schiem

Sure, I agree that progress (towards something) is inevitable. But in the dichotomy presented ("progress" vs. "programmers feelings"), I took progress to mean "the things we're currently making progress on [with regards to AI]." Which I would say are largely a wealth concentration machine, and will probably be a net negative for humanity. To more directly respond to the original question of "progress or programmer feelings", I would ask why we can't just do something else entirely?

I'm genuinely happy that you're having fun with it. I can't get over the feeling that _I'm not building anything._ To me, it seems like hopping on an IRC channel and copy-pasting code from a greybeard instead of writing it myself. I just don't find that satisfying at all.

I find this comment fascinating for a few reasons. The first is that it has the underlying assumption that all "progress" is good (regardless of what we're progressing towards). From my perspective, it seems like most of the progress being made is towards bringing about a sort of techno-feudalism and environmental collapse. Maybe a little bit less progress would actually benefit humanity?

The second thing revolves around this:

> In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.

This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

Sure, that's a fair point. You're right that I don't have those numbers, and I would be willing to be that at the moment, no one does.

> I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things

And I'm betting the opposite. As little as I trust the current industrial leaders, I trust Altman, Dario, Zuckerberg, and Musk far less. Maybe in 5 - 10 years when the dust is more settled we'll have a better picture.

Regardless, data centers are drawing moratoriums and regulation because they're the ones building things. If 500 new massive auto plants were planned to be built out in the next 5 years, they would also draw similar ire. It's only specific to data centers because that's what's actually happening, and we live in a world that is capable of responding to the actual events that are unfolding.

For what it's worth, I do agree with you about the politically impoverished communities bearing the brunt of our negative externalities. I would like it if we had regulation that priced in those externalities so we couldn't just dump them on communities that are unable to combat them.

If "this" was a single new Ford plant, I would imagine that the local population around it would be having a similar conversation.

If Ford announced that they were opening 10 new plants in every state, then yes, I imagine HackerNews would be having this exact conversation about it.

The other factor is that these tech backed build outs seem to revel in flaunting regulations. More established businesses tend to at least check the regulatory boxes when building new things. Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article:

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...

The person you're responding to is incorrect, fruit fermentation produces methanol: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8125215/

The primary mechanism of methanol production during fermentation is from pectin degradation. Grain contains considerably less pectin than fruit, so grain fermentation produces less methanol than fruit.

It's illegal to ship queen ants across state lines (let alone from out of the country) without a USDA permit, so you'll be hard pressed to find many sites willing to admit to it.

That said, Bugs In Cyberspace is well respected within the invert space - I'd be shocked if they were engaged in any kind of illegal insect trafficking. Roach Crossing is another solid place to buy from as well.

There are, just not lowercase characters that are valid hex.

The irony of this comment is that deportations were higher under Biden than during Trump's first term, which makes it seem exactly like it was "written by teenagers, based on emotions." The administration with the highest deportation rate in the past 60 years was the 2nd Clinton administration.

It depends on the AA battery, but you'd need 6 - 8 to get equivalent performance.

The Google Pixel 9 has a 4700 mAh battery at 3.9 volts. The total energy is around 18.3 watt hours.

A high capacity rechargeable AA battery is 2500 mAh at 1.2 volts, or around 3 watt hours. If you wired 3 AA batteries in series, and then 2 of those series in parallel (for a total of 6 batteries), that would give you 3.6v at 5000 mAh. 3.6 volts falls within a normal discharge curve for a lithium ion battery, so you probably wouldn't need a boost converter.

I don't use it at all for a variety of reasons, but I rarely bother to get into discussions on HackerNews.

Looking at how new it is, and how quickly things are changing, it seems likely that I could adopt it into my workflow in a month or two if it turns out that that's necessary.

On the other hand, I've spent the last 2 decades building skills as a developer. I'm far more worried that becoming a glorified code reviewer will atrophy those skills than I am about falling behind. Maybe it will turn out that those skills are now obsolete, but that feels unlikely to me.

They actually asked for quantitative evidence.

People who heavily utilize any of those _do_ have the associated skills atrophied. It's just that in all of the listed cases, the actual associated skill may not have actually been important.

The younger people at my job have atrocious spelling.

My ability to do mental math is much worse than it was when I was regularly doing math without a calculator.

People who have exclusively learned digital art do not have the muscle memory built up to seamlessly transition to analog art.

Almost everyone I know has awful handwriting.

