Long before generative AI, unpleasant nerds would poop on fun images by claiming they could "just tell" that they were altered in photoshop. Today I'm seeing a complaint that the path tracing from the multi-layered stained glass into the cloud simulation is not as accurate as a human would have painted by hand. And, that apparently makes us grumpy.
There have been unending examples of people liking an image until informed it was made by AI. Then, suddenly they see all sorts of fine-detail excuses to dislike it. And, of people calling out "obviously AI" problems in the works of human master artists when someone lies and tells them it was generated.
I'm not seeing any difference in the discussion here. The whale is a bit overly high-frequency. The owl is fine. The guy at the computer would be considered great if a human made it. The travel ad is bland. The balloon letters are fine.
None of these are "terrible eye sores". Some people don't like AI generated imagery as a process. Seeing generated images make them feel upset. That's reasonable. But, claiming these images in isolation are objectively awful regardless of their source is reactionary. If any of them were made by a person using Photoshop and/or Blender, they would be received with a resounding "Meh" or better.
You’re trying to rewrite history here. People didn’t dunk on shooped images because they had been altered, they dunked on them because people were trying to pass them off as real, or were content that would only have been notable had they been real. Not liking misinformation doesn’t make you an “unpleasant nerd”, but your reply certainly makes you one.
I get that AI anxiety is running high. But, this is doomerism running hard.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the new Threes!https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc... A very simple game to clone that gets 10,000 headlines because creators have always been anxious about cheap clones. And, anxiety drives the clicks that pay the bills.
Meanwhile, local models are already extremely capable and slowly shrinking their gap vs. frontier models over time. And, it has been long established that the censorship trained into those models can be disabled easily with open-source tools. De-censored models will happily dig into topics that push beyond the limits of sanity, let alone political pearl-clutching.
Besides that. If you want to write about some topic and AI doesn't want to help you, you still have your fingers. Type like a human and you haven't lost anything compared to when Celeste was made.
I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."
and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.
Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.
It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.
I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).
I understand the feeling - LLMs have seen the source code for other projects. but would you not have read other engine’s code to understand the problem space and existing solutions too?
The architecture is different, the language is different, implementation choices are all mine. It was not developed by autonomous agents. I don’t think you’ll find any code that is a duplicate of other engines* - happy to be proven wrong here.
* The regexp and unicode modules are taken from QuickJS and have the appropriate licenses.
Exactly. A common LLM criticism is that they "steal copyrighted code" (or other IP), but then often the same people say that code or music should not be patentable because it's all the same basic patterns just combined in different ways, so nobody should have a monopoly on that.
To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.
It is a robust, reliable cache of apt packages, with the additional goal of still being able to serve packages from the cache even when the upstream is down. This was started shortly after that DDoS of Canonical this past year. We've run apt-cacher-ng and apt-cacher over the last dozen years, but (a) it requires hand-holding about once a month and (b) it did absolutely nothing for us when Canonical was under DDoS.
I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop", but I've had 200-ish machines pulling from it for 6 months and it has worked way better than apt-cacher-ng.
I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects, while dehumanizing the 100 hours of my time I've put into it. I fear we're running the very real risk of both sides losing: the people trying to thoughtfully create with AI losing because of the AI, and the people avoiding AI losing because they can't keep pace.
To play devil's advocate, that sounds like the sort of uncomplicated thing that you could've manually vibecoded in 2020 without an LLM. What changed is that the LLM doesn't let you get analysis paralysis.
This isn't just a simple http proxy and checking if the requested URL exists on disc. It's a pretty subtle snapshotting system that fully understands and vets apt repos, detecting when the repo changes, proactively downloading "interesting" packages that have updated, verifying and validating all packages, and then promoting the repo to active when it is healthy. Plus a web-based admin interface.
The core of it is around 20K LOC, with another 40K in tests. The COCOMO model gives that an estimate of around 2 developer years of effort assuming full time work.
apt-cacher-ng, the hand-written C++ version, is 16K LOC for the core. apt-cacher-ultra does a lot more. Seems like a pretty reasonable LOC count to me.
You just write the code, don't stop to think. You only have to implement the very small set of requests that an apt client can make to an apt server. Probably "get package index" and "get package file".
Like za_creature said you can use a language more towards the YOLO end of the spectrum - more Go or Python or JavaScript than assembly or Rust.
Your commit history shows you had an issue of high background CPU use. You probably wouldn't have it in a manually coded implementation.
>You only have to implement the very small set of requests that an apt client can make
Why even write one of those? Just set up an nginx proxy cache and call it done.
But that doesn't even scratch the surface of what this project does. We already have a few simple approaches to this problem: apt-cacher and apt-cacher-ng. Neither of which were any help when Canonical was under DDoS. Both of which have proven unreliable.
