started imo. Spotify's desktop app on MacOS is becoming unusable (up to ~30s delays after clicking a button before the action runs—used to be snappy). I just saw the Epic Games launcher thing. Anecdotally, countless websites just break at random (more so than even when it was 100% human).

The frustrating part isn't so much being asked to use AI to program—it makes sense in a lot of cases—it's watching people blindly use AI in a way that you know, being experienced, will end in disaster. And knowing that any argument will be dismissed under the pretense of obsolete thinking.

I've resolved to just building stuff for my own businesses and myself for fun. If an opportunity or enlightened soul comes along that wants to benefit from my knowledge, great. But I think it's best to just let people feel the full brunt of what's coming. Sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is to stick the fork in the socket.

Is it practical to give weapons and combat vehicles to under-qualified but readily-available individuals to enforce laws they don't understand (let alone have knowledge of) like we do now?

It's not. We just accept it as a default because it's easy to dismiss something obviously good (making sure police are mentally stable, law-aware, and held to a level of scrutiny commensurate to the job) because it may require effort.

Someone being handed a gun and told to go "keep people in line" should be held to an almost absurd standard before ever being let on the streets. That we don't already do this speaks volumes about the underdeveloped state of our civilization (despite our hubris to the contrary).

I have a strange feeling that we'll see an increasing number of these to the point where we'll start to see legitimate issues in ecosystems as real talent exits (due to projects no longer evolving, being deprecated, etc as a response to AI).

Will be quite funny when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development—despite having AI—because it turns out you actually need talented, creative people to build the building blocks the AI spits out. LLMs can parrot but they're basically the Crazy Town [1] of software development.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6xffJn4-w

> There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility.

This is why two things should be mandatory for new officers: psychological examination and a mandatory law degree from a qualified institution. If you're enforcing the law, you need to actually know its contents and how it works. That would naturally limit the numbers and discourage people who haven't gotten over high school from using their job as a torment nexus.

Because they have low self-esteem and demand subjugation for their misdeeds and presumed inadequacy, all of which is perpetuated by a social apparatus that reinforces these beliefs as a matter of business as usual, or, "normal."

Good to know the going rate for a soul is $20M.

/s

It's a trade off. I use CFs load balancers to simplify steering to instances, but also appreciate that you get traffic filtering (even if not perfect). I think it ultimately depends on context and goals of what you're building. I wouldn't use that setup for everything, but I've found it's a healthy default for getting stuff stood up. Long-term, I think it makes a ton of sense to build up your own solutions.

Push back. Don't be weak. Stop making excuses.

And yes, I have before and yes, I was right, and yes, they appreciated it in the long run.

Only idiots think "speed" is the sole determining factor in all of this. Every time I encounter someone who's over-focused on speed, I get them cut from my team. Those people are corrosive for the very reasons your hypothetical presents. It promotes a culture of unthinking that eventually leads to disasters, hands in pockets, and whistling. Loser behavior.

Get comfortable with becoming human Roundup. Weed the garden.

All of this to just avoid knowing what you're doing.

Folks, this is the wrong direction. Use AI, but ffs take the time to properly learn what you're doing. We don't need to speed run civilizational collapse because we can't understand the concept of patience leading to better outcomes.

You can tell people are increasingly full of shit because they're doing this under the pretense that the problem is creating software faster, when really, a lot of people need to quit optimizing process and develop some skill and rigor. Most of the things that slow down software reaching production are human-created problems like "meetings," counting lines of code, or sending everyone to yet-another-conference that teaches them nothing (but boy does it look good on social media). It's all time waste and theater. And for what? So you feel included?

Pathetic. Learn to do this properly or get out of this industry.

This reminds me of an HN comment years ago where an engineer at some big tech company was at a loss as to how he would get snacks/drinks as the company was ending its free/open kitchen policy (the obvious answer being to just go to the store and pack stuff the night before).

That was the day I realized being a software engineer from greater America is totally different than those from SV. The coddling was (is?) unreal.

What was the overnight cost on taking that route (tokens and dollars)?

Read what I wrote again without pretense.

Adam Curtis had a great line in the 2016 doc HyperNormalisation [1] about Donald Trump turning Manhattan into a playground for the rich from the ~70s-00s.

Now we're turning everywhere into a playground for the rich. The sad part is that they're unimaginative and in such poor taste that it gives you pause about the dynamics of human hierarchies. Wealthy people used to be dignified; I'm not quite sure what you call today's crop. Insecure chic?

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c