llm_nerd

On the topic of great shithouses, I highly recommend the 2023 Japanese drama Perfect Days. It's about a quiet man that works for Tokyo Toilets, cleaning a set of architecturally interesting public toilets around the Shibuya district. The movie itself is compelling -- a fascinating study of a man and purpose, very similar to Paterson (2016)[1] -- but the whole thing is like taking a trip to Tokyo, with an enormous number of gorgeous shots of fascinating scenes. Also a lot of shots of someone cleaning toilets.

[1] The directors of both movies are friends, and interestingly Paterson ends with the protagonist talking to a man from Tokyo who came to visit Paterson, as a poetry fan of William Carlos Williams. It is coincidence, but it does make it feel like they're the same universe.

Paradoxically, gen AI being good at software engineering massively accelerated its impact on many other fields as a second order effect. Once generative AI could build code to analyze data, etc, its reach massively expanded.

> On the other hand nobody is going to try building a building only to check if it's structurally sound because that would be absurd.

Structural engineering isn't some mystical science. It's a set of mathematical truths, calculations, SOPs, and so on. If a human can do it, of course a machine can do it, and I'm obviously not saying "run it through the stochastic parrot and out comes a corporate headquarter building", but it's a part of the process where we're rapidly going to get there. And of course, the disruption in that field is already underway. For instance Stru AI. Yes, an engineer is still involved, but the premise is that your single engineer now replaces 10 engineers, and so on.

Gen AI isn't going to be plunging toilets or changing bedpans...yet...but it disrupts almost every role in the "white collar" world. That doesn't mean it eliminates every job, but it completely upends the norms.

What would you say you do here? - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z4Xw6WMvfNk

Gen AI has changed every single part of classic software development, and the impact hasn't even remotely been felt. And zero jobs are "safe" in that traditional way that we saw them.

It's actually staggering to think of how the teams I've led developed software five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago. Easily 95% of that effort has been obliterated (I'm estimating on the low side, more like 99.5%). Classic wisdom like "the specification needs to be 100% up front because once we implement it stratifies" are relics of the past.

Everything has changed. I can't fully express how software development will work, but it certainly won't involve someone whose job is "human interaction".

"I find it hard to differentiate between them." ... "The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display"

Either you are in denial about a personal vision deficiency, or you bought your display on Temu. Or you're just trying to show some sort of vision solidarity with the colour blind.

Yes, we all know that these aren't good colours for the small percentage of people with colour blindness. I literally directly addressed it in my root post, to then get confirmation that the person has colour blindness. Citing a page literally regarding being accessible to the colour blind is not making your case.

They are objectively, blatantly clearly different hues to the vision normal. Which is why I addressed the comment wondering if the person had colour blindness, which they of course do.

I explicitly noted that someone probably has colour blindness if they can't discern the hues. And it turns out that is the situation in this case, it just wasn't stated.

I didn't discount anything, and that's a simply ridiculous slur. My observation was absolutely correct.

Yes, a very small minority of people have trouble with certain hue combinations.

It seems that you're indirectly citing my comment, so I have to reply.

You really have trouble differentiating between 5fd3ff and b58cff? These are dramatically different hues (65 degrees on the colour wheel).

I mean, maybe the site is A:B testing different hue combinations, or there is a technical fault happening for some users, but if you really have trouble differentiating those two hues, one of your two declarations at the beginning of your comment must be false.

> I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help.

Seems like something you should probably declare upfront if you're complaining about the colour choices, right? As is your comment looks weird to the vast majority of people -- and yes, the vast majority of people are not colour blind -- who have no issues with the colours.

Should every colour-based game, chart, display, and so on have colour blind modes or safer colour selections? Sure.

Uh, what? What is the point of your worthless comment?

FWIW, they are pretty distinct hues, and are easily discernible. I only mention this because a lot of people go through life not realizing they suffer some form of colour blindness, so it's worth knowing. Another possibility is that you're looking at it on a very poor display.

An important life lesson: Some people are assholes all of the time; All people are assholes some of the time. Is it really such a big deal?

Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.

Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.

Canada never agreed to the "associate member" label -- that came from Ursula von der Leyen, and seemed to be ad libbed -- and just as we don't want to be the 51st state, we don't suddenly want to be a part of the EU instead. It was always about a different relationship that doesn't fall under any existing one, associate or not.

And some members of the EU are rightly saying "should we maybe define what this is before we're granting it?", and they're 100% right. If you basically handed over a lot of your sovereignty to a group and suddenly it's willy nilly adding new members in any form, without the consequences or costs, of course that is a problem for some.