As I said elsewhere, apt-cacher-ultra is a pretty subtle piece of software, it doesn't just do a naive cache, it fully understands the apt repo structure, validates the repo, and snapshots it, understands what packages your clients frequently request and preemptively downloads updates to them as part of the snapshot promotion, etc. A DDoS of the package sources, even in the middle of an upstream releasing updates, is something a-c-u will handle no problem. I've simulated this by firewall rules blocking upstream traffic. It's also proven much more reliable than apt-cacher-ng.
I've been in the software game ~40 years, I've seen it time and time again: "How hard could it be" and then when you get into it you realize there are a lot of devils in the details.
> you can use a language more towards the YOLO end of the spectrum - more Go or Python or JavaScript than assembly or Rust
You might want to change the way you phrase this idea. I think you meant that Go/Python/JS are more "YOLO-friendly languages" (you'll get into far less trouble if you write slop in them). My initial reading was the opposite. It sounded like you were saying the languages themselves are the slapped together garbage.
Assembly is most certainly not "YOLO-friendly", but is more YOLO.
> I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop"
Indeed. The number of hours is my goto defence too. So far I've put in maybe 200 hours of time into design, iteration, playtesting, QA, and balance of my game. Sure - almost zero has gone directly into writing code but this is still a major project.
People who one shot a crappy game have no idea how much work it still takes to get something really good over the finish line.
>I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects
Mostly I've stopped worrying or trying to convince the haters. I'm having a blast and building great things (lots more than just Asteria).
I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.
I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.
I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
> I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry".
Why not? What is the goal of "having an amazing tapestry"? Do you need to do increasing more things in the limited time you have left and making a tapestry isn't one of those things? What will you have once you've "finished" an amazing tapestry, just something to hang on the wall and look at? How does one "use" a tapestry after it's "finished" such that the act of finishing it is the most important thing? If you've finished it, will you get more enjoyment from looking at it for longer because it was finished sooner and thus the length of time you can look at it before you die is maximized? Exactly what you are optimizing for here?
I've done hard things. Many of them have a significant amount of time that is a slog. A tapestry is going to have a lot of days of just slog work. And that's fine. Doing hard things can be very rewarding. I've reupholstered a couch by taking it down to the sticks, repairing and reinforcing the frame ("hey kids, the couch isn't designed for walking and jumping on"), enhancing the design, re-springing it, redesigning the cushions so that they didn't need readjusting every time you sat down, making new foam cushions, and then sewing a upholstery. Took 3-4 months.
But, I'm in the last half of my 50s. The project you're commenting on, apt-cacher-ultra, probably would have taken 2 full time developer years to get to where it is now, and I'm doing some pretty big changes for the next version. I literally probably have a handful of that sort of project I can do left in my life, assuming I quit my job now and work full time on it.
Let me tell you, it's pretty sobering to be faced with: "I may only be doing this once, maybe twice more in my career."
So yes, building experiments where I get to try out my ideas without 2 developer-years of coding required is going to give me an opportunity for a lot of creation that I otherwise wouldn't have had. I've spent decades hand-crafting code, I fully understand the joy of doing so.
Yeah, I can never get in the zone with LLMs either. It’s like operating in constant interruption mode. And I always thought I was good at multitasking (even though I know formally it’s an illusion)
It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.
AI has essentially stolen my career from me. I _liked_ having to solve complicated problems with software, I enjoyed having to get into the nitty gritty to get things done. I never really cared that much about the actual business problems I was solving, so moving up a layer of abstraction to be some sort of bastardized product manager/architect does not scratch the same itch.
OTOH, for solving problems I care about, AI has been a god send. I can achieve things that I would have never had the time for.
Precisely. I have both feelings simulataneously. I am impressed by what it can do and horrified because I realize what it will do to the job market and society in general. Meanwhile everybody seems to believe that AI will cure cancer and therefore we should let it do all the damage it will do without realizing that people will die because of AI as well (in fact have already died because of AI).
> If anything, it should make me more optimistic, not less. If you have an idea, you can turn it into product within 30 minutes, no matter how complicated it is.
There is no product in that anymore because someone else could copy your product in the same time.
Right? If it's so easy and cheap where is the value? There is no value.
This fallacy is second to only every SME believing their jobs are going to be the jobs AI can't replace.
You have QA engineers chiming in about how "QA" isn't going anywhere.. On threads talking about code, tests, and PR reviews being completely automated.. PR reviews being a quality assurance activity..
If anything, AI could have prevented this strike by invalidating stale targeting data. The school building had originally been part of an IRGC military installation, then was physically separated about ten years ago. Satellite data would have made it abundantly clear that it was functioning as a school. A human in the loop could have prevented this tragedy by looking at the satellite data, but so could an AI system.
