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topherPedersen

Re:Coding Is Not Solved on Monday September 28, 2026 @03:52PM (#49883447)
I'm with you on this. At my employer, I feel like we are looked down upon if we don't take the lazy approach and let the ai attempt to one shot whatever it is we're working on.

One reason I'm reluctant to hand over all of my work to the ai is I don't want to forget how to program or let my skills deteriorate. Another reason is I don't want to become dependent on ai and find myself in a situation where I'm not able to fly/navigate/land the airplane if my auto-pilot or ai malfunctions or fails.

Then the last reason I don't want to take the lazy approach: When I've done "one shot tests" a lot of times the ai will try and take some lazy half-ass shortcut that we would not accept if it were a human doing the work. A lot of times it just doesn't do what you ask it to do.

Where I've found ai extremely helpful though is asking questions about our codebase, or asking it to build me a function that takes in a, b, c arguments and spits out x, y, z.

AI really is one of the greatest things mankind has ever produced, but I don't think it's so good yet that it can replace humans completely. Using it as a form of leverage though I think is what people should be doing. I suppose we'll see what happens to developers who let the ai take over completely. Some people are arguing that if you don't let the ai takeover completely your career is doomed, but personally I think you might be doomed if you forget how to fly the airplane by hand.

Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:29PM (#49638054)
My immediate thought seeing this design was how expensive this is going to be for companies to get their existing apps to look good on this thing.
Re:Google Kills Custom Search API on Jan 1, 2027 on Thursday July 16, 2026 @10:12PM (#48942668)
I commented the exact same thing. Couldn't Google save itself by becoming the search engine all of the AIs use? That's an area where I would imagine they have a massive moat & would be extremely difficult for startups to compete.
Re:Google Kills Custom Search API on Jan 1, 2027 on Thursday July 16, 2026 @10:09PM (#48942646)
That's surprising to me that they would kill something like this off, because LLMs are going to need search APIs. Why wouldn't Google want to be the search engine all of the AIs use? While we (people) may not need search engines as much as we once did, LLMs probably do need search capabilities. I could be wrong, maybe reply if I am, but don't LLMs typically need to search for information? For example, when I ask ChatGPT some obscure question about my Behringer RD-8 drum machine, an LLM isn't going to know the answer based on its original training will it? (even if the manual was out in the public internet when the model was trained)? Under the hood its searching for information and then processing it extremelly quickly right? These LLMs don't just "know" the answer do they?
Re:Google Hates You on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:23PM (#48314118)
Don't be evil. Drop the don't; it's cleaner.
Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground. Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left. There is no growth or upside left by the time these companies go public. If you invest in these IPOs you are buying the absolute peak with all potential future profits baked into the price, with nowhere left to go but down.
Hype & greed are a hell of a drug
It's been absolutely astonishing to see software developers pick software development as the first profession to attempt to automate away. Couldn't you geniuses have picked any other profession to start with? And it's not just the developers at Anthropic & OpenAI, even at my own company, the rockstar developers were the first to try and automate away all of the software development jobs at our company.
Re:The map that keeps Burning Man honest on Thursday May 07, 2026 @11:49AM (#48050859)
From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.
Re:SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @10:02PM (#47857842)
$60 billion with a B???
You're exactly right
Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @09:57PM (#47512237)
I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.
Re:Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15 on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @02:06PM (#47429147)
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
Re: on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @05:59PM (#46968227)
I don't have any problem with Waymos having a human in the loop for assistance, but sending all of our jobs to other countries is destroying the United States.
Re:New YC homepage on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:22PM (#46741033)
I noticed a photo of the Kalshi founders on the new homepage. I remember when Kalshi launched I thought it was so bad, and that those founders must be the very bottom of their class... they're billionaires now!
Re:Aldous Huxley Predicts Adderall on Monday November 17, 2025 @07:11PM (#45959951)
There's a schizophrenic vandal here in Austin that spray paints SOMA© all up and down Riverside Drive.
Re:Snapchat open-sources Valdi a cross-platform UI framework on Saturday November 08, 2025 @12:09AM (#45854316)
Rename it Snapp
Re:Snapchat open-sources Valdi a cross-platform UI framework on Saturday November 08, 2025 @12:05AM (#45854298)
This is so cool! I'm a React-Native developer, and I'm glad to see more options like this coming into existence.
Re:The AI coding trap on Sunday September 28, 2025 @10:00PM (#45409748)
I agree with this. My bosses boss thinks that AI is going to end up doing 95% of our work for us. From my experience (so far) AI coding follows the 80/20 rule, it can get you 80% of what you want for 20% of the time/effort. And the ratio might be more like, it'll get you 80% of what you want IMMEDIATELY, but it can't get you the last 20%, it needs a human to get it over the finish line.

