People say one thing and do another. It’s tiring. Long before LLMs we had the joke that a PR with 10 lines changes got 10 comments (all nitpicking), a PR with 1000 lines got just one, LGTM. We’ve had several bugs where PR review would almost certainly never catch the issue, people are terrible at reviewing things thoroughly. Guess what can do that much much better?
Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave? I can’t imagine the rationale to believe that. When Putin leaves all indications are that the next leader will actually be much more hawkish. They will only leave if someone bombs them to death. Which is quite a dangerous thing to do. Ukraine is pushing the limits, and everyone knows it’s with the help of many EU countries. I wonder what it will take for Russia to reach desperate measures in this war.
Russia have been taking desperate measures for years. The only thing they haven’t done is use nukes, which Russia can’t use without consequences that vastly outweigh the benefits.
>Does anyone really believe Russia will eventually just surrender and leave?
With internal turmoil, yes. To maintain the lines in Ukraine Russia needs to constantly send in troops and materiel.
Eventually Russia may decide not to do so. And then there is no magic "pause the frontlines" button if they do.
There is plenty of precedent for this in Russian history too. The Russian Revolution collapsed the frontlines in WWI. The Soviet
Empire collapsed with the fall of communism and concomitant internal turmoil.
Russian propaganda puts a lot effort into treating Russia as some sort of force of nature that cannot be deterred or reasoned with, that will advance and hold Ukraine at all costs.
It isn't true. They're humans like the rest of us, not a natural, unstoppable force.
I see no reason why they can't agree on a truce: Russia haven't gained any meaningful ground for a while. A truce or even a peace treaty would be strictly beneficial to Russia.
The reason is easy to see: it would mean that Russia lost the war which is a disgrace. On the other hand, if the war is continued there is a chance that Ukraine will have to make a deal at Russian terms and remove its army from the disputed regions which would be a victory.
Any outcome short of surrender of Ukraine is an enormous headache for Putin that will likely cost him and his system dearly. They simply cannot, or they will be dead. Why? Because a million of veterans coming back and telling the stories will ask this question: „Why?“ The „Nazis“ are still in Kiev, the NATO is coming, what we got is just thousands of kilometers of ruins, what for was that? The war keeps them busy, for now. The situation is worse for Ukraine than for Russia, so it may feel like they can go on and actually win.
The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that. What was the plan. And blaming the West (which won‘t be 100% justified) will not help. And he may feel that now he is applying good pressure too, with those drone strikes and knocked out refineries.
> The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
That is actually not true at all. People in Ukraine know that it is not about territory but about sovereignty.
The problem of giving up territory is that you will run out of it. The goal of Ukraine is to survive as an independent state, not to hold the ground.
>>>The same can be actually said about Zelensky, for whom any concessions to Russia mean political death too. If Ukraine loses territories forever, people will ask, why so many had to die for that.
There is wrong assumption here that Russia wants only those territories and not whole Ukraine. Also, the Ultimatum was sent to NATO, when Putin invaded Ukraine... and it includes aim to use force against half of Europe and justifications to use it against other half as well.
Also, just like it was with Hitler, allowing him to swallow those territories did not prevent WW2... that was also in plans of Stalin to use Hitler as puppet.
So, the maximum of Russian gamble is to take over most of Europe and given that he also threatened Macron, Putin does not see Russia equivalent in power to anyone in Europe but only USA. He is that stupid - he thinks, that anyone should bow to him, because he has 4000 nukes.
And then just push that (totally correct) line of thought a notch further to the conclusion that it's a long pre-planned, mutually agreed on (though I don't think there can be any disagreement in that club) operation to pull the people of both countries into the chaos in which they become apathetic, scared and subdued into the new world order developments like CBDC, total control and surveillance, while also getting rid of all revolt potential (read able men who are currently being slaughtered in the meatgrinder).
The value is subjective, if you lived in a quaint town and now it’s become a bustling place it may be a nightmare for you , despite the price increases. That is actually a win win situation, though, since you can now move to another quaint town elsewhere while taking a pile of cash with you, with the perhaps important caveat that you do lose your proximity to places and people you may consider more important than the money.