In every war, countless innocent people die due to mis-targeting or other failure modes. At times the casualty count there exceeds military deaths. It is so common that we have a term for it: collateral damage.
So the question is: does AI lower such damage?
If AI had not been used in the attack on Iran, history indicates the death tolls in this regard would likely been much higher.
Not making a political statement or implying support for the war. Just making a point that these comparisons are more complicated that your example.
I don't think that's true, Gaza residents die at much higher rates. Give it another 30 years for all the truth to come out and we'll probably learn that 98% of them were already dead as of the time of this comment.
Yes, what is happening in Gaza is disgusting, but the context was people dying on account of AI and this was the most concrete example that came to mind.
AI cannot possibly do meaningful bio science because it cannot run experiments on its own. It's limited by the crap science papers others have written, often with "third party" funding, i.e. in direct or indirect dependency from pharma.
I guess my wording was really bad. The point I was trying badly to make: I wasn't thinking about cell-level stuff, but rather human-level observations, experiments, etc. and these are not possible in a lab but only out in the "real world." I don't see AI running anything on that level.
edit: that would be more like medicine, not bio-science
if the complaints can be properly pointed at the actual problem - the corporate culture the complainers are actively upholding or the capitalist system at large, id be much more sympathetic
its a tribalism problem, but one of trying to uphold the current tribe system while theres a pretty obvious new tribe system replacing it
The whole "needing a job" thing is already part of a tribe though. It's a tribe that says (and enforces) that everyone needs to work for money or else.
I don’t think bluefirebrand is in the tribe of “everyone must have a job or die” so much as they’re in the tribe of “everyone says I must have a job or die”. Like yeah if I was forced at gunpoint to possess something or be ostracized from society then I too would be a little perturbed if someone made an automatic “take away the thing” device.
Well you’re not alone, I’m a little more stubbornly optimistic perhaps, but I feel your stress.
My comforting thoughts are, who is this all for, and what would happen if AI actually makes human labor redundant? Labs control the AI sure, but so much stuff is built around humans that it almost becomes comical to think it would be a bad outcome for a the average person.
Farms and land don’t cease to exist, houses/apartments don’t go up in flames instantly, people aren’t reduced to functionless sludge creatures as soon as they’re done being economic drivers. What’s the real plan? All the normal people die and a thousand or so chosen few sit around and watch AI videos and eat grapes until the heat death of the universe?
Nah, we’ll figure it out, perhaps it will be harder temporarily, and perhaps SWEs lose status before everyone else, but it will probably be okay overall.
But the incentives are not aligned, we are slaves to Moloch, the god of path dependence as described in Slate Star Codex.
Imagine what happens if landlords decided one day to collectively demand more money than actually exists in the total monthly income of workers. What would happen?
You can point out that if everyone just stopped paying rent, their houses and apartments would still exist, and they could live rent-free as their landlords would have no money to spend on enforcement. Technically, this is not untrue. But it's not what would actually happen, is it? One person would be the first to default on their rent, and their landlord would use the money collected from all their other tenants to seize back that tenant's formerly rented property. No individual tenant would dare to be the first to stop paying rent, so they all continue paying rent, selling their stuff, taking out loans until there's physically no way for them to keep paying, and only then do they default.
Yeah, correct, but I think it's also necessary to apportion blame correctly. Tribalism is a big part of the problem here. When people propose solutions to this problem they're often met with purely tribalist counter-screaming.
‘Having to work for money’ beats ‘having to hunt and farm for food’ and it’s technically a small step away.
‘Not having to work and being warm and fed’ is called being a pet. Some cats and dogs enjoy this life greatly. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I know plenty of people in their late 40's 50's and 60's that were doing fine and who now have to compete with junior and Claude.
And sometimes just Claude.
Obviously they had no inherent right to income but still, people have obligations that need to be met and if they stop spending the economy is not going to be happy. Especially cruel because we have been telling everybody for decades that a career in software is stable and that there will always be a need for more people.
I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
> What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk. This isn’t one of those developments that people can just stubbornly dig their heels in about.
Life throws obstacles at everyone. Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
> I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
> I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk.
We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you see as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.
The future isn't written yet. Your ability to predict it is an illusion. In aggregate, people whose job it is to predict large-scale economic events are worse than chance in their predictions.
I am thinking of a study showing that political pundits do worse than chance at predicting the political future (this does not include election modeling, which is not punditry).
There's no realistic way to compose a statistical model for what will happen to a society when a powerful new technology is introduced. Predictors of our brave new AI world are going to be about as accurate as our pundits.
