Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.
Perhaps the person you’re replying to was simply trying to stoop to your level, since you made the extremely weird “spreads his DNA everywhere” comment first. Perhaps this was, to borrow your misused phrase from elsewhere in this thread, the intellectually appropriate response.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
I was following along with your sentiment until the last, childish paragraph which really took the wind out of the sails.
I guess your point is you support things, not on a legal /impartial basis but on your perception of underdog/righteousness. Also, people who don't understand your initial post are psychopaths.
Fair enough, but that's a pretty shaky foundation upon which to build the law.
>in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated
No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated, but the automation should benefit everyone instead of just the 0.1% (actually this percentile keeps getting smaller and smaller, so the percentage of people outside of the "permanent underclass" is probably even less than that now).
The problem about AI (at its current level, barring AI2027 type scenarios) is not about AI, but about the way we've organized society as a whole.
I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
> I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
Yeah, but even once we've achieved a society in which existence is inherently justified, some things are about the destination and some things are about the journey. We need to organize society around producing people and lives, good lives, as the final economic output. A person we "produce" under such a system will probably be highly skilled and want to participate in society's productive processes, because mastery and participation are real human needs for living a good life.
The question is how we distinguish between processes that are important to the people participating in them, and those that are not. Factory work was and is a massive improvement over subsistence farming, but no population in world history has been permanently satisfied spending their lives on the assembly line, so either we can take advantage of highly automated manufacturing to just have machines do the work or we can redirect automation towards re-involving human craftspeople into producing less interchangeable, higher-quality products (the market has been moving towards customizable commodities anyway).
I agree with your first paragraph. I myself do not use AI for my personal projects (such as the game engine I'm developing), and do not intend to do so in the future regardless of how far AI develops.
I'm not arguing in favor of a human existence that is completely based on consumption, but one that maximizes automation as much as possible for the benefit of society as a whole so that all human labor becomes voluntary. At that point people will decide which processes are important for them to participate in on their own.
> No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated,
I disagree, because then the "human" part of our days are over. If everything is automated, I don't need to interact with any human at all anymore - but the random small chat in the Bakery every couple of days is very nice. Ther will also be no chance to break out of the loop. Try to get a human involved if the automated system thinks "naa, not today", that's going to be difficult because companies prove they will fire the human as fast as possible because the task seemingly is fully automated.
I'm sorry but I can't help but be critical. This seems more like an advertisement for a duolingo-for-math than a serious personal undertaking. I am not sure if this level of proficiency is something you want to boast of at the end of 1000 days of self-directed study, regardless of what level you started at. Do you think you'd be better or worse off with just doing two days a week with a personal tutor?
Also I am fairly certain that not taking a day off has hindered your progress rather than improved it. This is not a productive attitude and ritualizes the study instead of encouraging self-reflection.
Your criticism is poorly informed. Math Academy is definitely not a "Duolingo-for-Math". As a platform it's far from perfect, but as a program it's a serious and complete secondary school to undergraduate university math program, with excellent explanations, reinforced by well-thought out exercises. It's definitely competitive with the top-rated math textbooks in each of the areas it covers.
As for the OP "not taking a day off"... for some of us ritualization is productive because it's what we need to stick with a difficult program. Maybe for you that's not the case. To each his own.
(I have my own criticisms of Math Academy: The platform should be more flexible in pacing and allow repeating sections. It should have built-in spaced-repetition features. And the company is uncommunicative and aloof. I'd be willing to overlook most of these faults at a lower price-tag, but for what they charge it really rubs me the wrong way.)
My criticism is about OP's attempt at getting better at math. I have no knowledge of or concern for the Math Academy curriculum. But reading this post obviously did not give me a favorable impression of it.
I wrote it on the assumption that it would be something that OP could reasonably pay for, a possible alternate path for someone who wanted to improve at math and was willing to make an effort, specifically less of an effort than what they seem to have ended up doing in terms of time-commitment. Considering how much they value their time it may have even been more cost effective.
Math Academy is not the main subject of this post. The main subject of this post is OP's attempt at getting better at math through 1000 days of self study, in which that site is an instrument. My criticism is about how his approach may have been ineffective and may not be an ideal guide for others. It is the said ineffectiveness that made me question if his attempt was genuine.
I hope this has been clear enough for you. Let me know if you need more.
