bakuninsbart

It is tough though, I'd like to think I learnt how to think analytically and critically. But thinking is hard, and often times I catch myself trying to outsource my thinking almost subconsciously. I'll read an article on HN and think "Let's go to the comment section and see what the opinions to choose from are", or one of the first instincts after encountering a problem is googling and now asking an LLM.

Most of us are also old enough to have had a chance to develop taste in code and writing. Many of the young generation lack the experience to distinguish good writing from LLM drivel.

I think you are making a couple of very good points getting bogged down in the wrong framework of discussion. Let me rephrase what I think you are saying:

Once you are very comfortable in a domain, it is detrimental to have to wrangle a junior dev with low IQ, way too much confidence but encyclopediac knowledge of everything instead of just doing it yourself.

The dichotomy of Junior vs. Senior is a bit misleading here, every junior is uncomfortable in the domain they are working in, but a Senior probably isn't comfortable in all domains. For example, many people with 10+ SE experience I know aren't very good with databases and data engineering, which is becoming an increasingly large part of the job. For someone who has worked 10+ years on Java Backends, now attempting to write Pythin data pipelines, Coding Agents might be a useful tool to gap that bridge.

The other thing is creation vs. critique. I often let my code, writing and planning be rewiewed by Claude or Gemini, because once I have created something, I know it very well, and I can very quickly go through 20 points of criticism/recommendations/tips and pick out the relevant ones. - And honestly, that has been super helpful. Using it that way around, Claude has caught a number of bugs, taught me some new tricks and made me aware of some interesting tech.

I think one thing to look out for are "deliberately" slow models. We are currently using basically all models as if we needed them in an instant loop, but many of these applications do not have to run that fast.

To tell a made-up anecdote: A colleague told me how his professor friend was running statistical models over night because the code was extremely unoptimized and needed 6+ hours to compute. He helped streamline the code and took it down to 30 minutes, which meant the professor could run it before breakfast instead.

We are completely fine with giving a task to a Junior Dev for a couple of days and see what happens. Now we love the quick feedback of running Claude Max for a hundred bucks, but if we could run it for a buck over night? Would be quite fine for me as well.

Why wouldn't it? I still have to hear one convincing argument how our brain isn't working as a function of probable next best actions. When you look at amoebas work, and animals that are somewhere between them and us in intelligence, and then us, it is a very similar kind of progression we see with current LLMs, from almost no state of the world, to a pretty solid one.

That's not even a devil's advocate, many other animals clearly have consciousness, at least if we're not solipsistic. There have been many very dangerous precedents in medicine where people have been declared "brain dead" only to awake and remember.

Since consciousness is closely linked to being a moral patient, it is all the more important to err on the side of caution when denying qualia to other beings.

I've been experimenting with Claude, and feel like it works quite well if I micromanage it. I will ask it: "Ok, but why this way and not the simpler way? And it will go "You are absolutely right" and implement the changes exactly how I want them. At least I think it does. Repeatedly, I've looked at a PR I created (and review myself, as I'm not using it "on production"), and found some pretty useless stuff mixed into otherwise solid PRs. These things are so easily missed.

That said, the models, or to be more precise, the tools surrounding it and the craft of interacting with it, are still improving at a pace where I now believe we will get to a point where "hand-crafted" code is the exception in a matter of years.

Regarding truth telling, there seems to be some evidence that LLMs at least sometimes "know" when they are lying:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824

The issue is that by introducing hyperbole, the meaning changes completely. Take the two statements:

1. I want peace.

2. a) Therefore I need to be strong enough to deter any attack.

2. b) Therefore I need to be so strong that all my enemies fear me.

2. a) is sound. Nobody attacks if they believe the cost is higher than benefit. ("Believe" is doing heavy lifting here, most wars start when countries belief about cost/value is misaligned)

2. b) is incompatible with 1. Either you believe that a stronger party does not necessarily attack weaker parties, thus peace could also be maintained without supremacy, or you believe supremacy leads to wars, but then your own goal of supremacy cannot be in the name of peace.

Unless, of course, you're a race supremacist, who believes you're so much wiser and more moral than anyone else that only you can be trusted with unchecked power. An idiotic and immoral position to take.

