-2 karma · joined October 10, 2025
Moreover if you can get an edge that is even 2-3% over a coin flip all you need is risk management to make money.
Not understanding this is how you go broke. I traded for a number of years and did well. It was not hard to regularly beat the market, especially in futures and options.
It’s a tool. No one cares about code quality because the person using your code isn’t affected by it. There are better and worse tools. No one cares whether a car is made with SnapOn tools or milled on HAAS machines. Only that it functions.
We know there is no long term merit to this idea just looking back at the last 40 years of coding.
If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.
This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.
But really it’s because Google, Dropbox, etc made it so. Same reason Java got popular. It’s hard to beat first class corpo support even if the actual language isn’t that great.
Coincidentally I can run it all on a 10 year old PC. I see no reason I need to upgrade. I’d happily pay a small yearly fee for patches.
But that’s not why Microsoft did all of this. Their goal is to Hoover all your data into their cloud and lock your PC down so you can’t do anything but use their stuff. Their profit numbers are insane despite losing marketshare. It’s working because the current CEO is a ruthless non-tech moron.
People want to hate on Microsoft. Rightfully so. Apple has done the same thing. Once you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem it’s hard to switch. They push iCloud and Siri on you at every turn. They just made a “one OS” choice so it doesn’t feel as bad.
Anyone who says Linux solves all the problems has not tried to make something like solidworks and masterCAM run on it. I love Linux, I use it on servers, but it has 3% marketshare for a reason.
I tried to present a different opinion here and not flame anyone in my post. But since you're being inflammatory I feel it necessary to call out your terminally online sickness.
The reddit/HN pseudo-intellectual far left navel gazing view of the world is wildly uncommon in real life. Sorry to break it to you but you have to realize normal, well adjusted, people have concerns about books detailing teenage sex and rape. If you don't, you should probably get your head checked. The authors of these books are likely similarly sick in the head.
"Your honor, the death penalty for a traffic ticket?"
AI will never replace humans in this capacity. Lawyers may be scummy but most people would take a slimeball lawyer over a hallucinating, sycophantic "AI" pretending to be both a human and a lawyer. This reads more like astroturfing by Sam Altman to keep the ChatGPT hype going while he cashes out.
Surely unions are too powerful in several industries. Police, medicine, and law. But not having some association holding these people accountable is a bad idea.
Around the time social media emerged all of this changed. People started voluntarily using their real names and photos. They share intimate details about their life to complete strangers. They demand attention, they want to be noticed, they want a "record". It's trivial to piece together enough across anyones social media accounts to pin point where they live, possibly where they travel (sometimes daily), etc.
Subsequently we have children who are being born and raised by this system. It makes sense to me to fence these kids away from the internet. I take the more extreme stance of fencing children away from the entire internet until at least they're teens but I have also watched it turn from a place where you can learn to a very dangerous place for anyone not smart enough to remain anonymous.
Should the federal or state government regulate this? I don't know. What I do know is every bit of data on education. child rearing, health, etc have shown that the average person in the west is completely and utterly incapable of rearing children. Someone has to step in. We are getting to be past the point "it's the parents responsibility" works when the second and third order effects dramatically shift society and it's culture. Either we begin severely punishing parents for failures to thrive (e.g. prison time) or we enact laws like this. I am not against the idea of putting parents in prison for child neglect for their iPad kid, and investigating and potentially removing children from a home when their grades in school have a pattern of being excruciatingly poor despite intervention.
Legislators have a far easier time legislating ID laws than child neglect laws, however, and these ID laws are easier to swallow given existing infrastructure.
There are common themes among all of them. All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school. This list is more like "what should/shouldn't be acceptable for kids and teens". This is hardly a ban. It's at best parental control. But selling it as a ban is key to outrage culture and delivering their opinions about the current administration. Nothing is stopping a parent from purchasing these books for their child. Nothing is stopping them from finding them as a PDF, or at a local or online reseller. Pretending this is "taboo" information is an extremely poor attempt to hide political bikeshedding.
The entire education system is a racket.
LLMs can generate code that works. That much is true. You can generate sufficiently complex projects that simply run on the first (or second try). You can even get the LLM to write tests for the code. You can prompt it for 100% test coverage and it will provide you exactly what you want.