How can someone be so out of touch? A person buys a house, spend a whole life there, and through no action of her own happens to live in an area that drastically appreciates in value over the decades, all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
And where would she move to? All decent areas probably also increased in price, her property went up 10x in value but so did all other properties she would contemplate to buy. That’s the fallacy of thinking property is wealth when talking about your only residence.
The suggestion is that this person can get a mortgage to pay their property taxes over the next 20 or 30 years as part of their retirement - or they can sell their property and live well in a cheaper location.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
All else equal, I can see why the ability to live in the same house until you die would be given a high moral value. But in practice, IMO, this culture causes a number of problems. For instance, where I live, there was a lot of growth in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of young families, so they built a bunch of schools. It's an attractive place to live, so a lot of those people who lived in those houses when they were new and raised those families and attended those schools have kept living in those houses. But those kids that they raised there can't live in those same neighborhoods as adults, because there's no turnover, so they can't raise their own kids there. So now the schools are all half (or less) full, because the neighborhoods they were built to serve no longer have a lot of families living in them. So then they have to close and consolidate schools and everybody hates that. I don't really have a strong view on the moral question of whether houses "should" be owned by older people who have lived there a long time or by young people families, but from a pragmatic standpoint, this situation seems quite bad to me.
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
Yes, ironic how in such a discussion over how we value land, we choose there to be intrinsic value in a private dwelling and little value in an institution that raised that person and an entire community. Grandma Sally gets to die with dignity while her grandchildren wonder thy they need to change schools all of a sudden and separate from their friends.
Perfectly encapsulates modern society's attitudes by generation.
I also weep for the children. I still remember being a kid.
And I feel a lot more reverence for the memories of the house that my grandma and grandpa always lived in for the entirety of the time that our lives overlapped than I do for the memories of the school buildings I attended that are now abandoned or demolished.
I spent more years with them around than I did attending school.
No? I don't really understand what "outside forces" you're talking about. Property taxes? I'm sorry but that's just an incredibly silly and entitled way to think about land ownership.
The comment you are responding to is saying the opposite. They are saying that the person can access the wealth of the house (eg via a reverse mortgage) in order to pay the taxes while staying in the house. That's what this meant:
> Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Simple example. I bought the house at $100k. It's now worth $500k. That means I owe $20k/yr in taxes, but it also means I have $400k of additional wealth. A bank will lend me money with that wealth as collateral. If you imagine that the interest on the loan is roughly equivalent to the rate of appreciation of the property going forward, that's 20 years of taxes paid for by the increase in home value. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone!
GP is not forcing the retiree to move. GP is instead advocating retaining the use of property while reducing the cash flow burden. Asking someone to get a cash out refinance is not morally bankrupt; it is a pragmatic and fair solution. Some states also have deferred property tax schemes; these are even better. It is only fair for someone who, by luck, paid $100k to get a house that is now worth $500k and lives in a neighborhood that is now far better than when she bought the house.
Defered property tax for elderly can be (and usually is) implemented as a lien on the estate, to be settled upon the owners death. Do you heve any problem with that? Or should we now also think of (inheritance of) the children?
"And where would she move to?" -- Either the graveyard or the incinerator? She's dead... the bill doesn't come due until after her death and is settled from the value of the house.
>all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
Change that older lady to a 30 year old woman and the sentiment quickly shifts to "big deal, live in a house you can afford in. people need to move, get jobs, and work. Get hustling". And that is likely the story for a generation of renters.
Yes, it is morally bankrupt. But sympathy is a two way street and can quickly be lost when one side suffers pain.
It's classic neoliberalism think which for some reason the tech crowd is unreasonably susceptible to. "Oh you're poor? Can't afford your bills? Must be your fault." It's utterly disgusting.
