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Maybe HN is particularly upset because they feel targeted, given that overpaid tech executives have been giddily making the claim that programming jobs will disappear any minute now. What makes it even worse is that it's very obvious that said tech executives haven't programmed in over 10 years, if ever, and don't know anything about the technology they are selling. They are putting jobs at risk purely for the sake of personal enrichment.

This is probably combined with a general sense of AI fatigue. The population as a whole is getting tired of "AI slop" and companies trying to shoehorn "AI" into everything. Personally I'm also tired of every startup needing to be an AI startup. As if there was nothing else worth building or investing in. It's sucking the air out of the room.


It made me kind of angry when I saw Dario repeatedly claiming that AI would be taking all the programming jobs any minute now. His company supposedly is working for a better future, but he's giddily talking about something that could cause millions of people to lose their homes if it were true.

Our governments have a habit of being reactive rather than proactive. People have floated the idea of UBI, but if UBI happens, it will probably mean it's the only way to avert a crisis, and the amount that people will get might only be enough to rent a bedroom and eat processed food.

I think in the medium term, the reaction is overblown. Even though LLMs can make software engineers more productive, you still have a competitive advantage in having more software engineers. Medium to long term though, the goal is obviously to replace human jobs.

I'm not a communist, but Karl Marx understood that the labor force gets its bargaining power because they are necessary to produce value. What do people imagine happens when the human labor force becomes essentially completely replaceable? They imagine the government will be forced to take care of the population to prevent an uprising, but they forget that the police and the army can be replaced by machines too.


You can look up what tends to happen when human labor isn't needed anymore by reading about the resource curse - that one is also about not needing human labor. Only the least corrupt countries seem to be able to resist it. None of these countries have a very large population, so chances are that you don't live in one of them.

a one bedroom and processed food sounds frickin amazing sign me up

It's not surprising, Dario is an absolute ghoul. Exactly the same as Altman, peas in a pod.

And TPUs, their own hardware designed specifically for AI, and designed to scale better to larger models.

Yeah but the first LCD screens sucked. Poor color rendition and not usable for gaming. In the early 2000s you were better off sticking with your CRT.

For divers, we really should be focusing on building better underwater drones. Remove the risk to human life entirely. You don't need AI either, just a remote-controlled machine with a cable that goes up to the surface. I know there is some loss in dexterity with current robot arms, but building more dexterous system seems like it's not an impossible task.

ROVs have already reduced the demand for commercial divers on some types of work. But it's going to take decades (if ever) until they're able to do the full range of human tasks. Some construction work has to be done essentially by feel in near-zero visibility so using an ROV for that would require advanced force feedback mechanisms, maybe imaging sonar and other sensors. Not necessarily impossible, but extraordinarily difficult and extremely expensive with current technology.

For sport and exploration divers, going there yourself is kind of the whole point. I'm not interested in watching a video feed from an underwater drone.


Get back to me when drones or robots are being used for dangerous things on land, such as skyscraper construction. Until then, realize it is in fact not easy but extremely difficult and expensive.

In general it looks like these kinds of changes are trying to make it harder for people to do this kind of basic maintenance themselves. Force you to go to the dealer.

> Force you to go to the dealer.

I recommend to never go to the dealer, unless you're going there for a warranty or recall repair. A local repair shop is always the better option. And if you don't know of a trustworthy local shop, take it to the dealer for an estimate, and then you know if the local shops are bullshitting you (they should come in way under dealer prices).


While increasing dealer revenue is a plausible goal, it also seems plausible that reducing production cost could cause awkward maintenance. It is even plausible that only the bill of materials would be considered, though the feedback loop for increasing assembly cost is much tighter and less noisy that the loop of end-user dissatisfaction with maintenance issues.

Even within an organization, creating externalities from one department's perspective seems common enough.

Even if a decision maker is aware of the possibility of externalities and cares about a broader constituency (temporal or "spatial"), evaluating actual costs is an expense as is justifying that investigation expense and any mitigation/avoidance expenses to others in the decision web.


