stuartjohnson12

"everyone will do be doing the thing due to ai" - founder of thing company

Aloof condescension and snark is the embarrassing thing to be doing on HN.

I sometimes wonder what is in the mind when commenting this kind of thing. I'm curious:

1. What kind of programming do you do?

2. How would you describe the difference between AI coding in 2023 vs 2026?

3. How confident are you in your prediction of AI capabilities?

I don't think you need a huge, wide-ranging conspiracy to end up with a strong anti-privacy movement, even in a state which otherwise tries to defend consumer rights (in varying degrees of competency) for the most part.

I think you can just start with:

1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.

2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.

3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.

The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.

Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.

I am absolutely mindboggled at the idea that you think the US should not guarantee safe drinking water everywhere for everyone. Unless this comment is pedantic legal snark.

If you look at the difference between AI in 1960 and AI in 2020, you probably won't see much much difference. If you look at the difference between 2020 and 2026, the difference is around 80% of the time I spent as a software engineer in 2020.

The debate about ROI isn't about whether everyone is going to throw their hands up and stop using AI tooling - the debate is about where that value is going to be captured. It's pretty clear that using some degree AI assistance for programming is on the whole faster and better than writing code by hand for the majority of applications, and it's clear that the degree to which it's better than writing code by hand is increasing quickly.

I'm sure someone is going to reply to and say "actually it's not clear and the tech debt is about to explode everything real soon now" or something to that effect, but it's hard for me to explain this theoretically when it is so obvious in practice in my day to day.

When was the last time a formerly undigitised book that was printed but fell out of print suddenly became a success after being discovered in the last, say, 50 years? Is once in 100 years the sort of level of frequency we're talking about?

This is the kind of rationalization hoarders use. The inability to get rid of things because it could turn out to be something we want in the future for reasons that we cannot currently describe.

It's a loss avertive instinct that I think is misplaced. Treating every printed book as priceless is intractable. It's not how we treat these books at the moment. Apparently, today we don't even care enough to spend a few hours per book nondestructively scanning them in.

Let's say we, instead of destructively scanning this books, nondestructively scanned them. What would you propose doing with the copies afterwards? Sell them? To who? They're valueless individually for the overwhelming part. Warehouse them? Why? For who? Do you want to go and look through them? Why haven't you done so already? Have you ever shown interest in consuming an undigitised book a single time in your life to date?

It feels like the anti-AI crowd here have to tie themselves in knots here to make the loss minimization work.

I pre-empted this - my argument does not apply to texts where the physical object is a major part of the historical value of the thing. No, I'm not saying to destroy one of the four remaining Magna Cartas that were meticulously copied by hand. But even if I was, we're only dealing with texts here that are irrelevant enough to have never been digitised already - we tend to digitise most things of value and so the Mona Lisa and Magna Carta would never have been part of this discussion in the first place.

I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies were ever printed in a small town in Ohio in the 1970s as a test run for a failed book which was subsequently never commercialised.

Well, you probably weren't going to go and find any rare, non-digitised books to physically go and read (unless you were going to, in which case, rock on), so we can start by benchmarking relative probability there.

1. At some level of critical information-withholding mass, a leak or disclosure similar to SciHub is inevitable because of the commonly held opposition to hiding knowledge.

2. Availability via Google Books or similar.

3. Availability via AI model reference.

4. Failing any of the above, better AI models that are more capable of doing more things, at the expense of books that were likely to go unread (revealed preference, rare books are often rare for a reason). This will obviously be a nonstarter if you don't want this to happen, but I think it would be good for the world if it did.

I think category of old books that were going to be read or otherwise become important parts of human knowledge that have not yet been digitised and now will never become so because they are instead being shredded and will never make their way into the light because of AI company data hoarding is a small category.

I think people are, on the whole, too precious about old things. In the case of books produced after major commercial printing began, I don't believe it is the paper that imbues the book with historical value.

Indeed, I think there's a high chance that this process increases preservation of the most relevant part of the media - the actual content!

There are tons of old rolls of film slowly rotting away in warehouses that were never digitised. Even for beloved media, the BBC occasionally tracks down an old lost episode of Dr Who.

For now these books are in corpuses of training data, but eventually I trust they will make their way to the rest of us.

fable on longer coding tasks with fable subagents will easily chew through hundreds of dollars in a single run.