mrsilencedogood's comments

Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The economics are just too good. The profit margins are just inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else. Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream.

It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism.

Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?

But how do you actually bootstrap that process?

Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.

I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).

"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running."

Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

Yeah I really will give people a pass here. The state of email is one of the worst collective mistakes I think we've made.

You can literally be an expert in everything relevant - and your mail will still not get delivered just because you're not google/mailgun/etc.

I was trying to do a very simple email-to-self use-case. I was sending mail from my VPS (residential IP not even allowed at all) which was an IPv4 i'd had for literally 2+ years to exactly only myself - my personal gmail. I had it all set up - SPF, DKIM, TLS, etc etc. And I was STILL randomly getting emails sent directly to spam / showing up with the annoying ! icon (grates on my sensibilities). I ended up determining - after tremendous, tremendous pain in researching / debugging - that my DKIM sigs and SPF were all indeed perfect (I had been doubting myself until I realized I could just check what gmail thought about SPF/DKIM/etc. It all passed). And my only sin was just not being in the in-crowd.

Incredibly frustrating. The only winning move is not to play. I ended up just switching from emails-to-self to using a discord webhook to @ myself in my private discord server, so I get a push notification.

And this was just me, sending to myself! Low volume (0-2 emails per WEEK). Literally not even trying to actually send emails to other people.

fortunately it is now easier than ever to do small-scale scraping, the kind yt-dlp does.

I can literally just go write a script that uses headless firefox + mitmproxy in about an hour or two of fiddling, and as long as I then don't go try to run it from 100 VPS's and scrape their entire website in a huge blast, I can typically archive whatever content I actually care about. Basically no matter what protection mechanisms they have in place. Cloudflare won't detect a headless firefox at low (and by "low" I mean basically anything you could do off your laptop from your home IP) rates, modern browser scripting is extremely easy, so you can often scrape things with mild single-person effort even if the site is an SPA with tons of dynamic JS. And obviously at low scale you can just solve captchas yourself.

I recently wrote a scraper script that just sent me a discord ping whenever it ran into a captcha, and i'd just go look at my laptop and fix it, and then let it keep scraping. I was archiving a comic I paid for but was in a walled-garden app that obviously didn't want you to even THINK of controlling the data you paid for.

Damn, still not structured concurrency full release. Really looking forward to that one.

Happy to see Scoped Values here though. That'll be big for writing what I'll call "rails-like" things in Java without it just being a big "static final" soup in a god-class, or having a god object passed around everywhere.

Do people think this debate is new? We've literally been working on this problem for millennia and we're not really any closer even despite the huge ramp up in technological progress over the last couple hundred years.

Your remark on the adult/child/fetus/etc line is always one that I felt was under-examined in the context of the political discussion around abortion. And indeed most of the successful reasoning around abortion focuses less on the morality of a very specific kind of abortion, and more on the fact that you can't ban "true" abortion without also banning (or making dangerously more legally fraught) "aborted for reasons that give clear moral justification" - life of the mother, nonviability of the fetus, and so on. And even pro-choice people don't touch philosophical examination of "abortion for no reason except that the mother doesn't want to have and raise the baby." I mean, for obvious reasons. The public would be unable to have any kind of actual debate, and it's far too tied to things like "what is the nature of the self" (which I think is what's at hand in the AI discussion) and questions about the existence of God and of course the enormous can of worms of metaphysics.

My point with all this is that I suspect two things:

1) humans/industry/politics are not going to dig into the philosophy here in any real way

2) even if consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, I somewhat doubt GPUs can do it, no matter how complicated.

I think if we ever really get down to it, it'll be the reverse direction. We'll "copy" human minds into a machine and then just need to "ask the people if they still feel the same."

I mean NAND circuit primitives. Jokingly referring to the fact that NAND operations are all you need to build a complete logic system, but it's not very fun/ergonomic. And I'm joking that js is basically doing that but with whatever random js stuff browsers provide - which is basically just "js can do function calls. I guess let's build our entire framework on function calls."

I think part of the problem is that browsers don't really serve their original purpose anymore.

Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into.

And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can't just go wild and actually turn the browser into a locked down capital-P Product. Safari and Firefox (in that order... much to my chagrin) are holding them back from that.

