MaybiusStrip

All in all, it's clearly the AI skeptics that have egg on their faces. Sam Altman is very flawed and you could make a strong argument for why that's why he blew an enormous lead to Anthropic. Dario's predictions in general haven't been that far off. The general public is becoming increasingly aware of AI as a big deal (and something about 60% hates). Our jobs, regardless of where on the adoption curve we are, have undeniably changed a lot.

Zitron and a whole lot of people on HN were trying to claim this was a nothingburger or at least no more important than the invention of IDEs up until Dec 2025, and then all of a sudden everyone quietly shifted what the "reasonable" opinion was. If I were those people, I'd spend more time taking a look at what was wrong with my priors than look outward.

Millions of books go in the trash every day. Should all private property come with such an asterisk that it ought to be preserved for whatever unlikely contingency you can imagine? I don't know, AI actually seems like a much more worthwhile pursuit.

Which one of the authors of the website are you referring to?

The current year is 2026. I think it's quite likely AI will make the top 3 by then. Putting this on my calendar.

What do you think of people that say that about climate change? It seems you don't understand fully. This is not the time go get tired, right before this actually starts impacting jobs and people in other ways.

I "pair" with claude-code and still write 30% by hand, with additional review with gpt-5.4, but I definitely write fewer bugs than before. I'd estimate my speedup to be 2x.

The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.

Software jobs have been steadily outpacing other white collar jobs for the past year, but it's unlikely you will find one unless you work on your attitude and your ability to communicate respectfully.

This is a great point, because when you ask it (Claude) if it has any questions, it often turns out it has lots of good ones! But it doesn't ask them unless you ask.

This has nothing to do with burden of proof, it has to do with journalistic accuracy, and this is obviously a hit piece. HN prides itself on being skeptical and then eats up "skeptic slop."

You can literally go look at some of antirez's PRs described here in this article. They're not seeing it because it's not there?

Honestly, what you're describing sounds like the older models. If you are getting these sorts of results with Opus 4.5 or 5.2-codex on high I would be very curious to see your prompts/workflow.

"You can use AI but you are responsible for and must validate its output" is a completely reasonable and coherent policy. I'm sure they stated exactly what they intended to.

NAND2TETRIS is fun. For an experienced programmer the difficulty is almost akin to a game. Highly recommend it to programmers who have been in high level land for too long.

What percent of the time do you have to drive your car?

I'm confused, you said earlier that you use it every day.

Spend, not lose. And it's mostly on training, not inference.

I don't think so, I think it's more about openness. I've noticed older software engineers tend to be more anti-LLM and quick to dismiss.

The shortcomings are aplenty, but they don't bother me. The things it can do weren't possible 2 years ago. I'll leverage those and take the bad with the good.

Similar experience with Tesla FSD. I know other Tesla owners who tried it a few times and think it's trash because they had to disengage. I disengage preemptively all the time but the other 90% of my drive being done for me is not something that used to be possible. I tried to give up my subscription because it's expensive and couldn't hold out two days.

OK, I don't think that this delineation is actually as black and white as you're making it out to be, given most subjects are complex enough to require nuanced interpretations of data/facts, but I'll give you that in some instances there is a fine line, and there are certain areas where there is a lot of disagreement even amongst experts.

Still, an expert, by definition is just someone that has "comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of a subject." You could argue that as soon as you've acquired enough knowledge on a subject to form an accurate opinion, you have yourself become an expert.

Although I'm guessing when you're referring to "experts" you mean "establishment experts." For example, your average doctor whose spent decades studying medicine as opposed to your online research on how to best treat/prevent a certain ailment (you didn't provide an example so I am just referring a fairly common one). What's the difference between your expertise and theirs? On one hand, they have decades worth of rigorous academic study and personal experience over you, on the other hand, you may have a "fresher" perspective that may be devoid of certain institutional biases. I would just strive to stay humble.

This statement doesn't even make sense, where are you acquiring this knowledge if not from experts? Are you out there doing field research and conducting your own scientific experiments on every subject you're interested in?

I'd love to hear a couple examples of which "expert opinions" you've disproven for yourself and where you acquired the supporting evidence.

You are taking my Russian roulette analogy way too literally. The "bullet" is not literally just dead people, it's also the economic impact of letting this disease run rampant, which you are clearly not accounting for.

