rc-1140

What I'm getting from the contents of the blog post is that there's a constant fight the author has with their audience that I'm summarizing as "I think your endeavor is foolish and you shouldn't do it, but I'm not your boss so who cares, but it's a bad idea, but it could be useful, but you shouldn't do it".

I think if you have plans for a software factory (read: some kind of conceptual framework for a loop that turns tasks into code/features), you should try it. My opinion is that even if your implementation is a bust or you never take it past a proof of concept, you've at least done something to inform yourself about what's out there and what you've tried.

Better to have a graveyard of barely started projects that give depth to your knowledge instead of relegating yourself to prompt slavery because [frontier model of the financial quarter] can do Marvel + Bioshock + Ted Lasso + Command and Conquer or whatever horrifying Consumptionslop™ that people like Nikita Bier love so much.

Burning question: why is this worth paying for as a layman? I can sometimes find a use for all these LLMs for software development, but I can never find a good use for any of this outside of "slightly better search engine".

This is a really cool and practical idea! Some of my first professional efforts out of college were writing Python mini-apps with Tkinter to replace "abused" Excel spreadsheets. One of my friends working in sales might benefit from something like this, I'll send it his way.

I don't know about the stability/market value of this if you intend to turn this into something that attempts to make money, however. Said friend is currently using stuff like Gemini to generate HTML mini-apps as well; while he's not storing anything in databases, he's able to generate receipts and other things for essentially free.

Even software people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I think people like the article author are either single or have no dependents, and it's a big reason I cannot take many of these posts seriously. Much like the story of Peter Pan, the authors of these posts are college students who never grew up and had to be responsible.

The next step is to forbid generated/AI-edited posts.

I don't really understand what it is with CompSci graduates and their bizarre aversion to handwriting, note taking, and any kind of skill that's derived from arts disciplines or "average joe" office systems.

Shorthand notation exists and it's more than possible to develop your own. I'd trust a OBS recording going in the background over some AI slop that has some chance to micro-hallucinate what it's hearing. It also sounds like a skill issue that the author can't control the pace of his own meetings to where being able to take good notes is seemingly impossible.

The author's AI use cases seem like a band-aid to cover bigger problems. Let's not even get into the part of the blog post where the author has started delegating internal thinking and reflection to conversations with a LLM.

Saying it again, I think we're in need of a moratorium on "AI Has Changed The World Forever" posts. All of them read the same and offer nothing past "I asked a LLM to make a midsize feature, I haven't looked at the code but it compiles on my machine and that should terrify you" - buddy, we've had people pushing code that compiles on their machine and occasionally goes quickly read or unread in PRs, that terrifies me now.

I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they consider close to that level of perfection, that's when they say they're done.

While this may be an unfair generalization, and apologies to those who don't feel this way, but I believe STEM types like the OP are used to problem solving that's linear in the sense that the problem only exists in its field as something to be solved, and once they figure it out, they're done. The OP even described his mentality as that of a "Thinker" where he received a problem during his schooling, mulled over it for a long time, and eventually came to the answer. That's it, next problem to crack. Their whole lives revolve around this process and most have never considered anything outside it.

Even now, despite my own healthy skepticism of and distaste for AI, I am forced to respect that AI can do some things very fast. People like the OP, used to chiseling away at a problem for days, weeks, months, etc., now have that throughput time slashed. They're used to the notion of thinking long and hard about a very specific problem and finally having some output; now, code modules that are "good enough" can be cooked up in a few minutes, and if the module works the problem is solved and they need to find the next problem.

I think this is more common than most people want to admit, going back to grumblings of "gluing libraries together" being unsatisfying. The only suggestion I have for the OP is to expand what you think about. There are other comments in this thread supporting it but I think a sea change that AI is starting to bring for software folks is that we get to put more time towards enhancing module design, user experience, resolving tech debt, and so on. People being the ones writing code is still very important.

I think there's more to talk about where I do share the OP's yearning and fears (i.e., people who weren't voracious readers or English/literary majors being oneshot by the devil that is AI summaries, AI-assisted reading, etc.) but that's another story for another time.

> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.

Absolutely not.

1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.

2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.

Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.

Places like this (hackernews) and Reddit are where concepts like 996 become normalized and picked up by everyone else, including unrelated industries. I think this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP and not given any time to fester because "startup founders need to work 996 to secure revenue" or whatever.

No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.

The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit problem" go away?

> It seems like chasing golden unicorn super smart bois has been more of a problem than a solution in SV and companies like google. It starts to look like a schoolyard game or mensa.

> What I'm talking about isn't just awkwardness and lacking charisma. I'm talking about randomly telling women that they can tell she is on her period and things like that.

These don't seem limited to SV and Big Companies™ like Google, all it takes is a cursory scroll either through this website (even this thread!) or a trip to any of the CompSci-focused boards on Reddit. Additionally not limited to women and minorities, but anyone from a non-traditional background as well.

If anyone feels like working on these issues, the problem is extremely local, you don't even have to leave HN!

I think that there needs to be a separation of meditation's tangible benefits from both the religious associations, such as seeking nirvana or psychedelic experiences, and the social & financial ones stated in this article that either view meditation as a genuine secret superpower or are see it as a backdrop to take advantage of people simply trying to find mental peace.

My belief is that the idea Kabat-Zinn had, which is paraphrased in the article, is good. "Pay attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment" - stop, take some time to reflect on your feelings, process them. Maybe just take some time and not "think", where you give yourself some away time from the world. The anecdata from countless people seems to vaguely support the notion that this view on meditation works; I wouldn't call it concrete by any means, but it's as solid of a scientific start as one can get with something like meditation.

Software developers and those adjacent love to tout acronyms like "Keep It Simple, Stupid", why does the buck stop at software? The further one gets into the article, the more outlandish things get: electronic stimulation, microdosing various drugs (mentioned a lot on HN, which I've always found disturbing), cranial ultrasounds, even the stock photo of the lady meditating with a VR headset?

At the end of the piece, Laukkonen provides the following rhetorical question: "[W]hat is liberating about chasing different states of consciousness, and not enjoying the one that you have?" I think a lot of the comments here and the research presented towards the end of the article are in too deep in either side and are unable to see the forest for the trees.