So browsers just kind of hang out, not doing too terribly much, when obviously there are strong technical forces that want the browser to finally finish morphing from a document viewer to an application runtime. Finally fulfill the dream of silverlight and java applets/JNLP and so on. But nobody wants to bother doing that if they don't get to control it (and firefox doesn't have the dev power to just trailblaze alone in OSS spirit).

So instead the js people just have to plow along doing their best with the app-runtime version of NAND chips since the incentives don't want to offer them anything better at the browser/platform level.

"This is the best argument on the page imo, and even that is highly debated. I agree with "AI is performing copyright infringement" and see constant "AI ignores my robots.txt". I also grew up being told that ANYTHING on the internet was for the public, and copyright never stopped me from saving images or pirating movies."

I think the main problem for me is that these companies benefit from copyright - by beating anyone they can reach with the DMCA stick - and are now also showing they don't actually care about it at all and when they do it, it's ok.

Go ahead, AI companies. End copyright law. Do it. Start lobbying now.

(They won't, they'll just continue to eat their cake and have it too).

"intern or college-hire"

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around.

I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literally can't find it. I suspect "my", "kafka", and "topic" all get constructed somewhere to produce that topic name because it doesn't show up in the code as a literal. I also think there's so much indirection between the producer setup and where the "event" actually first gets emitted that MyMessage might not look very much like the actual origination point. Where's the initial origin point?"

Previously, that was "ctrl-shift-F my.kafka.topic" and then ask a staff engineer and hope to God they know off-hand, and if they don't, go read the entire codebase/framework for 16 hours straight until you figure it out.

Now, LLMs have a decent shot at figuring it out.

I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

But anyone expecting anything like Gen AI (being able to replace a real software engineer, or quality customer support rep, etc) is going to be disappointed.

I also think AI will generally eviscerate the bottoms of industries (expect generic gacha girl-collection games to get a lot of AI art) but also leave people valuing the tops of industries a lot more (lovingly crafted indie games, etc). So now this compute-expensive AI is targeting the already low-margin bottoms of industries. Probably not what VCs want. They want to replace software engineers, not make a slop gacha game cost 1/10th of its already low cost.

"If you commit to institutional neutrality, the result is a one-way ratchet"

Can you explain why this is the result? And why is it allegedly democrats that the ratchet pushed towards?

There are well-known differences in political alignment both among more-educated workers (the federal government probably does not employ many people without at least a college degree of some sort?) and being employed in a public-services government job (e.g. what kinds of workers are more likely to want to work for the EPA? People who want to protect the environment or people who want to exploit it more? Remember, one party tried to sell off a large number of public forests and lands and is gutting the national parks).

These seem like they would explain the majority of the effect you mention without any mention of some kind of ratchet mechanism.

We literally have collectively (to the value that US democracy approximates collectively) decided to abridge those rights within a certain distance of a border. I want people to understand what they are getting themselves into for the sake of their political protest. I would argue it is better to try to approach this reform differently than simply ending up in a border jail with your holiday ruined.

People who try to enforce this stuff via license fundamentally misunderstand the nature of copyright law.

Do you plan to sue people to enforce your license? Do you think people who are committing war crimes / crimes against humanity are going to not violate your license alongside all their other crimes?

The only thing this license accomplishes is ensuring no even semi-serious business will touch this with a 10' pole because it's a completely bespoke license with no prior understanding by their legal counsel. But you can already basically do that via the AGPL, except that some companies who are well-meaning may actually still use it.

Yeah, people love to LARP being Snowden but never actually have anything even theoretically worth being sent to border-jail over protecting.

And, if you do, and you're really asking hacker news for opsec advice, I would suggest you abandon your career as a super-spy or whatever you're doing, because you're doing it very wrong.

I suspect this is because open-core companies are often just 1 rugpull away from being not open at all. Open-core just means if I have some small bug, I might PR to fix it if it's not too hard for me. I am absolutely not doing free work for that company.

Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.

No, American big business talking heads are supposed to be direct. American workers are supposed to be demure, grateful to have health insurance, and slot perfectly into the cog slot they've been assigned. Someone who openly criticizes their former employer is showing they have opinions and will resist being mistreated. I mean, showing they're not a team player.

Companies would much rather miss out on growth than have employees who have any kind of leverage over them.

Well of course it's more complicated. But these 2 broad strokes do resonate with me as a meaningful bucketing. There are some people I see DMs from and go "ooh" and some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".