Hacker News: ecocentrik

New comment by ecocentrik in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

ecocentrik — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:47:16 +0000

Now you're arguing against your own analogy? Hunter was ubiquitous position in human society prior to the domestication of animals. 50% of the workforce in hunter-gather societies. Today, 12 millennia after the domestication of wildlife, that number is down to 9-14% of the global workforce dedicated to the production, distribution, processing, sales of meat (not including cooked food) according to opus.

Considering that only 1% of the US workforce was a software engineer I expect similar workforce optimization to occur in software engineering specializations over the next 12,000 years. /s But seriously, it's never going to zero.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

ecocentrik — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:45:42 +0000

We don't need as many hunters because we've domesticated sources of meat. We still need ranchers, butchers... an entire supply chain to get meat to consumers. We didn't remove humans from the loop, we just created specializations.

Software specialization might look very different in 10 years but I doubt that technically specialized humans will be completely removed from their professions. We might not be carrying bows and arrows anymore but we will be carrying the equivalent of a rope and a Stetson.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

ecocentrik — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:52:03 +0000

Languages have been reporting compile and runtime errors for decades. Additionally very few senior developers don't already have their minds wired to spot typos the way copy editors spot bad punctuation. Typos were only really a problem for students.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

ecocentrik — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:46:46 +0000

The capacity of the person prompting it to understand is the threshold they won't cross. They can squeeze the gap as much as possible by dumbing down answers or slowly ramping up information complexity but there is a limit to comprehension.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

ecocentrik — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:43:11 +0000

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

New comment by ecocentrik in "Tesla discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition in filing"

ecocentrik — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:35:30 +0000

The idea that anything can still be buried in a filling is equally ridiculous

New comment by ecocentrik in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

ecocentrik — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:43:34 +0000

Try loading the models up in a coding harness like Claude Code. There's a few docx skills listed on Vercel's skill index.

https://skills.sh/tfriedel/claude-office-skills/docx

New comment by ecocentrik in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

ecocentrik — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:17:19 +0000

When was the last time you used Qwen models? Their 3.5 and 3.6 models are excellent with tool calling.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Claude Design"

ecocentrik — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:10:53 +0000

Good homogenous experience is the hallmark of good design. There are no surprises with good design. It just works the way you expect it to work. Good design should not generally challenge your expectations.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

ecocentrik — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:56:06 +0000

They are clearly straining under new demand and everyone is being served highly quantized models without notice.

New comment by ecocentrik in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

ecocentrik — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:50:46 +0000

Oil producers that weren't disrupted over the last few weeks.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Spanish legislation as a Git repo"

ecocentrik — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:59:40 +0000

Tests for correctness, self similarity, duplication of concerns, contradictory statutes, edge case detection, cruft or outdated laws that muddy the waters...

If the full compliment of software development practices were applied to legislation and ordinances we would be living in a very different world.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Migrating to the EU"

ecocentrik — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:51:14 +0000

The term for this is ethical consumerism or conscious consumerism, defined as purchasing products that align with moral, social, or environmental values, acting as a form of "voting" with one's money.

Virtue signaling takes place wherever changes in group behavior are required by changes in conditions but calling it just virtue signaling is reductive. People are moving off of US services because of the behavior of the US government and US citizens.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Building a new Flash"

ecocentrik — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:21:24 +0000

Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.

New comment by ecocentrik in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

ecocentrik — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:27:43 +0000

I think the problem might actually be with reenforcing the red lines. The events of the last few weeks and this new deal only make sense if Anthropic was trying to find out how Palantir and the Pentagon had circumvented their restrictions to attempt to reenforce those restrictions like company actually concerned about the misuse of their product. OpenAI most likely came in with assurances that they wouldn't attempt to reinforce their restrictions.

New comment by ecocentrik in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

ecocentrik — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:06:08 +0000

No. I'm suggesting there should be AI safety regulation to limit how AI can be used by the government. It's new tech and it pays to be cautious and restrict usage in areas like nuclear missile launch and domestic surveillance.

New comment by ecocentrik in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

ecocentrik — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:48:05 +0000

Isn't the story here that the DOD is pressuring Anthropic and others to enable their AI for this specific use and for now Anthropic and others are saying no while the DOD threatens them with penalties.

We desperately need real AI safety legislation.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Test, don't just verify"

ecocentrik — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:33:48 +0000

Doesn't this run into the same bottleneck as developing AI first languages? AI need tons of training material for how to write good formal verification code or code in new AI first languages that doesn't exist. The only solution is large scale synthetic generation which is hard to do if humans, on some level, can't verify that the synthetic data is any good.

New comment by ecocentrik in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

ecocentrik — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:19:07 +0000

In the US they also get scanned and stored.

New comment by ecocentrik in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

ecocentrik — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:50:01 +0000

Given the choice between a 2000 acre banana plantation and 400 bitcoin. I would choose the banana plantation with full confidence that I would get a better return from bananas over the next 20 years.