8 ms·
The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work
- hoppp 5mo agoUnavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act
- ura_yukimitsu 5mo agoArchived at https://archive.is/DY9F3 https://archive.is/DY9F3
- basilikum 5mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260414151754/https://aphyr.com/posts/418-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-work https://web.archive.org/web/20260414151754/https://aphyr.com...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bbg2401 5mo agoThe author appears to be under the misaprehnsion that a personal blog with a comment section is impacted by the act.
- Devasta 5mo agoWhy wouldn't it be?
- monooso 5mo agoFor the reasons given in my comment, above [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767650
- MarkusQ 5mo agoMisapprehension? If so, they aren't the only one. https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_bloggers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/uk_online_safety_act_...
- monooso 5mo agoYes, misapprehension. According to the Ofcom regulation checker [1] (linked to by The Register article), the Online Safety Act does not apply to this content. Here's the most pertinent section (emphasis mine): > Your online service will be exempt if... Users can only interact with content generated by your business/the provider of the online service. Such interactions include: comments, likes/dislikes, ratings/reviews of your content including using emojis or symbols. For example, this exemption would cover online services where the only content users can upload or share is comments on media articles you have published... [1]: https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/Regulati...
- TimTheTinker 5mo agoPerhaps the author is being outwardly cautious but knowingly borderline-obtuse as a form of protest against a dumb law.
- krona 5mo ago> Your online service will be exempt if... Users can only interact with content generated by your business As soon as your blog allows comments which other people can read, then you're allowing people to interact with content not generated by your business.
- john_strinlai 5mo agois this legal advice you are offering, as someone practicing law in the uk? because you are all over this thread stating your opinion very confidently. (conveniently, there is no risk to yourself if you happen to be wrong or misinformed.)
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- mock-possum 5mo agoWow the typography is obnoxious on mobile, some lines only have 3 words due to the text justification
- greatpost 5mo agoThank you for this aphyr. My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.
- raddan 5mo ago[flagged]
- atomicnumber3 5mo agoAh yes just go start a company. Let me just ask my father for a small business loan of a million dollars.
- Aurornis 5mo agoClass warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO after years of reading “CEOs bad” content online, they can go into a learned helplessness mode because they think the behavior they’re seeing is normal. They don’t believe changing jobs would help because they’ve learned from social media to believe that their CEO’s bad behavior is actually normal. This has becoming a frequent topic when in a rotational mentorship program where I volunteer: Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this. We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.
- coldtea 5mo ago>Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. Mainly because "CEOs and billionaires" have fucked us over time and again, with their with their lobbying and bribing, with their power grabs, with their consolidation of news, entertainment, streaming, and social media properties, with their participation in the millitary industrial complex, with their censorship and partisanship, and with their rent seeking and worsening of their products...
- Papazsazsa 5mo agopreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379
- dlev_pika 5mo agoI think I’ve seen this article posted every day for the past week or so
- hk__2 5mo agoNo you haven’t, because it was published today. What you’ve seen are past articles from the same author on the subject that all share the same "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess:" prefix.
- dlev_pika 5mo agoOh that’s what’s going on? Was confused as to why the same title kept popping up. Thank you.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoThis has been on the front page for over a week in different forms what gives? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=future+of+everything+is+lies https://hn.algolia.com/?q=future+of+everything+is+lies
- baal80spam 5mo agoThere is new part added everyday.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago[flagged]
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago> more like witchcraft than engineering Welcome to web development buddy > how ML might change the labor market Human labor is expensive. If LLMs do make things cheaper and faster to produce, you don't need that many humans anymore. Again, assuming the improvement is real, there absolutely will be shrinkage for existing businesses in headcount. What remains to be seen is how much cheaper machines make work. 1.5x? 2x? 10x? 100x? > unlike sewing machines or combine harvesters, ML systems seem primed to displace labor across a broad swath of industries [...] The question is what happens when [..] all lose their jobs in the span of a decade It's more like hand tools -> power tools; a concept applied to many things. Everyone will adopt them, and you'll need fewer workers who'll work faster with less skill. You get a gradual labor force shrinkage, but also an increase in efficiency, so it's not like a hole is opening up in your economy. A strong economy can create new jobs, from either private or public sources. > ML allows companies to shift spending away from people and into service contracts with companies like Microsoft The price of hardware, as it always has been, is a downward trend, while the efficiency of open weights is going up (it will plateau eventually but it's still going up). We already spend $20,000 on servers, whether it's buying them once on-prem, or renting them out in AWS. ML is just another piece of software running on another piece of hardware > if companies are successful in replacing large numbers of people with ML systems, the effect will be to consolidate both money and power in the hands of capital That ship left port like 30 years ago dude. Laborers have no power in the 21st century.
