https://blog.timac.org/categories/reverse-engineering/

And frequently discussed on Hacker News:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Whose responsibility is it to select the colours? You think this is the responsibility of one of the developers‽ You don’t think “having taste in colours” is solidly owned by the designer‽ You think this is a developer task not a design task‽

Aside from that, the specific example you chose is an area where we have deterministic algorithms for judging contrast – we don’t even need AI for that, regular old procedural code can do it.

> as-console-user command [args …]

> Run a Homebrew command as the active macOS console user.

> This is intended for MDM, Munki and Jamf workflows where brew is invoked as root but Homebrew operations should run as the logged-in console user. The nested command is always dispatched through HOMEBREW_BREW_FILE.

— https://docs.brew.sh/Manpage#as-console-user-command-args-

This isn’t very informative. Is there more documentation somewhere else that I’m missing? Google search doesn’t really find much.

I currently have a dedicated `homebrew` user that I access with `alias brew='sudo --set-home --user=homebrew --chdir /Users/homebrew -- brew' but it’s got a number of shortcomings. What will as-console-user do differently to this?

I don’t think that helps at all. We already know how to consume that securely, we do it billions of times a day in web browsers.

> the inbox should work on an invite only basis. Basically you should pre-authorize the senders just like you add someone as friend on a social network.

Yes. A fundamental problem with email is that the only thing required to send email to somebody is knowledge of their email address, which as a recipient you cannot control. This is what enables spam and phishing. This needs to be changed so that in order to send email to somebody, you also need their consent. A “friend request” mechanism is one way of achieving this.

I think this is a problem that can be feasibly solved in a fairly reasonable way, and I sketched out a protocol for doing so a while back, which I described in more detail in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44969726

This is the complaint:

> he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.

He has traded readability for volume. The lack of readability is causing him to ship less. This was a bad trade because the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should improve readability.

I’m not talking about growth here. I’m merely saying that it won’t recede. My argument is that we won’t use the increased productivity to spend less money producing the same amount of software – we’ll use the increased productivity to spend the same amount of money to produce a larger amount of software.

As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.

The X thread shouldn’t’ve been posted here. If the podcast episode is worthwhile, a link to that should’ve been posted.

If I wanted to build something that is specific to my needs, this would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Even today with all the latest models – even if what I want is relatively mundane.

To add on to that, what would be produced would be ideal for me but less ideal for other people. Other people need things that I don’t, and they don’t need things that I do. And people’s needs change over time. So the actual range of software that there is appetite for is the result of a huge combinatorial explosion of features, for every single type of application out there.

The appetite you are thinking is satisfied today is merely “there is an app that does X” but the appetite that is actually present once we are able to create software much more efficiently is more along the lines of “everybody gets their own custom app that does X”.

I don’t think the appetite for software can be quenched until we have just-in-time feature generation. That is definitely not within present day capabilities.

There’s two things that could put an end to this. Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far.

Secondly, if AI becomes superhuman at software engineering when acting autonomously. Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results, at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things.

There isn’t strong evidence that either of these situations is going to happen in the near future, so I think software engineers are safe for now. But if you have a narrow skill set and you are focused in particular areas (e.g. front-end web development), then I would worry more, because even if AI cannot replace software engineers in general, it’s quite likely to be able to completely consume specific domains with generalists holding the reins.

— https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

This is nothing new for Zitron. The last article of his I saw:

> I also severely doubt that Anthropic managed to make the cost of running its services profitable in the space of six months.

> [Per The Information in January], Anthropic missed on its gross margin projections, saying that its inference costs were 23% higher than the company had anticipated.

> How did Anthropic, which faced a massive influx of new business to the point that Anthropic was forced to buy more compute from Elon Musk, magically become profitable? Other than that discount, of course.

If you follow the link to The Information, you’ll see that it’s a paid article with the headline “Anthropic Lowers Gross Margin Projection as Revenue Skyrockets”. But what happens when you actually read the article?

> Anthropic last month projected it would generate a 40% gross profit margin from selling AI to businesses and application developers in 2025, according to two people with knowledge of its financials. That margin was 10 percentage points lower than its earlier optimistic expectations, though it’s still a big improvement from the year before.

— https://archive.is/aKFYZ

So, according to Zitron’s own source, Anthropic are actually earning 40% gross profit margin on inference, and that is a dramatic jump upwards! This totally contradicts his position that it’s an implausible “swindle” for Anthropic to claim profitability. He’s counting on the fact that most of his readers don’t subscribe to The Information and will only see the headline, or that they will just see a citation and trust that it backs him up without checking.