May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)
The sycophancy, the grinding inevitablity of assimilation, the homogeneous entity that speaks out of a billion mouths. It's all there.
I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.
Guys I thought it was the fire next time.
> I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.
It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?
(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)
I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.
As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that.
Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.
I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific.
Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win.
I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!
tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation:
In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE.
So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely.
What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness.
But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents.
You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better.
Just needs more pop!
LLM code can be leveraged, but pretending that tokens are just going to turn into money printers at some point is not productive. The primary source of software's value to an end user is the thought that was placed into it. Where does that go for the AI-natives? As you say, they are seemingly brute forcing software engineering, at least so far.
One thing I have been considering is how LLMs primarily change the "build vs buy" calculus for a fair number of software niches, particularly things like developer tooling and small libraries and packages. Partially due to a projected increase in supply chain attacks, and partially due to the changing standards of engineers. There's no longer anything stopping someone from working with an ugly or clunky syntax, presuming it's a well documented standard. So many "developer experience" tools are going to hit this - Tailwind primarily comes to mind.
It's a sort of "erosion" of niches in the current landscape - although to me this does not really work out for the worse in the long term, since again, the thinking in the process will need to just go somewhere else.
Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.
The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.
Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.
At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.
So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.
People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.
LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.
> I. DEFINITION:
> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.
> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)
- Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01
Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells.
Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler).
Exactly correct.
Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act; whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...] Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."
By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal" implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)
Try thinking for yourself, instead.
Off-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand my vocabulary.
I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the point of being intolerable. Right up there with "narcissist" and "gaslighting".
Another example would be "Ponzi scheme", which I've seen abused for any situation the speakers seems unsustainable, even when there isn't any records fraud.
So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.
Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.
"They" are against me.
Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.
learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads for not blindly following the insanity
what do we honestly do?
Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.
This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.
It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.
Not sure about the details with Freifunk, but Guifi has collaborating companies who basically operate like ISPs but connect you to Guifi + you get a internet connection via the Guifi peering the installer helps you with.
The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly) don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.
The context for a new kind of internet is very different now, than when the internet started. That changed context provides an opening for new ways to do things.
A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for. As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too firmly entrenched, etc.
NSFW blog content on HN? Really?
Update: there's a section called "Pornography". It does not contain pornography.
But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.
https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n...
> This is, to be clear, a bad solution. MaxMind’s free database is not particularly precise, and in general IP lookup tables are chasing a moving target. I know for a fact that there are people in non-UK countries (like Ireland!) who have been inadvertently blocked by these lookup tables. Making those people use Tor or a VPN sucks, but I don’t know what else to do in the current regulatory environment.
But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.