It's super impressive in my opinion, but if you think it's going to straight up replace humans right now, I think you probably aren't a software developer in the trenches cranking out features.

I'm sort of a Neanderthal when it comes to understanding AI, but I don't think AI in it's current form works like a human. Right now, it kind of just cranks out all the code in one fell swoop. A human on the other hand works more iteratively. You write a little bit of code then you run it and look at an iPhone simulator, look at Figma designs, and see if you're getting closer to what you want. AI doesn't appear to know how to iterate, run code, look at designs, and debug things. I imagine in 100 years it will know how to do all that stuff though. And who knows, maybe in 1 year it will be able to do that. But as of right now, September 28th, 2025 it can't do that yet.

Re:Why does a fire truck cost $2m on Sunday July 27, 2025 @09:29PM (#44706350)
As a consumer (even a corporate or government consumer), you have to watch out for this in a capitalist system. My ex's family asked me to take my son to this specific water park this weekend. When I went to buy the tickets this morning, it was going to be $250 to go to the swimming pool! I live in Austin, TX and we have the coolest pool in the world and it's $5 ($8 or something like that if I take my son).

Businesses will try and trick people into thinking $250 is an acceptable price to charge to visit a swimming pool. They'll do the same shit with firetrucks if nobody is paying attention.

Excellent article, and great to see someone pointing this out. Prices will climb out of control if people are suckers and believe the lie of "you get what you pay for." It's more like businesses will keep ratcheting up prices indefinitely as long as there are suckers around who are easily parted with their money.

Extended rant... my ex once wanted to pay $500 for a f*cking vacuum cleaner. People are stupid. Had we listened to Henry Ford they'd still be making some version of the Model T and you could buy a new car for $6,008.85 (inflation adjusted price of a Model T).

You solved the mystery!
I could be wrong, but I think us software developers are going to become even more powerful, in demand, and valuable.
Re:Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war on Sunday May 11, 2025 @04:01PM (#43956673)
General Motors was in the lead then they just quit. It was stunning to see all of their incredible self driving Cruise cars vanish and then overnight see them all replaced by Waymos. It was like watching the downfall of Xerox PARC.
I saw a Waymo stop at a crosswalk last night in the dark where there was a person standing there waiting to cross that I don't think I would have seen. The person was not standing out in the road, they were standing there patiently waiting to make sure the car actually stopped since it was dark. I was really impressed! I don't think I'm a reckless or impatient driver, but I think the Waymo's are probably better at driving than I am. I know I prefer the Waymos to the human drivers I typically see on the road.
Thank God. People on the roads are extremely reckless and we don't do anything about it. Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. If you kill someone sober though, it's totally fine under our current system.

In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punishment should be that you're banned from operating 4 wheel vehicles, and only allowed to operate light 2 wheel vehicles like scooters where you will only kill yourself and no one else.

Re:Google to buy Wiz for $32B on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @05:18PM (#43405253)
They should have used that money to buy Perplexity.
Re:The computer built to last 50 years on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @03:09PM (#41780692)
I have several computers that are 40 years old. I think the reason the old 80s microcomputers last so long is they don't have any moving parts like disk drives that go bad (I've had really bad success with the external disk drives I've purchased). Unfortunately, I think the reason why computers and phones don't last a long time now is because the companies designing the phones, computers, and operating systems WANT them to quit working.

The reason computers slow down and stop working worth a damn has nothing to do with the hardware, it's the operating system's receiving "updates" that make them quit working. I have a TRS-80 Color Computer running the Microsoft BASIC "operating system" that Bill Gates wrote himself and it still works great 40 years later.

And then the big issue with phones are the batteries. The phone manufacturers know that the batteries go bad, so they glue them into the phones so you can't replace them. Obviously if you wanted the phones to last a long time, you'd make it to where you can put a new battery in the damn thing. They also know that the screens break, so they'd make those easy to replace yourself as well if they cared.

That is nice you can take phones to those little repair places and they seem to do a nice job replacing screens and batteries, but they could probably design a phone where you can do it yourself.

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