On the contrary, Figma's value proposition is increased by LLMs. Current coding assistants are like savant-idiot junior devs: They have relatively low reasoning capabilities, way too much courage, lack taste and need to be micromanaged to be successful.

But they can be successful if you spell out the exact specifications. And what is Figma if not an exact specification of the design you want? Within a couple of years the Frontend Developer Market might crash pretty hard.

There were many daggers making the Perl Community bleed:

1. Enterprise Development

Java et Al led to a generation of developers working further from the kernel and the shell. Professionalization of the field led to increased specialization, and most developers had less to do with deployment and management of running software.

Tools also got much better, requiring less glue and shifting the glue layer to configs or platform specific languages.

Later on, DevOps came for the SysAdmins, and there's just much less space for Perl in the cloud.

2. The rise of Python

I would put this down mostly to universities. Perl is very expressive by design, in Python there's supposedly only "one right way to do it". Imagine you're a TA grading a hundred code submissions; in Python, everyone probably die it in one of three ways, in Perl the possibilities are endless. Perl is a language for writing, not reading.

3. Cybersecurity became a thing

Again, this goes back to readability and testability. Requirements for security started becoming a thing, and Perl was not designed with that in mind.

4. The Web was lost to Rails, PHP, then SPAs

I'm less clear on the why of that, but Perl just wasn't able to compete against newer web technologies.

Germany has a 6 month probation period for new hires in which both sides can terminate the contract with 2 week notice. After that, it is one month, two months after 3 years going up to 7 months after 20 years.

> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.

Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.

In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.

> Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.

I'm quite fascinated by the huge overlap of flight enthusiasts and computer nerds. Any discussion on HN even tangentially involving flight will have at least one thread discussing details of aviation. Why planes, and not cars or coffee machines or urban planning?

Could you provide a prompt where the popular LLMs provide false or biased output based on "wokeness"?

Rewriting the cloud in Lisp.

On a more serious note, there should almost certainly be regulation regarding open weights. Either AI companies are responsible for the output of their LLMs or they at least have to give customers the tools to deal with problems themselves.

"Behavioral" approaches are the only stop-gap solution available at the moment because most commercial LLMs are black boxes. Even if you have the weights, it is still a super hard problem, but at least then there's a chance.

> people are genuinely talking about them thinking and reasoning when they are doing nothing of that sort

With such strong wording, it should be rather easy to explain how our thinking differs from what LLMs do. The next step - showing that what LLMs do precludes any kind of sentience is probably much harder.

Cantor talks about countable and uncountable infinities, both computer chips and human brains are finite spaces. The human brain has roughly 100b neurons, even if each of these had an edge with each other and these edges could individually light up signalling different states of mind, isn't that just `2^100b!`? That's roughly as far away from infinity as 1.

That is so narrow a definition of scientific research it excludes many major contributions to our base of knowledge. The primary difference between engineering and science is the intention - Scientists want to understand how things work by using the scientific method, engineers want to make stuff that works, but this still often includes iterating over designs by using empirical data.

If a team of engineers find a cool new algorithm to make computer vision easier, we learnt something new about the world in the process. On the flip-side, you actually have plenty of research in fields you would consider science, eg. physics, that do not use the scientific method at all, but instead deduce possibilities based on mathematical modelling.

Weirdly enough, both can be true. I was tangentially involved in EA in the early days, and have some friends who were more involved. Lots of interesting, really cool stuff going on, but there was always latent insecurity paired with overconfidence and elitism as is typical in young nerd circles.

When big money got involved, the tone shifted a lot. One phrase that really stuck with me is "exceptional talent". Everyone in EA was suddenly talking about finding, involving, hiring exceptional talent at a time where there was more than enough money going around to give some to us mediocre people as well.

In the case of EA in particular circlejerks lead to idiotic ideas even when paired with rationalist rhetoric, so they bought mansions for team building (how else are you getting exceptional talent), praised crypto (because they are funding the best and brightest) and started caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does).

Israeli and american intelligence agree that Iran was not aware of the October 7th attack. Hamas did that by themselves. In hindsight we also know that Israel thoroughly infiltrated the Iranian forces, so if they had known, Israel would have known in advance as well.