There probably should be a maximum legal age for the president and congresspeople (e.g. 65 aka "retirement age"). The guy is 78. It's common and expected for brain health to deteriorate, it's not a huge surprise, but the guy has too much ego/narcissism to ever admit that this is happening, and the people in his administration won't want to admit that they put a toxic narcissist with dementia into power and defended him way past the point where it was reasonable to do so.

There's many simple, small changes the US could put in place to make its political system less corrupt.


In theory, the electorate determines the maximum age for a politician by who they vote for…

There were several young Presidential candidates running in both parties over the last few cycles, but voters chose the oldest from each side. Which tells me that voters don’t really care about age as much as they do other things.

Which, when I view it from that lens, kind of makes your argument seem like: “people are voting for politicians based on things I think they shouldn’t, so I want to make a law saying they can’t”


> Which, when I view it from that lens, kind of makes your argument seem like: “people are voting for politicians based on things I think they shouldn’t, so I want to make a law saying they can’t”

Which is fine. We do that all the time.


Trump's situation has nothing to do with his age or mental acuity. We've had moron presidents before. Biden was supposedly a vegetable at the same time "he" was guiding us to a soft landing from COVID that made most other developed nations extremely envious.

It has everything to do with his public support for heinous and moronic and outright unconstitutional acts, and the way that support is pushed from the Legislative arm of the government. Without the majorities Republicans hold in Congress, Trump could have been rightfully removed months ago.

The President is not as powerful as Trump thinks he is. Congressional Republicans are using him as a lightning rod to keep pressure off their backs. They are mildly beholden to him in certain specifics, in that if Trump tells his base to primary you they often will, but they are not preventing Trump from doing stupid shit that even his base doesn't totally support that will objectively hurt everyone like this Iran war.

Reforming the Presidency cannot change anything because the paper already says he can't do these things. It doesn't matter as long as other people just pretend they don't hold the power they do.

Trump has been a moron, a simpleton, a grifter his entire life. None of this comes from mental deterioration. He's just a fucking moron who only knows retribution and grifting and refusing to pay contracts. A 35 year old Trump would be doing nothing different.


I'm not sure whether a less demented president would be even more dangerous.

I saw my comment score rise to 4 and then reduce to 0.

It beggars belief that this comment is even worthy of debate; the fact people actively disagree is astonishing.


I think the split is between those who recognize it as true, and those who recognize it as true, but are mad you called it out. Because "politics on hn" or "dear leader during war time".

Also, he's 79, and turning 80 this year. I'd be good with a limit of 75, which would mean no one in office at 80+.


Well, if the original article is political, the replies are likely to be political as well.

I can see the logic in the age limit, but I think the most likely scenario is that Trump stays in power until death.


No. People turned to Trump because the other side is equally ludicrous, refusing to address things as simple as urban crime and propagating meaningless feel-good solutions.

While I agree with you about the pattern of impotent feel-good solutions, let us be clear that urban crime is a municipality, or possibly state-level problem. People turned to Grump because they wanted simple answers to complex problems (validating their own egos), and they doubled down (refusing listen to their fellow citizens) out of pure mass-media-induced spite.

I don't agree at all. Both sides present simple answers. Mass media reflects liberal sentiment.

Mass media reflects top down sentiment. The red media machine frames this as "liberal" to market themselves as some alternative when the reality is that they are openly in the pocket of big business rather than even having to make a show of caring about individuals.

They both present overly simplistic answers. The blue simplistic answers generally fall short and fizzle, as they're framed in disempowering ways and neutered by corporate lobbying. The red simplistic answers cause active harm by rejecting reality and the idea of second order effects. Grump's policies are basically what the grassroots red tribe has been lusting after for decades, and the results have been disaster after disaster - regardless what one thinks effective policy should look like.

(the only two political philosophies I've been able to find that match Grumpism are anarcho-capitalism and religious fundamentalism. I used to have more of an ancap perspective, but I moved past that thanks to Yarvin's writings)


In my hometown, a seventh grade boy was strangled to death by his mom's boyfriend, who had been deported twice and convicted multiple times. It's comical to me you think people abandoned liberals out of 'pure mass-media-induced' spite. I hate this site.

For sure, that is a tragedy with failures of multiple institutions. But a single anecdote doesn't form a general argument! I would say that the main result of putting emphasis on such anecdotes is to make people crave overly simplistic solutions - that exact "mass-media-induced spite" I am talking about.

