hgs3

And remember, these AI models were trained on your work, your culmination of effort and sacrifice, without any consent, credit, or compensation, then sold back to you for a subscription fee.

What an asinine comment. Do you think I, as a software engineer, am sitting around twirling my mustache, cackling as I plot to destroy livelihoods? I'm trying to make a living like anybody else. I've had my own opportunities lost to outsourcing and H-1B's since day 1.

The economist John Keynes predicted almost 100 years ago that technological advances would lead to a 15 hour workweek. If AI now makes you 5x as productive, then why aren't you working 1 day a week for the same pay? Why didn't Keynes' vision come true.

Programmers don't need to justify code as art to reject AI. Programming is building and people who care about building do so because they take pride in the craft, because they take joy in mastery, because they are relentlessly curious, because they learn by doing, because they want to manifest the abstract because it's a natural desire to leave a mark, a legacy.

AI is the antithesis. You don't build, you commission. Mastery requires struggle, AI eschews it. Mountains of slop bury your handcrafted work, your culmination of effort, your capacity to inspire others as you yourself were inspired.

The reason you see less rejection of AI in tech circles is because tech is infested by capitalists who see programming as a means of extracting a buck, not as a craft. AI made their stripes more visible.

> I really love Rust's error handling. Result forces you to address errors ...

> C's error handling story, in comparison, is straight up tragic. It seems to boil down to functions returning a "magic integer" like -1 or a null pointer to signal there was an error.

In C23 you can add the [[nodiscard]] attribute to the declaration of an enum or struct type, then at every call site of every function that returns said type, the C compiler will emit a warning if the result is unused. Instruct the compiler to treat warnings as errors and you can't ignore them.

Interestingly, Zig's error handling is conceptually C like, but limited to integer-like enums (no structs). It's basically a union of error integer code and success result. However, despite being limited to integers, Zig has dedicated compiler machinery for this so there's idiomatic consistency in Zig error handling.

Have you tried Objective-C? It’s Smalltalk-style OOP meets C. It’s also a strict superset of C, unlike C++.

> you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago

Absolutely. There is a limit to how much code can be shared on stack overflow and, in the pre-AI days, code snippets had to be understood well enough to integrate into a larger hand crafted work.

Furthermore, stack overflow code is shared by consenting users and is licensed per the terms of service, unlike AI generated code which is trained on non-consenting users and is both ethically and legally dubious.

Can we also flag AI generated projects posted on Show HN?

I used to love reading HN for the handwritten articles and handmade projects, but in the LLM era the quality has deteriorated significantly. I find myself flocking to other message boards where LLM content is flagged, discouraged, or banned.

> what’s left to get to is relatively small

Not necessarily. In many (most?) areas of tech the rate of advancement follows a logarithmic curve. That is to say, the first 90% is achieved quickly but the last 10% takes significantly more time.

I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.

Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.