My point isn't that home brewing makes alcohol easier to obtain; clearly it doesn't, as you pointed out.

Rather, it provides a respectable rationale for having a beer (e.g. testing a batch, checking the bottle fermentation, seeing how it pairs with a meal).

Drinking is now part of a productive, interesting hobby. For most people that's harmless, but for a vulnerable individual, the hobby supplies frequent opportunities, a steady supply, and an intellectually respectable reason to consume. That's all.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173796

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

The positive of that is that if you ask three people to write the same function, it'll most likely end up nearly identical. You don't get codebases where different areas are written using different styles and different patterns.

This same effect applies equally to coding agents.

While Python and Node have undoubtedly seen a huge spike since the advent of mainstream AI, relatively recently I've begun to notice a small but growing trend of people switching away from or back to languages like Go and Rust. In an absolute sense, yes, Python is still dominating and growing.

The trend I have noticed is a very small but growing cohort of folks who are coming back to languages like Go and Rust.

And there’s a reason: the Go designers were huge Python fans, so leaned on its design quite a bit. They essentially wanted to make a modern Python with first class support for static typing and highly scalable parallelism, not just concurrency.

I've been noticing that many new projects that would have been written in Python or Node a year ago are starting to be written in Go, Rust, etc.

Theory: people realized there’s little benefit to Python for agents. As Zep wrote, an “agent is a long-running, concurrent, I/O-bound process that spends most of its time waiting on a model, a tool, or a human[1]” — not a particular strength of Python.

I'm wondering if you'd considered Go (or others—Go’s just my fav ) before landing on Node, and more broadly whether you've noticed a similar pattern?

1: https://blog.getzep.com/agentic-development-in-go/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091941

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Perhaps I'm mischaracterizing it, and it's about training those around potential abusers on how to recognize signs of abuse and adopt tactics that prevent it? Or it's about training _children_ to recognize what's unacceptable and how to report it safely? Or something else entirely?

Regardless, your conviction in the efficacy of the training grabs my interest. Could you share more about it so I'm not working off of incorrect assumptions?

You also mentioned that their abuse rates are lower than schools. Do you happen to have a source for that — I’d be interested in educating myself on that as well!

But that's not the point. You made up a quote I didn't say ("demonization"), and accused the former poster of doing something they weren't: defending the church.

Saying that schools are worse yet ignored is not defending the church. It may also be incorrect, but that's a separate assertion.

I read it basically as “schools are even worse than churches and scouts yet are overlooked,” nothing apologizing for the churches.

“Are you AI-ing me? Em dash giving you away”

It’s a pretty load-bearing (lol) example, yet it was clear in context it wasn’t serious. I’m beginning to notice people getting pretty good at detecting AI content, which I find reassuring.

It makes sense: AI-written prose is basically the homogenization of all styles of writing into a single voice, so it’ll stand out against the unique personalities we are used to seeing. It is just taking a minute for the average person to gain literacy — but it seems to be happening rather quickly, again unsurprising since we’re such social monkeys with a lot of our 15 watt brains dedicated to socialization and identity recognition.

Use your em-dash proudly!

It hit me at the end, when I read this:

> The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that.

I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LLMs, and the whole structure just pattern matched to Claude for me.

I went back and scanned it over again, and noticed several other tells:

* "Think of U/L [Unix / Linux] as a motivating analogy rather than a direct comparison." * "Priors" _and_ "a priori" used in the same article. * "A real kernel […]. The Ambiance Kernel […]. The Kernel […]." — LLMs love this pattern.

To be abundantly clear, *I'm not calling this AI SLOP*; it's obvious that a human put a lot of thought into this, gives a shit about the topic, and shared interesting ideas leading to a productive discussion. I really did like it.

There's just something empty or hollow about the LLM style; paraphrasing Joni Mitchell "there's something lost and some thing gained" [1] when using AI. Your writing, your code is more consistent, more structured, more planned out — generally better but in a way that loses the character behind human writing.

[1]: From "Both Sides Now", a great song about looking something from two perspectives: youthful innocence, and jaded cynicism. Listen to the original 1969 version first, and then the 2000 remake as you can tell she's singing from the respective perspectives. Deeply meaningful song!

Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!

Postgres is decent for a free ($$$) database, although it's lack of clustered indexes and in-place updates (its MVCC approach) sucks for many use cases. I find it a sensible default but not the best at any one use case.

Python, frankly, sucks nowawadays. Maybe it had its time, but there are so many better lingos now. It's got type hints that are ignored, really bad patterns ("dependency injection" that's really just the singleton pattern, FastAPI encourages you to open a db connection and a transaction at the front of every request and commit at the end while you're making other requests, writing to disk, etc), and it's slow in both user experience and runtime (no real parallelism).

But generally I have to make some trades to get a great job. I love Go, personally, and the incredible simplicity it encourages.

Seriously, if you'd be willing to share, I'd love to hear what you do!

If you don't, spend a few weeks before you start your search. You're almost definitely going to need them. Unless you're in a niche where the common stack is different.

This isn't me gatekeeping or something, it's just common sense. When 80% of the jobs are Python + Javascript / Typescript, running in Docker, using Postgres, using React on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and git plus github for deploying and reviewing, you're going to stumble without cursory knowledge. You don't need to be an expert in it all…

Same with waitlists.

It's impossible to avoid capitalism!

And instead just "sync" a code folder from one main repo (perhaps containing common domain models) to other repos?

Basically the Go philosophy that a little bit of copying is better than a lot of dependency?