viccis

I've seen many people point out that, despite AI being heralded as increasing engineering productivity by 10x or more, we don't seem to have gotten a decade worth of new disruptive sites and apps like we got multiple times a year in the early 2010s. Not that surprising to me, as product fit was always the bottleneck, rarely engineering.

But I can say that where AI and its externalities truly excel and have rapidly accelerated is in taking away or at least hobbling the value of many sites. This is another victim, I think. Reddit needs to figure out how to make money, and their main valuable asset now is a trove of somewhat organized (compared to, say, Discord) text conversations. They have so far been too incompetent to turn being one of the only way to get good results from google searches into revenue, so they're scuttling that with this and the normal site paywall in hopes of LLM corpus cash.

Literally why I started to come here. r/programming because a derelict wasteland. What commentary you got was frivolous and unhelpful. Posts about CockroachDB there would all be jokes or other commentary on its name, while you'd have the engineers who created it in here. I started to notice a lot of posts with mediocre discussion had a related post in the r/hackernews. While I had come here now and then, I started to see that I could actually still learn stuff here and decided to skip the middle man.

I had a coworker catch Codex (using 5.5 I think, not sure) AI generating screenshots to prove it had shipped a feature that it was blocked from shipping due to permissions issues. They will lie relentlessly lol

My recent problem wasn't that interesting. It was that somehow my /goal in my Claude implementer session got picked up in my planner session after the network cut out and I had to stop Fable 5 xhigh from running off to go code everything.

Are these real findings, or a situation in which fixes have been backported? At one place I worked, the corpsec guys were wildly incompetent and would try to bury me in "CVEs" in my systems that were nothing but "vulnerable" software versions with all of the "identified" vulnerabilities fixed by Debian backported patches.

>With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

I would expand this even further and say that the worst problem for people in the trenches isn't even just that this is happening, it's the it creates a situation where managers are held to some expectations (their team shipping product features) that incentivize not looking too carefully at what their team members are putting out. It makes it really hard to tell a boss "we need to stop and spend a few days reviewing and rewriting because one of my teammates likes to one-shot everything with poorly thought out Claude prompts making multithousand line PRs" when their own bosses are breathing down their neck.

It's the same struggle we face to get refactor work prioritized, just at a much more frequent cadence. "It's working so why do we need to spend another sprint on it?"

A good way to accomplish this is to ask the AI to give you some good names for the project. It tends to regurgitate those, and a quick search of existing apps will flush it out.

Part of the problem here is that this college has <5% acceptance rate. Very hard to get into and prestigious. The students who get in have been minmaxing and exploiting every advantage they can for their entire life.

Banning existing billboards isn't a first amendment problem if it's not contingent on the contents of the billboard. Much like some radio frequencies are reserved, other media are forced to obey regulations.

>Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one.

Only matters if the constitution is enforced. Courts can easily overturn previous decisions. If there's a will, there's a way.

I agree, I work on an "airgapped" BYOC system as well, that runs on data lake providers mostly, and it's a bit of a nightmare because each customer has their own labyrinthine network setup, their own way of ingesting data (as much as we try to be prescriptive, some of them just insist on doing it their way), vastly differing scales and shapes, and sometimes their own secure communication tooling to even read the emails describing the problems they have. It's basically shrinkwrap software.

We're moving away from it as much as possible lately for all but the biggest customers with the strongest isolation needs.

I am also struggling with coworkers thinking they can cowboy code some LLM written features into these codebases recently, not understanding the level of human verified testing that needs to catch all the manifold edge cases and weird decisions in their usage. An update that causes crashes is much harder to catch when you can't do slick blue-green deploys and similar things to roll out updates.

>Of course, woe betide those with social phobias

I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well.

Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.

I've actually thought about creating (maybe ironically with AI) a browser extension that just filters every submission about or clearly created with AI out. I spend all day being asked to review AI PR slop by coworkers who I suspect to be working multiple jobs, "creating" PRs that they don't review. They have AI review my comments and Slack me follow up questions on them. It's a constant drain on my productivity, and that of my coworkers who use AI appropriately. So I just hate to log onto here, the place where I go to read people who know what they're talking about describe their pet (or prod) projects, and see it full of AI discussion like this or "Show HN" with something they didn't make.

You can actually just eliminate existing ones. The government can just do things and absolutely already does whenever politicians really want something to happen (data centers, etc.). There's no law of nature that billboards must be allowed to remain where they are.

Oh it's the AI billboards, and not the crowds of like 20 people shooting up at 7am as I'm walking from my hotel to Moscone for my work conference? I guess the AI billboards do create a bitterly ironic feeling in that context, but my overall impression of SF is that it's the lowest trust society I've ever been to, in or out of this country. Basic lawlessness is so common that even things like my hotel's elevator inspection was 3 years out of date when I last visited. Part of that is that I end up having to walk around the Tenderloin/SoMA/Union Square parts of town if I'm there for something at Moscone, but honestly that's on SF. Keep the downtown part of your city that people visit clean enough that my clothes don't reek at the end of the day just from the smell of the city. I honestly never have this issue in NYC.

Seems like an almost irresponsibly misleading headline.

Back in my pen testing days, the best way to get someone to do something stupid and click Accept on something like a Java Applet permission check was to annoy them. Pop up a few annoying modals and eventually they just click yes on everything.

