sillyfluke

Yeah, when someone writes a vague prompt that simply says "Do what it takes to finish X" and the unleashed agents end up doing something lethal and illegal you would think its on the AI company to prevent any illegality and not the vague prompt writer.

>The implication that the solution to this is to somehow convince your direct competitors to do inferior in-person KYC for you is the most ridiculous thing.

People work with their competitors all the time (see Netfix vs Amazon). Whats ridiculuous is the claim that a scammer would prefer to show up physically at a bank and risk being exposed instead of operating remotely.

>leaking a selfie is pretty low down on the list of “bad stuff a bank could leak”.

don't some of them require a selfie while holding legible official documentation?

> There is no irony because I have seen humans do the same thing.

Your original comment started with the sentence:

> I am currently writing a lot of code that I am not reviewing anymore.

Then you give an example of catching a bad pattern the LLMs used when you actually reviewed the code, after you mentioned you had multiple agents set up to catch each others mistakes. That is the irony. You're mentioning that LLMs engage in basic bad coding patterns that are not caught by multiple agents, hence underlining the importance of human review.

> There is no irony because I have seen humans do the same thing.

Yes, but you were reviewing the humans. You're not reviewing the LLMs.

> I set up excellent testing the same way a CTO would set up excellent testing.

Knowing LLMs can make basic coding pattern mistakes (as you mention) but still unleashing them on your tests without routine human review that makes sure that test suites have not been negatively affected after each iteration seems like the polar opposite of consistantly maintaining excellent testing throughout the software development process.

>Claude was consistently doing database operations in a for loop, where it could use batch operations.

>The code in the end is better than a lot of the code I've seen humans write.

It's a little amusing to see those two sentences written back to back with no hint of irony to be frank.

By the way, why didn't the "Multiple agents going over the same problem catch a surprising amount of dumb stuff that would otherwise slip through" catch it?

Who knows how many skills you would have to have added if you actually reviewed the 400k codebase...But don't worry that's not what I am advocating. I myself would also latch onto any excuse that allows me to avoid the realization that I have to review 400k (or half that) lines of code, primary one being that I will always have a desperate paying customer that will always be grateful for anything I give them.

Which comes to your most valid advice which has nothing to do with AI (now that many devs have access to it):

> Work for business people who want fast results

This is what well oiled outsourve shops used to do and I must say it is no easy feat to be able to line up a constant stream of desperate businness people out of thin air, especially for your regular "I just want to code" engineer.

My guess is you're in the honeymoon phase with most of these people. The outsource shops that survived would fire the client that became more demanding and less grateful and move onto more freshly desperate client pastures. It is true that sales, self-promotion, and marketing are more important than ever now...

>Set up excellent testing.

Is this the part that you hand code or constantly review yourself? I guess not, since you would have explicitly mentioned something that important. I would caution you not to be surprised when no one believes you have excellent testing when you've unleashed multiple LLMs on it and are not reviewing code anymore.

>There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof".

You may have a different understanding of the word "complete" than the standard definition.

Unless you are claiming the verifiers kept the watches being tested under constant survellance for several years, the proof you are alluding to may only prove that it is not routinely sending or recording data. It does not prove they can't turn it on whenever they feel like it, or when obeying a time-limited and geofenced mass surveillance order.

> clearly

Debatable, and clearly not clear. It's weird to say this when there are obvious counter examples staring us in the face, not least of all the founder of the company he just left, of who (Dario) people could have said the same thing when he left OpenAI.

Granted, there is less likelihood now then there was then but this much is clear: if he starts his own company, he may make more.

Meta:

> True which is why I said anecdata

Forgive me for being cheeky, but presumably this is not why you said anecdata.

You presumably said anecdata because you were describing your own personal sessions with Claude. Your original comment is written as someone who is assuming the AI is doing a deep deterministic analysis of its own internal systems in order to respond to you. It could simply be aping some discussion on the same topic within its training data, which if sensible is, as you say, not entirely worthless...

Since the discussion was related to the job security of a programmer with good taste, I'm trying to read your comment from that perspective.

If I am understanding you correctly, you are claiming that an AI will not design a table to be readable unless a programmer with good taste is prompting it. Did I understand you correctly?

If so, then yes we are going to arrive at different conclusions, because my claim is that the table made by the programmer with no taste will be acceptable to the client, hence good taste won't save the other programmer because good taste will require more guiding and interference by the programmer. And then the client will just go with the no taste implementation.

If the programmer with good taste truly does not lose any time implementing their solution when compared to the other programmer, as you claim, then yes the client will go with good taste since all else are equal.

I just find those assumptions hard to believe at this stage.

1. is a bit contradictory or at the least a "devils in the details" wishful fantasy which hasn't been showcased convincingly in the wild yet (by "the wild", I mean software eng shops and corps). It's assumed the devs who have taste were able to implement their taste fine pre-AI, sure, but the whole gotcha in 1. is that the ones with good taste currently are not confident in implementing their good taste while simultaneously "producing good results quickly using AI".

It's a story as old as time so I'm frankly less amused by it. The old school censors always saw every "data" that was taboo under the sun prior to censoring it for public consumption.

> Lost track of how many juniors I've seen throw their hands up and say they can't progress because they don't have logs/clean repro

Not the parent, but I think their approach is the correct one even though their line that you quote "You can't debug something..." should be everything instead of something.