I wonder how long it will take for the damage Alpöge and Buckmaster have done to the perception of these AI-driven scientific developments to fade.
Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.
I don't think of this stuff in terms of AI anxiety, I just think that the AI labs should be falling all over themselves to display deference and humility to those who made it possible.
The LLMs that make this stuff possible weren't created by the AI labs from whole cloth. They crept up and jumped onto the shoulders of giants, basically the collected (non-consensually, of course, but jingles keys look at this pelican riding a bicycle!) works of humanity. Every discovery LLMs enumerate in this fashion rightfully needs to have a billboard-sized asterisk regarding the provenance of the discovery. "Claude" didn't discover this, everyone who worked to produce the internet that Anthropic siphoned into their dataset belongs on the credits.
It's great that it happened, and I wish them the best of luck in using our work to make the world a better place. Just don't forget who the rightful owners are.
The AI labs did that to themselves. All those billions and their marketing and communication skills are like those of a local street vendor selling fake knockoffs.
The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
100% agree. I understand the argument around the "fun" of programming and learning. But my joy from coding (especially when working 9-5, on a team of 5-500 people) always came from the value creation for other people and for society.
AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.
My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.
However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.
I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.
> my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
You need both. You really need both. A salesman to keep the craftsman from getting too bogged down in details to ever finish, and the craftsman to keep the salesman from ever lowering quality too much that customers start seeing the company as money grubbing misers trying to make a quick buck.
It only works with both. Too much of one and you sink.
This can be seen time and again in successful endeavours. (Apple, Microsoft, Google, star wars, honestly so many movies, moon landings, the list could go on)
I don't think you really are struggling to understand, you just don't agree.
Some people genuinely enjoy the process of thinking hard about a problem and writing the code that solves it.
Literally the entire "flow" of coding has changed. It's now about parallel agent management and testing, less about any actual writing of code. Even thinking hard about problems has been reduced due to how insanely good AI has gotten.
The other side of this equation is the people who now pump out socks for pennies. You can get what you’re advocating for but it means software development becoming something closer to sweat shops.
I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.
I'm, like, 99% sure I am dyslexic. So, I might be the worst example of spoken and written language usage possible.
Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.
I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.
Yea as long as ppl actually read the code they produce its just a tool to generate characters faster than typing them yourself. One of the issues I see is the hype around "just trust it bro". Somehow not looking into the product u produce became a thing.
For some of us, writing code is a big part of how we think through a problem. It's like playing an instrument—or using a DAW—for a musician; the mundane mechanics, the part you dismiss as a mere means to an end, is the engine that gets us there. If a musician were provided a service by which they didn't have to sit around noodling on the guitar or piano, finding out which melodies or chords sounded good together, but instead just have to tell the service "write me an upbeat pop/rock song, 130 beats per minute, F# major key, emphasis on the drums and electric guitars, and the lyrics should be about a woman named Alice and how the singer longs for her exquisite beauty"—are they really composing? Are they a musician at that point? Or are they a client commissioning music?
Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
I appreciate the response and I get it. Something was lost in this transition and you explained it well.
The only pushback I can think of is that I do feel coding, which is a list of instructions to a computer, differ from music. With LLMs the translation work between English and coding primitives and concepts was reduced significantly. I think that took the challenge and the sense of control/mastery out of the craft.
There is something lost in that transition. I remember my university professor used to equate coding with poetry. But after decades of working on corporate codebases, I personally welcomed the automation. I always wanted to build ambitious and quality software and this was nearly impossible with the level of abstraction we had before. So something was lost but also a lot was gained.
Programming is like music in that the act of producing it is itself a medium for thought. Any but the lowest level languages are not just instructions for a computer, they're a formalism for abstract procedures rigorous enough to be executed by computers in a predictable, repeatable way (what you put into an LLM is emphatically NOT this) but expressed in a form that can be reasoned about and shaped readily by humans. If you take away the mundane doing of the thing, you don't just remove the challenge or sense of control, you take away the entire craft.
So it's a bit strange to treat composing program code as something that's incidental or ancillary to what software engineers do. A software engineer solves problems through writing code. If you make the writing of code go away, you're no longer building software. You're a product manager or a systems analyst, delegating the building of the software to someone or something else. If that's what you want to do, go nuts. But say what it is.
