To me this goes in the same direction as people not feeling sorry for software developers because our job is supposedly automating the job of other people (which I don't think describes the profession accurately as a whole at all).
Neither sits right with me. Can't we just all collectively acknowledge that we have to grapple with this new piece of technology that either is already or at least seems to be going to be hurtful to a lot of individuals?
Instead of looking at the in comparison limited group of people currently pushing this technology and asking ourselves whether we should be on board with their doing, we look to one another and are happy that someone else is now suffering just the same as we are. What a sad state of affairs.
100% agree. The comment you are responding to is basically playing "victim Olympics".
AI is going to suck hard for lots of professions, software engineers and mathematicians included. I think it's much more productive for folks in these professions to show solidarity with each other given the way AI will disrupt their livelihoods, rather than showing disdain based on who you think may have it slightly better.
I agree with you because I so thoroughly understand what mathematicians are saying. Expertise and knowledge developed over decades, previously unique and marketable, and status conferring, are threatened in their relevance because of ai.
I know this intimately because I identify, roughly, as a programmer first and security researcher second. Guess which two fields ai companies decided to specialize in first? Yes, the FML ones.
The intellectually rewarding part of my job/skills - the only reason I enjoyed them - are, not completely gone yet, but threatened. And shrinking. This is a very scary observation.
I know from ‘isomorphic situations’ lessons in history that fighting the tide is pointless. I have to decide intelligently how to respond. Easier said than done when your livelihood and identity are at stake.
For now I still have a job but I and everyone around me is worried. In a year, At best our jobs will be very different.
So yes I empathize with these mathematicians enormously.
I don't empathize with them that much, as many of them share in the blame of creating the broken system we have today. They want the status that comes with tenure and having a nice math job, and then pull up the ladder for everyone else.
Math journals commonly reject papers as “out of scope” or “not of sufficient interest” without an editor or referee actually reading them. So it’s not as if the “math community” was checking these papers for accuracy in the first place. Now AI speeds up the creation of papers that go unread, and we’re supposed to pity mathematicians? If journals and experts can’t be bothered to read the papers, why should authors bother to write them without AI? And suddenly mathematicians are worried about AI papers being “too hard to read,” even though that wasn’t a concern pre-AI, when no one was reading them anyway. Too bad. The incentive structure now points toward AI, and mathematicians share the blame for that.
Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...
> or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).
For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!
At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.
Proponent: EmergingTech is gonna be amazing, it'll at revolutionize everything!
Bystander: Alright. But I'll hold off until I see actual evidence of that happening. Truly revolutionizing tech usually shows clear signs of being revolutionary, and doesn't need evangelists.
Proponent: You're gonna be left behind! Act now, or forever miss out! Here's analogies with things we know in hindsight were revolutionary.
Bystander: Those analogies are bad for these specific reasons.
Proponent: You will be proven wrong!
It's so dumb. At least you AI proponents don't post pictures of yourself with glowing laser eyes when you evangelize, so I guess that's an improvement over the cryptobros.
PS: I emphasize that I'm not claiming that the technology won't have huge effects on society. If that's your take on what I write, you have to read again.
To people stating these high commit numbers: What is your average changeset size? I have found that having agent do large changes (few hundred lines or more) results in a lot of friction for me and it feels like at some point I leave a happy path where instead of moving quickly I get dragged down.
One thing I am wondering: How much logic (in the programming sense) is there in this product and how much of it is „just“ a lean wrapper around the LLM?
Hi HN, I am wondering if with the recent push for CLIs rather than MCPs people have heard of or are using Restish for creating their own CLIs for APIs?
The thing lets you create a single CLI for any number of APIs following OpenAPI v3 or JSON Schema. I've tested if with our self-hosted Grafana and it does work, though I am not sure if it is as good as the Grafana MCP.
Anyway, it seems perfectly positioned for the CLI over MCP push, while sitting at 1.2k GitHub stars which is tiny by AI standards. So I am wondering if there is more nuance in CLI over MCP here or if other solutions exist?
(Note: I am not in any way affiliated with the project, I just think its neat and interesting)
And if we do adapt we might still get replaced because less of us will be able to do more. Or we wont because of Jevons Paradox. Linux maintainers on the other hand can code (with and without AI) what I could not (with or without AI). So in a way becoming a more knowledgeable, more skilled programmer is the way? In any case, too much speculation about the future.
(1) Are there any plans to make this compatible with the ducklake specification? Meaning: Instead of using Iceberg in the background, you would use ducklake with its SQL tables? My knowledge is very limited but to me, besides leveraging duckdb, another big point of ducklake is that it's using SQL for the catalog stuff instead of a confusing mixture of files, thereby offering a bunch of advantages like not having to care about number of snapshots and better concurrent writes.
(2) Might it be possible that pg_duckdb will achieve the same thing in some time or do things not work like that?
(1) We've thought about it, no current plans. We'd ideally reimplement DuckLake in Postgres directly such that we can preserve Postgres transaction boundaries, rather than reuse the Ducklake implementation that would run in a separate process. The double-edged sword is that there's a bunch of complexity around things like inlined data and passing the inlined data into DuckDB at query time, though if we can do that then you can get pretty high transaction performance.
(2) In principle, it's a bit easier for pg_duckdb to reuse the existing Ducklake implementation because DuckDB sits in every Postgres process and they can call into each other, but we feel that architecture is less appropriate in terms resource management and stability.
Agreed. One of the researchers quoted has a good take on this:
> “There are definitely groups out there who would like to push the responsibility of reducing carbon emissions away from corporations and onto individuals, which is problematic,” said co-author Dr Ramit Debnath, Assistant Professor and Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge. “However, personal carbon footprints can illustrate the profound inequality within and between countries and help people identify how to live in a more climate-friendly way.”
because most damage is institutional so most of the work has to be done by institutions (states) and corporations. you can track the carbon footprint of rich people all you want, this won't change a thing until states and corporations are forced or voluntarily do what is necessary. It is like trying to do cost optimisation in your company by slashing the department with the lowest budget while leaving the ones with big fat budgets almost untouched. Doesn't make sense, will not work. Personal responsibilisation will only make sense in a framework where states and corporations first do their fair share (see yellow vest in France).
Neither sits right with me. Can't we just all collectively acknowledge that we have to grapple with this new piece of technology that either is already or at least seems to be going to be hurtful to a lot of individuals?
Instead of looking at the in comparison limited group of people currently pushing this technology and asking ourselves whether we should be on board with their doing, we look to one another and are happy that someone else is now suffering just the same as we are. What a sad state of affairs.