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>> You no longer need to review the code.

You also no longer need to work, earn money, have a life, read, study, know anything about the world. This is pure fantasy my brain farts hard when I read sentences like that


You also no longer need to work, earn money, have a life, read, study, know anything about the world. This is pure fantasy

This will be reality in 10-20 years


A traditional Marxist revolution is more likely than that.

It's already reality if you want to, today and in 10-20 years the outcome will be the same: being an homeless! And no please no UBI bs thanks

99.9% of today’s jobs will be fully automated in 20 years. What do you think will happen to all the unemployed population?

I remember when they were saying that 20 years ago

20 years ago, Kurzweil predicted AGI will be achieved by 2029, and ASI by 2045. We are right on track.

hahahahaha. Please can you advice on lottery numbers? I'd like to win a bunch of money before losing the job

Why should we throw away decades of development in determistic algorithms? Why tech people mentions "geneticists"? I would never select an algorithm with a "good" flying trait for making an airplane works, that's nuts

But you have selected an algorithm with a "good" flying trait already for making airplanes. Just with another avenue to get to it versus pure random generation. The evolution of the bird has came up with another algorithm for example, where they use flapping wings instead of thrust from engines. Even among airplane development, a lot was learned by studying birds, which are the result of a random walk algorithm.

No there is no selection and no traits to pick, it's the culmination of research and human engineering. An airplan is a complex system that needs serious engineering. You can study birs but up till a certain point, if you like it go doing bird watching, but it's everything except engineering

>it's the culmination of research and human engineering.

And how is this different than the process of natural selection? More fit ideas win out relative to less fit and are iterated upon.


First of all natural selection doesn't happen per se, nor is controlled by some inherent mechanism, it's the by product of many factors external and internal. So the comparison is just wrong. Human engineering is an interative process not a selection. And if we want to call it selection, even though it is a stretch, we're controlling it, we the master of puppets, natural selection is anything but a controlled process. We don't select a more resistant wing, we engineer the wing with a high bending tolerance, again it's an iterative process

We do select for a more resistant wing. How did we determine that this wing is more resistant? We modeled its bending tolerance and selected this particular design against other designs that had worse evaluated results for bending tolerance.

And that, my friend, is just engineering, like I said above it's an iterative process. There is no "natural selection" from random shaped wings

Yes, and it was an intentional process.

Natural selectiom:

- is not an intentional process

- does not find "the strongest the fittest the fastest etc."


First, how did we model the bending tolerance if everything is just randomness?

Second, there are other algorithms that constructively find a solution and don't work at all like genetic algorithms, such as mathematical solvers.

Third, sometimes, a design is also simply thought up by a human, based on their own professional skills and past experience.


By that logic, everything humans do is per definition result of natural selection. Everything is a sphere if you zoom out far enough.

However your starting definition was more limited. it was specifically about "creating candidates at random, then just picking the one that performs best" - and that's definitely not how airplanes are designed.

(It's not even how LLMs work, in fact)


Great rule of business: sell a solution that causes more problems, requiring the purchase of more solutions.

Customers are tired of getting piles of shit, look at the Windows situation

Or don't sell the solution. When you have monopolies, regulatory capture, and endless mountains of money, you can more or less do what you'd like.

That's a lie, people will eventually find a way out, it was always like that, being it open source or by innovating and eventually leave the unable to innovate tech giants dying. We have Linux and this year will be the most exciting for the Linux desktop given how bad the Windows situation is

Only been hearing that for twenty years and these tech giants are bigger than they’ve ever been.

I remember when people said Open Office was going to be the default because it was open source, etc etc etc. It never happened. Got forked. Still irrelevant.


I said "being it open source or by innovating" eg Google innovated and killed many, also contributed a lot to open source. Android is a Linux success, ChromeOS too. Now Google stinks and it is not innovating anymore, except for when other companies, like OpenAI, come for their lunch. Google was caught off guard but eventually catching up. Sooner or later, big tech gets eaten by next big tech. I agree if we stop innovating that would never happen, like Open Office is the worst example you could have picked

> redistribute something to the society

with a proprietary black box tool you pay a subscription for? that's nonsense


In Greek mythology Prometheus took fire from the gods and gave it to humans, for the low subscription fee of a liver a day.

You can always run models locally? Local models will become cheaper and faster over time. Don't panic just yet

Will this will that and never consider will not. As of now, observation made on evidence, it looks way more the latter to me.

this argument is nonsense…I write code on a macbook running macos. it’s not a subscription, but some people also pay a subscription for a proprietary IDE. so any FOSS written with proprietary paid software doesn’t count to you? only if it’s a subscription model?