What about product vision? The taste, and the hundreds—if not thousands—of micro-decisions required to build something decent? What about codebase architecture? The user experience, and how using the software makes someone feel? What about the narrative and mental models the software offers users? How does it shape the way they think? What about expanding into adjacent, bigger, or deeper products?
Is none of this part of the artistic side of the craft? If I tell an LLM, 'Connect to DB X, pull data from Y, and display it in table Z,' is that really less of a craft than manually referencing API docs, wiring up data pipelines, and serializing objects? Is telling an LLM 'Do X, then Y, then Z' truly that different from writing if X do Y or while X do Z? It reminds me of the pushback against Java and other high-level languages when they were first introduced—people panicked over losing low-level control.
I do recognize something is lost by moving to a higher abstraction (e.g. from JS/Java/PHP to English), but to say the entire craft is lost and what we had before was "music" relative to the nothing now, I believe it is a narrow take on what is happening.
> What about product vision? The taste, and the hundreds—if not thousands—of micro-decisions required to build something decent?
That's what Steve Jobs brought to the table. Was Steve Jobs a software or hardware engineer? I would argue no—he was fundamentally doing product design and management. You can argue this is a craft as well, but it's a fundamentally different one from software engineering.
> What about codebase architecture?
LLMs are getting good at this too. Within a few years we may not need humans for this. If you're hoping that "architecture" will be your moat, well, I'm sorry...
> The user experience, and how using the software makes someone feel? What about the narrative and mental models the software offers users? How does it shape the way they think? What about expanding into adjacent, bigger, or deeper products?
Again, these are largely product design concerns. Software engineers can do them, sometimes even well, but they alone do not constitute software engineering.
> Is none of this part of the artistic side of the craft?
You seem to be getting hung up on my music analogy as some sort of "code as art" thing. While I agree that code can be artistic, that's not where I was going with it at all. I mean that in order to compose, a musician usually picks up and plays an instrument, or simply sings in order to play with melodies and harmonies to determine what sounds right. They set up a sort of ear/brain/muscular system feedback loop to shape how a song sounds and feels in real time. If you have them specify what kind of song they want in English, you've cut out that feedback loop. They're not really being a musician anymore, they're commissioning music. They're more of a musical director. It's the same with programmers. Programmers work and think in code. Code becomes a medium of exchange of ideas about procedure between each other, their future selves, and the machine. I learned a lot about this writing Lisp, but even in a stodgy language like Ada, I can get a lot of thinking through of a solution done by writing what types I want to be working with, in Ada. If you take the code away and say "here, specify the program you want in English", you're basically asking the software engineer to stop being a software engineer and start being a product manager or business analyst. Which is fine, you know, maybe we just don't need software engineers anymore.
> I do recognize something is lost by moving to a higher abstraction (e.g. from JS/Java/PHP to English)
No, it's not "just another layer of abstraction". It's fundamentally different. Generally speaking, software abstractions are transparent homomorphisms from the constructs in the language of expression (e.g., Java, PHP) to instructions the computer can execute. How an LLM converts your prompt into code is both opaque and unstable. I get that we're really not supposed to care about that, nor did many people care exactly how the compilers they used work. But with a compiler, if you do care, you can examine it and it'll make sense, or you can write your own. An LLM, not so much really.
Again, you are no longer building the software yourself. You're asking a teammate to. It's just that your teammate exists in silico now. This becomes more true, not less, as LLMs become more capable of the grunt work of, you know, engineering, freeing you for the more important business of stating what you want in vaguer and looser terms. I guess the dream is that we'll all become business founders, with the LLM as our founding engineer, and we can just ask them to build what we think the business needs, and go through them to make refinements and changes.
"I guess the dream is that we'll all become business founders, with the LLM as our founding engineer, and we can just ask them to build what we think the business needs, and go through them to make refinements and changes."
That's pretty much what I'm doing after 20+ years of writing code.
They do feel like teammates sometimes, though I tend to give them much more explicit instructions. It feels less like complete outsourcing and more like declarative programming in English.
Where we differ is that you seem to see code as this rigorous medium of thought that defines the craft, whereas I don't. I've always viewed code as a translation layer between human intent and machine execution. That layer has simply dissolved. Viewing code this way might feel less romantic and more pragmatic, but I think it’s more accurate. You can think, reason, and make decisions just as rigorously in plain English. The skill of translating English into code was what got automated—the true craft lives way above and beyond that layer.
