cvwright
cvwright on Hacker News
The Soviet Union had amazing scientists and free healthcare. I think there’s another factor in play here.
Clearly you’ve never been to a faculty meeting :)
Good luck protesting when that government of engineers does something you don’t like
> and look where we are at now.
Living easier, richer, safer lives than 99.99% of all humans who have ever existed?
They thought it would be their friends running the show, sending the robot dogs after their enemies.
They could make it even easier and give you only one party to choose!
I suspect that they read the article last Friday about Claude finding the origin of the ECDSA constants. That was only a few hours before Google received the vulnerability report.
The two cases are very similar. The only difference is that the weak randomness was harmless in the earlier story, and here it’s devastating.
We’ve known for a long time. I used to work for a very prestigious national laboratory, and we interviewed some PhD candidates from the absolute top schools who, as far as I could tell, had coasted through grad school and hardly done anything. It’s rare but it definitely happens.
You and I would be very happy with that, but you and I are not most people.
Most people like the addictive garbage, and they reward the systems that feed it to them. That’s why every surviving platform has gone that way, and why any new attempt to do better always fails.
It’s ugly but it’s true.
The counterpoint to this is that early 20th century Germany was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world.
In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.
Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.
I tried it last month after hearing here that it didn’t speak in Claudisms.
As a chatbot it’s totally fine, virtually indistinguishable from Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude.
For coding it’s… okay. I tried 4.6 and it feels similar to Opus from 12 months ago, or maybe Sonnet from 9 months ago. YMMV.
It’s curious how tariffs are always a bad move for the US, but always a good move for other countries.
I come from a lower class US background.
I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.
As you point out, a HS diploma is largely meaningless these days.
This discussion is about students trying to get into top colleges, which is a completely different population with completely different problems from those doing the bare minimum.
Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that.
Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.
We’ve already had those limits for years on any corporate project with average (or below) developers.
I work with a lot of AI code, and it’s not any worse than what big teams were already producing.
A small team of 2-3 really good humans is in a whole different league, but that has always been a very rare case.
We’re at the point where people who talk too fancy get accused of being LLMs, and the people who make human mistakes get scolded for grammar.
Sometimes I don’t need my todo app to be “great” or revolutionary in any way. I just need it to work, and bog standard average is perfectly fine for a lot of things.
This frees me up to spend more time at the design level, solving harder or more novel problems.
Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time
Don’t use deterministic encryption unless your data is already highly random.
Any adversary who knows the distribution of the plaintext data can guess what your encrypted values are, with accuracy that improves as your sample size increases.
There were a bunch of papers on this 10-12 years ago. (Full disclosure: I was an author on some of them.)
It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.
When all the “walkable” neighborhoods embraced chaos and crime, yes, there are negative externalities that follow.
You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.
The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.
Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.
Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.
Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.
Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.
LLMs are bringing us back to all the “proper” software engineering stuff that we’ve always known we should be doing, but until now we never had enough time/people/money to do it right.
Brainstorming and research before writing a design.
Writing a design or spec before writing the code.
Comprehensive unit tests.
Etc etc etc.
Like you, I get vastly better output from the tool when I create a detailed spec in markdown before I let it start coding. And bonus, the LLM is pretty good at helping with the spec too.
You’re arguing that we have too many PhD students in CS, not too few.
I agree with you fwiw.