One of the things every democratic constitution henceforth, and supported by the US, did differently. Maybe a constitutional change to afford basic rights to aliens is in order.

My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous than the political shift we are feeling.

But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.

It is a one-syllable word, easy to pronounce in many languages, quite distinct from other words and brands, and can easily be turned into a verb.

"Race realism" is just a meaningless label Neo-Nazis use, because they are still trying to fly under the radar, or they are slightly embarrassed of being what their grand-parents fought. They might try to butter up their standing by (falsely) citing stuff like the Bell Curve, but it is still the same vile and evil ideology it was 80 years ago.

But not all fascists are neo-nazis. Just because a subset of today's fascists describe themselves that way, doesn't mean they are fundamentally different from other fascists. Look at Steven Miller; he's jewish, and quite obviously a white supremacist. He's all about dehumanizing people he thinks of as leser, and he welcomes the new fascist America. AfD, the german far-right party, is both very pro-Israel and loves to play "tread the nazi line and extend it"-game. Anti-semitism is a common, but not necessary prerequesite to fascism.

When I was younger I also thought the opposite of good should be bad, and it is silly to describe things as evil. I disliked the religious connotation, but have changed my mind. There are people committing absolutely horrible things, and calling it anything but evil is underestimating the depravity of those characters. To quote Captain G. M. Gilbert:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

With the bounce back the Dow Jones lost 400 points. For comparison, the German DAX lost 900 points, but is only half the size. It is a reckless and probably counter-productive strategy, but I do think Trump will be able to extract short-term benefits from a number of countries. I just hope the EU will finally decrease reliance on the US going forward. Our extreme reliance on US tech and defense makes us easy marks.

Can that "taste" be measured in Dollarinos?

There are multiple factors exacerbating this even further:

1) AI generated code is "soulless". Reviewing code can be engaging if you are trying to understand your colleagues thought process. Sometimes you learn something new, sometimes you can feel superior, or politely disagree. AI ain't worth the hassle.

2) You unlearn how to write code by relying heavily on LLMs. On some level, it is similar to an IDE giving you context clues and definitions. On another, it can replace the hard work of thinking things through with mediocre yet usually workable solutions. And that's the big trap.

The book Why Nations Fail makes a pretty strong argument for the core feature of successful societies to be strong institutions with low perceived corruption. Sensible laws that are upheld equally are a part of that.

The US in particular benefits from an absurd amount of resources (not least of which is land), a perfectly safe geographic position, the global language and an immigrant culture. Basically able to coattail the British after independence, the destruction of much of Eurasia during WWII cemented its position as first. And great diplomacy, including the Marshal Plan, enabled the US to create an international system with many benefits and natural synergies with its inherent strengths.

Bukele, who calls himself "the coolest dictator in the world" [0], won his first election in 2019, and his second election in 2024 in landslides. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world and was basically dominated by brutal cartels. Bukeles solution to this was to use the military to round up everyone who is a suspected gang member. Note that this includes people who simply have too many tattoos or are young male who have relatives related to gangs. They built a mega-prison, aka concentration camp to contain these people, but it seems like it is significantly below capacity, estimated at 16k prisoners while being able to "house" up to 40k people. The conditions in the prison are aweful [1].

It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.

But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/26/naybib-bukele-...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-pris...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#I...

A tariff is a tax specifically on foreign goods. It is an artificial barrier to trade used to make domestic products more competitive. VAT is a tax applied to all products equally, so it isn't a trade barrier. You might be able to construe a convoluted argument that it is easier for domestic companies to work through domestic regulation, but that's pretty weak.

The US seems to have simply taken the value of the trade deficit with a country, divided it by total imports from that country, and used that as the tariff percentage. So in their logic, wherever there is a trade imbalance, this must be explained by barriers to trade. So in a sense this is also a repudiation of the core hypothesis of global free trade as an ideology: That, if countries trade freely with one another, they can specialise on certain production and a virtuous cycle makes everyone richer. In Trump's ideology, trade is a zero sum game, and having a trade deficit means that you are losing.