thatguymike
thatguymike on Hacker News
It's completely true that we get to focus on the fun parts, but I think the burnout some of us are feeling is that the boring parts were also protecting us. It wasn't always fun to spend an afternoon mapping out a 500 line python class; but it sure was relaxing, and a good reason for deadlines to shift forwards and back by a day or two when they needed to. Now we only do the fun parts, which also are all of the least well-specified tasks, the parts that require 100% of our brains, the people-focused parts, and the most time-sensitive parts. All things which leave us tired at the end of the day, even if they are fun. Not to mention the 5-10x increase in context switching, which is itself draining.
Perhaps we'll work out new norms for how to organize our time sustainably. Or perhaps ClaudeCodex will finish blowing through the job of a SWE in the next 24 months (remember, it's only really 12 months old in its current form).
Have you tweaked the reasoning level? “High” can mean different things across different models.
It should burn N + len(answer), because you have to re-cache the whole answer without the prompt stack.
Perhaps more persnickety, it pushes the LLM out of distribution - if it’s unnatural for it to write in plain language without the prompt stack, your prefix will be an unnatural conversation which can reduce intelligence in hard to measure ways, especially over long conversations.
Not saying don’t do it, clarity is perhaps worth the intelligence hit, but it’s not going to be a free lunch.
“Users are the product” is a phrase used when the users aren’t the ones paying for a free service. For a paid API the users absolutely are the customers.
Impossible in fact, because there are 4 of them and you can’t repeat numbers
I agree an academic research program wouldn’t spend billions on a datacenter, but that’s just a reason why foss AI as described in this article won’t work - because big compute is required to do anything of real relevance.
FOSS is the wrong analogy. Building frontier LLMs isn’t primarily an engineering discipline, it’s a scientific research program.
Of course we do have basically open source research programs, including most universities and big projects like CERN. But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector.
It would be possible to make a decent publicly funded AI research program. But it would look more like the Manhattan or Apollo projects (which frontier labs already model themselves after) than some extra research grants for universities.
They are definitely doing this to build RL environments. Absolutely heinous.
Very interesting! I honestly would have expected the opposite: I was optimistic about strongly functional languages in the age of AI. The more modular and side-effect-free your code is, the easier it should be to constrain changes, catch slop, and reduce LLMisms like spooky hacks-at-a-distance.
It looks like the issues are in the compiler and documentation so hopefully it’s fixable… I write in Python every day but I do miss smarter languages and I hope AI doesn’t fully obliterate them.
> A total of €13.5 million has been allocated to the project.
> This public investment underlines the importance of an independent, trustworthy and future‑proof Dutch language model.
It does, but not in the way you think it does.
The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.
I love the concept - blocking apps are often too restrictive which makes me disable them. Slowing could be a nice alternative.
This probably uses a vpn? It’s important to think about how to stop me disabling it casually. I use Opal which blocks my settings page too. Which works great but frustratingly it blocks my legitimate needs very often too!
Agreed - they dont even need to send an employee to do it, they can just send a driverless waymo with the luggage surely!
A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.
Well this is incredibly joyful, well done.
Tech Guy reinvents meditation
That’s… not how the labour market works
Happy new year from SF. 2025 was about hanging on, balancing a heavy workload and a new baby, but in ways which I’m confident are the right decisions for our future. I did a lot of Becoming An Adult this year, learning to trust myself and my partner, and prioritizing what matters. 2026 will probably be more of the same..! But I am hopeful things should ease up over time.
Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.
The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.
Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?
Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?
Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!
Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)
This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1...
Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.
It’s funny, I immediately thought it was LLM but I was fairly confident it was ChatGPT. I suppose the styles are converging more than I thought: too long, lists, “not just x it’s y”, “here’s the X”…
Getting laid off in our careers is indeed likely, but part of the deal is that it’s not mutually exclusive to becoming a multimillionaire. We work cushy jobs for high pay, with the possibility of absurd payouts, accepting that the deal we get from the industry is good enough to not rock the boat too hard by unionizing. There has been enough excess value to go around.
I think it’s not a coincidence that most of the unionization pushes i hear about are in the Games industry: it’s superficially similar to the software industry but workers are treated much worse for much smaller payouts. If software industry keeps heading in that direction, maybe unions are coming. But the idea of unionizing up until now has been mostly laughable, and proponents haven’t made themselves look informed or relatable by pushing it.