I know I try to find a pattern (or a point) where it may not exist. People will read into things like this what they will; sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're seeing a pattern that's not there.

My take-away is that the original post smelled like a bunch of AI generated nonsense, with light human editing; strictly with a view to nerd-sniping only. Von Neumann is catnip.

What a great phrase.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071043

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

This particular essay starts with

> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.

... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.

It finally gets to

> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.

That's a truism of no value.

Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.

At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.

In toto, the conclusion of the paper:

> Together, these findings define a dual-layered model of molecular convergence in ASD: convergence through shared interaction networks in the wild-type state and convergence through recurrent functional consequences of interaction rewiring in the mutant state. More broadly, this work establishes a scalable framework for systematic interrogation of the autism proteome, enables prioritization of druggable protein interfaces, and provides a rational foundation for precision therapeutic strategies aimed at restoring neurodevelopmental trajectories.

I have no grounding here. Does anyone want to have a go at teasing the meaning out?

Never a truer word said. It's the only thing that moves the needle.

I'm not sure that businesses are straying from AI. I reckon everyone's on board. but AI is now accessible to the business folks - callow as they are to the requirements of the technology components - and it's bound to run up against the technology folks trying to wave them off when enthusiastic excesses threaten what the code does, now or in the future. There'll be adjustments on both sides.

That has always been true. AI doesn't change it. It just rearranges some elements that come ahead of that understanding. The volume and velocity are challenges but the understanding and judgement is what separates the good and the great.

BTW: "systems" in my world include not just the technology components but also the humans who operate, adjust and manage all the pieces, and the processes that control it all.

It might, but there'll be a significant cost, even outside of developer attrition. In a lot of operating businesses the opportunity cost is quite high given all the moving parts that sustain its current operations i.e. people, processes, etc.

It's a tough call; and a one-time automated code conversion may be the smallest part of it.

I would have felt that he was at least technically savvy; and, beyond that, he might have the spark of one of the best qualities of a future colleague i.e. interesting-ness - one can't underestimate that.

On the other hand

> he just literally didn't know

That would have been disappointing to hear.

But, let's say this effort is a complete success. What's next?

Can all the maintainers of the c codebase move over to maintaining (forward) the Rust codebase. Surely there'll be some friction, and losses to friction.

What about deployments, monitoring, support and trouble-shooting? Are the teams that perform those functions now capable of performing those functions in the future? It seems to me that the here-to-there for functional, evolving and reliable systems in the real world has been elided and become simply "a player to be named later".