You'll note that I didn't make a prediction. Nor did I tell someone their prediction was wrong. I called into question someone's certainty about their own prediction.
> We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you see as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.
I can read between the lines.
Also, this new reality is today. You may not be seeing this in your place of business or culture yet, but for many of us, it arrived up to 2 years ago.
As mentioned elsewhere, my org is asking us to reduce usage because it is expensive and there's no evidence it improves productivity.
If that's happening at [redacted] of all places, I think it's reasonable to think that the technology may not be as transformative as predicted due to its (currently) poor performance in generating revenue.
We're profiting from its inefficiency by selling compute to other companies, especially AI startups. It's expensive and unprofitable for them and a cash cow for us. The position we're taking is bearish and somewhat more reversible than that taken by Meta, for example.
This is sensible and pragmatic, but I think you're talking past the other commenter.
Obstacles presented by, for example, your boss, or your company's competitors, or your political system, are not the same as obstacles like heartbreak, natural disasters, emotions, illnesses we cannot yet cure.
> Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
A lot of people perceive that elites are throwing dodgeballs at them in order to increase their own profits. Saying "them's the breaks, it's just the way it is" appears to be deflecting criticism from those elites and that system.
It probably depends on whether you think we could actually feed everyone, today, if we chose to, or if you think e.g. human nature prevents that from being possible.
Seriously: this is a massive problem that we are creating and given that the tools that make the problem require better tools to solve them I really am not all that happy about how this is going.
Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing. People are losing their jobs. This is not a small thing and it will cause a lot of misery for those people. To effectively tell them to man up and to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle. Not every problem is a technical one and not every problem can be solved with technology.
I'm not worried about myself, I've had a lot of luck in my life for which I'm super greatful. But I'm also quite aware of the exceptional position that puts me in and how many people are not so fortunate that they could probably live on their savings for the rest of their life if things ground to a halt.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck, or they may have a few thousand bucks in savings at most. They've worked hard all their lives and simply were never in a position to save enough against this kind of eventuality because the deck was stacked against them.
Have a heart, and realize that barring a couple of unfortunate moves it could be you looking at your last 500 bucks with rent due and a couple of mouths to feed.
I hate the idea that it’s considered “tone deaf” to encourage people to adapt to changing conditions. I’m not going to adopt a pessimistic tone and say “yup we’re all fucked, ain’t nothing we can do.” It’s intentionally changing the tone, not being deaf to it.
> Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing.
I’m sorry if it’s coming across that way. It’s not my intent, and I’m aware that many people are a lost paycheck away from a crisis.
But if you really think the right thing to do in response is to complain and commiserate, I don’t think that is helpful, either. I think it’s much better to encourage behavior that has a chance of being effective.
If you think it’s somehow wrong to encourage people to behave in such a way that has a better chance of setting them up for success, then I vehemently disagree.
> To effectively tell them... to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle.
You must have a pretty low opinion of people if you think they can’t adapt.
Possibly. But 1/this thread doesn’t seem designed for that; and 2/I’m not sure what outcome you’re contemplating. If it’s “we need better unemployment insurance and public healthcare,” I’m totally down with that. If it’s “ban the use of AI for writing software,” I think that’s a fool’s errand: the genie is not going back into that bottle.
This thread is not designed for discussion? I'm not even sure what that means. If the sentiments expressed in this thread lead to people discussing the same topic elsewhere, does it matter what this thread is "designed for"?
> 2/I’m not sure what outcome you’re contemplating
What does that have to do with anything? I'm responding to a comment complaining about the fact that others were complaining about a narrowly envisioned future which seems, to them, inevitable. I'm merely pointing out that the dissenting opinions could have value to individuals who want different outcomes from the ones predicted.
> This thread is not designed for discussion? I'm not even sure what that means. If the sentiments expressed in this thread lead to people discussing the same topic elsewhere, does it matter what this thread is "designed for"?
It means that that’s not where the conservation in this thread is going, and in my experience on HN, almost never does. There’s no organizing going on here. It’s not even clear what a group of organized people would fight for based on the conversations here.
Finally, I’m not telling people they can’t commiserate or complain. It’s an open forum for people to speak their minds. However, that freedom cuts both ways; people are equally allowed and encouraged to have contrarian views that are respected.
How do you know there aren't people organizing after discussing something online and realizing there are others out there who agree with them? You assume, but you don't know.
And yet, you speak confidently, as though you do know. What's with that?
Do you have evidence that rules it out? It's a distinct possibility. A lot of complaining and commiserating had to happen before unionization took place en masse.
Nevertheless, you seem to insist on one vision of the future, predicted without evidence. I suggest the unpredictability of (or absence of) that future and you expect that I should explain exactly what the alternatives are.