But that doesn't mean OP isn't correct. First, you shouldnt be remembering everything. If you are finding yourself remembering everything your project is either small (I'd guess less than 1000 lines) or you are overburdened and need help. Reasoning, logically, through code you write can be done JIT as you're writing the code. LLMs even suffer from the same problem. Instead of calling it "having to remember to much" we refer to it as a quantity called "context window". The only problem is the LLM won't prompt you telling you that it's context window is so full it can't do it's job properly. A human will.
I think an engineer should always be reasoning about their code. They should be especially suspicious of LLM generated code. Maybe I'm alone but if I use an LLM to generate code I will review it and typically end up modifying it. I find even prompting with something like "the code you write should be maintainable by other engineers" doesn't produce good value.
I am not an accountant but for many years I worked adjacent to them as a developer. I got a lot of time to ask questions and I was generally curious. Even at the SMB level accountants don't necessarily always have a "ground truth". There are so many ways to bury financial data that it needs almost constant vigilance. Yes, in theory, there is one ground truth (inputs should balance with whats there) but in practice humans are SHOCKINGLY good at committing accounting fraud. GAAP is another thing.
Most of "AI"s superpower is tricking monkeys into anthropomorphizing it. It's just a giant, complicated, expensive, environmentally destructive math computer with no capability to create novel thought. If it did have one superpower it's gaslighting and manipulation.
To be honest flock seem like the perfect distraction from the larger surveillance state we live in. I feel like most of the writing I have seen on this acts like this some new, disgusting, pervasive thing. The truth is law enforcement has been using everything available because there’s nothing stopping them from subpoenaing or straight buying the data.
The larger problem is law enforcement needs to be curtailed (good luck unless we bust their union which the pro-union left won’t do), and then cameras need to be removed from phones and homes.
I agree it can be energizing because you can offload the bullshit work to a robot. For example, build me a CRUD app with a bootstrap frontend. Highly useful stuff especially if this isn't your professional forte.
The problems come afterwards:
1. The bigger the base codebase generation the less likely you're going to find time or energy to refactor LLM slop into something maintainable. I've spent a lot of time tailoring prompts for this type of generation and still can't get the code to be as precise as something an engineer would write.
2. Using an unfamiliar language means you're relying entirely on the LLM to determine what is safe. Suppose you wish to generate a project in C++. An LLM will happily do it. But will it be up to a standard that is maintainable and safe? Probably not. The devil is in the mundane details you don't understand.
In the case of (2) it's likely more instructive to have the LLM make you do the leg work, and then it can suggest simple verifiable changes. In the case of (1) I think it's just an extension of the complexity of any project professional or not. It's often better to write it correct the first time than write it fast and loose and then find the time to fix it later.
It's not a secret companies do not want to hire Americans. Americans are expensive, demand too many benefits like fair pay, healthcare, and vacations. They also are (mostly) at-will. H1B solves all these problem. When that doesn't work, there's 400 Infosys-likes available to export that labor cheaply. We have seen this with several industries, the last most prominent one being auto manufacture.
All that matters is that the next quarters earnings are more than the last. No one hates the American worker more than Americans. Other countries have far better worker protections than us.
I see no reason H1B couldn't be solved by having an high barrier to entry (500k one time fee) and maintenance (100k per year). Then, force them to be paid at the highest bracket in their field. If H1Bs are what it's proponents say - necessary for rare talent not found else where - then this fee should be pennies on the value they provide. I also see no reason we can't tax exported labor in a similarly extreme manner. If the labor truly can't be found in America the high price of the labor on tax and fee terms should be dwarfed by their added value.
If it is not the case that high fees and taxes on H1B and exported labor make sense then the only conclusion is the vast majority of H1Bs and exported labor are not "rare talent" and thus aren't necessary. They can come through the normal immigration routes and integrate into the workforce as a naturalized American.
1. You have no expectation of privacy in public.
2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket.
It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is:
1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies.
2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word.
3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action.
4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me.
The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face.
So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
Casual thinking, as the author implies is necessary, would make you realize all of this was inevitable. The whole reason the tech boom existed, the whole reason the author is typing on what I can only guess is a 2005 T-series, the whole reason the internet made it, the whole reason all of this works, is STRICTLY because they wrenched control from us.
If FOSS was gonna work it would've by now. I love FOSS, but FOSS enthusiasts are so obnoxiously snobby about everything. In 30+ years linux has wrenched all of 1-2% more of the desktop market away from the giants.