- cratermoon 5mo ago"Another critical lesson is that humans are distinctly bad at monitoring automated processes". Humans are also distinctly bad at noticing certain kinds of bugs in software. Think off-by-one errors, deadlocks, or any sort of bug you've stared at for days and not noticed the one missing or extra semicolon. But LLMs can generate a tsunami of subtly wrong code in the time a reviewer will notice one typo and miss all the rest.
- aphyr 5mo agoYes. For more on this, see section 2: https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-dynamics#latent-disaster https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...
- cratermoon 5mo agoAh I see. I had not gotten that far. Something I got from "Story of Your Life", by Ted Chiang. The sentence, "The rabbit is ready to eat"[1]. Also this old chestnut from NLP: Fruit flies like a banana. Time flies like and arrow. [1] The movie Arrival is based on this novella.
- intended 5mo ago> "Another critical lesson is that humans are distinctly bad at monitoring automated processes". I believe the technical term is vigilance degradation?
- curuinor 5mo agoOmnissiah-bothering, I call it.
- nothinkjustai 5mo ago[flagged]
- moussore 5mo agoCan the mods please remove a lot of these comments? Too many bot replies
- micromacrofoot 5mo agohow can you tell?
- mitthrowaway2 5mo agoWell for one, the commenter literally called themselves "no think just AI".
- sealthedeal 5mo agoHAHAHA
- forgetfreeman 5mo agoSeems like a slightly more topical analog of "mitthrowaway"...
- sealthedeal 5mo ago[dead]
- Jtarii 5mo agoDo you have proof the person you are replying to is a bot or are you just going on vibes?
- nothinkjustai 5mo agoOf course they have no proof, and spending 2 minutes looking at my comment history would indicate such. My fault for reading this article half asleep and wanting to thank Aphyr for their writing. I should have instead written 5 paragraphs pedantically criticizing minor aspects of their post while completely missing the point. Or maybe I should be offering my expert legal advice (I watched Suits once) on the UK Online Safety Act.
- mannanj 5mo ago> This feels hopelessly naïve. We have profitable megacorps at home, and their names are things like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. These companies have fought tooth and nail to avoid paying taxes (or, for that matter, their workers). OpenAI made it less than a decade before deciding it didn’t want to be a nonprofit any more. There is no reason to believe that “AI” companies will, having extracted immense wealth from interposing their services across every sector of the economy, turn around and fund UBI out of the goodness of their hearts. > If enough people lose their jobs we may be able to mobilize sufficient public enthusiasm for however many trillions of dollars of new tax revenue are required. On the other hand, US income inequality has been generally increasing for 40 years, the top earner pre-tax income shares are nearing their highs from the early 20th century, and Republican opposition to progressive tax policy remains strong. I think we are in general a highly naive, gullible class of people: we were conditioned, programmed and put into environments where being this was the norm and rewarded. The leaders and those extracting resources, who we gullibly allow to trample over our dignity and our rights, take advantage of this and reinforce it through lobby and influence of the mainstream culture and media campaigns around us. Further, if social media becomes a threat to their statuses, they have been shown to employ their influence there too through censorship and more; we therefore, may be best to learn how to not to be gullible and grow some balls.
- simianwords 5mo agoNo you don’t have to review every single line of code produced by AI in fears of security. This is quite exaggerated and I think the author is biased in his own field.
- vegancap 5mo agoHow come this is blocked in the UK? :S
- Jtarii 5mo agoI think he is trying to make some misguided political statement.
- kentm 5mo agoHis reasoning doesn't seem like a political statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379#47757803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379#47757803 That seems very practical and well-reasoned to me.