> I write code on a macbook running macos. it’s not a subscription

You already answered yourself, but let's pretend yours is a valid point: you lose access to Jetbrain IDE you can still code on another free ide/text editor and still give to society without heavily relying on ai somewhere in the cloud of the tech bros, which they don't want to give back to society, they want to be the gatekeepers of programming.


and you can switch AI providers, or use local LLMs. again, a nonsense point to raise about how FOSS is developed. coding “by hand” also doesn’t go away. if you lose your proprietary tools (laptop, OS, IDE, or coding agent) you can always work around it

All I see is missed opportunities to build a bunch less nuclear power plants and call it a day, without messing up with the landscape. Am I the only one? I believe if we Europeans and Americans start building nuclear power plants again we could finally compete. Renewable energy is not constant and has a storage problem

I also lament the landscapes covered by solar panels. Even deserts are not dead barren ecosystems. Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.

But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.

Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.


>Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.

Utter horseshit.

Putting up what amounts to a bunch of shade on steel pillars just doesn't harm the environment. There are more than a few contexts where it improves the environment.

There's no identified or predicted harm from large scale photovoltaic installations.


If nuclear plants were as inexpensive as renewables, that would make a ton of sense.

France decarbonized way before the rest of Europe with nuclear and it wasn't expensive. 50 reactors for $200 billion. Gernamy has spent twice that on intermittents and still relies on coal

Such a tired point. It’s not the 1970s anymore, and the west can build any large projects cheap. Go look at the projected costs for France’s new fleet, and that’s before the inevitable cost overruns

Could you post a link to those projected costs?

"EDF estimates EPR2 programme cost at EUR72.8 billion"

France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-estimates-ep...

Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.


Great. So 538TWh per year is 61 GW so roughly 61 GW * $9.38 = $576 billion staggered over the 80 year life of nuclear plants is $7.2 billion per year of capital expenditure.

For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France


PV solar is between $.97 and $1.16 per watt, so that's going to be the front line. With storage you can get from $1.60 to $2. This is already the bulk of the power generation in Europe and is only going to increase. The idea that you're going to run nuclear plants at 95% capacity factor economically is also very suspect in a continent saturated with cheap PV solar.

US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones. https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...

Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.

See “Market matching costs” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source


At least half of people I talk to are strongly opposed to nuclear energy. How many are opposed to the current sources of energy as well? I wonder.

Agree they oppose nuclear, perhaps because of the fear of the unknown radiation or whatever. Reality is all nuclear incidents combined are nothing compared to the health problems oil and gas created(not to mention political implications). To me filling a giant space with solar panels or installing giant bird killing turbines is such a moronic move when you can have unnoticeable small nuclear power plants

> bird killing turbines

If you think wind turbines are a significant cause of bird deaths it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Please don't bother commenting on this topic again.


Not as many as cats I certainly know that, it obiovusly was an hyperbole used to underline that all we need is just a nuclear power plant to replace all that wind turbines

Our study, covering 45 species across 91 countries, reveals that human-induced factors—predominantly electrocution, illegal killing, and poisoning—constitute the major threats to bird mortality, highlighting a critical issue in global biodiversity conservation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...

and from last year, US specific, endangered species:

A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.

https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/state-of-the-worlds-b...

Wind turbines are a significantly lower threat than windows, look it up!


Compete with what? Is this more American shadowboxing?

Sure and limit yourself at the starting point, people underestimate how much limiting these tools are, they're trained a on a fixed set can only reproduce noise from here and there

> they're trained a on a fixed set can only reproduce noise from here and there

This anti-AI argument doesn't make sense, it's like saying it's impossible to reinvent multiplication based on reading a times table. You can create new things via generalization or in-context learning (references).

In practice many image generation models aren't that powerful, but Gemini's is.

If someone created one that output multi-layer images/PSDs, which is certainly doable, it could be much more usable.


If image generation is anything like code generation then AI is not good at copying layout / art style of the coder / artist.

Using Visual Studio, all the AI code generation is applying Microsoft's syntax style and not my syntax style. The return code line might be true but the layout / art / syntax is completely off. This with a solution that has a little less than one million lines of code, at the moment, which AI can work off of.

Art is not constant. The artist has a flow and may have an idea but the art will change form with each stroke with even removing strokes that are not fitting. I see as AI generated content lacks emotion from the artist.


Image generation is nothing like AI code generation in this regard. Copying artist style is one of the things that is explicitly quite easy to do for open-weight models. Go to civitai and there are a million LORAs trained specifically on recreating artist style. Earlier on in the Stable Diffusion days it even got fairly meanspirited - someone would make a lora for an artist (or there would be enough in the training data for the base model to not need it) and an artist would complain about people using it to copy their style, and then there would be an influx of people making more and better LORAs for that artist. Sam Yang put out what was initially a relatively tame tweet complaining about it, and people instantly started trying to train them just to replicate his style even more closely.

Note, the original artist whose style Stable Diffusion was supposedly copying (Greg someone, a "concept art matte painting" artist) was in fact never in the training data.

Style is in the eye of the beholder and it seems that the text encoder just interpreted his name closely enough for it to seemingly work.


