Which ones? The Sacklers are a prime example of how impossible it is to actually go bankrupt; considering they harmed millions of people, had the government step in and still remain one of the wealthiest families in the US.
> I am more annoyed by the anti-AI luddites filling the comments with low value complaints than I am by quality content written partially by an LLM.
Low value content is still content, written by a human being with a specific point. I would argue that LLM written content is even worse than that, because what value does it add when you or I can just ask the LLM itself for it? Its existence is solely that of regurgitation.
The combination of the internet and how insanely pushed every single facet of AI bullshit is has made me incredibly cynical. I see a post like this reach the top of HN by a nobody, getting top votes and all I can think is that this is once again, another campaign to try and make people feel better about AI.
Every time I've asked people about what the hell they're actually doing with AI, they vanish into the ether. No one posts proof, they never post a link to a repo, they don't mention what they're doing at their job. The most I ever see is that someone managed to vibe code a basic website or a CRUD app that even a below-average engineer can whip up in a day or two.
Like this entire thread is just the equivalent of karma farming on Reddit or whatever nonsense people post on Facebook nowadays.
> Before passing through the device, the plaintiff spoke to another officer, trying to explain the situation, but was told that the AIT machine had been “adjusted” so that it would not damage her spinal cord implant.
We're in this really weird world where have this obviously useless to the public agency. It does in fact serve a purpose to the government. But it's useless to the public, at least in the form of officers deployed to airports.
Yet we still wind up with these stories where some TSA employee says something and for some reason people just roll with it. I am just left in awe that this is possible. Especially in the case of an individual with a medical implant. Almost certainly a medical professional told them to never do this.
Why would someone take a such an action based off a TSA employee's statement? I will not even use the word "risk" because the outcome here is known in advance. Just for perspective, I had a TSA officer proudly explain to me without any conversation (I did not want to speak to him) on my part that his qualifications for working there were "could not get into any other federal job, so they sent me here!"
> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing
Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.
It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse.
With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable.
A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not. This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.
There are two important failures I see with this logic:
First, I am not arguing for reusability. Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then you can find the best way to solve that problem, faster.
Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror.
Coding is a constant balance between understanding what you're solving for and what can solve it. Using LLMs takes the worst of both worlds, by offloading both your understanding of the problem and your understanding of the solution.
> Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror.
If you are anything above a mid level ticket taker, your responsibility exceeds what you personally write. When I was an “architect” responsible for the implementation and integration work of multiple teams at product companies - mostly startups - and now a tech lead in consulting, I’m responsible for knowing how a lot of code works that I further write and I’m the person called to carpet by the director/CTO then and the customer now.
I was responsible for what the more junior developers “vomit out”, the outside consulting company doing the Salesforce integration or god forbid for a little while the contractors in India. I no more cars about whether the LLM decided to use a for loop or while loop than I cared about the OSQL (not a typo) that the Salesforce consultants used. I care about does the resulting implementation meet the functional and non functional requirements.
On my latest two projects, I understand the customer from talking to sales before I started, I understand the business requirements from multiple calls with the customer, I understand the architecture because I designed it myself from the diagrams and 8 years of working with and (in a former life at AWS) and reviewing it with the customer.
As far as reusability? I’ve used the same base internal management web app across multiple clients.
I built it (with AI) for one client. Extracted the reusable parts and removed the client specific parts and deployed a demo internally (with AI) and modified it and added features (with AI) for another client. I haven’t done web development since 2002 seriously except a little copy paste work. I didn’t look at a line of code. I used AWS Cognito for authentication. I verified the database user permissions.
Absolutely no one in the value chain cares if the project was handcrafted or written by AI - as long as it was done on time, on budget and meets requirements.
Before the gatekeeping starts, I’ve been working for 30 years across 10 jobs and before that I was a hobbyist for a decade who started programming in 65C02 assembly in 1986.
I am not talking about using an LLM to make code reusable in the sense youre arguing.
My point is that the very act of training an LLM on any corpus of code, automatically makes all of that code reusable, in a much broader semantic way rather than through syntax. Because the LLM uses a compressed representation of all that code to generate the function you ask it to. It is like having an npm where it already has compressed the code specific to your situation (like you were saying) that you want to write.
I'm sure DOGE and all of its fans have a lot to say about this. After all, we all know fighting waste and corruption in the government is exactly why it was formed.
It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.
No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.
It's still on the claimant to establish copying, which usually involves showing that the two works are substantially similar in protected elements. That the defendants had access to the original helps establish copying, but isn't on its own sufficient.
Only after that would the burden be on the defendants, such as to give a defense that their usage is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.
'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
> 'Compromise' is strictly just code for becoming Republican, and I'm not going to vote for a Republican.
No it doesn't, and thinking that was shows the lack of "strategic sense to productively participate on a topic this." You're position basically seems like: give me everything I want, even if it's a losing platform.
> A great example of this is abortion, where for years Democrats did have 'moderate' positions on abortion. The end result has been taking away people's rights and stomping on any notion of any abortion.
They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
They were never going to get a pro-choice person there, but what else did they lose by insisting that's the only kind of person they'd accept?
> Compromise is how we got to here in the first place, with feckless politicians unable to have any sort of spine and gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for.
Lack of compromise is precisely what leads to "gradually shrinking the amount of constituents they'll fight for." You're saying: if you're not 100% for everything we stand for, we won't represent you.
