Hacker News: cmiles74

New comment by cmiles74 in "AI ruling prompts warnings from US lawyers: Your chats could be used against you"

cmiles74 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:02:11 +0000

It will become increasingly difficult to argue that a particular transcript between someone and Claude isn't accurate, once Anthropic finishes tying those transcripts to your official identification with Persona. Wild times!

New comment by cmiles74 in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

cmiles74 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:08:13 +0000

There's a lot here, mixed some marketing and some dubious LLM claims. That being said, I think there could be real benefit in pushing detail on how features effect finances down to individual teams. Right now I have two features on my desk that both seem reasonable; if I knew which one would generate more income (i.e. increase customer retention, lead to more sales, etc.) that would make this choice a lot easier.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

cmiles74 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:48:47 +0000

You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.

I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:41:40 +0000

Indeed! In the article Bob is an astrophysicist.

I think the difference between the workflow you describe and the description of Bob's is that you have a pretty good idea of what a working solution would look like. In my reading if the article Bob does not.

In my opinion, the software developer analogue of Bob would be someone who would often reach for the LLM as it's nearby and easy. Maybe at first they would be careful about reading and vetting the model's output. Over time they might grow comfortable and overly confident with the model's output and pay less and less attention. As they take on more complex tasks they begin to understand less and less about the LLM tooling output but they don't really notice, it all looks good and tests are passing. Eventually we see a production problem, maybe even an outage. When we narrow down the issue to a PR with Bob's name on it and ask him how it led to the production issue, Bob tries to be helpful but struggles to understand his own PR.

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:13:42 +0000

Maybe it saved them some time? So far the studies seem to lean toward probably the LLM didn't save them any time.

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:06:38 +0000

Until the LLM is wrong and Bob passes the erroneous result off as accurate, reliable and vetted by a knowledgeable person. At that point Bob is not producing a useful result. Then it becomes a trap other people might get caught in, wasting valuable time and energy.

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:03:45 +0000

It's a spectrum and we don't have clear notches on the ruler letting us know when we're confidently steering the model and when we've wandered into vibe coding. For me, this position is easy to take when I am feeling well and am not feeling pressured to produce in a fixed (and likely short) time frame.

It also doesn't help that Claude ends every recommendation with "Would you like me to go ahead and do that for you?" Eventually people get tired and it's all to easy to just nod and say "yes".

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:59:01 +0000

Do they need to write maintainable code? I think probably not, it's the research and discovering the new method that is important.

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:55:13 +0000

I have to disagree that Bob will be a better producer, although I do agree that Bob will produce more. In this scenario, Bob isn't clear on which LLM output is valid and important and which is erroneous and misleading; I think that's a pretty critical distinction. It's the kind of thing that might go undetected for a long time, until a particular paper turns out to be important and it's discovered that it's also entirely wrong, wasting a lot of time and energy.

New comment by cmiles74 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cmiles74 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:51:31 +0000

I think we already know what we need to do: encourage people to do the work themselves, discourage beginners from immediately asking an LLM for help and re-introducing some kind of oral exam. As the article mentions, banning LLMs is impractical and what we really need are people who can tell when the LLM is confidently wrong; not people who don't know how to work with an LLM.

I hope it will encourage people to think more about what they get out of the work, what doing the work does for them; I think that's a good thing.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

cmiles74 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:44:17 +0000

Oh no, I wasn't clear: I am sure people read these agreements. I think most of the time, they don't understand them. Also, we can't always understand how these agreements might be applied even if we do think that we understand them.

I don't think we can hold people responsible for these types of contracts if they are under duress, for instance, under threat of the loss of their job. In this case the person signed in order to get the promised severance package, without which they wouldn't be able to continue with life-saving medical coverage, in my opinion that would also be under duress.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

cmiles74 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:52:18 +0000

I'm not sure we can hold individuals responsible for signing these non-disparagement clauses. They often don't have a lawyer to review the paperwork and, I am sure, employers like Facebook aren't going to wait for a new hire to have a lawyer review that paperwork. There's a real pressure to sign everything with HR and get on to starting your new role.

Plus the power imbalance.

New comment by cmiles74 in "A nearly perfect USB cable tester"

cmiles74 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:06:09 +0000

I’m sure it’s overkill but I wanted to know how much power my laptop or whatever was actually drawing.

https://iaohi.com/products/aohi-the-future-adonis-usb4-2-0-2...

New comment by cmiles74 in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

cmiles74 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:24:35 +0000

It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.

Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).

New comment by cmiles74 in "Apple Just Lost Me"

cmiles74 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:01:29 +0000

I assume they are talking about the "This application was downloaded from the internet" warning, which I also don't like. Requiring dollars for signing and then _still_ showing a warning when someone installs your application seems crappy to me.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python"

cmiles74 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:43:39 +0000

I dunno, if you can slog through the Python ecosystem then the JVM is starting to look not so bad. Plus with Clojure you don't need to deal with the headache and heartache that is Maven.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Nvidia NemoClaw"

cmiles74 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:56:57 +0000

Agreed. I think the "simplifies running OpenClaw always-on assistants safely" bit is pretty misleading. I suppose it can wreak less havoc on your local file system but, as you point out, it's access to your account credentials (Slack, email, Amazon?, etc.) that is the real danger.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?"

cmiles74 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:13:49 +0000

I mean yeah, I agree, but is it that hard to keep relevant technology in the mix? I'm not saying everything has to be cutting edge!

New comment by cmiles74 in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

cmiles74 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:56:19 +0000

A weekly ops meeting where they talk about ensuring PRs with AI contributions get extra scrutiny? I think that's significant news.

New comment by cmiles74 in "Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues"

cmiles74 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:47:00 +0000

Seems like a bad bet to me. It looks like authors are going to lose this case setting the precedent that you not only don’t need to license training data, obtaining it illegally (for free) is totally okay.