short_sells_poo

Python is an extremely popular (and successful) language that is profoundly uninteresting.

You are saying they Zig is uninteresting because they don't want to pander to the current fads?

Let them cook. Perhaps they want to work on the core language for now, and maybe in 2-3 years time they can focus on the framework.

Or maybe they don't care about being popular. A passion project that is being worked on for a small group's enjoyment can still be interesting.

And one day AI might use this complex math to eradicate humans and you will still be "it's all completely fine"?

The fundamental argument boils down to: "who is all this being made for"? And the answer should be "us, humans". A lot of people here seem to breathlessly fawn over AI as some sort of value in itself, but this is incorrect. There is no absolute value in the universe (as far as we know), the only value to us as humans is subjective.

If AI is not generating value for humans, it isn't generating value, full stop.

Hence the question: "what's the point if we can't understand it?" is perfectly valid and should be discussed. The broader question of "what's the point of AI if not for improving human lives" gets lost in breathless adoration of a technology where nobody knows the outcome.

I'm not saying we need to abandon the pursuit of AI, but we must ask difficult questions at every step because if the technology ends up being as ground-breaking as many here think, it could just as well precipitate a dystopia.

All good, I was just trying to point out what parent was trying to get at, perhaps too bluntly.

I'm not trying to diss anything you do, kudos for trying!

I generally found that the HN crowd is difficult to please and perhaps a better avenue of getting feedback (and support) is to tailor material specifically for HN.

E.g. if you had a blog post talking about what you are trying to do, the problems you encountered and interesting solutions you are looking at, you'd get a much more interesting response? We get continuously assaulted by "the next big business idea" all the time, both here and in our professional lives. It's difficult to stand out in that deluge. Talking about the technical side can be an easier way to engage people in constructive discussions.

Well, the parent poster has a point. They are asking: why are you notable? Neither your company, nor you seem to have any track record, references, an indication that you know what you are doing or some prior art that'd be indicative of future performance.

That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.

I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.

Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?

I agree that it isn't an unavoidable tradeoff in principle, but looking back at our (as in humanity) track record, it is 99% likely to be.

99.99% of finance is freshman level math if at that. Then 99.99% of the remaining 0.01% is somewhat more complicated but still not frontier level.

There are very-very few cases where you need truly advanced math in finance. The problems that need solving are generally vastly more pedestrian.

You need to deal with terrible data quality, terrible formats, noise in every aspect of your work, disruptions, lack of standards, inability to generate new data (and repeat experiments), conflicting and often opaque incentives, technical problems ranging from shitty APIs to having to squeeze nanoseconds out of your network stack, etc.

These are all difficult problems, but they are crucially not frontier math problems (by and large).

Yeah, the issue is that it takes one disgusting degenerate who doesn't know how to use a toilet and pisses all over the seat or worse.

I'm purposefully not calling these people uneducated, because I routinely encounter it in an environment full of highly paid and educated people with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc... kind of education. These people come from money, earn money and are supposedly educated. And yet, they will happily piss all over the toilet seat and not even bother to clean it.

Shows also that money doesn't buy class.

There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.

FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.

It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".

No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.

If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.

I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.

That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.

I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.

> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client

But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.

Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.

> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.

You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.

100% inheritance tax would be ideal, but it's never going to happen in practice.

Recognizing the gaps in your wisdom is a sign of wisdom :D

What do you mean by consciousness here? Ie in what way do you think LLMs are conscious?

OK this sounds fantastic, but is it going to be another case of an expert dropping in on this thread and going "Ah, 100s of these come out every month. It's promising but nowhere near human trials yet."

Yes and the human would say: "your photos are ass, it's impossible to price the necklaces"

I was always wondering about this as well. How much more manoeuvrable can an unmanned drone be given that it doesn't need to lug around life support systems and avoid any G forces that would kill the expensive squishy mammal inside? To your point, it can be indistinguishable from a missile.

Or maybe have a slower but still very nimble carrier drone platform with loitering capabilities that launches very fast and nimble drones/missiles?

Going even further, do these even need to be as nimble and fast as fighter jets? Once you completely remove humans from the equation and replace super expensive and nimble fighter jets with swarms of cheap drones, the loss of a drone or even a carrier becomes much less costly and they won't need to overemphasize survival to the degree that expensive human piloted jets do.

