tech that approaches new change with curiosity rather than pseudo-religious turning away will win out because of the type of people who are building the former
> tech that approaches new change with curiosity rather than pseudo-religious turning away will win out because of the type of people who are building the former
Why not
tech that approaches new change with religious recklessness rather than critical thinking will lose out because of users that are tired of regressions and breakages.
Well, not that one, because that one is incorrect.
Adoption of coding agents is motivated by understanding and productivity. That's not traditionally a religious aspiration.
In software engineering, and in so many other settings too, LLMs can act as a strong catalyst, or strong damper for curiosity and critical thinking. The same way that when you used to find a thread on StackOverflow about the exact problem you were facing, you could either copy/paste the solution and forge ahead, or else use those breadcrumbs to research and more deeply understand the problem and its prospective solutions -- you can drive the model to the same effect.
If you are looking to think critically, it can be an absolutely fantastic partner in that endeavor. If you are looking to slap together a solution for a problem you don't care to understand, it can do that too. How you want to use it is up to you. And how other people use it can and will be everywhere across that spectrum.
> If you are looking to think critically, it can be an absolutely fantastic partner in that endeavor.
Joining “thinking critically” and a tool that has no truth basis is concerning. You may as well put numbers inside a raffle box and just take one out instead of using a calculator.
There’s no definition of correct that LLM tooling enforces, so how can it be a partner in thinking?
That’s the main issue with slop coding. It would be way more useful to send pseudocode out if you can. Logical semantic is always independent of programming syntax. No need to generate code.
> Joining “thinking critically” and a tool that has no truth basis is concerning. You may as well put numbers inside a raffle box and just take one out instead of using a calculator.
LLMs can have as much truth basis as humans have. We humans have fallible memory, all manner of cognitive biases, varying degrees of deceptive tendencies, misunderstandings, heartfelt beliefs in things we cannot prove...
And nonetheless, looking at art, reading books, talking to children, interacting with nature -- can all prompt us to question our previous assumptions and productively challenge ideas we might have otherwise thought settled. Seeing these different perspectives, however grounded or not they may be in truth and physics, is part of critical thinking.
A calculator will only get you so far. If you're looking for LLMs to tell you the "correct" answer, then you may be disappointed. But if you want leads to follow, ideas to consider, pointers to existing research, experiments to run, then it can be very helpful, similarly to talking to a very knowledgeable colleague. In the end, so far at least, it's still up to the human to make good decisions, based on evidence.
Wait, so by pseudo-religious you are not referring to the people that worship AI like a panacea that will solve all our problems and can't see what's wrong with it? that's odd
hm. for me, AI agents effectively already have their day unless there is a retrenchment. i essentially do not interact with the web (outside of a few social media sites) anymore
if the reason to do so was the ad revenue, then i definitely agree. but in terms of me happening on to your ideas, now is perhaps actually better than any time in the past. i also do pay for writing à la substack
found the article quite weak, hurt by the East Coast media’s tendency to make everything about government & Trump.
> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
Do they at least pay good interest on the money they took in? Because a decade long interest free loan is a really weird thing and non-refundable only makes sense if they end up shipping them, and they should probably ship them before a sizeable fraction of their customers has died. 9 years to make a car...
A number of the people who paid those downpayments, were invited to the recent Roadster demo. Where they got to see a similar car demonstrated, complete with flying. And with no sense of whether it will actually be built, or will be street legal.
No, I would have added an 'r'. But seriously: there are obvious grift kickstarters, though the platform operators do quite a bit of work to keep those out. But at some point the line between 'grifter' and 'highly motivated but delusional founder' gets blurry and I'm happy I don't have to make the call. More so because it's going to be a mess of false positives and false negatives with plenty of overlap, even for experts in the various fields. So making it a marketplace is a good idea, the problem with that is that it then becomes a competition in marketing and glitz rather than solid financial, technical and commercial planning.
Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds.
