At least that wasn't my plan. I'd expect the space made by ignoring chaotic thought to leave room for a new kind of peaceful vibrance. And then if you read some video title claim a form of enlightenment.
I had it open, then decided to read it later because my kid needed attention. Ten minutes later I was looking for it on the frontpage and couldn’t find it anymore. I spend lots of time (too much) on HN and it definitely felt like some coordinated effort, very non-organic.
>Don’t sell out your moral compass for a quick buck.
As I grow older (I'm not that old), the more I think I'm an idiot by not playing "the game", but I just can't make myself do it. Maybe because deep down I believe in at least karma, if not some afterlife.
I found a fake quote from Dostoyevsky yesterday which said (I'm paraphrasing):
"Don't let the corruption of others be an excuse for your own."
I know it is a fake quote, but still I think that is a worldview to try to strive to. Seeing people like the author of the article supporting a similar point makes me a bit happier and hopeful that the big AI "revolution" won't make my life miserable.
I'm 55 and I plan to never get in the game again (20 years in industry). I'm going to teach as long as I can, and then only work for a non profit that's doing good or for the public sector. The pay won't be up there, but I have limited time left to do what needs doing.
I can relate to those feelings, having now quit three "good" jobs for reasons of "the game" (specifically - in all three instances - I could not help to sweep sexual and violent misconduct under the rug). I felt and still feel like an idiot about those moments in a lot of ways. They have certainly cost me a lot and have changed my career drastically. I also know that, in the end, I could not have made myself act differently.
I don't really know what to say tbh. I feel insane at times too but I'm being a realist and a pragmatist. I think I'm in the "changed their mind" camp because I got tired of fighting and can't deny reality. It is a losing battle. All approaches to manage changes in a traditional way also don't work. I have seen people who left because they can and I might follow suit too.
Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over. Someone asks me for a 10-11am brainstorming meeting regarding a concept they are working on, at 11:15 they have a "design doc" ready, at 1pm they ping me if I had a chance to review it yet, at 3pm I approve it, at 3:30pm they send a 7k line PR... "dude, that's not ok. I'm not reviewing 7k line change" so they say "oh yes absolutely sorry about that. that makes a lot of sense. Do you want 7 1k-line PRs? or 14 500-line PRs?" "hey Claude, split this into 10 commits and open 10 stacked PRs" :|
> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.
Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.
As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.
Whether code review is inportant or not probably depends on whether the problem someone is solving is important or not. But when it is important, I think we should be putting the onus on the person who filed the PR instead of burning our own neurons trying to understand volumes of stuff. Tell me what you asked the AI to do. Why is that a good idea? Once I hear that answer (because many junior programmer ideas don’t even get past that point), let’s look at the code together. Tell me why you think the code you submitted does what you say. Did you look at the code? Did you write tests? Did you check for test coverage? Maybe you’re a little smarter than that. Did you think through pre- and post-conditions? Corner cases? Are certain undesirable behaviors impossible? How do you enforce that? Types? State machines?
Even before slop coding good code review was hard, because verification is a hard problem. But we have many tools at our disposal to increase confidence without having to go full-on mathematical proof. Human understanding has always been the bottleneck, and as long as the thing you are doing is for humans, humans will have good reasons to want to understand it, so they will remain the bottleneck. This is ok. It’s ok for humans to be the rate-limiter. But don’t go it alone and fry your own brain.
> Even before slop coding good code review was hard, because verification is a hard problem. But we have many tools at our disposal to increase confidence without having to go full-on mathematical proof. Human understanding has always been the bottleneck, and as long as the thing you are doing is for humans, humans will have good reasons to want to understand it, so they will remain the bottleneck.
When people rally agains AI, that is why. AI hypers think it’s about the actual coding. It is not. It’s about the understanding and what you built is logically sound, conceptually and concretely. The code aspect matters only for maintenance sake and verifying the logical structure.
Which is why good devs are burning out on this. The PR authors don’t care, management don’t care, so to not be between a rock and an hard place, you just LGTM the review. And then users are suffering with insane bugs.
I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.
"harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship."
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
Surveys on the approval of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 showed numbers between 80% - 90% of people approving the war.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
Families of people who signed up for the war got large amounts of money. The transfer of money from the Russian national wealth fund into the economy, together with the shortage of workers, increased salaries.
[Edit] People didn't keep that money but spent it so others profited from that money too.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
a "war chest" is usually saved by the state (by under-investing into everything civilian) and then given back to the working-class population as salaries, sign-up bonuses, investment into logistic infrastructure.
If you look up the stats - there was a real-estate boom in the early years of the was as many families could finally take a mortgage. Now many cannot pay for it because the bonuses and soldier salaries "don't last" hence companies like "Samolyot" are now in trouble.
Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
I do wonder about the internal mental calculus of a Putin-like dictator, essentially, "how far can I push this before I end up like Ceaușescu or Mussolini?". Not anywhere near as far as an actual 99%, I think.
The starvation years of the DPRK in the mid 1990s directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union might be the closest that such a state has come to the situation getting so dire that the people could have theoretically risen up, no matter the consequences, but for a myriad of reasons the North Koreans were unable to.
Putin does not have absolute power entirely on his own (no dictator truly does). He can only continue with what he is doing because the Russian population on average either actively supports him or is not working against him.
If literally 99% of the Russian economy was destroyed, no matter how currently oppressed they presently are, the Russian people are likely to rise up and remove Putin. It'll be bloody as all hell but if the economy were to truly and completely collapse (let's say, all refineries were severely hit and taken out of commission for months), it would happen.
As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
One important part of the war is to break up the 'deal' Putin has with the Russian population where he can stay in power and do what he likes so long as he doesn't mess with their lives too much. It's important that the everyday Russian is woken up to the realities of the war because it's ultimately them that will be stopping it, one way or another.
The random people can blame the autocratic government led by Putin and co., not the victim of their aggression which is trying to defend itself.
Downplaying the role of aggressor and portraying the victim as somehow to blame is really something, which leads me to think that you either did not fully think this logic through or that you are a Russian shill.
The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.
What a nice article. If I ever get in a situation where my manager demands I have to go all-in on AI (run 10 parallel agents and lose my sanity while trying to follow what is going on), I'll ask them to read this article first.
Additionally, isn't it ironic that the only comment on Substack is:
> "Sometimes in the process of writing a good enough prompt for ChatGPT, I end up solving my own problem, without even needing to submit it". AI as a rubber ducky, I think this is good AI use!
I'm not even a practicioner or have any deep knowledge about meditation. I am just asking a genuine question.
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