You're not wrong, but that's an entirely different discussion from whether or not someone should be forced out of their house simply because gentrification and inflation causes their taxes to go up year after year likely long after they're done working. Oftentimes people buy homes in low-cost areas because that's what they can afford. It's not their fault when the area gentrifies and their taxes skyrocket past their means through no fault of their own. We can advocate both for homes to be more affordable for people that need one and for people to not lose their homes due to constantly rising taxes.
Lisp minimalism is very different. It assumes a runtime with automatic memory management for example, even if the language concepts themselves are minimal, especially in Scheme, it has almost no syntax and just a few core facilities on top of which everything else is built, which are closely related to the Lambda calculus, kind of ignoring completely what real computers actually look like.
In C the minimalism comes from providing only the minimal set of things that are available in most (maybe all) architectures (the Von Neumann paradigm), like linear memory, a simple function calling convention, close mapping to Assembly operations etc.
But C syntax is not very minimalist compared to Lisp , let alone Forth. The fact that C syntax became prevalent in the programming world seems to be mostly an accident to me, it’s not objectively better than those minimalist languages’ or Pascal’s, Prolog, ML families.
That is because C already worked everywhere even before CPU makers agreed on things like making pointers and words the same size.
Edit: And by "worked everywhere" I mean C did the heavy lifting of being a programming language that was even a little bit portable across architectures.
Instructions like AAA (Ascii Adjust for Addition) on the 8088. The 8087's stack architecture. XLAT, STOS, etc. Asymmetries in how the registers work. ENTER/LEAVE. Kludge instruction sets like the Z80.
An instruction set ideally suited for C is the PDP-11.
Why would AAA be an instruction made for C? I don't see this. Or 8087's stack architecture? Or xlat? ENTER/LEAVE is also a counter example where CPU vendors added instructions for other languages than C.
Brainfuck has a even more minimal common denominator. It's just increment pointer, jump to address, read/write. It's basically just a minimal turing machine that ANY architecture will run.
Again: you're defining minimum wrong here! It's not minimum in the sense of using one instruction (which is possible, see "mov"). A minimum common denominator is NOT that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowest_common_denominator (I am not a native speaker, apparently it's normally said "Lowest Common Denominator" in English, in my language it's "mínimo múltiplo comum", so sorry for the confusion).
For example, the LCD of 4 and 3 is 12, that's the "minimum" number they have as a common multiplicator.... it's not 0, even though both multiplied by 0 equal 0. In more concrete terms for C: C is more like the maximum number of things that intersect across all different "common architectures". You want to have most things that everyone supports, not the lowest number of things possible! Hope this clarifies what I mean.
> In C the minimalism comes from providing only the minimal set of things that are available in most (maybe all) architectures (the Von Neumann paradigm), like linear memory, a simple function calling convention, close mapping to Assembly operations etc.
This is beautifully illustrated in the old classic The C Companion by Allen Holub which overviews a simple abstract demo architecture and code generated for it. This is a small book (in the vein of K&R C) but contains enough illuminating info. for a programmer.
What happened to React Native? Is it going to be discontinued as well?? We have quite a few customers using it, so we provide a SDK for it. Could be interesting if we can retire that.
I agree with OP. It’s already the case that when I write code by hand I forget to do stuff that an AI with good instructions would never forget. I struggle with Boolean conditions that get more complex than a few operators while the AI can easily explain and track things like that. Debugging in your head was necessary sometimes to figure out why something was doing unexpected things, now you ask an AI and explain the strange behavior and it will tell you exactly what the problem was in seconds. In summary, at least let the AI review your work, you will be surprised how many issues it finds. At some point it’s just not worth it trying to do things manually, it’s even becoming irresponsible, like not using a type system ( though even that argument was polemic once)
You are explaining why it’s safer “for you” to let AI write code for you, considering the safety here is being put forward in comparison to coding in assembly. That’s fair.
But it still doesn’t explain based on what principle and logic this is the case with regard to coding in a higher level language vs. assembly.
Let’s reframe the question: why do you think writing in assembly is less safe? Do the same reasons apply to AI coding? What are those reasons?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good to let AI have a pass at the code, but this doesn’t lead to the above conclusion IMO.