Greg Rutkowski

Early stable diffusion prompting was a lot of cargo cult copy pasting random crap in as part of every prompt.


Putting it in the context of an anti-AI argument doesn't make sense. AI was everywhere, like in photoshop brushes, way before it became a general buzzword for LLMs or image generation. I'm not anti-AI but that it can come up with a limit set based on its training data it simply is the truth. Sure one can get inspiration from a "times table" but if you only see 8s and 9s multiplied you're limiting yourself

> If someone created one that output multi-layer images/PSDs, which is certainly doable, it could be much more usable.

This reminds me, if you ask most image models for something "with a transparent background", it'll generate an image on top of a Photoshop checkerboard, and sometimes it'll draw the checkerboard wrong.


I've seen plenty of artists start by painting over an image they got from google image search, and end with something incredible.

And it's not that limiting. You aren't stuck with anything you start with. You can keep painting.


> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies.

Every now and then I post the same exact comment here on HN, where the heck are the products then? Or where is the better outcome? The faster software? Let alone small team competing with bigger companies?

We are NOT anti AI we're exhausted to keep reading bs from ai astroturfers or wanna be ai tech influencers. It's so exhausting it's always your fault that you're not "using the tool properly", and you're going to be left behind. I'm not anti AI I just wish the bubble will pop so instead of fighting back bs from managers that "I read that on HN" I can go back coding with and without ai where applies to my needs


This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it:

how AI speeds me up:

- no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use

- can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type."

- can quickly answer questions like "does anyone in the code seem to build this string manually instead of using the library/helper method for it"

- can quickly generate code like "all I want is a gosh dang PKCS-formatted key, why is that so hard for this library" which the docs did not provide

which is really cool. it absolutely speeds things up by 10-100x in some scenarios. a lot of the sucky parts of programming are being mired down in these kinds of messes.

how AI slows me down:

- have to explain to jr dev why, even though it has unit tests, the AI-generated bespoke mutex async cache is not going into our production codebase

- have to explain to PM why I cannot let them vibe code new features into the hot path of our prod services when they are not on-call to be forced to clean it up when it explodes at 3am

- have to explain to senior dev who should REALLY know better why you cannot _just_ ask someone to review a 2000 LOC PR

- have to explain to CEO in tremendous itemized, evidenced detail why [big project in eye of sauron] did not go noticeably faster than it did 2 years ago even though the team was hand-picked to be full of people he knew would use AI as much as he wanted them to.

- have to explain to CEO why I really wish he would stop playing with AI and bothering the crap out of the engineers and go back to actually doing whatever it is the CEO gets paid 10-100x what a software engineer salary to do. [actually still trying to figure this one out without getting fired.]

I'm as interested in AI use as anyone can be, when I have to put up with sycophantic "believers" who really wish they could replace me entirely with the chatbot.

Also, this shit is expensive and still being sold at a loss. I signed up for Amp and blew through my $10 of signup credit getting very little done. I'm certainly not paying my own money for that.


The worst blow for me was search engines, you're so right that are broken on purpose now, that's a total bummer. Also wondering how Google is not loosing money from non shown ads in search

It doesn't really feel like those companies care about money anymore, to me at least it feels like we're in the middle of an ongoing total economic collapse and their actions seem to concur. Why else would they be stockpiling assets, infrastructure and all the tangible stuff they avoided so far? May sound slightly conspiracy-ish, but honestly, it's somehow the theories pushed into mainstream that are laughable nowadays.

I can't buy it because for many people like you it's always the other that uses the tools wrong, proving the contrary for skeptics that keep getting bad results from llms it simply is impossible with this narrative as the base of the discourse, eg "you're not using it well". I don't even get why you need to praise yourself so much being really good at using these tools, if not for building some tech influencer status around here... same thing I believe antirez is trying to do(who knows why)

Have you considered that maybe you aren't using it well? It's something that can and should be learned. It's a tool, and you can't expect to get the most out of a tool without really learning how to use it.

I've had this conversation with a few people so far, and I've offered to personally walk through a project of their choosing with them. Everyone who has done this has changed their perspective. You may not be convinced it will change the world, but if you approach it with an open mind and take the time to learn how to best use it, I'm 100% sure you will see that it has so much potential.

There are tons of youtube videos and online tutorials if you really want to learn.


> Have you considered that maybe you aren't using it well?

Here we go, as I said, and again and again and again it's always out fault we're not using well. It is impossible to counter argument. Btw to reply to your question, yes many times and proved to be useful in very small specialized tasks and a couple of migrations. I really like how LLMs are helping me in my day to day, but still so far away from all this astroturfing


> "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated"

This simply is a mediocre take, sometimes I feel like people never actually coded at all to have such opinions


I just wish wasm had some kind of api for drawing on a canvas, managing pointer/touch events and provide some accessibility apis. That's all I wanted and I believe also need for ditching altogether dom and other horrendous apis and start making real native like apps in the browser


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