phendrenad2

[delayed]

I'll be thankful that I already built the groundwork for various projects and the rest can be done on lower quality AIs.

I did this for a while. I went so far as to built a highly advanced web crawler webapp that was better than the Internet Archive in a lot of ways.

But the modern web has made this unreasonable. Every webpage is 99% junk (CSS, JS, HTML structure, tracking pixels, UI images, navigation links, cryptominers (I joke)) and 1% content. You need a smart AI system to pick out the good parts, otherwise you'll quickly find yourself schlepping hundreds of gigs of junk to just preserve your favorite websites.

The better idea is: if you love information, back it up. Collect the knowledge from the website, not the website. And then preserve it. Create a free ebook. Or sell it on Amazon kindle. That'll last a lot longer than the website will, and any HTML backup of the site you could possibly make.

I wonder if we'll ever see nanotech xenon arc lamps.

It's true that 2 layer boards are very cheap, but there's a big jump in price when you go to 4 layers, and 5+ layers and beyond is a huge jump in price. I think that for PCI, below 6 layers will be tight and below 4 layers would be impossible.

Look at all those wires! No wonder hobbyists haven't bothered with the PCI bus much.

This is just prompt noise that any RE will be able to easily coax claude to ignore. It exists to get the big loserly game companies like Nintendo and Sony off their back.

Why was the previous discussion of this flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50299182 Is our new policy to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that CVEs don't exist? Because I'm not getting behind that!

Deskilling is good, actually, as long as it's the right deskilling. "Skill" in software development is partly raw IQ and partly knowledge of complexity. Programming author Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man-Month) categorized complexity into "essential" and "incidental". Examples of incidental complexity are: React/Rails/Django/Laravel makes a backward-incompatible change to their interface and you need to scurry around the codebase fixing invocations. Or a senior developers on your team have a weird in-house coding style and all the junior devs need to learn it to get their code approved. Or management wants to move everything from one cloud provider to another so you have to change a bunch of resource URLs. Examples of essential complexity are: Self-driving car algorithms. Making your code run faster on the CPU. Adding support for a new web standard like SPDY.

I'm not lamenting the days when you needed to pull a seasoned (read: exquisitely expensive) COVOL developer out of retirement to make a change. Now AI can figure it out well enough, I just need to know how the basic concepts work.

A lot of talk about the demise of Stack Overflow. But let's have some positive reminiscence: They really captured lightning in a bottle at one point. On the internet, everyone has an opinion, and they fight like hell to defend them. It's amazing that SO was able to remain civil for as long as it did. People actually wanted to help! And the best answers typically rose to the top. I don't know what went wrong, I suspect it was a variation on Gresham's Law: "bad social currency chases out good social currency".

Can you blame them? I blame the administration for crashing the economy and making it hard to run an honest news site.

I don't think NetBSD has ever had a reputation for what they mean by "spotty hardware support" here, which is apparently uh... power management on laptops. Their links take you here: https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/

Your mistake is assuming that the company is anti-ICE.

That's too bad, I would have liked to visit it one day. I hear Mt Everest will be demolished next to make room for a bodega.

> None of the substantive code was written by AI.

That is impressive

If a decent, empathy-forward place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?

If a hyper-left-leaning place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?

Something I've been thinking about lately is how doing anything well is an unknown factor more difficult than you originally think. Your initial estimate of how hard something is to do is usually terribly wrong. Once you think that you're 20% into a project, you realize that you're only actually 5% into the project. Then later, when you reach what you think is finally 20% again, you realize that, once again, you're only 5% into the project! This repeated discovery of "more to do" really beats people down and discourages them from doing ambitious things.

(See also Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.)

Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.

Do you REALLY not understand the difference between selling a Super Nintendo cartridge and infinite number of times, as it accumulates dog bites and dust, and selling a series of ones and zeroes that never degrades? Or did you not read the post I'm replying to? Or are you just employing a strawman for god-knows what reason? Would love to know, do tell.

A good case of "Don't do A or B, because A is bad"

Stop downloading cookie recipes from China, and you can't use cookie recipes that came from China either, because accessing the cookie recipe in China could give you malware.

It doesn't make much sense but this is the government that gave us such greats as "the internet isa series of tubes".

China didn't elect anyone, let alone an anti-immigration populist, but their population is falling, and they don't have any plans to open up to immigration.

> Over the course of the film, the directors managed to make a theater full of people with fully developed pre-frontal cortexes repeatedly reconsider what they believed

Oh really? Go ahead, tell me a story about anything without my opinion changing throughout the story. Go on. I'm sure you can do better than these award-winning documentarians, oh Ms. blogger!

(And then, once you demonstrate that it's even possible, kindly explain why the flying flip your way is better.)

I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug

The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.

Multi-polar something something

That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code. Usually the source of any game that gets shut down is shared with games that are still live. Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also. I'm not saying that I have the solution or that your idea isn't good on some level, but we have to be realistic.

Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol

(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)

Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999.

This question gets asked regularly on HN. I've asked it before. I never got a good answer.

The truth is, there's no other place for us. Software was the last "good job" after enshittification made every other industry a race to produce the worst product that consumers will still consume. So no "re-training" will help here. Every other job sucks as much if not more.

It almost seems like becoming a philosopher, influencer, politician, or warlord is a better long-term strategy.

Just wait until upper management fires all of the middle managers and senior developers to increase efficiency. Then you can say whatever you want to the empty chair.