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gspr

Re:Resisting Cognitive Surrender on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:55AM (#50352023)
> But then we do say things like "Nolan made the film" even though he didn't hold a camera or build the sets.

I do say that, too. But I'm not in the film industry. My understanding is that those who are, don't use words as crude as "made" to describe a role in the making of a film. I believe they say that he wrote, directed or produced a film.

We are not talking about some other field of expertise here, where we are outsiders – the production of food, the supply of water, or the making of movies – we're talking about our own field of expertise.

Re:Resisting Cognitive Surrender on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:47AM (#50351372)
> Is it only "cognitive surrender" if you already know how to code?

Is the article claiming that?

> Not knowing all the details seems more like the default human condition, in the sense that most people don't know exactly where their water comes from or where their waste goes exactly. "Water comes from the tap, food comes from the store".

Sure. The ability to specialize, and on the flip-side not have to care about a lot of things, remains one of the biggest driving forces of human civilization. But in this article, I don't think the person worried about cognitive surrender is the "most people" in relation to food or water. They're the farmer or the water infrastructure engineer!

> Most of the non-technical people I see using LLMs to create software are not engaging in "cognitive surrender" as far as I can tell.

Maybe not. But the might be cognitively surrendering when they use the LLM to summarize the day's news or write a message to a friend, or even plan dinner for the week. I'd say they are. I agree that it's not clear-cut.

> They're evaluating what they can see, i.e, judging results. They build things for their own use. They test them, iterate on them to meet their needs and try to achieve their vision.

No. They have things built, then they test them. This is different. It might be OK, but it's not the same as building.

> This is roughly the same process they followed when they used to outsource to an agency except the loop is much tighter.

Yes. But they wouldn't usually outsource summarizing a letter from grandma, or the political agenda of a candidate/party in an upcoming election. That's surrender.

> It seems to work well, mainly hurts when the problems are invisible, so security, backups, breaking migrations, perf, maintenance over time (language / runtime updates, dep updates, lib updates, server updates etc).

… or ones own abilities deteriorate.

> Tooling and processes that make that stuff more visible would close a lot of the gaps.

Not the problem of one's own skills though.

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:31PM (#50344082)
Stop with this "they". I'm sure most people on HN live in democracies. We are at fault for not raising our voices. We've become lazy participants in the democratic process. Blaming "the government" is only gonna cause disillusionment and further the causes of evil.
Exactly. And as an added bonus: it's a nice dry-run in case of an actual war. There's certainly value in disrupting your adversary's food supply.
Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:54AM (#50333859)
A lot of the advice here seens to be "disable wifi, don't plug in ethernet, use a computer or similar to provide content".

This is good advice. But I'd consider it the absolute baseline. I'd be much more interested in hearing about TVs that'll still try to get to the internet (neighbor's badly secured IoT network, bluetooth, 5G) or ones that cripple themselves when you tamper with wifi.

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:51AM (#50333842)
> Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.

I'm sure it won't be long before these bastards embed a cell phone modem deeply into the device :(

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @06:26AM (#50324596)
I don't wanna absolve any of the evil shits in Trump's circle, or among the MAGA crowd, of blame in this. But I think the biggest issue of all is the anglosphere's love for first past the post electoral systems. There's no excuse for FPTP, and while they often have a positive side effect in giving crazies zero representation, they're vulnerable to crazies taking unchecked control of the system.

Sure, MAGA would've been a large congressional embarrassment in a proportional system. But they wouldn't run the show.

Re:Shiny Object Syndrome on Saturday October 31, 2026 @08:18AM (#50315442)
I wonder if this has any relevance at all to a bunch of new stuff that people on HN seem very obsessed over these days.
Do you conclude the same about the US when some lawmakers in e.g. Texas propose some insane law rooted in the old testament or something?

You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.

The resulting mechanical code change might be trivial. The bugs themselves are often decidedly not.

You're essentially saying that swallowing a pill is trivial, so therefore pharmaceutical engineering is.

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:07PM (#50295049)
There dies part of my childhood. RIP, you gave the world so much!
Re:We Won't "Just Hang Out" on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:51PM (#50294049)
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes

What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!

Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?

Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:27AM (#50287335)
"Come on just try it" is a quite weak argument.
Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:30AM (#50285565)
Was it so hostile?

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:26AM (#50285545)
Did it really? It would be nice to see some concrete examples.
Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:26AM (#50285533)
Everyone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.

I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.