But I don't think I can convince you on HN if you have such a strong views on coding. And I'm left to wonder, how are you feeling about the craft if what you perceived as the core activity (I thinking coding was at best 20% of the craft) got fully automated? Have you tried to build a really complex software with LLMs over few months? I think that might give you more clear picture of what truly happened.
> Working with AI tools [...] You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work.
You can work that way, or you can get involved. I am extremely hands-on with the LLMs and it feels like I'm pairing with someone who is doing the typing. My partner is brilliant in some ways but incredibly stupid in other ways. It can't replace me; for the most part I could replace it, but the work would take 10X longer.
Definitely feels like "my" code at the end. I find it very satisfying, it takes away much of the tedium of programming (ie the typing).
The extrinsic value of music is to entertain. The craft is part of the appeal.
Much of paid software is written to provide a business outcome. I hand-code at home while relaxing. I use the LLM harness at work to produce value for the business at the expected pace. There are indeed drawbacks to using an LLM to write your software. The job is to mitigate the issues and deliver the business outcome.
There are software use cases that LLMs handle poorly. It makes sense to perform those manually.
Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code".
The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck.
I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
I don't like the guy, nor do I think of him as a role model, but he's not successful because he palled around with Epstein; he got the opportunity to pal around with Epstein because he was successful. And that success inspired others. The business-oriented side of IT hailed him, and Microsoft, as a success story to be emulated. Those people are going to come out on top when all is said and done in the AI revolution. The old-school programmers who got into it for the sheer joy of it, the hackers, are going to lose, as the abilities that set them apart and let them trade some of the value they bring for enough money to keep hacking become available to anyone on tap for a few bucks per million tokens.
I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
Sorry but Bill Gates is an excellent example of someone that should be prison on various charges: from harming children to deliberately denying access to a vaccine to make profit to engaging with human traffikers.
There is nothing redeemable about a man that was born with a silver spoon in their mouth and decided to act like a tyrant with little democratic controls.
> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing.
These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone.
I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.
A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
I don't consider it a craft whatsoever personally. It's a means to an end, coding for me was always about getting the computer to do what I want, LLMs just moved the abstraction multiple rungs up the ladder.
Yeah i feel like most people (especially those who entered the workforce in the 2000s and later) just dont give a shit about their code. One of 30yo guys i work with (a good generalist) was recently complaining how most of these chucklefucks are just churning out darios of vibeslop docs and code (darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds) that they dont understand.
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
Because 99% of people don't care. It's something that gets relegated to a niche audience really fast and it's understandable especially if we take the last 25 years. People just have enough of it it's like modernism in the 80s if you want an art metaphor. I for one I am glad we are at the advent of a real Personal Computing revolution. Seeing my mom use software custom made (I am not writing developed for llm code) is just fascinating. She is 70 and she "gets" it now.
I like to write code and still do, for like, Screeps. With AI I can have it do the mundane stuff, and use my knowledge/skills to guide it in a better product direction than others do (IMO).
I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
What did you expect when writing software became a job though?
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.
It is such an incredibly disrespectful way of communication.
If the author can't bother to write the article himself why should the thousands of people who come across this post bother to read it?
How do I know where the author's own thoughts end and AI's assumptions about his thoughts begin?
Then again people typically don't read past the title so I suppose it doesn't matter what the content of the article is, as long as it gets people talking and directs traffic to their website.
Its like I'm reading a claude chat response but worse in every way. Its such quantity over quality nonsense. On the off chance it isn't obvious from the get go and you learn its AI written halfway through you feel taken advantage of as you assumed you were reading someone's actual thoughts. But instead you spent several minutes reading something thats just some generic LLM output.
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
Is this the culture referred to as BMAC? I've recently heard that both them and the Indus Valley Civilization remain fairly unresearched, which was surprising to me.
> "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!"
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
Sorry if you were offended, I was just making a joke. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theories, but a lot of people do, and that’s what I was poking fun at.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
As much as these solutions sound good a true fix requires a drastic change in corporate culture at Microsoft and an attitude shift towards their users which seems ... extremely unlikely to happen in the mildest words. No "hardcore mode" or transparency about telemetry, or removing any other anti-user behavior will last as long as the people who made these decisions and the culture that led to them stay in place.