The evidence is that it’s happening right in front of our eyes. The fear and anxiety are driven by some people’s natural responses to that, as they see it, too.
I’m not going to produce a laundry list of how it’s already impacting engineering productivity and practice. You can look that up yourself.
How long would you be able to sustain a mostly-comfortable lifestyle if you were to lose your job right now with no chance of finding new employment? If the answer is, say, more than a year, that might alter your perspective on the issue.
As the conversation was about the societal trend. For the vast majority of people the answer is <= 1 month and it drops off precipitously adding months on.
HN stranger, I want to observe that you shared a suicidal idea. I'm sorry to read about your unemployment situation and know things must not be easy. As one HNer to another, I implore you to not to pursue that path and seek help in doing so. That we are members of this community confers to us opportunities to build knowledge that serve us well as life long learners. In that vein, going back to school is not a bad idea.
Having been in this game for a long time, I get the negative aspects of the industry. They grind on me, as I believe they have for you. Choosing a different path is not an all or nothing proposition. Your knowledge, and you as a person, have value. I hope you find a way towards better mental health and wish you well on that journey.
Thanks for saying that. My sentiments are the same. Life is difficult for many, and we all struggle in different ways. I’m sure bluefirebrand has something amazing to contribute to this world, even if it’s not what they think it is right now.
> The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.
A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.
But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.
Plenty of other professions were hit by computing. Part of why programmers are so emotive about this concept (other than the fact that emoting online loudly seems to be much more accepted in software than other professions) is that programming has never been threatened in the same way as other professions have been until now.
My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career; free flow of information over the internet and commodification of spreadsheets changed all of it. From my parents' generation, I know practical effects folks who became unemployable once movies went to digital effects; engineers who found their draftsmanship skills obsolete. Folks with near-photographic memories whose entire superpower was destroyed by computing. I personally grew up in a blue collar community that was income depressed because its labor became commodified, though that was due to mechanization.
FWIW, I agree with pretty much everything you've said. But I don't think it's unique to any profession or individual that they tend to care the most deeply when it hits them directly.
The only thing I don't really agree with is where you say "My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career." I still think of management consultants as some of the highest paid careers around, and getting a partnership track job at one of the Big 3 is one of the most desirable jobs (for MBA types anyway) there is, so I just don't know what you're talking about with this one.
> But I don't think it's unique to any profession or individual that they tend to care the most deeply when it hits them directly.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. I just meant that part of the unique feelings in the air for software engineers is that this is the first time we're facing this.
> I still think of management consultants as some of the highest paid careers around, and getting a partnership track job at one of the Big 3 is one of the most desirable jobs
There's plenty of other jobs the MBA type could get into these days which are also high prestige and there are now many more tiers of management consultants. The elite folks at McKinsey are still high prestige with high salaries, but your average Accenture or Deloitte consultant is both pay and prestige wise about the same as an average knowledge worker. Plenty of VCs, fund managers, and investors are high prestige MBA-types. The explosion of private capital means there's a lot of opportunity to manage private capital; private capital markets were just much shallower 50 years ago.
> you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too
And? Who are these people that need all this sympathy from internet strangers? Grow the fuck up and go solve your own damn problems. I can’t stand these “I need internet strangers to tell me that my life is, in fact, hard” people.
Also, "ok, and now I've cloned your hard work overnight, no need for any decisions on my part, I just had my agent use yours and reverse engineered it and/or used it as an oracle. Why the frown? I thought you were in this for intellectual curiosity and exercising your creativity, not just stroking own ego, right?"
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
I don't see why I should care about this any more than I cared about "somebody I don't like could read my code and learn from it" in the past. The frontier labs can generate or buy all the training data they need; not releasing your app isn't going to hurt them in the slightest.
I get not wanting to contribute to closed, commercial models. We need to hurry up and get Folding-at-Home style distributed community model training going. At that point, I’d be pretty happy if my projects contributed to improving community models. Even if commercial models benefited too.
Building a procedural open world at the scale of a flight sim in UE5, in a month wrote 5k prompts, spent 40B tokens and will likely take at least a trillion more over the next year of full time dev work.
Big solo projects exist, they're just not coming out as frequently because of, uh, how time works
Yeah, I think people are not sufficiently appreciating the value of knowing what to tell the AI to do, and how to tell it. (Or the value of having the AI help you figure that out.) In previous decades, we had to know this stuff, it just usually stayed inside our own brains. Perhaps the incentive to type[1] it out is also helpful.
[1] Yes, lots of people use dictation instead. I feel like speech-to-text loses you the benefits that speaking has over writing in terms of communication power, plus it's inefficient. I'd rather harness the benefits that writing (really, editing) has.
Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...
If you got into software because there was something you wanted to make with it, now is the best time to be doing it. I can't stop building and might need the max plans.
Linus Torvalds has never cared all that much about the freedom aspect. Why not make the kernel GPLv3 or sue some companies violating even the GPLv2, for example?
Ooph, this quote sounds so much worse taken out of context.
My understanding from reading the lwn article is Linus's implication is more specifically about filtering out people that cannot write code without LLMs or the willingness to spend the money on the tokens required to uphold the quality of the kernel. He does not want to push out developers that do not use LLMs.
I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.
The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
It seems to me that you are comparing two kinds of business-minded people. Some want to sell tailored products to individual customers, while others want to sell one-size-fits-all products to many customers.
You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?
I love solving problems. But I don't enjoy sharing my solutions with the way the world is today. My comment was directed towards the "sharing" aspect, not the making aspect. I still solve problems on my own and learn on my own but I'm not a fan of the way the world has become.
UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
You asked me to respond to more than just the UBI concept raised.
I 100% agree people need a culture of looking out for each other. I'd argue that has only successfully happened sustainably in smaller communities, and from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Take care of your neighbors, and ask them for help when you need it. You aren't proposing this here so I'm not arguing with you, but it never works for long when the "help" comes from the top down. For a short period we may actually see the government take resources from some to help others, but eventually that is corrupted and they stop at the point of taking resources and power.
A UBI will never work, the Soviets tried effectively that and it fails miserably.
You end up with the government deciding how much bread each person needs, how much the bread will cost, how much to pay a person so they can pay the defined price for the allocated amount of bread, etc.
Either utopian claims of an AI and robot-powered future are right and we don't need money because you can just have what you want, or money and resources will still be scarce and we will continue to compete amongst ourselves for resources.
2) America in 2026 is not the USSR in the 20th century, so even if they did, our circumstances are very different from theirs.
3) UBI was only the first suggestion; you completely failed to address the other and then jumped to a black-and-white conclusion.
The general thrust of my proposition was that people shouldn't have to submit to an artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary "productivity" in order to access goods that are objectively abundant. When people realize that and make the necessary compromises, they won't have to worry about shipping useless AI-assisted slop for "income security" and can focus on using AI to build consequential and useful software.
Please do not get bogged down in whatever kneejerk anti-UBI thought-loop your misaligned amygdala is screaming at you.
1) you'd have to expand on your refutation here. The soviets absolutely did decide top down how much bread each person deserved and how much it cost. They used that type of data to help decide how much grain to have farmers grow, where and when to ship it for bread production, and in part how much to pay people so they could buy their allocation of bread. Not directly a UBI, but functionally very similar with the caveat being they forced people to work in predefined jobs for a set pay rate.
2) I didn't say the US is the USSR. I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed. Feel free to call out specific differences that may help it work better today in the US, I'm genuinely curious despite my skeptism.
3) I can respond to the others as well, but that isn't necessary to have an interesting debate or discussion on any one topic. If one was required to respond to all raised ideas they could try to shut down all conversation by threading together a long list of hard to discuss topics, avoiding responses to any one topic.
I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though. We ultimately all make our decisions, some more impactful than others, and if we end up in a dystopian future with no jobs and AIs/robots in charge of the world we made that bed for ourselves.
I'm not bogged down in any kneejerk reactions and I'm not parroting what I've heard air bags saying elsewhere. I've read up on the topic, the history of the USSR, and read Marx writings (well the translations, I speak some Dutch but no German). We may disagree, but my views aren't uneducated reactions.
1) You are describing something that is not UBI, and calling it UBI anyway. A rationing system that is not fungible and that varies allocation is not universal, and not income as capitalism knows it. The Soviet planned economy was categorically not UBI. Full stop.
2) >I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed.
You did not.
3) That's not applicable here. Why did you respond to the UBI issue only?
>I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though.
I didn't speak to this at all. The "artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary 'productivity'" is independent of AI and ML and has existed for several decades.
>my views aren't uneducated reactions.
See 1.
My conclusion is that you actually aren't interested in a conversation. You haven't responded earnestly or considerately to anything in my initial post except the portion suggesting UBI, which you dismissed with a faulty presence.
Here is my suggestion: talk about something else from that post. Anything else. Do not revisit the UBI topic.
The only reason the Soviets didn't have a true UBI is because they realised they still needed people to work and they wouldn't if you gave them what they needed for free. That's why I said they had what was effectively a UBI, they decided what people needed or were entitled to and created a system that would give them only that. The fact that they forced people to work is an implementation detail that we'd likely run into in the US today as well, we couldn't afford for the government to cut checks and no one work.
