That's not correct. Trapdoor functions aren't one way because they destroy information, and if they were they wouldn't be very useful because you wouldn't be able to go back the other way (i.e. decrypt the text). You'd end up with many possible inputs for a given output, like a hash.

Users pointing out things that are missing, or me forgetting to tell them I’ve added something, or both of us having a different idea in our minds of what something should do. It’s still extremely time consuming.

3 years ago if I saw a post on the HN front page about a desktop environment written in Flutter (or a Swift port of Flutter), I'd be absolutely blown away.

Now, I see this, and I feel nothing. I'm not impressed. I don't want to know how it works. I'm not going to read 300k lines of AI slop code. I don't care about architectural decisions made because they're not made under any true constraints. I'm not even excited about the AI part of it, because I know AI can do this. We could all build this if we just prompt hard enough.

I'm tired, boss.

Looking more broadly though, a model I can run on my laptop (Gemma 4) is ~4 points away from GPT-5.3 codex or Sonnet 4.5 on arena.ai LLM leaderboard. Those models were SOTA less than a year ago.

Local AI on your device seems like a much more likely future to me than datacenters in space. For inference at least, training is another story.

If you're an investor, you're probably managing other people's money. Would you want to explain to your customers if & when you were wrong, why you didn't go all in on AI? This is the most transformative technology humanity has ever conceived and we've been making sci fi movies about for decades, and didn't put all our money into it?

So now that investor money is too scared to go anywhere else, that means if you're a CEO who cares about your share price, and who has to front up to the board every few weeks and defend your strategy lest they fire you, you must care about AI too. We aren't just a stiff old database anymore, noooo sir, we are the context layer for agents.

So now, if you're the CTO, are you going to tell the CEO that AI has no use case here? Not if you care about your job. Repeat, all the way down to the bottom.

There will be an emperor has no clothes moment. It might not be as dramatic as everyone is hoping, and it doesn't mean AI isn't world changing and is not here to stay, but the survival-induced psychosis at every level of the corporate world is absolutely unsustainable.