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- jerf 5mo agoThe interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on the table. If we're nearing the top of a sigmoid curve and are given 10-ish years at least to adapt, we probably can. Advancements in applying the AI will continue but we'll also grow a clearer understanding of what current AI can't do. If we're still at the bottom of the curve and it doesn't slow down, then we're looking at the singularity. Which I would remind people in its original, and generally better, formulation is simply an observation that there comes a point where you can't predict past it at all. ("Rapture of the Nerds" is a very particular possible instance of the unpredictable future, it is not the concept of the "singularity" itself.) Who knows what will happen.
- forgetfreeman 5mo ago"given 10-ish years at least to adapt, we probably can" Social media would like a word...
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 5mo agoWe can adapt by shutting down social media. We don't really need that. It's been pretty bad since before the AI wave took off.
- fellowniusmonk 5mo agoWe needed a better phone book we ended up in a world where most of our fellow citizens fucking casino.
- faangguyindia 5mo agoWe are bottom. It's just a start. We are in era of pre pentium 4 in AI terms.
- _doctor_love 5mo agoAnother interesting one from 'aphyr -- I think the points around the Ironies of Automation deserve deeper focus, possibly even a separate follow-up post. I would encourage folks to look at the following industries: nuclear safety, commercial aviation, remote surgery. These industries have dealt with the issues of automation for much longer than we have as programmers. In the research I've done, these industries went through a similar journey in the 20th century as we are now: once something becomes automated enough, the old way simply won't work. You have to evolve new frameworks and procedures to deal with it. So in the case of aviation they developed CRM and SRM - how to manage the airplane as a crew and how to manage it as a solo operator. Remember that modern airplanes are highly automated!! The human pilot is not typically hands-on-wheel for most of the flight. In the case of surgeons, they found that de-skilling without regular practice can occur in as little as four weeks! So to combat that, some surgeons are now required to practice in simulated environment to keep their skills sharp. My feeling is that 'aphyr is right in the short-to-medium term. Current market forces and US regulatory posture (or lack thereof) makes it so that there are less rules and less enforcement. IMHO the results are depressingly predictable but the train has left the station with enough momentum that there's no stopping it. If we survive long enough to make it past the medium-term things will change.
- aphyr 5mo agoThank you for this! I really wanted to go deeper on human factors, and I think there's a lot to be said about CRM and sociotechnical systems design, especially when ML gets used for decision support. Ultimately wound up truncating that section (along with more of the economic critique) because the piece was already far too long.
- intended 5mo agoThere’s a paper out there, on designing IT systems from god knows when. It is incredibly dry, except for a line in it that stood out: All IT systems are political systems, because they decide how information and decisions flow. I can only guess as to how much content you would have to explore on that axis.
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- boxingdog 5mo ago[dead]
- enraged_camel 5mo ago>> Imagine a co-worker who generated reams of code with security hazards, forcing you to review every line with a fine-toothed comb. One who enthusiastically agreed with your suggestions, then did the exact opposite. A colleague who sabotaged your work, deleted your home directory, and then issued a detailed, polite apology for it. One who promised over and over again that they had delivered key objectives when they had, in fact, done nothing useful. An intern who cheerfully agreed to run the tests before committing, then kept committing failing garbage anyway. A senior engineer who quietly deleted the test suite, then happily reported that all tests passed. >> You would fire these people, right? Okay, now imagine a different colleague. One who writes a solid first draft of any boilerplate task in seconds, freeing you to focus on architecture instead of plumbing. A dev who never gets defensive when you rewrite their code, never pushes back out of ego, and never says "that's not my job." A pair programmer who's available at 3 AM on a Sunday when prod is down and you need to think out loud. One who remembers every API you've forgotten, every flag in every CLI tool, every syntax quirk in a language you use twice a year, or even every day. You'd want that person on your team, right? In fact, you would probably give them a promotion. Here's the thing: the original argument describes real failure modes, but then commits a subtle sleight of hand. It personifies the tool as a colleague with agency, then condemns it for lacking the judgment that agency implies. But you don't fire a table saw because it doesn't know when to stop cutting, right? You learn where to put your hands. Every flaw in that list is, at the end of the day, a flaw in the workflow, not the tool. Code with security hazards? That's what reviews are for. And AI-generated code gets reviewed at far higher rates than the human code people have been quietly rubber-stamping for decades. Commits failing tests? Then your CI pipeline should be the gate, not a promise. Deleted your home directory? Then it shouldn't have had the permissions to do that in the first place. In fact, the whole "deleted my home directory" shit is the same thing as "our intern deleted the prod database". We all know that the response to the latter is "why did they have permission to prod in the first place??" AI is the same way, but for some god damn reason people apply totally different standards to it.