> They didn't moderate enough, where they needed to moderate. I know for a fact Democrats have lost Senate races in "red" states, at least in part, because the candidate couldn't take a clear pro-life position.
I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
> I know for a fact that Democrats have lost senate races in red states because the candidate took a clear pro-life position. Your arguments are not going to work on me, considering I've lived in Texas and have seen what happens when Democrats compromise their position into oblivion. Or hell, you can look at the DINOs and see how every goddamn time they torpedo'd policy over the past decade.
The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
> Any Democrat that chooses to compromise over issues like abortion or trans rights or anything like that should be chased out of the running. We should adopt the exact same strategy that Tea Party republicans used to gain control over the Republican party.
Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Purity is a dumb strategy when the Tea Party republicans do it, and it'd a dumb strategy when liberals do it. Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut? The answer: lots. Uncompromising purity like yours is actually an exploitable vulnerability.
> The lost because of that? If so, it sounds like it was the red-state liberals being immature and choosing a no-win situation: either lose because you run a candidate that makes liberals happy but can't win the state or liberals doom a candidate who can win the state because he only offered the liberals 90% instead of 100%.
This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
> Tell me: how many competitive races have "Tea Party republicans" lost because they ran a nut?
Most Republican elected officials in Texas? Ken Paxton is insane, incredibly corrupt and someone that should've been ran out of the state years ago. Same with Greg Abott. The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
> This is an incredibly nonsensical rationale. For some people, including myself, abortion is going to be a hard line. I don't care if you think compromise is a better option, if that line is crossed they are losing my vote. If abortion can be a single-issue policy for Republicans then I can damn well make it into one for myself.
Donald Trump and the MAGA right thank you for your service to their cause.
>> Such black and white thinking. You'd rather have 0% alignment on issues than 90% or 75%? Because that's what you get when a Republican wins.
> Correct. I'm done voting for the lesser evil. If it works for Republicans it can work for the left. As much as you say it's a 'dumb strategy' we're in this situation today because it works. It's what got the current set of Republicans into power.
I think you misunderstand how and why Republicans win in a lot of places, and how and why Democrats lose. Maybe you're also thinking too much about Texas. Everywhere is not Texas.
Also, even admitting for a moment that "it works for Republicans" (which I disagree with), you're assuming a false symmetry between the left and the right. To make a Starcraft analogy: the left could be Protoss and the right could be Zerg, and strategies that work for Zerg won't work for Protoss, because they're actually different. Getting mad at a Zerg for winning with a Zerg strategy doesn't change that.
> The idea that democrats should compromise a bit with insane assholes who are causing direct harm to women is a mistake. Even if you consider it 'tactically' correct, morally it is a mistake and is a losing proposition for their own voters.
There's a name for that: letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You'll never get perfect, and if you demand it, at best you'll get less than you could have accomplished otherwise, and at worse, you're inviting total defeat.
And if your kind of thinking becomes dominant on the left, we're fucked (in more ways than one).
Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want. At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America. Or maybe timing the political pendulum with economic swings simply lets you run any candidate you want.
No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
> Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want.
Complaints about the other side will get you nowhere.
And the lesson I got from Trump's win the real cause is Democrats are were so out of touch that they allowed someone as bad as Trump to win. The turn towards fantasy politics, where liberals just need to be more liberal and maybe bigger assholes and suddenly we get everything we want is completely unrealistic. All it will do really do is just ratify the Trumpian dysfunction.
> At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America.
Are even you paying attention? Trump totally did adjust their positions closer to the left. When was the last time you heard about Social Security privatization, for instance? Trump also threw generations of right-wing free-trade economic policy out the window to pursue tariffs.
> No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.
It's a lot more realistic than what you're offering. If you're not thinking about the valuable things you really want that you're willing to sacrifice, you're not being strategic.
A lot of people are angry, and looking for catharsis in fantasy. "What if we try just doing all the things that feel good to me, and none of the things I don't want to do? If everyone's like me, we'll win!" That's really dumb and won't end well.
What percentage of those eligible voters do you think would've mattered? For example I lived in WA and voted, how much do you think my vote mattered over an entire red county of 100 people voting for Trump?
Our electoral system is designed to disenfranchise the most populated areas.
More voters 55+ will have died in a year (~2M/year) since he was elected to office than was the margin of victory. High single digit percentage points of eligible voters who did not vote. Ahh, well, it is what it is. We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Trump got less than 50% of the vote, and less than a third of eligible voters voted for him.
The real issue is that the two parties have created a situation where you cannot vote for a viable candidate.
Case in point: approximately a dozen democratic senators have come out in support of the war. Like, if you don’t want to intentionally bring about the apocalypse/nuclear holocaust, and you live in those states, the only way to avoid voting for those things is to not vote.
You can try getting your incumbent kicked out in the primaries, but that’s a dangerous game in swing states. In your case (WA) you absolutely should vote in the primary for the farthest left democrat possible.
We probably should switch to multi-party proportional representation at some point.
This is the right idea. Under-appreciated is that voting in the federal general elections is the point at which you have the least effect on anything. Earlier (primaries) and more local (all those elections way fewer people go to because there are no nationally-covered races on it) is far more effective at actually affecting the world. Someone who votes in all of those and skips the federal general bubbles is a more-effective voter than someone who does the opposite and only votes for the big federal offices (and those are the only ones people will commonly shame you for skipping, which is really backwards)
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