We aren't just shutting everything down to save lives, we're shutting everything down because we some reason to believe that if 70% of the population gets this disease in a very short amount of time 20% of them are hospitalized, and at least 2% die (in truth, the CFR would skyrocket if we don't flatten the curve), the societal and economic havoc would be much worst than the one resulting from these government imposed quarantines. At the highest end of the risk spectrum, it could be orders of magnitude worst. Do we know that for sure? No, hence the Russian roulette analogy: some chance of extremely high risk, esp. when it comes to the entire planet: NOT WORTH GAMBLING.

If you think that world leaders are currently sacrificing the economy just to save lives, you are not paying attention to what they have been doing.

Sure, I was referring to this study which shows that 20% of cases were either severe or critical: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

True, this is only in China. In most other countries, it's still too early to be able to collect great data because of how quickly the situation is evolving (the denominator is bound to be wrong due to delays between cases being detected and the amount of days it takes before cases evolve into severe/critical condition or death). But it's data, and you can't easily dismiss it.

> So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math.

This isn't entirely true. The epidemics in China, South Korea have more or less been resolved, and many of the steps being taken in other countries are based on comparing the outcomes in those countries compared to ones that are failing to slow the spread of the disease with disastrous consequences (Italy).

> But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable.

It's possible that the health experts are not taking the economical windfall into account, but the politicians enacting the laws probably are. These decisions are being made in rooms with people who, with their knowledge pooled together, most likely have more information about the disease and the economic impact of their decisions than you.

Secondly, the reasoning for national shutdowns earlier rather than later is to shorten their length. As of now, local government officials are hoping not advocating 3-6 month shut down, but rather trying to avoid one by shutting down now. I remember reading the figure of 2 weeks but I cannot find it quickly now. We will see.

>And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?

This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?

2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.

I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb

You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...

I get it, some jobs are more desirable than others, and there has to be some reason for people to take the less glamorous job, but that barrier could just be skill. I support hard work when it comes to training. Hey, you want to make video games, well it's a really competitive field and you better train your ass off in order to be the best at what you do. I think generally, leveraging passion in order to get people to work really hard is good. They get fulfillment out of it, and everyone else gets a great product.

But that's not what this is. This is investors and executives who found a money pump and are pumping as hard as they possibly can without any regards for the health and wellbeing of the human machine they're putting pressure on. At some point, you have to give people the time to live their lives outside of work or the world is going to become a worse place. They become stressed and depressed, and it affects their families and friends, and and then has a ripple effect on society.

Let's say you manage to carve out 2-4 hours a day to work on your side project while remaining a decent person to your wife and kids. Leaving your job means you could spend 11-13 hours a day on it instead. That's an enormous difference and could easily mean the difference between failure and success.

Not only that, but you are putting yourself in precarious legal territory by bootstrapping a side project. Your employer could easily claim ownership of all your IP.

OP was a senior software engineer at AWS, how difficult do you think it would be for him to re-enter the workforce with a competing cloud provider nor even coming back to Amazon?

Supply/demand is not the only thing driving the difference between the salaries of a middle-school teacher and a Google software engineer.

Before you draw conclusions about all homeless people based on the the ones hanging out in Pioneer Square, I challenge YOU to go to a homeless shelter like Mary's place and learn a bit about the people living there. My fiancee is a doctor in the Central District and deals with homeless people every single day. A huge number of them are working families with children who work in the city and can't afford to rent, commute, or find a job in a cheaper area.

> This isn’t popular, but...

Sorry to break it to you, but you're not the independent thinker you might believe you are:

"Drug and alcohol abuse tops the list among the general public as a major factor why some people might be homeless. More than eight in ten (85%) adults feel this is a major factor. "

"Mental illness or related mental disorders such as post traumatic stress disorder are cited by two-thirds (67%)."

https://shnny.org/uploads/2007_Gallup_Poll.pdf

Mindfulness and meditation have been popular for thousands of years...

"Collapsing into the downward spiral of poverty and homelessness" is not an appropriate outcome for not being frugal, and a system where this is the case is probably not very good. Again, circling back to the idea that focusing on frugality as a solution to poverty ignores the larger systemic problems actually keeping poor people poor.

I would qualify: people aren't just dissatisfied because of the "unfairness" of growing inequality. The growth of the wealth gap has some very real ramifications, ie: on the distribution of power in politics.