I only use Pro for Google as their models were so far behind, but I tried to give Argon a go, and notably it is only available in the chat interface. One brief conversation, with three exchanges, and my quota was exhausted and it restricted me to Flash-lite for the rest of the day. Rather comical stuff.

And it prompts me to upgrade to Ultra for "5x more usage". In contrast I use my Claude Max plan endlessly, on enormous problems, and my 5x max plan sees me almost never hitting double digits on my quota using Opus 5.5. It doesn't compel me to sign up for Google's higher level plans.

I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.

It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.

Sort of related from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247203

(about zig's reimplementation of the libc, and some rough edges)

This is a bit of a strawman, as almost all AI-related opinion pieces are on here lately.

"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."

Who pitched this? Where was this argued?

And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.

It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.

And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.

The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.

I have to interject here because I think this is a slightly dangerous claim.

Balloon helium is just helium, broadly, at 98%+ concentration. It has a tiny amount of atmospheric gas, mostly nitrogen, in it as there is no need to go too far with purifying it, but there is zero intention of making it any safer to inhale. It is basically accidental contaminants.

If you inhale 98%+ helium, the diffusion gradient reverses and oxygen floods out of your blood. Did this once as a kid and actually blacked out. This is functionally just as true at 98% helium with some nitrogen and a tiny amount of oxygen as it is with 99.9999% helium. The difference for inhalation is a wash.

Inhaling helium is not advised. The protection we have, such as in my case, is that invariably our rapid physiological response stops us from inhaling helium and oxygen can return.

It's all the same helium, of course, going through different levels of industrial purification. I only clarify this as it isn't like we find super pure reserves in nature and that's what is lucrative, but instead it's all the same contaminated helium and then it gets processed to further and further levels of purification, like many other industrial products.

If there is a shortage of helium, it's a shortage of all the same helium. But so long as it's treated as a novelty gas, and so long as it continues to just be wasted, it's hard to take claims of a shortage too seriously.

As a fun fact, the vast majority of helium on Earth is courtesy of the radioactive alpha decay chain starting from heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Helium got trapped by the same geological formations that trapped natural gas, hence why they're usually found together despite being from completely different processes.

I mean...who cares? It's actually kind of strange that your comment got others talking about AI naming things.

SQL Slammer didn't actually slam anything, and applied to a single vendor among many SQL providers. Heartbleed didn't make anyone's heart bleed...I mean, at least directly. Shellshock only impacted a single shell environment, again among many. Log4Shell impacted a single logging implementation, among many. Spectre and Meltdown...I mean, who would think that related to CPU cache side channels?

These are just dumb names for people to share in referring to something. Seems silly and like a waste of time to spend effort getting upset about them.

They weren't getting money from nvidia, and really why should they? nvidia provides very expensive hardware on which I can access my own steam library, etc.

The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.

And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.

When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.

This is a particularly hilarious take. Especially after Tesla's actually interesting vehicles were abandoned from cratering sales so they can focus on a ridiculous DumpsterBox that also is an enormous flop. Must have been "cool and fun" making the stupidest looking vehicle in history, but also it's terrible at every single thing you'd use a truck for. So cool. So fun.

Now they needed to make a worthless Theranos display to fool gullible suckers, in a farcical display. It's all quite amazing.

And I mean, if there is one thing that Elon is renowned for, it's how great he is as a boss, and how much he thinks about his future Soylent Green. That he has pathetic fanboys who rush around defending him is utterly perverse, but such is the world we live in today.

When it's by a repeat scammer, yes. Like, good god.

Hey remember when all of the Tesla factories were being retooled to make robots, and the hilarious robot demo where some remote controlled junk was pitched as next gen? Also SpaceX would be to Mars by 2021, and would have landed a crew there in 2023. Totes!

Musk is Elizabeth Holmes who lucked into buying a growing business. Like, he 100% does exactly what Theranos did, and which she is sitting in jail for, trying to boost the stock on bullshit and lies.

"prestige project to show off Tesla's advantage"

Advantage? The entire engineering world is going "why?", for a wide range of reasons.

Not unlike the CyberJunk nonsense where he needed to boast that it can stop bullets and double as a boat (https://nationalpost.com/news/world/cybertruck-texas-wade-mo...) and is made out of impractical materials. That massive, colossal flop didn't show any "advantage", it showed that a toddler was running the show, and when people just want cars he's off desperately trying to regain his Iron man allure, now that he's just a vile, garbage human being.

