On the one hand - you’re happy for the entrepreneurs

On the other, every single thing I hate as a consumer happens because of lack of competition and these acquisitions that old dinosaurs use to prop themselves up

Every single one - I don’t think I’m exaggerating

Not particularly heart broken about Roku at this point, but still bugs me to see

An easy read that dives into stoicism, a similar mindset, within the context of running the Roman Empire.

Great read.

It’s not useless, at least not yet. And the fact that you recognize this puts you way ahead of the typical HN user constantly crying about how AI could never

What’s going to make you a good AI-augmented engineer is going to be treating AI like a good partner

Not like a genius, not like an idiot - these are extremes where all the memes on LinkedIn are generated

Like any partnership you will see it comes with bad ideas and good ideas - that it will challenge your own ideas and be sometimes wrong and sometimes right

Approaching it this way, I think my learnings only accelerated - the conversation is of much higher value because it’s a fast back and forth where I can take a moment to learn on those occasions where its ideas beat mine

You are feeling a little insecure, paranoid is not the word, and that’s a good thing

Tackle the problem for what it is: I have this sidekick now that can help me bang shit out in a fraction of the time it used to

Use the the brain that got you here to figure that out - don’t waste your time on these debating whether ai is good or not or listening to stories about how it’s stupid because one time it suggested something that wrong

You’re going to be fine, put AI to work for you

Ask me again in a few months but for now you’re fine

When the city of San Francisco is handing out tax breaks to companies for forcing RTO in shitty Bay Area infrastructure and Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism, it’s hard to not take these findings with a grain of salt

Even if true, I am positive the solution isn’t to stuff people back into offices and rob them of the little leverage they got during covid

I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple

And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between

On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game

On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing

A big part of it is that people feel like they are drinking from a firehouse having to learn to use ai (which is not always just a prompt) and having to leverage it effectively at the same time for real product/business work

I suspect this will settle down at some point too

One other observation I’ve seen: the makeup of a team that can leverage ai is turning out to be different than the make up of the usual high performing Eng team we think about

In my own circles this has led to more work not less

Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold

Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around

Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again

I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there

AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers

My dad (now retired) was always super practical about stuff. He'd tell me pretty nonchalantly things like "yeah we're dealing with xyz constraint, we may have to cut a corner over here, but that's ok", when I asked him about it he gave me a little spiel that you can be thoughtful about how you do things, including when you can cut a corner and more importantly, what corners are ok to cut.

I really took that to heart - especially the "be thoughtful about the corners you cut"

If an LLM has consistently one shotted certain tasks and they are rote/mechanical - not reviewing that code is probably ok.

Are you getting lazy and not reviewing stuff that should be reviewed even if a human wrote it? That's probably not ok

I can live with some basic code that broke because it used outdated syntax somewhere (provided the code isn't part of a mission critical application), but I can't live with it fucking JWT signing etc

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess

If/when they overtake the US, all things aside, they deserve it. There is no world where the US overtakes China but there’s a world where China overtakes the US. Best outcome for the US atm is parity.

Just remarkable the things they’ve accomplished in the time they’ve accomplished them.

I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software

The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch

It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out

The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond

So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?

Even with a throw away, no chance I use OpenAI now - if/when Anthropocene does this I’ll be in a tough spot

I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer

> “2025 was the year when AI really started being useful for many different tasks,” said Terence Tao

I think I’ll go out on a limb and agree with Terrence Tao, I think the dude is well known in the math community, or something

The answer is probably more straightforward than we think, e.g. “the user thinks I can do this so I better make sure I didn’t miss anything”

Their intensions were good, they always are, but the minute you decide to nerf something powerful for someone, it means someone out there has access to the full blown, unnerfed version

Which means there are powerful people out there using AI in ways or for activities in which you will never be allowed to anyway

So yeah, this is just more of the same