In this instance, if the murderer had been prevented from reentering the country, this murder would not have happened. Everyone can agree this would have been a much better outcome.

But we can easily imagine a slightly different situation where the mother gets deported, the kid stays here in the "care" of the boyfriend, and then gets subsequently strangled by the citizen-but-criminal boyfriend.

Without data and a logical model, we're hopelessly lost in the weeds. Data for putting in context how prevalent various types of these occurrences actually are. And a logical model that keeps the focus on the relevant details. For instance, the [presumably criminal] convictions seem much more relevant here than the immigration status. And the immigration status seems like a red herring that feeds into those simplistic answers.


It's disturbing to me that you think one criminal is representative of all immigrants. Especially considering immigrants as a whole commit fewer crimes than citizens. The immigrants, especially undocumented, mostly try to keep a low profile and work. But you, rando new account, are trying to imply they are all bloodthirsty criminals because of one tragic case you read about in the news.

Years back, there were people on this site with investments in Tesla that would mass down vote any comments negative comments about Tesla or Musk. There are people on this site currently working on DRM and online ads and regularly defend efforts to defeat ad block efforts. There are immigrants that advocate for pulling up the ladder behind them and advocate for very racist policies.

Don't take the down votes personally, just know there's really scummy people out there


> There are immigrants that advocate for pulling up the ladder behind them and advocate for very racist policies.

If you listen to the immigrants supporting "pulling up the ladder", you wouldn't be making such bad faith attacks. Typically the arguments come from legal immigrants that took no benefits, attacking policies of mass immigration or illegal immigrants and giving social benefits to immigrants. This isn't pulling up the ladder, this is a fiscally conservative view that someone who pays taxes can hold and is a reasonable policy to have.


You made up an argument to post a bunch of text. I've gone through the legal immigration process before.

You can look through my replies to find people who are not like your straw man.


I didn't downvote you, but I don't agree that he's unpredictable.

At least to me, he is very predictable. He has an MO, and he never deviates very far from it. And he publishes his stream of consciousness on social media, which exposes a lot about what he's thinking at any given moment.


I disagree.

If his decision to attack Iran was predicted, the markets would have prepared beforehand.

Nation states would have prepared.

Instead we have economic chaos the world over.


I agree with you, but most average people in the US were blindsided by his obsession with Panama, Canada, and Greenland. Remember, most average people in the US aren't thinking about other countries. Maybe Mexico. I know many older people who love Trump but don't know anything about Iran. It's very confusing, and seemingly counter to his America First and 'I only end wars' comments.

I feel like this is most products in the AI space lately. More marketing fuzz than substance. Hard to figure out what thing even does.


You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.


I already see people using an agent to write a git commit


What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand


Because it's not perfect and it still fabricates things from time to time.

I have coworkers who do this and it sucks to be on the receiving end of. It means I now need to read every commit message with skepticism.

It's an example of using AI to save energy for yourself while simultaneously increasing the energy expenditure of your coworkers.


100 x 5s is nearly 10 minutes. If it takes 10 minutes to write a PR there may be a "skill issue". The bottom end of this 1-2 minutes makes more sense.

How much productivity do we really need? Even at senior dev payscale 2 minutes is like a dollar. The tokens and calls involved in having a 5s commit could close in on 10¢, depending on your contract, the model etc. and that's today's costs. Do remember that my salary is on top of the rates for the LLM, so if the 5s response takes 5s for me to prompt, that's 15s (10 for me 5 for the LLM) that the boss is paying for.

This starts to feel like a billionaire eating ramen noodles just so he can reach his second billion dollars.

Where I work our contract limits API calls, so doing this could result in not being able to use the model when I need it later for something more sophisticated (planning, debugging etc.) than using tooling I'm paid to already know.


Im not even talking about the description but “commit this to git with the description x” type prompts


Probably constrained by training resources. It's much easier to experiment with a smaller architecture. You may need many training runs to figure out hyperparameters for example. If each run needs multiple GPUs for a week the cost adds up quickly. I think it makes a lot of sense to start small.


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