Nearly unrelatedly: a few months back I tried to have Qwen and all the frontier models be a RISCV CPU, and they all failed miserably every time. They'd get a handful of instructions in at most before derailing completely. What surprised me the most was that they would all often fail on decoding instructions, which should be pretty close to a task that they've shown themselves to be good at before.

I even added a warmup phase where they were given the answer to a decode and a few steps of running, and ask them to abort if they disagreed. Didn't help.

All in all, for someone who doesn't use LLMs much, this was a far more exhausting and boring exercise than I'd imagine it to be. The only thing that sparked some joy was the models' persistent cheating, whereby they'd try to analyze the whole program upfront and only give the final output (when applicable), despite orders to faithfully step through each and every instruction.

Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:31AM (#50285223)
Yes. "A hodge-podge of little snippets I don't understand" is the situation I'm in and wish to avoid. "An LLM wrote a lot more that I don't understand" will make the situation a lot worse.

There's indeed lots of good advice in this thread. I appreciate it all! "Just use an LLM for the stuff you don't understand" is, however, not one of them.

Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:22PM (#50281074)
Reading code in a language you do not understand is not a way to understand.
Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:38PM (#50278807)
> LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

I'd rather leave it unconfigured than have a massive configuration I don't understand.

Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:54AM (#50274714)
So here's an embarassing confession for the occasion:

I code in Emacs almost every day. I read and write e-mail in Emacs almost every day. I take notes in Emacs almost every day. I maninpulate data in Emacs almost every day. Yet I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all, I barely use any packages beyond "whatever it is that Debian ships by default", and I'm quite bad at fancy Emacs shortcuts. My Emacs config file is a hodge-podge of little snippets I don't properly understand – and it measures in at just about 100 lines, including comments and whitespace, with a significant part of that being just mundane configuration data for the mu4e Emacs client!

This has been the case for about 15 years now. And I'm the kind of person who really likes to know my tools. It's such a ridiculous situation! I somehow never get properly around to sitting down and learning, and I really struggle to make LISP click.

Sigh. I hope I'm not alone. I really really really should learn this thing!

Anyway, the most important part is: Despite all of this, Emacs is still fantastic for me! Here's to the next 50!

Re:Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:13PM (#50265126)
Poor guys. I'll never understand why it's so attractive to generate tons of code that you clearly don't understand, and then especially to go on and push it onto humans who do strive to understand.
Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @10:29AM (#50259940)
I don't know if my doctor uses these systems. I don't go to my doctor very often. I've heard that many do, and I'm speculating.
Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:28AM (#50258963)
So I've heard. I also know that several doctor's offices here use AI transcription. I'm sure I have a legal right to demand that they be switched off (I'm worried about privacy and accuracy here), but then I've got to be an asshole and increase the workload on my well-meaning doctor who probably had no say in any of this.

This is gonna get so much worse. It's like the smartphone revolution on steroids – and we've seemingly learned nothing! We're in dire straits.

Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @07:55AM (#50257797)
> They also have a reward system that punishes people for ignoring the llm review (by pushing their submission lower in the queue).

This is what I fear will push its way into every part of society soon, too.

"We're not forcing you to do your banking through our AI interface instead of a normal one, you're free to opt out, but multiple functions will be missing and we'll charge you a monthly fee."

"You don't have to have an LLM grade your exam, but beware that the human grader will be overworked and grumpy for the extra task."

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:23AM (#50255649)
Because our current society isn't a survival game where we fight over insufficient food. Mostly. Society ensures that most people don't have to choose between behaving nicely towards their fellow humans and feeding their family.

It seems a lot of the bunkerbros don't realize this value of society. They don't need society any more, they think.

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:20AM (#50255629)
> You can pack enough to survive for decades in that bunker,

Emphasis being survive. Maybe. These morons seem to think this will be a continuation of their current lives. That somehow people will continue to serve them if society has collapsed. They're delusional.

> There are other competing sociopaths, and also 8B of population who don't care about saving world much.

Oh please! The billionaires think that they're so special, they owe their fortune to their inherent genius. But when it comes to helping the world it's apparently "but but the other 8B aren't doing it, I'm just a regular guy who can't accomplish anything!"

Losers.

What scares me the most is that non-technical people in power don't see to understand the difference between messy buggy crap and quality. This isn't new. But now they're often the ones pushing the "AI driven" development methods, so they'll never admit to causing a problem they don't even see.

Lastly, their "solution" to the crapfest, I fear, will be society footing the bill for "more AI" to "fix it". 95% of people will just accept that software has to be shit, and we'll all pay for it, while quality will be shown the door for being more expensive.

Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).

This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.

(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)

Yuck.

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