This was all inevitable.
It should not be a hard ask that regulatory bodies produce meaningful, thoughtful, and extensive uneditorialized reports on a subject. These are then given in summary to congress who can use this information to inform regulation.
This strategy is superior for a few reasons:
1. It keeps regulatory bodies honest and when held to the highest possible standard of scrutiny works to prevent a lot of trivial gaming of the system
2. It separates the powers appropriately. Congress can ask anyone to do research and return results. This is not the same as providing an unelected body defacto law writing power.
And on the final point regulation can be good. I think it's dishonest to interpret my position as anti-regulation. Rather, I think regulation is trivially corruptable. Regulatory capture is the mechanism by which the largest wealth-having class maintains their power. Regulatory capture is trivialized through the use of Chevron Deference (see my post above). By cleanly separating the two we reduce the probability of corruption. If a corrupt politician can't inject their stooges to defer to then we have an extra mechanism by which to protect our rights, and protect our health. It then falls on congress to do the right thing. Then it's OUR responsibility to elect people who will do that.
If we allow for the assumption congressmen are not idiots, are capable of reading and referring to experts, and act accordingly then there should be no meaningful difference modulo preventing unelected officials from writing law. If we cannot guarantee that, then it's not corruption, it's a complete failure of the legislative branch of government and the election system. Which I think we both agree here in one way or another that the system has completely failed.
Congress is expected to make laws. End of story. Chevron Deference allows them to reduce their own liability and burden by rubberstamping opinion into law. That is a tremendous problem. Congress' core directive is to protect our rights. Not restrict them. Industry plants have a much easier time infesting regulatory bodies through revolving door policies, regulatory bodies change with every administration, and regulatory bodies are not held to a standard of rigor that approaches 1/10th of the worst quality scientific journal. That is a major problem. The first thing any true tactical politician will do is move his or her favorite industry plants into regulatory bodies. Then, they can give "opinion" that aligns with the view of that person, which is then rubberstamped into law.
If we cannot expect congress to do their job our government has failed it's absolute simplest purpose. There are then much greater problems than whether turtles are choking on can holders.
While it is not a popular topic here, gun laws, and I am taking a risk with my karma even talking about it, have been subject to some of the most vague and dangerous interpretations by the ATF. In this case we provided congress a way to bypass constitutional scrutiny (pre-bruen) by deferring to the ATF. Two examples are bump stocks, and FRTs, both of which the ATF interpreted as "machine guns", defying their own regulatory definition, and creating felons out of innocent people quite literally overnight. Honest people had their doors literally kicked in. This is a terrifying level of power. It is not the first time the ATF has done this. I would recommend spending time reading the writings of GOA and FPC if you'd like to see how confusing it is for a law abiding gun owner to stay within the lines of the law when Chevron Deference existed. At any point something you lawfully buy, fill out the correct forms, and lawfully own, could be suddenly interpreted with no notification as criminal and thus you INSTANTLY become a felon. There are violations of ex-post-facto, denial of constitutional rights, etc.
Justification is highly subjective and in many cases these regulatory agencies are handed the pen to write and sign their laws.
There is no difference between a regulatory agency writing and passing law, and congress completely deferring all responsibility to them. This is the problem. "Justification" is not held to any standard.
My personal opinion is opinion from a regulatory agency should be held to a higher standard than even the most prestigious academic journal given the consequences. Chevron Deference being used to regulate companies is one thing. Chevron Deference being used to regulate constitutional rights is a consequence, and thus, it is a good thing it is eliminated. Perhaps congress can actually do it's job and demand a higher level of scrutiny, care, and precision from our regulatory agencies.
The problem as I see it
1. Professors themselves don’t understand it and are regurgitating pedagogy from books.
2. The material load is so high for your average bachelors degree you’d spend 8 years in school otherwise. I would hazard to say this is necessary and sufficient but schools wouldn’t get funding and our job oriented society would have it so then only the wealthiest could get education (like it was for centuries).
3. Tests are a benchmark and very expensive. You can consider a class’ total value to be loaded on the final exam. I recently wanted to go back to school casually. One of the cheapest universities available wanted 2600 dollars for a partial differential equations course. If I fail the course I lose 2600 dollars since I would need to retake it to proceed to higher mathematics. This alone does not allow a person time to explore - and that’s just one class!
