anonzzzies

Maybe i'm blind, the article starts with performance in bits/s for 'competitors', but then I cannot find the performance of this solution?

Could be; I just notice that literally everyone has them and calls them 'our free tv' etc; it seems also to have some pirated netflix and other streamer stuff as when I recommend something, they usually have it there.

Not sure what they are doing, but I am in Spain; most non tech people friends who like football have a little 'device' they get from their local friendly 'internet installer' which gives them free(-ish; they pay a few Euro per month, I guess for the VPN?) football (+ any other tv/movies/etc). And this is non tech friends who wouldn't know what a VPN is for the 1 million$ question on that show. So clearly it's all kind of useless (we know).

And so far Starlink (I cannot get anything else on my farm) seems to not have joined in the fun; I can reach anything still; probably not a big enough target.

I think OP, as said on Reddit, wanted to get a lot of investment and ride the wave but did not know how to. This was said as such on Reddit today by them. This is indeed a shame especially it was a year earlier but indeed a lack of marketing; many people on Reddit told what to do in this case, in hindsight, it’s worth checking it out imho.

I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.

Agreed, I had the same talks around 2000 but at the time it was still very much mssql/db2/oracle for 'real companies'. Yet i'm still surprised how much pushback we get, especially in Asian countries (India) but we do get it, a lot. And we have conversations with financial partners in the US as they advice our VCs; those calls go the same way 'ah, you are using that hipster open source stuff, yeah we don't do that here'.

> because software is built for only newer CPUs.

You are right, but it reads (to me, could be just me) you mean newer specs which used to be true when I shipped software in the 70-90s; you mean faster machines / more memory right? Like installing a new version of software or OS and suddenly all memory is used, system is swapping and you did not ask for that but some obscure feature you didn't need needed to be shipped fast.

I hope so, I see some changes; far less than many seem to think here though.

> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse

It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.

What year? The ones I had were the best. Very expensive, but service at the office & at home, very sturdy, very long battery life. That was somewhere early 2000s.

> but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU

Been doing it for decades. Not a billionaire and not interested in becoming one; in the US I would've been one. But never had issues.

Try getting something good out of fiverr or upwork. Even now it’s terrible (we get to clean up some the experiments). I agree maybe with the in house after enough years but that will also have a big effect on employees of those companies; a future (5+ years for sure as enterprises don’t move so fast) AI would need few resources to create and optimize and improve. I am not resisting my company won’t exist soon-ish; I am resisting that people see a bright future for devs here on HN. I don’t know where that comes from outside handwaiving ‘loom’ and ‘train’.

I know fiverr will start delivering nice software in 5 years and that’s what I worry about. By that time fiverr is probably just a chatbox though without humans, as what is the point?

The point is that button pushers currently simply don’t seem to be able to do this work, so it’s a little more than pushing some buttons. But no, I don’t think it will last very long, but few years more I guess looking at the competition and lack thereof.

Clients are starting to, that’s exactly why I am not sure why AI doom deniers here think this will think it will go well for them. But it will still take awhile and we are enjoying that time. If we see new markets, we will move into them.

The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though. We build LoB apps which are basically crud apps (they are not but most here would call it that).

We can have fun and make money right? Possibly at the same time but not in that case.

Yes, but we can say it happened in our past. But agreed, we cannot go back 20m years and say it’s simultaneous with the events here. If GP meant that, then agreed.

It usually is more like; I send an email or so which contains enough details to understand whatever we are doing. A person in that list sends it to 20 people. The next email is a zoom invite with 30 people of 1.5 hours to ‘go over the email together’. If these people have no influence, good or bad over the outcome, why would I waste this time while it usually just says they were too lazy or incompetent to read the email?

Useful talk and meetings all day is fine, but these are just to write busy/billable hours for all these useless folk with no value for the project. And socially I like listening and talking, just not for this.

But that 20m year old light is in our past light cone; we can say it is in our past. If it is not in our light cone, we cannot communicate any temporal info so we cannot say if it’s now, past or future in reference to us as observer.

Yes, agree with that, but that's usually not the sort of work we talk about here. But sure, robots are close there. All those admin jobs on the other hands...

They sure are though; they have many processes to automate as well: big corn farmers/factories also have admin, erp, crm, departments with processes etc. There are companies doing billions in revenue with departments of people just copy/pasting PDFs who do real life things like you state who have immediate gains. But they won't do it alone yet and luckily need us. They still benefit though vs the large consultant businesses or even their own IT deps though.

