bartread

> but the AI lead to amplification of the good and the bad in people.

LLMs absolutely project who we are back at us.

Well... yeah, but, it's more than an opinion: the dead have been radiocarbon dated, which is how we know they didn't all die at the same time as originally believed.

And if they died at different times, especially when most of them died before the Romans arrived, then the whole big battle theory just sort of falls apart from there.

Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle…

I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].

But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.

Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.

There never was any big battle.

There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.

Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.

So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.

I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.

[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.

Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.

If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.

I think with Anthropic the only way you get control of data residency is to use their models via another platform, so I tend to agree with you.

IIRC OpenAI do offer data residency controls but only to enterprise customers and subject to minimum spend.

I get what you mean, but I've always taken the view that code is malleable as compared to other forms of engineering that involve creation of something physical - a bridge, a railway, an aircraft, a car, or whatever (even something like building a house, depending on size, construction methods, materials, etc.) - so I've never really subscribed to the point of view that it's "hard" to make changes to a software system, including distributed software systems, no matter how large or complex, as compared to how hard it is to make changes to something that is physically built.

With that being said, I think it was Fred Brooks that observed (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that software systems are the most complex systems human beings create, and this was all the way back in the 1970s, so there is something to the point of view that making changes to software systems can be difficult.

Nonetheless, I think LLMs and agents have taken software systems from being quite malleable to being really very malleable indeed, and in that sense I absolutely agree with you.

Yeah, it happens.

I was fire-wardening at a carol service about 15 years ago (think ~850 year old gothic stone church with thousands of candles spread around on every available flat surface - looked amazing, potentially catastrophic).

I was sat near the back with a bucket of sand under my seat, and a guy sat in the middle of the row just across the aisle from me, who would have been around 40 or so, had a heart attack and died.

No warning, no history, just gone, and leaving a fairly young family behind. It was honestly shocking.

> in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with

Easier in terms of effort and time, but it still costs, and it still adds drag.

The fact that I can do housekeeping much more easily with agents doesn’t make me want to do more of it. The whole point is to free up my time, energy, and thinking for things that are more worthwhile, interesting, and value-adding. That’s my mentality both at home and at work.

If you’re building a framework or a library, whether open source or commercial, and you think agentic and AI native development gives you more license for breaking changes and churn because your users can just fix it up with their agents, then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you because that blade cuts on both sides.

If you can keep churning and breaking stuff, then I can get fed up, drop your shit like a hot rock, and build it myself. And I will.

I’ve just rebuilt my personal site from scratch after getting cheesed off with the framework I used and it didn’t take very long. What’s actually taken longer is making all the improvements I would have liked to make but were too much hassle before, so one needs to relearn shipping discipline, but that’s OK.

Same goes at work. Even major stack changes, like migrating database engine, are so much easier. Yes, you still need to be methodical and disciplined - in fact I’d argue agents make that more important than ever in many enterprise contexts - but it is still so much easier. I’m seeing projects left and right that in the old world would have taken weeks or months executed in days or weeks. It’s wild times.

Exactly: limiting access is fine, lack of contingencies is not.

Some systems and services still only allow for one owner though (I'm not going to name names), which can be a big problem when MFA is mandated. From what the poster I responded to said, I'd be very surprised if that were the case for them though - just slightly daft policy.

Great example of performative enterprise security practice that contributes to degraded security posture, I suppose. Best of luck.

I'm going to guess if you did it on the video card and simply disabled those enhancements it would be considerably more energy efficient than doing it on the CPU as well which (a) means your laptop battery lasts longer on a charge, and (b) also opens up the possibility of not needing a particularly powerful CPU in order to juice the resolution, because the video hardware is doing the work for you.

From a programming perspective I do completely get the desire to have the CPU do all the work though - if you want absolutely everything under your control it's easier, and especially if your game is single-threaded.

Portia jumping spiders are incredibly smart. People have done experiments where they place the spiders in a complex environment with food in a hard to access location and they basically just sit there looking around until they've figured out a route to get the food. It takes them a while, I guess because they can only process so much information at a time, but they're remarkably good at doing it.

> Because there's literally a market carve-out for city-driving electric cars like the Leaf and the BMW i-series.

And? Do you think these cars are incapable of highway driving? What do you think happens when manufacturers release cars that are terribly noisy in the cabin at highway speeds?

I’ll tell you: what’s always happened. Reviewevers and consumers will slag them off and people will vote with their wallets.

A lightweight car is not a car that inherently has to be unpleasant to drive at speed.

And you think cost cutting is new? Robert McNamara and his “whizz kids” near ruined the reputation of the Ford Motor Company due to quality issues stemming from his relentless cost cutting in the 1950s and 1960s. What he and, really, what the rest of Detroit were doing enabled the success of Japanese manufacturers in the USA because they made a higher quality product and charged less for it.

> And these days the over-reliance on plastics for structure and cost reduction

People have been complaining about this since the 1980s. Plastics have been used extensively in cars for decades, including in ways that compromise the durability of critical components and sensors. This is not a new problem.

It is sheer ignorance to claim that any car weighing less than a ton will inherently be unpleasant to drive at highway speeds.

Yes, and if you’d read my comment properly you’d have realised I briefly surveyed some of the factors that influence cabin noise perception (though by no means all of them), and I also mentioned that many other manufacturers were making similar vehicles that performed well at motorway speeds, so I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say here.

> I doubt a sub-1 tonne car is going to be pleasant to drive at highway speeds

Why would you think that? Well, you sort of explain it, but you don’t have any evidence or experience to back it up, so I’m still not sure why you think it?

Back in the day (think 1990s) plenty of small European hatchbacks weighed less than or around 1000kg, and noise at highway speeds was not a problem: Peugeot, Citroen, Renault, VW, Fiat, and others all had small hatchbacks that were absolutely fine, and perfectly comfortable, at motorway speeds for long distances.

My first car was a used 1998 Renault Clio: depending on which engine and trim level you bought they either weighed a bit less than 1000kg, or a bit more. I looked mine up and it weighed 1050kg.

I did about 50,000 miles in that car, including lots of long journeys. Back then I had a far too heavy right foot - which eventually got me a speeding fine - and even then noise wasn’t an issue on the motorway.

There’s so much more to how noisy a car is inside than merely sound insulation. Aerodynamics are a huge component, but so are shut lines, seals, and panel gaps. Materials and surface finishes also matter. Even things like the shape of the wing mirrors, or how the shape of the front corners and headlights direct air around and past the wing mirrors[0], can have a massive impact on whether or not a car is noisy at speed within the cabin.

This is Hacker News. We all to a greater or lesser extent work or dabble in incredibly detail oriented disciplines. Why would you assume disciplines outside those in majority representation here aren’t equally, or even more, detailed?

[0] I want to say either the Nissan Note or the Nissan Leaf had nobbly protrusions on its headlights specifically to reduce cabin noise by changing the way air flowed around the wing mirrors.