4. Schools are simply a money laundering vehicle that takes money from students and moves it into administrator pockets. Education costs have skyrocketed yet education and pedagogy remains the same. This is money laundering by any other name.
- understanding leads intuition. There’s very little of either, anywhere.
It was weaponized by both parties to create defacto laws without proper legal procedure. It should’ve been unconstitutional from the beginning as only Congress can make laws. Regulatory agencies are far easier to control, generally contain administration-friendly plants, and are not expected to provide any justification for their decisions. The result is laws that change as the wind blows, confusions, and rights restrictions done by people who should have no business doing so. The “reasonable interpretation” rule allowed Congress to completely defer to them and force citizens to spend tremendous capital getting a case to the Supreme Court.
Chevron’s overturn was objectively a huge win and hardly a “rogue” decision. That editorialization is not a fair representation of the problems it has caused when regulatory agencies begin attempting to regulate constitutional rights. It was overly vague and gave far too much power to people who cannot be trusted with it.
We shouldn’t need Chevron Deference to make laws that protect people from harm done by corporations. Period. If we do, it’s a failure of Congress to do their jobs and a mechanism should be in place to have a “reset button” (like many other countries when they form a government).
Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.
To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.
> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.
> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
You want intellectual argumentation and then make an asinine claim like this.
First, HN was never a place for intellectual argumentation. It's reddit level dunning kruger with the pseudo-intellectual snobbery of a college philosophy courses. If you don't follow the zeitgeist you dont get to argue anything anyway. This is a terrible place for actual debate and those that do enjoy "debate" here are generally on the same side with a marginal (< 1%) difference in their views. The average HNer is a tech enthusiast, mid-to-far-left reddit poster. If you want some good debate turn on flagged/shadowed posts and enjoy the people who generally do not agree with HN's insane take on almost everything and havent been thought policed by Dang. If you were as smart as your smarmy post implies you'd realize any place with le updoots and le downdoots doesnt allow for spirited debate.
Second,
> Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it
"AI" doesn't work well. I've been a professional software engineer for a long time. The best use case for "AI" is mild code review, writing comments, and stubbing out boring work like initial database table schemas. It absolutely hallucinates to hell with any sufficiently complex problem and if you're not aware of context windows you will walk yourself into a trap. The average person is not smart enough to recognize this. Thus, "AI" doesn't only fail to deliver, it is also dangerous due to it's sychophantic nature. I quote AI, particularly, because LLMs are not artificial intelligence. At least, not anymore than least squares analysis is artificial intelligence.
> data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999
Your rant provides no evidence it is not a bubble. An entirely unprofitable industry attempting to scale to make pennies is not sustainable. The amount of capital pouring into a literal wish is not similar to 1999.
It's similar to the 2008 economic crisis where, when the chickens come home to roost, the government will be bailing out big tech companies with taxpayer money because their infrastructure has parasitically attached itself (via the "cloud") to almost everything we use.
> In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging
There have been two DRAM price fixing scandals. If it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck... well it might be a duck. People are right to infer price fixing. The only difference now is it's "legal" because they announced it via a quarterly report. Every 5 or so years there's always something going on with DRAM. One wonders why.
> It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
Your MD friend should stay in his lane and not weigh in on topics he can't hope to understand. His biggest problem is India, not AI. Just like software engineers. Radiology is outsourced at levels similar to software with the only difference he probably made his nut 10 years ago and software engineers aren't paid anywhere near as much as a good non-outsourced radiologist.
Nearly everything on there sucks now. It's all campy politically-undertoned garbage and not anything I would consider fun to watch or a great way to waste my time. The first squid games was neat. A novel concept and interesting. Then Netflix did what they do best and netflix-ify it into a political message rather than a horror film. The latest Ed Gein show had the potential to be amazing but ended up falling into the same campy, political, director had too much creative liberty trash.
They are a tired company that has strayed from their roots. The Warner Bros acquisition makes complete sense because the entire media entertainment apparatus is capable of only producing:
1. Remakes of movies that are themselves remakes
2. An hour and a half movie where they try to inject The Message into as many frames as possible
3. A campy nearly serious movie that needs stupid jokes injected for the squirrel-brained morons that pay for it.
The entertainment industry is in a financial nosedive because no one wants this garbage anymore.