This has been my experience as well. AI writes better code than me. Rarely I touch it to improve, but often reading it makes me realize it took care of things I did not even think of.
You should be careful. It’s not just about being faster. LLMs can write more tests, more reliably, and find things that must be changed following a change that you might overlook, and find contradicting requirements so much better than humans. You can probably keep up in terms of speed , though I doubt it for nearly every programmer I’ve ever met including myself… but almost certainly not with the same level of quality and thoroughness, despite what people on HN seem to think.
I’ll be ok, I produce higher quality work than any LLM ever will. And if that time ever comes, which I seriously doubt, it’s not like it’s that hard to prompt.
LLMs will hallucinate edge cases or worry about things that just aren’t possible within context. It results in more tests than are needed. I personally dont think LLMs are any good at all.
A month ago I was still talking like you. Then I said to an insisting colleague, “watch I’ll try to vibe code a game engine and show you the crap it produces.”
Granted, this wasn’t my first game engine so I knew exactly what to say, but I was completely floored. GPT Sol & Astra at max effort was flawless at nearly everything I threw at it. I’m talking fully ground up, zero dependencies, just the primitives and SIMD. Fully featured engine done in two weeks with deferred 2-stage render pipeline, shadow maps, mesh shaders, MSAA, post processing, collision, physics, the works.
I even intentionally skipped a few important optimizations and went back to refactor them in, thinking there’s no way it can do a wholesale rewrite of major systems, but it did it. I got dry mouth from all the jaw dropping. My prompts got shorter and more ambiguous, so it would ask me clarify. I audited every line of code, and it was good (after adding two skills.md). I gave up. I’m a reluctant believer.
It sucks, but sadly these things are really good. Don’t be last contrarian, there’s nothing to gain. You’re just lying to yourself
I think this is the part that stumps me. I've done similar things, I'm not math heavy but "vibecoded" a full physics simulator. It wasn't 100%, but it was 90% or 95%. Wild!
But I dropped it and will probably never touch it again.
Are you going to do anything with that game engine? I'm sure there are thousands of others who've written a game engine with the tools. What are they being used for? Is it just to "try it out"? I see people producing a LOT of software. Sure, the code is good, but was it needed? Are people using it?
And maybe that's OK - we're just writing software for ourselves now, because it's so cheap + fast to produce.
> Are you going to do anything with that game engine? I'm sure there are thousands of others who've written a game engine with the tools. What are they being used for? Is it just to "try it out"? I see people producing a LOT of software. Sure, the code is good, but was it needed? Are people using it?
Yes of course. It’s trivially easy to say “procedurally generate a mesh of description of unique shape”. If you can put it into words, the LLM can do it. Do you have any examples of something it can’t do?
You just described the exact same scenario that I’ve heard over and over for the last 2 years. “I didn’t think AI would take over software engineering. But recently, it blew me away with a greenfield implementation of something that already exists and that I know how to make. It has few users and has spent little time in the wild. Now I’m a believer.”
It’s definitely getting better, but this isn’t the kind of thing that is going to change the world. It needs to be good at things that are much more entangled with the world for that.
Maybe I’m just better than you? It’s something to consider. Your whole point here is that astra could pump out something faster than you ever could at a quality level _you_ think is good. It might be worth some reflection that _your quality level_ is not _my quality level_.
I have no pressure to use this stuff. I’m still getting paid. I’m still shipping higher quality software at the same speed as the rest of my peers. Why should I sacrifice quality for speed?
People say this, and it sounds reasonable. But, as a user of software, I certainly am not feeling a lot of software getting more reliable and higher quality. Mostly I feel the opposite of that.
We improved that by creating a skill that is precise about what we want our tests to look like, and telling the AI to always use the skill when writing tests.
It still writes a bit too many and uses a bit too much mocking, but the alternative of humans missing obvious use cases and just being lazy to test important cases is much, much worse.
Of course. LLMs only produce the average. Most of the time if you think you need to mock you should probably just do the real thing. It’s mostly an antipattern.
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