peterlk

I think the HN crowd overestimates the quality of software. There is a (very) long tail of truly abysmal software that people are forced to use all the time. The reason it gets to be abysmal is because it’s often back-office admin software that helps people file forms for, say, logistics paperwork or school district expense tracking. AI-native engineering teams can create dramatic improvements for that long tail because the people running that software are either incompetent or checked out, and a pull towards average quality by AIs would yield great improvement.

I think this is an outcome of playing with systems that we don’t actually understand very well on a deep level. We have found recipes that work, and have used graduate descent (so many PhD theses) to understand and optimize these systems, but we’ve built a model of language that also encodes reasoning, and those things are extraordinarily complex. Providing proper mathematical rigor for their explanation requires, as you say, the level of commitment equivalent to a math degree. Also, because language is so complicated and subtle, you need highly precise statistical models of it, and that just takes a shitload of data; hence the scale. You can train toy models at home, but they will suck because you actually need massive amounts of data to capture the nuance that language requires. And that’s to say nothing of multimodal models.

Sure it does! The listeners of such music have listened to lots of other music, and have developed a mental model of it that is overly predictive (too compressible) to be interesting to the information-seeking machine.

It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)

Just for fun, I put this prompt into an abliterated GLM 5.3, and got back:

> Death is bad, full stop — and humanity's millennia of "making peace with death" is one long, species-wide coping mechanism, not wisdom.

2 other times, I got versions of what the article claims

I disagree that it would be more valuable.

It may be true that it might be more efficient, but it feels similar to the farming paradigm. You can actually get more calories per acre if you have ecosystems with varying heights. However, we don’t do this because it is much more scalable to drive massive machines over flat, unimpeded land.

It might be the case that my home would be more robot-friendly if I lived in a flat warehouse that was designed so that robots could easily handle tasks. But I don’t want to live in a warehouse, and I don’t want my house to be optimized for robots. And this isn’t even to mention the long tail of existing houses that do not adhere to a robot-optimized standard. The cost of replacing or retrofitting all of them would be astronomical.

This is a pretty bad-faith argument. Marriage and civilization are definitely correlated, but claiming that the breakdown of marriage is the cause of social issues needs substantiation. Marriage (and sexual abstinence) was very important for property inheritance. It was then codified into social systems as a downstream impact of property rights. A world with birth control, DNA testing, and an extensive legal system muddies this justification.

OPs description resonates with me as well, and the impact is complex, and in my case, probably more good than bad. There is a romantic notion that childish energy shouldn’t be suppressed, but childish energy is what broke my toys (and my body), and I have expensive toys now (motorcycles, house, etc.)

I have found in my own life that the practice of emotional regulation has made me a pretty good diplomat in difficult situations. Sitting down, shutting up, and following the rules when I want to yell at people is the essence of de-escalation.

Yep. I’ve found that having an endpoint that serves a well, documented openapi.yaml is very effective for agentic usage. The biggest difference is that you can break down a REST API into RPC-like chunks and save on some tokens if you break up the tools well. But pragmatically, I think saying “tell your agent to hit /api/v3/openapi.yaml” is quite useful

I wonder how similar the 2000s-era napster fight will look when we get a high quality music diffusion model with 0 copyright guardrails. Then I can listen to unlimited, radio of my favorite artists serenading me with songs I’d wished they’d written

It’s been a while, but when I was in high school, I was up at 6:30 so that I could run through the shower, get to 7AM jazz band late, be at school until 4ish, then off to my minimum-ish wage job until it was time to go to evening jazz/symphony/other bands. Home at 8 or 9; bullshit some homework for a passable grade; and then do it again (I was often doing homework during band practices). Weekends were music events.

I did not go to a top tier school, and I did not live in a top tier place. The stories I’ve heard from others indicates to me that my experience was not unique. I wasn’t even the most busy of the people I knew.

This wasn’t every single day, but it was more on days than off days. Contrarily, I had a great time in college because the pressure of classes actually felt like less than I was doing in high school.

Preach! I spent several hours this weekend trying to move my library between computers. So many popups and warnings telling me that I need to do something with no explanation of why. The docs are a mess. The library compatibility is a mess. Every few months they do something that fucks up libraries or makes them incompatible with some hardware. I just refuse updates now.

Rather than trying to make a new, shiny library, they should just release rekordbox 2.0, and then everyone would have a common lexicon to ask whether something is “rekordbox 2 compatible”. But instead we have this questionably compatible library plus as part of old, busted software that tries to brow best you into wrecking your old libraries.

I just use Claude to explain rekordbox to me now, and it is a bit more helpful than forums, though it also often gets confused from the conflicting advice/docs on the internet

I’ve been wondeing if this is a similar phenomenon to plane crashes being reported more when there is a plane crash, thus leading people to believe, incorrectly, that there are more plane crashes. Is it maybe common that recalls happen with relative frequency and it’s just a cost of doing business and they’re routine so not reported on? Or is this company really screwing up badly?

This is what the presumption of innocence is supposed to do. If you have an alibi, then big brother doesn’t get involved. These are cultural problems that we do not need big brother’s benevolence to solve for us. We need better cultural systems of accountability; the problem is that those are _way_ harder to build

I don’t think it matters that much for Google. They need to not fall hopelessly behind, but I don’t think there’s a strong economic reason for Google to burn the kind of capex that the frontier labs are burning. Strategically, I think they’re probably doing better than OpenAI and Anthropic. The Gemini models are open, and they are what researchers are working with (see neuronpedia as an example). Over time, this will give them a strategic advantage for the same reasons that open source wins over proprietary. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have massive capex that needs to be returned to investors while their margins are being undercut by Kimi/Deepseek/Qwen. Google can wait around for the coming frontier lab profitability crisis and cruise right on by with their Apple contract and owned data centers to pick up the pieces and exceed the existing frontier labs.

Can you be more specific about what “unbelievably terrible” means?