The issue is that major US banks are systematically important to the US and also everyone else. Practically nobody cares about Icelandic banks - not even their depositors if their deposits were protected by the state (which they were).

If a bank like JP Morgan were to fail, the event would be without exaggeration cataclysmic to everyone, even small local banks and credit unions. Even if ultimately the clients of JPM could be made whole, the weeks of uncertainty and frozen funds would single handedly obliterate the financial systems across the globe. It's the age old adage: "if you get margin called and get wiped out, it doesn't matter that you'd have recovered just 2 weeks later". The world as a whole is deeply leveraged. It's that leverage that affords us the ability to supercharge all the growth, from AI to drugs research, insurance, EV... everything. But that leverage comes at a cost, which is that systemically important institutions failing can have disastrous cascading de-leveraging effects.

I'm sure we'd more or less all survive and the world would recover, but it would likely be a 2008 GFC style scenario most likely.

The issue is the conflict of interest in POTUS' office. A news agency giving high speed access to news ostensibly just reports news, doesn't make them. The office of the POTUS literally makes the news, even more so today than in the past.

The markets are very headline driven these days because Trump is a prolific poster and is highly unpredictable. This is basically him selling preferential access to market moves that he himself generates.

It's truly an unprecedented level of grifting happening.

Inevitably yes, the question is whether the combined cyborg is still better than the original human.

E.g. I'm sure we are generally less skilled in mental arithmetic since the advent of the calculator, but it has allowed us to solve vastly more complex problems in the end.

> it should not be legal to redefine "buy"

Your post made me go on a thought exercise: imagine a world where you could either own or lease software products. Game developers could decide whether their customers can actually buy the product (which involves ownership) or just the traditional licensing/leasing, which is the prevailing model today.

How would ownership actually work? What does ownership of digital goods mean? Can they even be owned? You get 1 copy of the bytes? How is this enforced? What's to stop you from just selling it multiple times?

If you can't resell it, then what do you actually own? The right to use the product in perpetuity? But that's just another form of lease, no?

Am I getting bogged down in semantics?

You raise a good point, but where would we stop? Should movies depicting medieval events use medieval English? It was the lingo at the time after all.

Chuck Norris can play a game of Russian Roulette with a loaded semi-auto handgun and win. Repeatedly.

It's important to make a distinction between ownership and carry permits. Ownership permits allow you to own and store firearms in your home in a secure place, and take them (unloaded) to a shooting range.

Carry permits allow you to carry loaded firearms in public.

Carry permits tend to be heavily restricted, but I believe handguns are not. The UK is an exception in that gun control is significantly more onerous than any other European country and more or less bans civilian handgun ownership completely.

E.g. in Switzerland, it's trivial to get a handgun. Not any more difficult than buying a double barrelled shotgun or an AR-15 style rifle. On the other hand it's very difficult to get a license that allows you to carry loaded firearms. The regular firearm permit allows you to transport unloaded guns from your home to the shooting range and back.

There are a lot of shooting clubs in former eastern bloc countries as well, and both long guns and handguns are popular for sport shooting.

There are plenty of countries aside the US where citizens can and do own guns.

E.g. gun control is strict in most of Europe compared to the US, but it's entirely attainable to most people without a criminal record to own firearms.

The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.

There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.

Population density is literally measured over a planar metric: people/km^2

You are suggesting it's measured over a cube volume?

I wonder to what degree this is a "if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of thing.

The first place might have a strong surgical team and might be inclined to solve everything via surgery?

It's really telling about the state of the UK economy that the highest earner's business doesn't make anything but literally drains money from the masses.

> It even uses Ruff's code under the surface.

This is the modus operandi for a lot of vibe coded stuff. Absorb the code of entire projects wholesale and then repackage it as something new.

Some of them have the decency to at least give credits to the original.

I wonder if there's also another aspect: Games have to be fun for humans and this involves a lot of trial and error with actual humans in the loop.

You can't just spin up a bunch of claude agents to implement a game for you, because implementing a new feature requires that you playtest it with a fairly fine granularity as it's being implemented.

You can save some time implementing various subsystems with llms, but at some point the dev cycle will turn into: tweak things, build, play, rinse and repeat.

I'm sure asset flip and friendslop games will become cheaper to make with ai tooling, but if you want to make a genuinely good game, it will have to involve humans actually playtesting it during development.