themacguffinman
themacguffinman on Hacker News
And the point the previous commenter was making is that the damage is pretty simple to reverse because trees are fungible, a point that is not countered in any way by an incredible analogy to notoriously non-fungible children.
The cutting down of a forest is obviously not morally or legally or technically comparable to the killing of a child. I honestly wonder whether you think you are persuading anyone when you make such a comparison, do you really believe that these trees should be held in the same regard as children?
If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, their sites will still work in Safari because Google ratifies and publishes the web standards that Chrome follows so that Safari and other browsers can follow it too, something that Safari actually does less than Chrome.
Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.
Reminds me of the bit about security in Steve Yegge's Google Platforms rant:
> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
A large part of how actors act is specific cues given to them by the director, which is pretty clearly work by the director. A director also gives specific instructions for a lot of other things that have a noticeable impact on the resulting value of the movie.
That's different from telling a maid to generally clean your home. If you gave a maid specific instructions on how to clean and how to move things around in a way that made a noticeable impact on how clean your house ended up being, you could be proud of the managerial work you're doing. But no one does that, because people pay money to not have to work.
Likewise, if you just told an LLM to let it rip on a general task then you're not doing much work, but if you were managing the LLM to do specific things then you are doing significant work.
The downside is obviously that uncached queries take much longer (adding >100ms) and more queries are uncached since you can't share the cache with a large user-base. Unless you just visit the same websites over and over again, this results in worse overall performance.
If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
I don't believe that at all, the average person voted for this government.
I remember reading about how the reason that Rosetta 2 had good performance compared to other x86-on-ARM emulation efforts (like Windows') is that Apple built special instructions into their M chips dedicated to emulation, so maintaining Rosetta 2 support occupies silicon space when developing new M chips.
I think it's because mental ability and personal worth is pretty strongly tied in the modern world, in that way calling someone deficient is like insulting them. I don't know if you can escape that dynamic, intellect is just very important in modern work and culture. To judge someone as mentally deficient is essentially relegating them to the bottom rungs of the modern economy and status hierarchy in a way that judging athletic ability doesn't do, so naturally it's not comfortable for people to make that judgement.
The author isn't literally discarding their stances, they're temporarily putting it aside to investigate a specific question. The paragraph is pretty clearly a throat-clearing that establishes the author's stance while saying upfront that this article isn't about those stances.
I do, over the years they've replaced my phone three times, two of those were beyond the 1-year manufacturer warranty period.
Seems pretty high effort compared to a content blocker mobile app or native parental controls.
I'm not sure why anyone would get this.
The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.
The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
How about they keep the bug report open until they attempt and confirm the bug is no longer reproducible?
I doubt software development will stay as "low skilled prompting", or that it is even low skilled prompting right now. Productive LLM usage goes beyond typing in better prompts and involves things like improving guardrails (eg type definitions and tests), context (docs and "skills" and MCP servers), and management strategy (instructing specialized agents together). It seems natural that there will be high skill AI coding to differentiate engineers, at least until superintelligent AGI emerges and kills us all.
Isn't that what is implied by the toughest job market yet for junior level candidates? Author is very confident that the answer to his question is "no".
How is it unsustainable when iOS has enforced even stricter rules for its nearly 20 year lifespan?
I think the key metric to good software has really changed, the bar has noticeably dropped.
I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1], because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high popularity and engagement.
It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar is lower than you might imagine.
[1] https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363
[2] https://archive.ph/bDTxE
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-has-it-ha...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-school-strike-us-mil...
The events are out of order, the bottom three events are:
- Feb 27, 2026, 02:13 PM: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation
- Feb 27, 2026, 12:00 AM: Anthropic: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
- Feb 27, 2026, 10:14 PM: Dept. of War: Anthropic is a supply chain risk
The keyword is "cancel", not threaten seizure with the DPA and destruction with a baseless supply chain risk designation.
Not this, because this is completely unprecedented? In fact, the Pentagon already signed an Anthropic contract with safe terms 6 months ago, that initial negotiation was when Anthropic would have made a decision to part ways. It was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.
I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
A lot of people are using Claude Code which many consider to be a noticeably better for coding than the other models.
I think also they tend to be generating non-C++ code where there are more guardrails and less footguns for LLMs to run into. Eg they're generating Javascript or Python or Rust where type systems and garbage collection eliminates entire classes of mistakes that LLMs can run into. I know you said you don't use it for Python because you know the language but even experienced Python devs still see value in LLM-generating Python code.
Humans are also non-deterministic code generators though. It can be possible that an LLM is more deterministic or consistent at building reliable code than a human.
My first impression of the idea is that what you're pitching is a lot like Kickstarter or Indiegogo (I'm assuming you're talking about physical sales because you mentioned Shopify). Kickstarter even holds money in escrow as a stronger signal of demand.