I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.

Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.

However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.

Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.

No. Analyze the thread more carefully, particularly the original comment to which I replied. Should help any good faith reader to see that it's the opposite.

>That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending

You'll see that I actually introduced that fact originally to clearly delineate the roles, whereas GP was blurring / reassigning them to make his point. I added that Congress's other major role here is in oversight, which corrects the GP's assertion that political appointees are needed for accountability to the people. i.e. I'm saying that mechanism exists, Consitutionally. That destroys his primary argument—that this is about accountability.

You seemed to have overlooked that fact (in addition to my other points), in much the same style as GP. Perhaps his rhetoric has worked on you a bit here.

>Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.

That is not what's happening here, and reads like a complete misunderstanding or calculated twisting. The "in this case" bit is actively misleading. The OMB already executes spend management. There is no special "case" here. The regime is using the OMB to politicize the process by claiming it was partisan—i.e. using the same well-worn tactic in its ongoing attack on science and other matters.

>I'm not sure that's actually true in general

Of course it's true. Statistically.

>that trust is not absolute

Never the assertion. Immaterial.

>and things have happened (like initial COVID response

In fact, the left experienced a temporary bounce in scientific confidence during the initial COVID response, before settling down to pre-pandemic baselines. Meanwhile, the right experienced a roughly 20 point drop in confidence that has persisted.

>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades

The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.

Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.

No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.

Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.

In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.

Your "guess" is not the stated reason. FTA:

>“Consistent with our grant-making standards and practices, the organization is not an eligible grant recipient during the ongoing investigation.”

In fact, WRT Fidelity's actual disposition on funding hate groups, the SPLC reported in 2023 that their donor advised fund had been consistently used to that effect, including anti-LGBTQ, anti-government, anti-Muslim, and hard right groups.[0]

[0]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/extremist-cryp...

Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?

And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?

Perhaps you're considering only the European theater, but even that would have been significantly more challenging for Russia without the U.S. tying up (and degrading) Axis resources and manpower throughout Europe and elsewhere (e.g. the Pacific). Japan could have very well opened an eastern front for Russia.

And, it was the U.S. that forced a two front war that prevented Germany's fuller focus on Russia's western front (millions fewer troops). Not to mention U.S. logistical and material support to the Soviet Union, which may well have prevented their industrial collapse.

Even with all of this support, the fatality rates for Russia were astronomical. To this day, it boggles my mind that one nation lost ~26 million people in a single war.

Hard to imagine how they would have succeeded without the U.S.

>You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load.

I keep thinking maybe it's me who's just not getting the vibe coding hype. Or maybe my writing vs reading code efficiency is skewed towards writing more than most people's. Because the idea of validating and fixing code vs just writing it doesn't feel efficient or quality-oriented.

Then, there's the idea that it will suddenly break code that previously worked.

Overall, I keep hearing people advocating for providing the AI more details, new approaches/processes/etc. to try to get the right output. It makes me wonder if things might be coming full circle. I mean, there has to be some point where it's better to just write the code and be done with it.

Serious question: at what point is it easier to just write the code?

Still, it seems that some people who couldn't code previously, can now do...something.

But, for experienced developers who have tried vibe coding, does it actually slow you down? And does it negatively impact the quality of your code?

I'm trying to figure out whether vibe coding in its current state is really a net-positive versus good engineers. And, I'm not even certain whether it's marketed as such.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047404

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43878507

Points: 31

# Comments: 15

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799568

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

That's the thing though: those stans were (and still are on some other platforms) very vocal, irrespective of his copious ups and downs (e.g. prior Tesla problems, Twitter debacle, provocative/bad behavior, etc).

In fact, it seemed the worse things were the more vocal they became (like a PR army), and that included here on HN until very recently, IMO.

Well, everything has become political though, right? I mean, you mentioned health, but that's actually a hyper-political topic.

I've definitely observed this over the years, but there has also been a fair bit of consistency in the form of certain through-lines and more balance.

In any case, what I'm describing is a pretty sudden shift—in particular the recent "re-normalization".

In the last couple of years in particular, I'm pretty sure I noticed a hard-shift in the kinds of posts that were being up/downvoted, comments being made, etc. This was very similar to bot activity on other platforms, and it represented a significant pull to the right. I'm not trying to be political here, but there's no way to be clear without stating it.

But, recently, it's as if all of that relented and HN has kind of "normalized" again. For instance, I'm seeing more posts that are critical of DOGE or Musk that would have been downvoted. Now it's the opposite.

I don't know if this is attributable to the discovery of bot farms that were eliminated by HN mods or something else, but it does not seem organic.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43777109

Points: 11

# Comments: 19

Exactly that. It was never that it straight-up didn't work. It was just that there was some issue.

I first encountered it with a TV that literally had a dead pixel. From there, the next 3-4 purchases featured something wrong. Monitor's built-in settings menu didn't display, cordless phone speaker issue, etc.

Dead pixels.

No way it was random. Funniest part was they'd get snippy with their return policy, like you were the problem.