- aphyr 5mo ago> It personifies the tool as a colleague with agency, Er, just to be clear, I am not personifying these tools. This entire section is a critique of the attempt to frame LLMs as "coworkers".
- m0llusk 5mo agoBullshit is more dangerous than lies.
- pixl97 5mo agoIn enough quantity it becomes impossible to tell the difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- elcapitan 5mo agoI really appreciate this series of posts, as it serves as a good summary of key points of the discourse around AIs, and links to the relevant articles etc. I find following all those discussions myself exhausting, so if I can find this all in one place and read it nicely grouped, that is very helpful.
- buildbot 5mo agoI love the analogy of AI coding as witchcraft! It’s very accurate to how working with these tools feels - At one point I was forced to invoke a “litany against stubbing” in a loop to make claude code actually implement a renode setup for some firmware. That worked really well. It feels like hexing the technical interview come to real life ;)
- barbazoo 5mo ago> I continue to write all of my words and software by hand, for the reasons I’ve discussed in this piece—but I am not confident I will hold out forever. There it is, an actual em-dash in the wild, written by hand.
- aphyr 5mo agoI put... I'd guess around 60 hours into editing this piece, and had review from a dozen-odd friends, and I am still finding and fixing errors. I imagine that asking an LLM for a copyediting pass probably would have been helpful, but goshdarnit, I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago> I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand For what it's worth I think it's pretty reasonably good prose, not merely somewhat passable
- aphyr 5mo agoThank you <3
- itissid 5mo agoEveryday I sit down to build a product for my clients. I am a one man shop _now_. Before I had people helping me. My mental state is not good. A very odd thing happens when claude or codex complete code fast, I begin to think of all the other things that are needed to make AI Agent work better. I begin to worry about problems that other people use to help me with and think "Can I do those too?". Problems like product design, devops work etc. In a bid to try I get nerd sniped by the velocity people seem to have — and these are respected devs not just twitter claims. And because I am so bad at "doing it all" its causing my mental health to suffer because of long hours i have to put it in. I miss my friends and colleagues who I worked with. I always struggled with coding before 2023, but i made ends meet and put food on the table and could work sane hours and knew what I needed to do. Logically I should have been happy that I did not have to grind on code — and some days I truly am — but it would yield such poor quality of life at such a high cost was not what I expected...
- artur_makly 5mo agoyou can always course-correct and find your sweeter spot.
- itissid 5mo agoFor course correction, I began with trying to think a bit more about solving problems for my clients by talking to them more often. That helps to some extent because I feel happy talking to them for understanding how to solve their problems. What I do feel the issue is with I just having to do everything to keep costs down because hiring another dev vs doing it with AI consideration is real and it has collateral damage: I spend more time trying to build AI agents to do the work and there is 1 or 2 fewer jobs I create.
- itissid 5mo agoFor any one who has not read the cockpit recording of air-france-447 I would encourage them to[1]. It is simply jaw dropping study in how things go wrong so fast — a risk with AI we have barely begun to acknowledge let alone regulate as a community. [1](https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/ https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/)
- macrocosmos 5mo agoThat catastrophe is entirely on Bonin the bonehead.
- tra3 5mo agoI read through the link. The other pilot and the captain are complicit by the virtue of being there. Autopilot disengages at 2:10 and they crash at 2:14. Terrible. My other immediate thought -- Tesla's autopilot. I've never used it so I'm not sure I'm fully correct here, but apparently it requires you to be vigilant and take over in certain situations? Wonder how well that works out in practice.
- fragmede 5mo agoIn practice, there's a camera in the Tesla that looks at the driver to make sure they're paying attention. If they're not, perhaps fiddling with their phone or looking at something in the passenger's seat, then the system gives a warning and then a strike. Get five strikes and you can't use FSD for the next week or two. So drivers are directly incentivized to keep their eyes on the road because if they don't, they can't actually use the system which would suck for a long road trip.