The issue with your juniors is them throwing their hands in the air without actually reading the code when they hit a wall, and not them trying to reproduce and inspect the bug first.

What's the issue with telling them, "Obviously if you can't reproduce it and inspect it with dev tools, read the code."?

I've won bets off devs who blamed me cause they said they couldn't reproduce the bug consistently when they tried but it would happen randomly in production. Mind you, the bet wasn't even about who was at fault. The bet was that I could reproduce it if I actually tried.

You are complaining about juniors in a role that's known for the motto "it works on my machine" of course they're going to whine the moment it takes some effort to reproduce something.

At the end of the day, how are you going to claim you fixed an issue if you can't reproduce it to begin with? The senior has to now read the code more carefully cause there is no proof the junior actually fixed anything.

>the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter.

Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?

This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel.

Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nondeterministic tools in their current incarnation, at least to humans.

If an automatic chisel had a feature that could switch from chiseling from sedimentary rock to chiseling marble but would randomly and nondeterministically switch to the other mode during its use it would be considered defective. But with LLMs the industry has collectively decided that the nondeterministic automatic chisel builds so fast that the current defect rate from the nondeterminism is acceptable.

It would make sense to isolate the last line of defense from LLMs, ie the tests, but this rarely seems to happen any more. Once the tests are contaminated with LLMs all bets are off.

And people forget that along with atrophying skills and reasoning due to less coding, the skill degradation is hastened because the programmer is faced with the reality that they would have to constantly figure out, review or edit someone else's code (ie, the LLM's) if they truly wanted to maintain a last line of defense. But as this type of task is literally the least liked task in programming, the programmer passes it off to the LLM as well to avoid burnout...

just a warning - The Expanse is not competency porn like the Martian, more like political/military action in space.

...and a mandatory website for every app they tell you to download.

"imaginitive" is a more contentious adjective but The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and the Expanse seem on the optimistic side of the spectrum to me.

>It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine.

This was a very predictable outcome given the curcumstances.

You forget to mention the guy who was the posterboy for futurism literally decided to turn himself into a political machine circa 2018 or thereabouts against half of the country, apparently triggered by his inablity to cope with his child transitioning and the bruising of his ego when NPCs on the internet made fun of him for failing where they succeded (the scuba diver pedo incident is one example).

Prior to that, he was the second coming of Steve Jobs to the same cohort (pg even called him "Steve Jobs with no taste" on this forum at the time).

Tech should be considered with its political direction (or lack of) to be deserving of adulation. The Cold War dictated the Apollo program for Christ's sake. The whole thing was saturated in politics. The difference is that most people were united for the cause. Believe me, if the people running the Apollo program declared war on half the country it would have been remembered and popularized quite differently.

I'm sure Jewish German scientists had a reluctant admiration for whatever Wernher Von Brauhn was acheiving with the Nazi space program but it would be completely secondary to the fact that he was enabling the Nazi party to "win". No engineering feat could or should eclipse that fact.

Regarding Tech without taking into account the direction it's pointed at is ridiculously naive, whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.

It's not like Germany would have magically grown out of the Nazi party if only Von Braun kept on building cool shit.

I think they're cutting strategic investments that they don't have personal investments in, as suggested in their banana republic handbook. They seem to be fine with fossil fuel investments for example.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.

Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.

The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:

"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Trump-...

alternative for those that can't read the link:

https://consequence.net/2026/08/eminem-dolly-parton-tribute-...

https://archive.is/t7GHA

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

...as Mickey Mouse was fond of telling me as I waiting for the ride at Disney World. Or it was my drill instructor. can't remember which.

Subsequently named Head of Post-Ethics at Palantir.

The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...

>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition

The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.

He was method acting, so I'll allow it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but something tells me they don't defer to a panel of astrology app power users when deciding whether an app is a novel astrology app or not.

Also I'm not sure if I should be insulted when they insist that The Kama Sutra is "low effort".

...and I've noticed that's not always the case. What's the value of such a bland whitewashing comment?

Their numbers might be dwindling, but I would wager there are still some devs out there burning the candle from both ends.

To be fair, I find US forced company events like this way more unbearable than UK/European ones. In the US, the incessant combination of excessive alcohol with neurotic self-awareness gets you to another level of hell.

In another FAANG, the L7s were complaining that the level of office machinations that were occuring stateside was off the charts compared to the offices overseas.

UK afterwork pub culture should be under UNESCO cultural protection at this point, I'm always surprised it's lasted this long. One would have to admit it's fended off the decreasing consumption of alcohol in the new generation impressively even though they may despise the tradition.

In the parent's comment I initially read "PR" as "Public Relations" not problem report since their comment is about OpenAI and does not directly accuse Hugging Face except for that phrase. But it's still amiguous to me who's PR they are actually talking about. A good faith reading given the rest of the comment leads me to assume they are talking about OpenAI, not Higgins Face.

I did actually search Hugging Face with police in quotes and found no articles containg the word police but that might be a ddg thing. Then I checked Hugging Face's report and they specifically use the term "law enforcement" not police, as is to be expected I guess. So that checks out.

Can you find any info on the police investigation by the way? At the least, OpenAI should be investigated for potential criminal negligence, right?

Right?

This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.

I agree, though it should be said arguing in public is for people willing to accept the consequences of their actions (retaliation, getting fired etc). That's why ideally you should arrange your life (mentally or materially) in such a way that allows you to act without the fear of being fired, if possible obviously.

Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?