Musk also said production was starting on the Roadster in 2020. It turns out that things Musk says don't mean much.

And it can still be a distraction. The fact that they went through all this effort for a fantastically unreasonable thing just to wow for a company that is off the rails is...pretty telling. Have you never worked with someone who is late for everything, always overpromising and underdelivering, and as it becomes more apparently their promises get more exaggerated and unreasonable? That's Musk. Like "look you can play games on your screen", which absolutely no one asked for in a car, and for which it does much shittier than a $200 pad.

For that matter it's Trump too, and they're both cut from the same cloth -- don't like the dumb arch? Well now it has snipers and drones! And also it will eliminate the debt, deficit, income taxes, and...

So instead of just starting production of a vehicle 8 years behind schedule, look, new distraction! Amazeballs! Don't worry coming real soon now. Just put in those deposits!

I mean, the one part of this story that is unclear and no one seems to be asking hard questions is the compressor status -- there are vague, handwavy (oh we'll build a compressor claims, but I have huge doubts). A 5000 psi to 10000 psi compressor in the real world today is enormous. It's industrial equipment that generates enormous amounts of heat, is hilariously loud, and takes enormous power. While I am 100% certain this dog and pony show had their tanks filled by external massive compressors out of sight, I am pretty skeptical Tesla has any magic innovation in that field.

How bizarrely hostile. So weird.

> Voodoo Graphics came out in 1995, we had commercial GPUs since early 1980s.

I mean, if you think you're going to get me in a gotcha, you should know that the first thing we considered a "GPU" came out three years after the Voodoo. The GeForce 256.

But since we're talking about gaming, the first real 3D accelerator in that market was the 3dfx Voodoo, and it revolutionized gaming because even though we had graphics cards, their abilities were laughably limited (blitting was a big feature).

> so it was not parallel at all

You, uh, really should look this up. Are you consulting an LLM or something, because it's like someone who has no idea what they're talking about just randomly saying stuff. PS3! AVX-512!

"drew a single pixel" is a funny comment that kind of gives away the game. Do you have any idea what is involved in drawing "a single pixel"? This is rhetorical, because you seem to have no idea at all.

I'm just going to ignore you, but Christ you know you don't have to double down on this stuff.

Parallel processing was fully in force in the very first GPUs, like the Voodoo. Not like a modern GPU with thousands of more flexible shader cores, but the first iteration had a pipeline architecture that saw multiple blocks operating on rendering separate parts of the pipeline in parallel. This was revolutionary. Especially given that CPUs at the time had a single core.

I'm not sure what the PS3 comparison is for, or why we're comparing a 2026 AVX-512 CPU with a 2006 gaming console. Okay? A modern GPU can obliterate any CPU in SIMD, presuming you conform with the types it wants. Add that it's weird to bring up as AVX and other SIMD techniques are basically the same sort of architecture, parallelizing a problem.

> 3D graphics can really go wide only on wireframe/points, z-buffer forces sequencing between polys so the parallelism there is very limited.

Rendering a 3D is scene is the very definition of embarrassingly parallel. While optimizers can cull the scene, you know that the entire depth within the frustum (there are a variety of optimizing techniques to minimize the overdraw, but it's a part of rendering a scene) is "rendered" and in amalgamation the Z-buffer values are compared and discarded, blended, or whatever? It is an extraordinarily parallel operation.

"Software rendering went out of the window because the CPU tends to have other things to do besides just multiply 4x4 matrices, which was shifted to the shader cores of GPUs."

Hardware rendering took over because generating a 3D scene is embarrassingly parallel, and the industry quickly learned that you can have thousands of reasonably simple "cores" that can divide and conquer a scene in parallel. There was a no way a general purpose CPU could keep up.

Ah, sarcasm. The lowest form of wit.

Do you maintain an account on HN just to troll? I see it's fresh, likely replacing a banned account, so it seems yes.

Thanks for your nonsense and a laugh to start the day.

30+ years of professional software development, at all scales of projects and teams.

Yeah, your silly rhetoric is just a laugh. And to be clear, I was responding generally for HN, not for you. I was just having a laugh at your "literal crime!" nonsense (which you've doubled down on -- newsflash, HN, it's a crime to have bugs in your code! All of you to the slammer!).

And to be clear, it's easy upvotes to do the "I'm a purist that hand crafts every instruction, and I generally have no idea how anything works so I believe this nonsense, and AI is terrible and only bad people use it" bit on HN, as there are other unemployed sorts like you who think they can contrive a reality if they just say it enough. It's honestly pathetic business at this point.