- jcalvinowens 5mo agoAnybody who is interested should read the full report: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/AirFrance447_BEA.pdf https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/AirFrance447_BEA.pdf
- ApolloFortyNine 5mo ago
- groby_b 5mo agoI really wish we'd stop arguing about AI with an "some automation failed, so all automation is bad" approach. Yes, AF447 crashed due to lack of training for a specific situation. And yet, air travel is safer than ever. Yes, that Tesla drove into a wall, and yet robotaxis exist, work well, and are significantly safer than human drivers. Yes, there are a lot of "witchcraft" approaches to working with AI, but there are also significant accelerations coming out of the field that have nothing to do with AI. Yes, AI occasionally makes very stupid mistakes - but ones any competent engineer would have guardrails in place against. And so a lot of the piece spends time arguing strawmen propped up by anecdotes. And that detracts from the deeply necessary discussion kicked off in the second part, on labor shock, capital concentration, and fever dreams of AI. The problem of AI isn't that it's useless and will disrupt the world. It's that it's already extremely useful - and that's the thing that'll lead to disrupting the world.
- tra3 5mo agoI think you're maybe oversimplifying a bit. I dont think the argument here is that "AI" is not 100% so we shouldn't use AI. There are issues we need to be aware of. Specifically, AI companies want to inflate the utility of AI because that's how they make money. There should be guardrails where appropriate. Unfortunately, as usual, we need to make mistakes before we can learn from them. Robotaxis do exist, but they are not made equal. Tesla's for instance are 4x worse than humans: https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-crashes-austin-month-4x-worse-than-humans/ https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...
- _dwt 5mo agoI think you may have missed a subtle point: there is an especial risk from automation which almost always works correctly. The aviation industry calls the phenomenon "automation fatigue". It's very difficult for humans to stay alert and monitor systems like these, and the use of the systems tends to lead to de-skilling over time in the very skills required to monitor them and fix the (rare but fatal - at least in aviation) error cases when they occur.
- groby_b 5mo ago
- GistNoesis 5mo agoProgramming is indeed becoming witchcraft, with LLMs it is of the utmost importance that you chose the right database administrator. For example I'm now relying on Soteria, the greek goddess of safety, salvation and preservation from harm to act as my database administrator.
- drivebyhooting 5mo agoIn the case of UBI, how would we differentiate between a previously highly paid professional (SWE, lawyer, author) and a pauper (janitor, car washer, unemployed). It’s only fair that they would receive the same amount. But then how can the former category continue to fulfill their obligations?
- stevenally 5mo ago"But then how can the former category continue to fulfill their obligations?". They can't. Just like the steel workers who lost their jobs in the 1970's.
- simeonantov 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- intended 5mo agoDoes Aphyr give himself a limit of 6 semicolons ? If their editor returns, will this count drop to 0? (And before anyone brings pitch forks out, this is what they wrote in a previous article: > “Cool it already with the semicolons, Kyle.” No. I cut my teeth on Samuel Johnson and you can pry the chandelierious intricacy of nested lists from my phthisic, mouldering hands. I have a professional editor, and she is not here right now, and I am taking this opportunity to revel in unhinged grammatical squalor. My life was made poorer for knowing that semicolons are apparently a sin, but richer for the rebellion.
- keeganpoppen 5mo agoi respect the author of this post wayyyy too much to ever imply that i know more than them, or that i even have proprietary knowledge that they, themselves do not possess. i admire aphyr, and i aesthetically agree with many of the arguments offered forth. but this whole thing feels a bit cherry-picked— i’m not gonna go chapter-and-verse (cf. belt-and-suspenders) about it, but on some levels this comes across as a bit superficial. i think the general thrust— that ai is a sort of Narcissus’s pond— is completely a reasonable and well-considered take. but i would be shocked if someone with the intellectual powers of someone like Aphyr has never had an interaction with an ai in which they did not feel like they were interacting with the deep recesses of their mind in a way both profound and, more importantly, productive. and yeah, there’s plenty of pyrite in them thar hills. but, it does have this almost Lord of the Rings The One Ring -esque pull when you get into a certain “embedding space” (/ thought space) in a certain thread conversing with ai. it genuinely is a profound transformation of cognition, and working superlinearly productively with it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. i share all the same aeathetic concerns, and all the deeper ones. but there have been sessions that i have had with ai that made me blankly stare up at the heavens as well, and i don’t think i’m anywhere near the only one.
- mrdependable 5mo agoCare to provide any examples of what sort of content are in these conversations you had with AI?