False equivalence fallacy

Yeah one of the worst offenders of this are the leetcode problems that have a clever but extremely elegantly simple greedy algorithm (such as "return True" lol). Great example is Majority Element [1]

The answer seems pretty clear when you think about it enough, even the proof seems like it makes sense. The problem is marked Easy on Leetcode. But coming up with the algorithm and proving its correctness is a two-name algorithm with its own Wikipedia article. In your example, the challenge isn't even really to "design" that algorithm, it's to prove that it's true.

1: https://leetcode.com/problems/majority-element

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_majority_v...

>The coding questions that require an "aha!" moment are very similar to brain teasers, and should also be avoided.

The problem with these is that their solutions always seem trivial when you are shown them (or spend time solving yourself) and then mull over them for a while.

>Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation?

Is there even the tiniest reason to suspect that the people steering this progress will use it for the democratic good of all?

The ability of an LLM to produce something not in its training data set.

"Engineer" is a floating signifier and there's no reason to pretend it's anything otherwise in the US.

If anyone wants more discussion on weird fiction, I'd recommend Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie. It's a fairly short but interesting read and not particularly political like most of his writing is.

It's good to avoid anthropomorphizing them when evaluating their capabilities (all the AGI nonsense)

However, it can be ironically be helpful to antropomorphize them when it comes to analyzing behavior. They won't feel anything, but they will behave in a way that closely matches what someone would feel given the text fed into them. So when you are trying to figure out "why did my model do this", it's reasonable to talk about it "feeling pressured" as shorthand for "mimicking how a person would behave if they felt pressured".

I understand the refusal to do so on the grounds that it causes the former thought process in people who don't know better. One of the things Dijkstra was right about for sure.

Historically, owning them meant when one person upgrades, other family members could get their old ones. I use my old iPhone as a dev phone for iOS coding. I can also just enjoy having a working device that I'm not still paying for once it's paid off.

The iUP was better about giving the choice to just buy it out at the end. This one is more rigid:

>Terminating your Apple Upgrade Lease: Closing your lease and returning your device terminates your lease. You may incur substantial fees if you terminate your lease before the end of your initial lease term. You may have the option to upgrade to a new device by entering into a new lease agreement and returning your prior device. If you upgrade, your new monthly payments may be greater than your prior monthly payments. If you do not upgrade, terminate your lease, or purchase your device by the end of the initial lease term, the lease will convert to a month-to-month lease for up to six months. Your monthly payments may increase during the month-to-month periods. If you take no action at the end of your extension period, you will be charged the purchase fee under your lease. You will not own your device at the end of your lease, unless you pay the purchase fee. Insurance is not included in your lease, and you may incur damage fees if the device is lost, stolen, or not returned in the condition required by the lease.

Partnering with Klarna explains it quite a bit. They make money on penalties. This new plan has all sorts of sticks it will beat you with if you stray off the path, so it's perfect for them.

They're switching to a lease model. Almost certainly because of the cost of components, but also in their interests to continue the "you'll own nothing" trend. They're even using Klarna as the leasing provider.

>All, without exception, point out that failure to address the emotional content is a bad idea and one of the reasons conversations become ineffective.

I am not sure how you could walk away from this comment thread and still think that's the case. Minus this digression which does argue about central concepts, the discussion about the original point is pretty close to the bottom of Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement.

I guess maybe a better question would be why you think pivoting a conversation about how open weight models are changing the industry into a conversation about whether a commenter was rude is a positive outcome? I would understand either ignoring him or answering his content, but I'm trying to understand how getting into back and forth about tone (back in my day we call that a flame war) is a good use of one's time.

>Do understand: Until about a decade ago, I thought like you. It caused me all kinds of headaches in the real world

I've found it to be quite the opposite! Not rankling at someone's emotionally charged language in real life has been incredibly useful, both for interactions with friends and strangers, but also with family. The people I know who are miserable about visiting family at Thanksgiving feel that way because they are unable to stop themselves from getting into conflicts because their relatives made some emotionally charged statement. There are also plenty of situations where people come in hot and angry, and you can turn it around by simply letting their tone slide and trying to help them. Happened all the time when I tutored compsci students. They'd come in angry and surly because they'd been beating their head against a problem or concept, and a little patience and forbearance went a long way towards improving their attitude.

>Depends on which subreddit and which flavor of groupthink. The behavior you say is upvoted is one I often see downvoted to oblivion on Reddit.

Really doubt that but feel free to give an example.

>If it's OK to address his comment sans the "decel", it should also be OK to address his use of "decel" without discussing the rest of the comment

I think the only acceptable response is to answer his argument if you can read it. If you can't handle a heated commenter and insist on making his anger the discussion, then you'd have been better off not answering it. So just recognize this and ignore.

>Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good

For convenient definitions of "dangerous"

Oh, I understand. It's the nature of the voting system of comment feedback. Reddit behaves the same way. Arguments become competitions to see who can inject enough vitriol while still maintaining a placid genteel demeanor. The one who "wins" (convinces the peanut gallery to upvote them) is the one who can avoid looking like they got mad.

It's why people can advocate for ethnic cleansing here, and that's fine as long as they word it correctly, but if someone calls them an asshole about it, they're flagged.

Really common in rationalist circles from my experience as well because they believe that true statements aren't always normative, and that, since their arguments are true because they're rational, their statements aren't necessarily normative. Begging the question, of course, but I see that in situations like Scott Alexander's defense of "human biodiversity" theories (the whole HBD moniker is itself an example of everything I'm talking about condensed into two words).

Because discourse around tone isn't productive. You could wipe this whole comment thread, starting with the parent of mine, and lose exactly zero information.