Pre-selected for gullability. If you have bridges to sell... I once came across a grifter that had the principal of a VC company here totally sewn up. He called him 'sensei' and did everything he could to butter him up. Meanwhile he was defrauding them to the tune of a couple of million every year. Very scary such people.
Agreed. Even the non-governmental example in the article - Nikola Corporation - was uncovered as a fraud more than six years ago. And the governmental examples as described aren't even fraud, they're corruption.
Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.
Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.
A good argument could be made that precisely because it happens in government and those people aren’t booted out post-haste, then society is apparently a lot more OK with this style of behavior than before.
I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?
And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.
Most of the population wouldn't care about another Theranos because it wouldn't have any impact on them. People only cared about the first Theranos because Elizabeth Holmes was such a bizarre character. The fraud and business failure didn't have any broader impact on the financial system. And while knowingly giving unsuspecting patients inaccurate blood test lab results was inexcusable and deserving of severe punishment, in the end no one died.
I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.
I've used the CLIs for Codex, Gemini and Claude and they all give off the feeling of being on an very rickety, very fast runaway train.
You install an update. Oops, they added a sandbox that doesn't work inside a docker container, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, you can't log in inside a docker container any more, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, they started catching the copy+paste shortcut and replaced it with one that doesn't work.
You revert a broken update. Oops, the update changed the format of your login details, the old version can't read them, gotta log in again.
You install an update. Oops, can't scroll with the mouse wheel any more.
Not showstopping bugs (if you're used to persuading broken oauth logins to work) but it certainly makes updating an "ugh, what have they broken this time?" experience.
You got further than I did. I checked them out and went back to manual prompting. Just don't have a need for codegen that much, and when I do I'd prefer to be in control.
It does some neat things that, ultimately, are super obnoxious. Background animations and "sparkle" effects that make my terminal indicate activity at all times. Just subtly broken behavior.
Just an FYI, in circles similar to HN, people will respond very negatively to anyone suggesting anything that might hint at tightening amphetamine prescriptions.
I'm counting on it, I find it deliciously ironic how much there's little interest here in the actual wellbeing of people. The logical hoops people go through here is hilarious.
tbh as a non-user, I think stimulants are likely life improving for many (potentially most) people. what i dislike/chafe at is the insinuation that stimulants only work for people with diagnosed ADHD or only have non-recreational effects for people with ADHD. the latter especially seems to rapidly have become a folk wisdom.
What would the "recreational" affects of stimulants be? I sometimes take it on weekends, does that make it "recreational"? If it makes me happier through better conversations, less distractions, and less hating myself for not doing the one plate that's been sitting unrinsed for a week, is that "recreational"?
This is the kind of absurd thing that people say when they know drugs from 2000s teen comedies, I fear. Just cause you've vaguely heard about people doing adderal at parties doesn't mean it's anything like meth, which is the common layperson misunderstanding. It's not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.
I've never understood recreational use of amphetamines. When I take them (prescribed, of course), I feel like garbage but I'm able to get my work done (which is the only reason I take the damn stuff). If I could choose to shed my executive dysfunction but never be able to take stimulants again, I wouldn't even have to think about it - obviously I'd take that deal.
People absolutely take amphetamines recreationally, they are mood & confidence boosting and help you stay up to party. I’m not sure what in my comment you are disagreeing with to be honest, you seem to be imputing a bunch of views to me and then arguing against them. I never said anything about similarity to meth, although they do hit the same targets. I have not vaguely heard of people doing adderal at parties, I have explicitly been to parties where people were doing adderal.
Sure, there's always the middle ground, but there's always the extreme, people abusing amfetamines because a regular human being isn't made to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week, or because after the third pill it's not kicking anymore.
And people should drop the cynicism that just because there are doctors around everyone is well cared for. Just look at the opioid crisis in the US, fuelled by respectable doctors chasing financial incentives.
Having been in medical school I would never trust physicians on the topic of amphetamines. More than half of them would regularly (ab)use ADHD meds during education, some would sell prescription meds to other students which in theory could get them suspended (it's not just the brightest people who end up physicians ...).
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