I did respond earnestly, whether you accept it or if I'm explaining myself poorly. You have yet to propose how a UBI would actually work, or pointed to an example of it ever having worked in the past. Socialism and Marxism have been tried, the don't work. And yes, UBI is an idea that goes back to Marx's writings.
Per Claude: On the central factual dispute, fuzzythrowaway is right and _heimdall is wrong. The Soviet system was not a UBI, and the claim that it was “tried and failed” doesn’t hold up.
1. “The Soviets tried a UBI-like system and it failed”
The Soviet system was the opposite of a UBI in almost every defining respect.
It was conditional on work. During the 1929–35 rationing period, rationing applied only to people employed in state-owned industries and their family members, and politically disenfranchised “lishentsy” were deprived of rations entirely. There were four ration tiers, and the lower ones couldn’t get basic items like meat and fish. That is a tiered, employment-linked allocation, not a universal one.
Work was legally compulsory. The 1936 Constitution made work an obligation of every able-bodied citizen, on the principle that those who don’t work don’t eat. It also defined the system’s distribution principle as payment according to one’s work. A 1961 RSFSR decree went further and targeted people avoiding “socially useful work.” Joseph Brodsky was tried for “parasitism” in 1964. A system that punishes people for not working can’t be called a UBI.
It wasn’t cash, and it wasn’t the standing system. Rationing was in-kind and episodic. Bread rationing ended in early 1935 and all food rationing by October 1935, then returned in wartime and again during perestroika.
_heimdall’s fallback (that the Soviets lacked a “true UBI” only because they needed people to work, which was “an implementation detail”) concedes the point. Unconditionality is the defining feature of a UBI, not a detail. His causal logic also fails. The Soviet economy’s problems came from state control of production and prices, and a cash transfer leaves prices to the market. That is why Milton Friedman backed a negative income tax: he thought it would address poverty without expanding the state bureaucracy he opposed.
His claim that UBI “goes back to Marx” and so shares socialism’s failures is also unsupported. The histories I found trace the idea through Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796/97), Thomas Spence, Joseph Charlier, and later Friedman and Stigler’s negative income tax. In 1968, more than 1,200 economists, including Tobin, Samuelson and Galbraith, signed a call for income guarantees. Marx isn’t in that lineage. Even if he were, a policy’s origin doesn’t determine whether it works.
2. “No one has shown a UBI working”
Alaska is the best long-run case. Residents have received a universal, unconditional dividend since 1982, and a peer-reviewed study found no effect on employment and a 1.8-point (17%) rise in part-time work.
3. Other claims
_heimdall’s AI/ML reply: fuzzythrowaway’s point was about an economic system that forces people into manufactured competition. _heimdall answered a different claim, about submitting to AI and ML systems.
_heimdall’s false dichotomy: he says either post-scarcity utopia or continued competition for resources. UBI proposals assume scarcity continues, so the dichotomy doesn’t engage with them.
_heimdall’s “top-down help never lasts”: he gives no evidence. Alaska’s dividend has run for over four decades, and the Social Security Act dates to 1935.
Claude correctly understands my earlier points and expands upon them with the history I was referencing and the rationale I was constructing. Perhaps it puts it more persuasively.
It would be nice if we could get a Show HN category specifically for this. I feel like often times when people share projects (whether on HN or otherwise) they're immediately downvoted and cast aside as "AI".
Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?
When AI labs mature and inference costs start to matter, they will start optimizing for inference cost instead of sacrificing everything for intelligence.
But even without that, open weight models are already good enough and everyone would be fine with paying unsubsidized prices for them.
The problem is now the AI can do for $100 what took you 3 months full time.
Employers previously hired you because cheaper alternatives such as offshoring were impractical…
Now the AI is cheaper, faster, and better than domestic labor and offshoring while still hosted domestically…
Some will feel one doesn’t need an experienced rockstar to babysit an AI…
In about an hour I just solved about 80hrs worth of personal coding/debugging with a portion of a $20/month Claude subscription… Frankly it makes all my knowledge and experience feel kinda worthless… I only gave it a few sentences…
My POV is that indicates you need to up your expectations for yourself. You apparently have the knowledge and experience to cause 80 hours worth of work to be completed in a few sentences given today’s tools.
So then, given your knowledge and experience, what challenge would require 80 hours of real, focused work out of you using today’s tools?
My understanding is that "The best reasoning they give" is the entire point. It such a huge issue that it drowns out all of the valid but smaller issues you are pointing out. And, the benefit to the water is just a bonus.
High level, I agree with your comment. In the case of this experiment, it was built by the Turlock Irrigation District, which was "financed by issuing public general obligation bonds. The debt was systematically paid back over decades through local property taxes and water delivery fees collected from the farmers." However, there are lots of canals that are directly owned by the state, so they are good candidates also.
