HERE (if offline)

10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.

Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?

What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?

I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).

There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...

GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.

It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.

Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?

I think it's the same in the US and probably most of the world.

Last I heard, word on the street was, a lot of people want that job and openings are limited (and tenure generally long-lived), so you pretty much have to know someone there to get the job, and even then probably wait a long time and work your way up. There are so few of that job, and enough people want to do it, that the pay is quite low. So it's not really a viable career unless you are wealth or have another actual breadwinner.

Grain of salt of course. There are a lot of exceptions to the above, I'm sure. But that's what I heard.

Honestly in 2026 if you want to be a 'librarian' you should probably learn and do tech to make enough money, and then spend your available time being a pirate librarian for Anna's Archive or whatever. Far, far more impact: worldwide, unlimited.

But I think if you put your mind to it, anything can be achieved.

Walking around most "libraries", they are kind of a thing of the past. Many literally got rid of tons of books to make room for technology or whatever. Some seem good still though.

I think it's high time to really start reinventing libraries though. AI and digital access and all. And books. But mostly, literacy (of all the above). Maybe some billionaires/trillionaries can fund that. Who funded/founded so many US libraries back when. Carnegie?

  - "cheap, stand-alone PCs"
  - "Star's closedness was a problem"
  - "know your competition"
  - "initial sales were not what had been hoped"

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/35211

There was more emphasis on values like: God-as-god. Country. Family. Courage. Integrity.

The newer values are more like: Money-as-god. Survival. Cats. Dopamine maxxing.

I may get downvoted for mentioning religion in the context of a question about values. But to bring data into it, it's reportedly a fact that "None" [0] as a dominant religious self-identity is indeed a newer/increased phenomenon. It would be hard to argue thats that's not a clear measure of shift in values.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18652908-the-rise-of-...

> Palantir is a vertically integrated outcome based software solution provider

Nailed it AFAICT.

From TFA, https://ethanding.com/foundry-viz/ is indeed a neat visualization of the public Palantir docs.

1. Turn grill on all the way. Close lid. Wait for grill's gauge to reach >400 F (>200C).

2. Put steak on grill. Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

3. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

4. Flip steak over, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

5. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

It's been 8 minutes of grilling. Steak is about done. Stab it with a meat thermometer into the middle part, it should read 350 F (or 176 C) to be medium done (pink in middle).

Tips:

a) Optional but recommended: rub steak with olive oil and steak seasoning on both sides, including the edge.

b) If steak is thicker: add a little more time. If thinner, use less time.

c) If steak is frozen (buy good cheap steaks and freeze to last a long time): add a little time.

d) To cheat, put a little dab of butter on top for the last segment of each side.

e) Leave the steak out for 15-20 minutes to get to room temp before making it.

f) Let it sit on a plate for 8 minutes before serving. It's still cooking, and the juices settle in. You can "tent" foil over it if you want.

g) Don't cut the steak when checking it. "Fast" and accurate meat thermometers are cheap now.

This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet instructions are different.

Assume the business logic and all edge cases work in the legacy app. The app is "done", just too old to work on or run on modern hosts. Hence the project.

Would/could you use AI to deliver the project at 10x the speed? Or at 1/10 the price? Or charge the same amount as ever?

I have a feeling the lowest-cost developers on freelance marketplaces are not very good at using the AI tools (and whatever related acumen) and need a lot of hand-holding, the same amount of effort almost as if I decided to guide AI to do it myself.

IMO, there's value you can sell in being someone that (even developers) can hand off a project to, to do end to end, if it's fully specified. Even though the buyer could do it themselves, the developer would be taking on managing it and having AI do it until it's correct, and all the little things, few as they may be.

AI should be giving contract developers superpowers. If it's not, then the limited set of contractors with the AI superpowers will be able to charge 10x as much for their time, and the actual cost of the project remains the same even if it's done 10x as fast/easily.

Curious if you see/feel this, or if there's a marketplace for "please vibe code this for me, make sure it works and is what I want".

https://web.archive.org/web/20190401161916/http://www.incomp...

or

https://web.archive.org/web/20260727174324/http://www.incomp...

McDonalds should start allowing full 50% off order discounts in exchange for customers opting-in to receiving custom-printed wrappers with hyperpersonalized advertising printed on-demand just for them.

Could they afford to do it? IDK, advertising is effective and seems like a big business.

I think with their McDonalds App discounts for more normal pricing (last I checked), they're half way there?

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/palo-alto-schools/2026/07/10/...

https://www.fournorms.com/campaigns/petition-for-intentional...

https://www.schoolsbeyondscreens.com/reform-proposals

As I understand it, a major reason it's a consistent chorus is because people don't want the "AI is here" talk to drown out (and thus slow the arrival or distribution of) speech/text/popular-understanding about actual strong AGI.

To make an analogy, it could be like this:

Some people were expecting 100 tulips (because they were told tulips are available and can be ordered), and they ordered them. They received 100 daisies. And were saying "OMG, THE TULIPS ARE HERE! THE TULIPS ARE HERE!"

A nearby observer might have said, "You know, those are daisies. Not tulips."

And 95% of people might have said back, "WE GOT 100 TULIPS! SAYS SO RIGHT HERE! THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL! STOP BEING A NAY-SAYER! THESE ARE BEAUTIFUL TULIPS!"

The 5% could just to think to themselves, and could get chastised by the crowd, if they were to say say it out loud: "Well, those are not nearly as beautiful as tulips. And if you don't take it up with the seller, you may never receive the real tulips you were after. Since you think or at least act as though you've been sold them already."

So here's page with a line chart and downloadable CSV data, with a ~79 year lookback best as could quickly be found [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA

In short: Don't worry, this one is just a 1974 or 2008 or 1992 or 1981 style blip. Hopefully. It always recovered before. (Before 1947, data is sketchy/excluded though.)

People did wait in soup and bread lines in the 1930s, I think. Check the online libraries, you'll find entire books from the early 1900s on how to make economical tasty meals on a shoestring budget.

We can do better. But it's not going to be by relying on large corps to help us out, probably.

It's going to be by reinventing the systems that are utterly broken.

[0] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real personal consumption expenditures: Nondurable goods: Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption (chain-type quantity index). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN many times before.

Is it related to that?

Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:

> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.

> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.

This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:

> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?

And starts off,

> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....

I too am not a SWE. This confuses a lot of SWEs, recruiters, interviewers, etc.

My domain used to have a name, but that name got changed to something that has the word AI in it. And I don't really identify with that either, although I use parts of that.

Hacker (in the HN sense, obviously) actually captures fairly perfectly how I approach using computers/tech.

Good piece for those with such an identity crisis to re-find the word for it.