lionkor

Another theory is that around that time the people who value good writing got so annoyed at the AI spam that they left

I've been thinking about this too; it's high time we put the capital-E Engineering into software engineering.

Ah, that makes sense. My bad!

> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars

It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?

It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.

I'd also be interested!

The AI bashing is a response to the "AI is superintelligence and can write a kernel that's better than Linux" mentality, that is tiring, reeks of gross incompetence, and is almost maliciously wrong.

SOTA LLMs can't reliably implement a single, small feature without producing overly complex code. They don't do engineering.

My approach is two-fold: 1. frontload every conversation with a lot of guidance on how to approach things "like an engineer" (those terms are never uttered, but the guidance basically encodes my workflow as an engineer), to focus on only the problem at hand today, not overbuild things, etc, and 2. not trust a single line of code it produces.

Not today, but tomorrow maybe, Claude could prevent you from implementing anything that looks or smells like a competitor product, for example.

You think they wouldn't?

It's incredibly sad that somehow knowing how to navigate websites made for complete idiots (domain registrars) is considered worth paying for. How many middle-men do you want to pay?

Can't the website just lay itself out for print differently?

> Native cross-platform GUI built with Tauri 2 and Svelte 5

That's not native, and if you pointed it out to the LLM that wrote this, it would agree. It's just dumb so it didn't think of the fact that that's entirely the wrong term.

OBVIOUS presence of LLM-use devalues something to the point that you have to wonder why a human is in the loop at all

What role did generative AI play in the development of this?

- What personal data you process and retain (login details, access logs, statistics, etc.)

- How long you retain it

- Who (which human, name and email) to contact when you have questions

- Which third parties get the data (if you use Google fonts, Google would be one of those, since it gets the users IP), etc.

That's the sort of default stuff that must be in a privacy policy, there are a few more things that you'd need to comply with GDPR and the UK's equivalent, but that's the kind of thing you need. :)

It's missing a privacy policy, so not sure why you require login for users

That's precisely the result of jumping on "the shiny new thing", yeah! That's my point!

> Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code

Not at all. It's hard to keep up with lines of code per day, i.e. quantity.

It's not difficult for humans to keep up with the quality, and produce far superior quality code by writing it themselves or instructing an LLM what exactly to implement, down to each function's API surface (if typing is the bottleneck).

A lot of you people are forgetting that there's an engineering aspect to programming, and LLMs are really really really terrible at it out of the box.

Let's say you can let AI design and 3D print 1 large real-life bridge per week. Would you say that humans can't keep up? Or would you point out that there's a difference between what civil engineers do and what an LLM with a 3D printer does?

> You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use

This was said about web technologies and crypto and every other hype cycle, and it's never been true at all. The vast majority of people are okay just picking something reasonable or a default, and sticking with it.

It's not difficult to imagine that pi.dev will be around in 10 years, and it's not difficult to imagine that vim, visual studio, vscode, linux and ext4 will still be around in 10 years.

I don't know what kind of massive innovation you see here. This is like flying cars; every couple years there's a demo of a flying car of some variety, some people immediately short mercedes, and 5 years later mercedes is still around, making slightly more modern cars than before.

If you really believe that the tech-news hype cycle reflects reality, I urge you to go solve an advent of code in a normal programming language, maybe that'll help get you back on track.

> Who the hell would want to be an entrepreneur and start a small tech business of any sort in the EU

Probably only people who are interested in living in such a place, and those who care about that sort of stuff are maybe less likely to choose total annihilation and exploitation for profit, so you see less multi-billion dollar companies that have to promise they're not evil, I guess?

It's a different culture, that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

If a company can't deal with PII safely, they SHOULDN'T be a company in the first place. If you can't have a zoo without starving the animals and running them over every now and then, maybe it's fine that you can't start a zoo, even if countries exist where you could do that instead and be fine (as long as you hide the bodies).

Well, my example is C++, it relies on function overloading existing for, for example, to_string(uint8_t[]) and to_string(uint8_t) separately, which means this error would come down to overloading instead of catching the type error.

Just saying, because C++ is very popular everywhere in this "kind" of company, if you catch my drift.

Someone uses Claude to role play as a hacker... Yikes

Maybe somewhere in the code it says

    key_string = to_string(*key);

instead of

    key_string = to_string(key);

another con is that you have to agree to the ToS etc. of GitHub, which might be a con depending on how pedantic you want to be about your software license.

Customers cannot pay at all with it

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153356

If you want "progress at any cost", particularly at the cost of human lives, you're right. We're behind in the ever so important AI race, and we're missing that privacy of people, health of people, happiness, and the future of humanity is entirely irrelevant unless it makes you money, today.

I think it's the complete saturation of the platform with members who make it feel like HN is a platform for people to boast about how many tokens they burnt to rewrite something that already worked fine.

It polarizes people to either join the "the LLM is my god" crowd or the "if AI touches the repo, it's all slop" crowd.

The careful balance is rarely discussed, probably because that's the part that still takes work.

Yes...? Is it not? If you write that you're gay, or muslim, or christian, or even just straight, all of that is especially sensitive under GDPR.

That's not what GDPR is. I'm assuming you don't have the time or energy to research it, so the quick summary for you is that it does actually protect your privacy and gives you easy and fast avenues to acquire the data a company has about you (in a portable format), request deletion of your personal data, and requires that you explicitly consent to any processing of your data (in detail).

If a company doesn't follow these laws, the fines are proportional to the revenue(?) of the company, so the fines can get quite existential if a company fucks up.

In practice, this is not "shoved down" my throat at all. In practice, this means that I can request companies delete all my data, and they respect this, in practice. I can also request a .zip file with all data they have of me, and I will get it within a couple of days max.

It also means that e.g. your family doctor has to have you sign a document if they want to enter your data into a system, or if that system might be accessed by a 3rd party (such as IT support).

This isn't theoretical; this works. I've requested data deletion from various companies and requested data exports from various companies (and it worked without any issues every time).

It also means that, at any company I work at that handles PII, everyone is VERY careful touching anything with PII. The fact that you have to implement data retention periods, limit the amount of data you collect and retain, etc. forces companies to respect your privacy even if they don't want to or it's inconvenient.

Is a medical condition not PII? Together with the fact that it's linked to a specific person, their tasks, responsibilities, mannerisms. Even an IP address is PII, not sure how a full chat log isn't, even if it's not text-book PII.

Weird that Flock (YC17 [1]) is clearly being used for more than license plate reading, and is built to do more than that, and is actively abused for that without any repercussions, and we point at the officers misusing it rather than the company supplying it?

The old "if we don't do it, someone else will" doesn't apply if you're the only person evil enough to run Flock.

[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

If you're in the EU, be aware that the chats might contain PII. Even if someone says something like "Sorry I have dyslexia" in a chat, that's PII.

So id be very careful with chats and treat them like chats, not like code.