So the question then is "What is the actual skill that AI tools are replacing?" And if the answer is "thinking," then that should be terrifying.

This tracks with a report[1] that nearly half of consumer spending now comes from the top 10%.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...

The point of dog whistles is that most people can't hear them.

To head off typical response to that passage - the idea that "the eye of a needle" was referencing a literal gate in Jerusalem (changing the meaning of the passage from "impossible" to "you might have to squeeze a little bit") is a post-hoc justification with no basis in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle#Gate

I recently learned from my vet that fleas are a very common form of tapeworm transmission, and animal to animal transmission is comparatively rare.

https://www.cdc.gov/dipylidium/about/index.html

A cursory search would show you how much frustration there is around broken autofill attributes. Such a dismissive attitude helps no one. Would you like me to paste the contents of the Jira issue I did last month working around a password input where we couldn't turn off autofill?

From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.

The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.

By summing up the top 60 entries for UK billionares from The Times Rich List for 2024 (which is data from 2023), I get almost exactly 500 billion pounds in net worth (£499.55bn). According to Wikipedia, the UK had a total net worth of $15,972bn USD, which comes out to £12,298bn at the current exchange rate of 0.77 pounds / dollar.

That comes out to around 4.1% of the total wealth. However, the number from Wikipedia is from 2022, so this figure isn't going to be entirely accurate.

According to copper.orgs fact page, the "average" single family home (whatever that means) has 151 pounds of copper pipe. The current scrap price for #1 copper where I live is $2.88. That comes out to around $446.

That would maybe cover the cost of the pex itself, OR the cost of fittings and tools, but probably not both.

I'm using #4 as an example of the opposite end of the spectrum from day trading in Robinhood - traditionally safe investments with little long term risk as a form of building wealth.

The point that I was trying to get across is that across the people I personally know around my age, I can find examples that run the gamut of financial risk - everything from "leave it in a savings account" to "YOLO on options." Because of this, I don't think it's particularly useful to draw conclusions about what the general population is doing based on anecdata alone.

I have anecdata #3 and #4. Both of these people are in their early 30s.

#3 - A friend who recently (within the last year) drained his savings to $0 paying for a trip to Europe. All of the money came from day trading stocks on Robinhood.

#4 - A friend who bought a house just over a year ago. The house cost a few hundred thousand, and he decided to put a >50% down payment on it, which he did by liquidating some (not anywhere close to all) of the money he has in index funds.

Those are probably the two most extreme examples, and I could provide more examples that are anywhere in between. I'm going to wait for a study that does some statistical analysis over the population before I draw any conclusions.

I'm reading their comment as the opposite - there are mechanisms for a high trust society in place (which is good), but if you go out of your way to opt out of it then you're on your own.

My Indiana mortgage payment is $500, thank you very much.

I've also found that, at least with Comcast, swearing at the bots will usually put you through to an operator.

I used to work for a Moodle host that also did custom plugin development.

The Moodle code base dates back to somewhere around 2000 ish, and comes with the baggage of the early days of PHP. The Moodle code is full of "no guard rails" style functions, where you do things like write strings directly out as HTML and write direct SQL queries. Couple this with the 'plugin hub' not really have any acceptance criteria, and you get hundreds (thousands?) of security vulnerabilities.

I think there's been a push to modernize things in the few years since I left, but it's hard to update a codebase that old.

If you're serious about it, the way that I (accidentally) found that works is to keep some spiders and roaches as pets. I used to be the same way, involuntarily flinching whenever a large enough insect would crawl on me until I adjusted to being around them all the time. The roaches and smaller spiders don't trigger any kind of involuntary reflex anymore. I do still flinch when the largest spiders (> 5 inch leg span) move very quickly while I'm doing maintenance but I'm pretty okay with that, especially because one of them could put me in the hospital.

The original comment and every reply reads like it was copied straight from a marketing brief. This is everyone's reminder that Hacknernews is not immune to astroturfing, and it's often done much more subtly.

The assessment of Cocky -> Lazy -> Stupid -> Dead is spot on. I haven't gotten super far, but my last run ended because I saw a bunch of 'C' in the next room and didn't bother checking what they were - turns out gravity hounds have a pretty good stun lock. Out of curiosity, what class were you playing?

For what it's worth, if someone told me they beat Morgoth in an interview I'd probably hire them.

You have just answered why I've never been able to cut bread straight. I always thought I was just bad at it and somehow everyone else had mastered bread cutting while I wasn't paying attention.