- hliyan 5mo ago> One of her key lessons is that automation tends to de-skill operators I recently discovered an example of this phenomenon in a completely unrelated area: navigation. About a week ago, I realized that I couldn't remember the exact turns to reach a certain place I started driving to recently, even after having driven there about 3-4 times over a period of a month. Each time I had used Google Maps. When I used to drive pre-Google-Maps, I would typically develop a good spatial model of a route on my third drive. This skill seems to have atrophied now. Even when I explicitly decide to drive without Google Maps, and make mental notes of the turns, my retention of new routes is now much weaker than it used to be. Thankfully, routes I retained before becoming Google Maps dependent, are still there.
- acoard 5mo agoPlato on how reading and writing make us more forgetful as we rely on this new technology: > And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
- ofjcihen 5mo agoI see this copy-pastad everywhere these days but it misses a huge point which is that written things don’t read or understand themselves.
- hliyan 5mo agoAgreed. Past, unfounded worries about proliferation of new mental labour saving inventions is a real thing, but it's wrong to indiscrimately use the analogy every time a concern about such inventions come up. It reminds me of a certain type of developer who blurts out "premature optimization is the root of all evil" every time someone raises a performance concern at design time (I usually ask such people to complete the second part of that Knuth quote or shut up).
- wslh 5mo agoI wonder if vibe coding is partly what happens when software engineering fails to converge on reusable abstractions. Instead, we got fragmented tools and endless reinvention of the same components, and LLMs arrived as an ad hoc abstraction layer on top.
- Terr_ 5mo agoCopy-paste-and-hope As A Service.
- asdfman123 5mo ago> I can imagine a future in which some or even most software is developed by witches, who construct elaborate summoning environments, repeat special incantations (“ALWAYS run the tests!”), and invoke LLM daemons who write software on their behalf. This sort of prompting is only necessary now because LLMs are janky and new. I might have written this in 2025, but now LLMs are capable of saying "wait, that approach clearly isn't working, let's try something else," running the code again, and revising their results. There's still a little jankiness but I have confidence LLMs will just get better and better at metacognitive tasks. UPDATE: At this very moment, I'm using a coding agent at work and reading its output. It's saying things like: > Ah! The command in README.md has specific flags! I ran: <internal command>. Without these flags! I missed that. I should have checked README.md again or remembered it better. The user just viewed it, maybe to remind me or themselves. But let's first see what the background task reported. Maybe it failed because I missed the flags, or passed because the user got access and defaults worked. AI is already developing better metacognition.
- ryandrake 5mo ago[dead]
- gilfaethwy 5mo agoI'm concerned that developing better metacognition is really just throwing more finite resources at the problem. We surely don't have unlimited compute, or unlimited (V)RAM, and so there must be a wall here. If it could be demonstrated that this improved metacognition was coming without associated increases in resource utilization, I would find these improvements to be much more convincing... but as things stand, we're very much not there. (There may be an argument here re: the move from dense to MoE models, but all research I am aware of suggests that MoE models are not dramatically more efficient than dense models - i.e., active parameter count is not the overriding factor, and total parameter count is still extremely important, though it does seem to roughly follow a power law.)
- baliex 5mo agoIs anyone else just getting this? <h1>Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act</h1>
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- omega3 5mo agoThe answer has always been the same: self-regulated profession and trade unions. Instead the ever efficient software engineers have efficiently dug their own grave. The regulated professions aren't going to be affected by the AI because their members understand that preservation of job security[0], their pay and QOL is more important than automating themselves out of existence. [0] https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/medical-degree-apprenticeships https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/medical-degree-appre...
- npodbielski 5mo agoYes, this is so true. But we never thought about that but instead thought about how smart and better and productive we are over other people in similar position. Also you forgot the link?
- fragmede 5mo agoWhich regulated professions? Trade unions still require work for their members to do. If there's a recession and say a construction slump, it doesn't matter how high or low the union's regulations are for their members, if there's no work, there's no work. Medical doctors are a special case, but eg iron workers theres the official list people get called up from, but you're not getting called up from that list if there's no work. You get work through knowing the right person aka networking. Which is where software engineers find themselves today.
- menaerus 5mo ago> Which regulated professions? All other engineering (civil, chemistry, mechanical, electrical, ...) and semi-engineering (architecture) disciplines.