The word for what you're thinking of is "faith". Theory and belief are the constituents of all consciousness.
Young engineers sometimes fall into this trap - that there is absolute truth, and everything else. It would be nice if true, but it's wildly out of line with reality.
"Believing" something is not the same as having a dogmatic faith in something. We (ideally) change our beliefs with every new piece of input. That's good.
> We (ideally) change our beliefs with every new piece of input. That's good.
sounds like a cope. like shifting goalposts. or no true scotsman fallacy.
if I see a tree in front of me, and 2 seconds later I close my eyes, and someone asks me if there is a tree in front of me, should I say yes because I "know" it, or because I "believe" it ?
In that 2 seconds, the tree could have fallen down. So if i said "yes", I wouldn't be lying but I would be incorrect.
Therefore all "knowledge" is belief about some past "truth". Whether you call it faith, evidence-based, dogma etc. they all do fall under the same bucket if you think deeply about it.
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice
I find that what makes people hate LLM-voice isn’t the voice itself. It’s that the voice pings their brain with a reminder of their AI anxiety. That ping makes people instantly upset.
> They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance … When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize... They are (software) machines
I believe these ideas contradictory. I find that people get angry at LLMs bullshitting precisely because they are not anthropomorphizing. People bullshit all the time. But, these are machines! Machines are not supposed to bullshit! And, when they do, there’s supposed to be a bug filed and fixed.
By holding LLMs up to the expectations of machines instead of expectations of (simulated) people, users are frustrating themselves.
If you take the same “trust but verify (everything)” approach with LLMs as you do with people, you’ll be a lot less frustrated.
I can't speak for others, but there's no anxiety in my dislike of "LLM-voice." The writing is terrible, overly dense, and often needlessly self-congratulatory or hedged. Many times it reads as if someone rewrote a perfectly good sentence with an unimportant preamble and adjectives pulled at random from a thesaurus which, I suppose, is kind of what happens.
Micropayments would solve so many problems for the internet. And, cryptocurrencies would solve so many problems for micropayments. But, it's a non-starter because any proposal gets flooded with people popping veins about how crypto can't solve anything.
If it's so easy to solve, go solve it. Set up a test site with micropayments. Maybe scrape CNN and see how many people will pay you micro for a copy of CNN.
Check it out: As millions of people have recognized, we have a new discoverability problem! How about, out of the 9 billion people on Earth, we figure out how to get a few dozen of them motivated to work on that instead of sitting and moping for the rest of our lives about the end of human creativity?
They are ridiculous because the reality of the situation is boring. Boring doesn’t drive engagement. So, all the clickbait headlines and ragebait comments imply scandal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get attention.
After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.
This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.
Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
Seems about right. Copyright is supposed to literally prevent outright copying. The output from an LLM is not a creative work of the prompter. It's genuinely the opposite, I use them when I don't care about something but have to do it anyway for whatever reason. It makes more time for me to do the things I like working on.
It feels shitty that they have been trained on the life sums of all of our work and online presences with absolutely no credit given... But then again, I'm not sure I'd want to know what parts of the weights were from me and which weren't.
I feel like people will be upset by this take... But you don't get credit for the creativity of an idea alone. Every asshole has ideas. It's called a work of art for a reason, emphasis on WORK.
I’m trying to imaging what giving credit would look like… “Credit: Everyone who has made anything freely observable on the internet.” Would folks be less upset if that was included?
Frankly, I should have been putting something similar attached to any drawings or paintings I make physically. My entire life I’ve been training my brain on countless works of others. And, I’ve never asked one of them for permission or given anyone any credit.
Long before generative AI, unpleasant nerds would poop on fun images by claiming they could "just tell" that they were altered in photoshop. Today I'm seeing a complaint that the path tracing from the multi-layered stained glass into the cloud simulation is not as accurate as a human would have painted by hand. And, that apparently makes us grumpy.
There have been unending examples of people liking an image until informed it was made by AI. Then, suddenly they see all sorts of fine-detail excuses to dislike it. And, of people calling out "obviously AI" problems in the works of human master artists when someone lies and tells them it was generated.
I'm not seeing any difference in the discussion here. The whale is a bit overly high-frequency. The owl is fine. The guy at the computer would be considered great if a human made it. The travel ad is bland. The balloon letters are fine.
None of these are "terrible eye sores". Some people don't like AI generated imagery as a process. Seeing generated images make them feel upset. That's reasonable. But, claiming these images in isolation are objectively awful regardless of their source is reactionary. If any of them were made by a person using Photoshop and/or Blender, they would be received with a resounding "Meh" or better.
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