I guess this is why many people say LLMs are lazy; it seems that if they have a task that is hard, they always take the easier one until you beat them with a stick. Then if there are more tasks, it just stops after one claiming completion and, in some instances, they go for a seemingly unrelated task to simplify the actual task: and the latter is almost always wrong and irrelevant to the problem as a whole. Earlier LLMs used to read the unit tests and generated code to just cover the tests and put // TODO stub implementation.

Yeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with salespeople who now send me presentations that just have a bucket loads of hallucinations in them: turns out they never read them but had interns write most of them: now they still cannot read and AI generated stuff looks plausible. I only have anecdotal experiences but this sure seems to resonate for the AI negativity around here. I could be wrong but it's so far removed from our experiences.

LLMs are just tools indeed.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone finds it counterproductive. This was strictly impossible for our small team before recent AI and hiring more people didn't work for the pricing. Our profits jumped, revenue jumped, client count jumped. What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences?

We do spend all our time either code reviewing or talking with clients but the latter was already the case and the former was just better spaced out over time as this would before take many months.

We (my company) have a corporate LoB ‘base’ which has, collected over the odd 40 years, any process you could imagine and using that we just look at large corps to their processes and offer to automate, on departmental level so they don’t need board approval nor IT dep approval to pay for it. SOTA AI can do this in a day or two with our base, almost on its own and we charge just below the departmental budgets for it. We have to send in nasty sarcastic ‘project managers/sales guys’ to the many meetings as of course these middle managers want to be seen as useful so these meetings are objectively useless to us but required misery anyway. They (meatspace meetings) are of course now far more expensive than the (just) tech part, even if you value the framework at some $ licensing and SLA cost.

These corps, and they are mostly multinationals, mostly owned by US, IN or CN owners and literally all their IT deps absolutely stink; stuck on Java or C# from 20 years ago with 0 incentive to improve or learn anything; they heard about AI but don’t use it for anything.

This is gravy train, worth billions in whatever region if you manage to get in at the right level. Not sure it will last as, in my experience, most of these people in those departments can be replaced by a LLM running on an iPhone today and LoB apps are pretty boring if you have one solid consultant who has a few decades knowledge; they must be training LLMs to do just that?

I think you never worked with ‘plenty’; most people I worked with in the past 40 years in IT I am suprised when they actually can walk in on their own. I would say most can be replaced by deepseek flash now, let alone Astra or Fable. I never know in what heaven HN people work, but my company is doing some fixing for a multinational with 20k ‘devs’, most outsourced and they are quite literally morons, far behind even bad LLMs. Their trick is basically to schedule as many calls with as many people as possible to look busy and make their timesheets somewhat plausible. And these are mostly devs. When you see the questions to jira tasks you worry about if they don’t forget to eat or go to the toilet randomly. Oh yeah, most are classified as seniors. An we visit many companies like this. So I am definitely confused how people on HN seem to think most humans can do something worthwhile.

They said it every decade since invention. My father who worked in IT since the 60s told me to become an electrician when I was kid as computers will replace all jobs soon. I did become an electrician, welder and have two doctorates; math and cs (which was part of the math dep then). But this time does feel actually different; cheap LLMs are good enough to do advanced work, better than most colleagues I worked with over the decades. Sure you need humans still, just not many. Robots are crap still mostly but we are just starting out… I will not have to worry in my lifetime, but if I had kids or grandkids, I would be worried. But I guess all generations, like my father, have that anyway; we will see.

Yeah, it is actually very bad now. And somehow keeps leaking keys.

I cannot really think of worse bread than pret or that first picture garbage. It's just so horrible compared what I bake at home, but sure, you can keep it for 40 years and it'll still be the same. Apparently people value that over their colon health.

Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.

I use Astra to drive Fable; I drivel into my phone while walking in the forest and it builds. I don’t need to check; I do as clients need to pay, but it always is great. And it surprises me with things I did not know were possible even (never encountered them before so why would I know). We are at the point where our clients send voice messages and they get what they want without humans basically. This costs 10+10 max2 subs but that’s nothing compared to hiring people. We didn’t fire anyone; we just have 100+ more clients and make almost 50x more money. It’s boring but great as long as it lasts, we are already where you say for what enterprises generally need for the boring parts. That’s 99%.