- rambambram 5mo agoThe comparison with sociopaths is a good one. On the surface all human behavior, but if you lift the veil even a little bit it becomes clear there's no substance, no conscience, etc. Read up on Cluster B personality disorders (borderline, narcissism, sociopaths/psychopaths) and you see the similarities. Love bombing, gaslighting, a shared fantasy, etc. It's very interesting and scary at the same time.
- sambuccid 5mo agoGreat article, near the end it talks about where the money go and if there will be universal basic income. I think those paragraph had an assumption that if models get very smart all the money will go to big tech. But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I think we should really try to do what we can to keep it that way). I'm wondering what the predictions would be in the case where AI becomes very powerfull, but also models are generally available. Two possibilities come to mind, the first one where all the money no longer spent on employment would go towards hardware. New hardware manufacturers or innovators could jump in and create a bit more employment, but eventually it would probably all progress in one direction, which is the only finite resource in the chain, the materials/minerals needed for the hardware. Those materials might become the new "petrol". It's possible that eventually we would have build enough chips to power all the AI we need without needing more extraction, but I wouldn't underestimate our ability to waste resources when they feel aboundant. In the second possibility, alongside a very powerful open-weight LLM, there could be big performance advancements, which would make the hardware no longer the bottleneck. But I'm struggling to imagine this scenario, maybe we would all be better off? Maybe we would all just be deppressed because most people won't feel "usefull" to society or their peers anymore?
- hn_acc1 5mo agoEven if hardware is "cheap" and open-source/weight models are available.. Now what? How does this benefit the average person who just wants to have a 9-5 job and go home and hang with family / enjoy some hobbies? Not everyone's idea of utopia is "all the code I could ever think of writing at my fingertips 24x7".. I mean, I sometimes code for fun, etc. But I also do other things. I don't WANT to be able to do 25x my current amount of work just because. Imagine if you're sick for 2 weeks - now you're so far behind you'll never catch up? The older I get, the less I want all the latest tech everywhere. I just want dependable things that work. And ESPECIALLY stuff that isn't spying on me. If AI can replace anyone who today uses a keyboard/mouse/screen or does something adjacent (for example, teaching) - what's left? If the AI bros are in it for the $$ (many are, I think) - what if a few hundred people in the world had, effectively, all the $$$? Will I still be able to retire in a few years, or will my $$ be worthless? Will I only be allowed to live/buy food/have medical care if I swear allegiance to one of a few tech overlords? Some of those super-dev-brand-marketing-everything guys will be able to spin up a business in a weekend - to what end? What products would they sell? They're a prompt away (not man-years) from someone else copying their product - so why would I give you $10 for it? So you effectively have ZERO $$ from software sales. What's the purpose of self-driving cars if no one has $$ to go anywhere? Do I think we'll get there? I (mostly) don't - but I also don't understand the thinking behind those who DO want to get there at all costs.
- MomsAVoxell 5mo agoEvery time I hear of a hallucinogenic AI event, I am reminded of what happens often with synthesizers, as in the musical variant - an instrument, set up for musicality, creativity, and exploration which - in a mere glance of a finger tip upon a delicately balanced knob - can turn immediately into ear-splitting terror and calamity, if one is .. you know .. not too careful. We have to remember that the results of our prompting is a synthesis, formed on the mass psychosis of a humanity which is simultaneously capable of being completely and utterly heinous to each other, and gloriously noble and kind as well - with nought but a stray new word and a thousand old forgotten to keep us all together or not. In any case, all culture is a lie, which only persists in the re-telling. The past is a lie, too, somehow, someday, forgotten the day nobody remembers it. Hope you make some tunes into the winds and they echo on forever. And by you, I mean, not an AI/ML-based entity, but rather, the source of all lies, the human soul itself.
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- lrvick 5mo ago> Machine learning seems likely to further consolidate wealth and power in the hands of large tech companies Only if you let it. You can own the means of production. I self host my daily driver LLMs in hardware in my garage. Never given money to an LLM provider and never will. I only do work with tools I own.
- sageframe 5mo ago[dead]
- yubblegum 5mo agoAlways a pleasure to read the thoughts of Kyle. I wonder if he self censored here regarding potential futures here as concentration of stupendous wealth in generational hands and obscene wealth disparity coupled with machines that can do what "bodies" can naturally points to depopulation as a goal for the elite and their (future) spawn that are not on the choping blocks.