Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075525

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

When the changes are small and properly reviewed, there's no point in caring how it was done. It should be trivial to write, but difficult to approve and merge.

Projects as significant as Debian should own the fact that they are indeed a bureaucracy and take inspiration from what has always worked long before LLMs.

I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.

If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.

From that perspective, LLMs are a weapon meant to disrupt their power and shake out the businesses that are too weak to resist or too dumb to see the threat. It's not about "solving" code, but weakening the competition enough that they sell out or go away. The code is still as valuable as any other proprietary information, operations, plans, etc.

It would make it a lot easier to ignore most of the insane promises and pointless arguing. I do think LLMs have potential, but not while it's still being advertised as general intelligence or whatever politically charged scifi nonsense that makes the chronically online salivate.

Considering the amount of investment involved and disillusionment, the public will be demanding this soon anyway. I am looking forward to it.

I can't think of anything dumber than all the tedious work forced upon people by "the telephone game" and a lack of oversight. That's intrinsic to any office.

They had a capability and then immediately demanded it be used as soon as possible. No deeper thinking is required.

There was very little incentive to force the moves you're claiming Apple intended to. You've got it backwards. This is exactly how Jobs' "reality distortion field" actually worked. People would overthink every time he was wrong or flat out didn't give a shit. His overrated status compelled people to make things so, and you're falling for it like they did.

> Sony and all the previous big labels just did digital uploads of their catalog instead of ripping CDs like cavemen. For the 2nd-phase rollout of iTunes Store in October 2003 with 400,000 songs, Apple could have had CD Baby and other small indies use the same effortless transfer process as the Big Labels but for whatever reason, Steve Jobs treated them differently.

Did you ever consider that it was "effortless" for the big labels because they invented the formats iTunes used along with all the guidelines for how uploads should work? Why wouldn't iTunes take their lead instead of the other way around? The goal is to get this shit out the door now and make money. The big label archives already had things in the right formats and properly audited to be consistent, or they had the means for a quicker turnaround if they didn't. Of course it would be massively easier for everyone except the indie labels.

They're lucky Apple found a quick remediation. They delayed signing the contract because they had to wait and see if any damage was caused. Next steps would have been renegotiating or lawsuit.

What you're describing is a nice side effect of that for Apple, but the reality is they're not going to do the bitch work of importing all those songs from a hodge podge of whatever formats they're given. They didn't have a better tool available at that time to make their catalog consistent.

It's very believable that Apple felt enough urgency to rush this phase.

I have to assume you and the author (at that time) aren't familiar enough with the corporate world to realize all discussions containing privileged information (contract details that would never get a press release) are confidential by default.

Of course Apple would never think they'd have to explain this. It's a reasonable expectation for them to have.

Sorry, what? How is collaborating with people around the world working "alone"?

Why do we insist on anthropomorphizing AI in this way? The quicker we purge this habit, the sooner we will find the clarity promised by AI.

That clarity will not be a celebration of AI. It will not make unproductive people more productive. It won't even necessarily make productive people more productive. What limits us is the over-centralized distribution of information that has brought us into this ugly groupthink and censorship. This era of AI is becoming the moment where people gain deeper insights for themselves, not produce new content for others.

If we want new content, we need to truly work alone. It requires someone to maintain internal focus for long enough to say something nobody else has. Just because some people inevitably reinvent what others have, doesn't mean everyone is bound to. The way we're headed is guaranteeing nobody is ever alone enough to achieve new ideas. We can't be living in a landfill and hope to build great monuments.

I'm glad you brought up Jevons Paradox, because it's for this reason I believe it's an extremely poor description of what's happening with AI.

The broader topic people should be discussing is not Jevons Paradox, but marginal utility.

More artifacts have diminishing utility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

I'm confused by this take. In general, LLMs don't replace the expertise required to use an LLM.

Knowing the right input to give the LLM is not enough, nor does it ever end. The LLMs themselves need to be continuously updated and/or specialized for use case, and the "right input" is a moving target.

Keeping both ends of this aligned is the exact same expertise we already had before LLMs. These implementation details would only impact the credibility of those researchers who don't adapt to using this new tool. Who would stumble over something as trivial as this? LLMs aren't even the most important tool in the toolbox anyway.

Bad mobile support is a sore spot for any "Show HN" announcement.

Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.

> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.

This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.

As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.

You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.