Which is why these critical pieces are important, so that this proportion doesn't increase. YC should stand these criticisms lest it become a religion of sorts.
> AWS Lambda - yeah I really bought the sell on this - "its scalable!!!!", and I ignored the slow startup times, the MASSIVE development complexity.
I don't know... Maybe I spent too much time studying how to tame AWS using IaC and gitops reproducible deployments, but AWS lambda seemed to me the most impressively simple and inexpensive product. Once I did an complete project, from end to end, designing the architecture and flow of multiple lambdas communicating with each other through SQS queues to search, extract and load info from geotiff files from S3 into a PostgreSQL database, and it was really straightforward.
If you leverage docker images for deployment and separate the interface for treating lambda requests from the core logic, it doesn't have much space for surprises.
If the author went with the cliché that lambda scalability can harm your budget, it wouldn't be original, but at least it would have been plausible, but complex? I don't know, maybe someone could present the case with more deails for why it's so complex.
Better to not be a hypocrite and continue abusing your hard exploited capital?
It's the banality of evil over and over again. Can't really blame the individual, with some extreme exceptions, otherwise by calling people out as you are doing you are participating in perpetuating the problem without contributing with anything new.
The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)
This could be right for the current architecture of LLMs, but you can come up with specialized large language models that can more efficiently use tokens for a specific subset of problems by encoding the information differently (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03214-7).
So if instead of text we come up with a different representation for mathematical or physical problems, that could both improve the quality of the output while reducing the amount of transformers needed for decoding and encoding IO and for internal reasoning.
There are also difference inference methods, like autoregressive and diffusion, and maybe others we haven't discovered yet.
You combine those variables, along with the internal disposition of layers, parameter size and the actual dataset, and you have such a large search space for different models that no one can reliably tell if LLM performance is going to flatline or continue to improve exponentially.
> So if instead of text we come up with a different representation for mathematical or physical problems, that could both improve
But then, wouldn't we first have to translate all of our current math and physics knowledge into that new representation in order to be able to train a model on it? Looks like a tremendous amount of work to me.
Yes, but by then you already have general LLMs capable of helping with the work. And even if you didn't, if that's what it would take to advance research in these fields, that would be a justifiable effort.
>This could be right for the current architecture of LLMs, but you can come up with specialized large language models that can more efficiently use tokens for a specific subset of problems by encoding the information differently.
That's precisely what happens on the bad side of a S curve.
I'd like numbers/evidence on it too, but for my own generation, I compared my cousins for years precisely about overprotectiveness, and those who were only protected against extreme imminent danger have succeeded in life way further (for their starting conditions, socially and economically) than those who had my aunts all over them not letting them fall and have scrapes.
Anecdotally, again, the parents of those who did NOT fall on dirt were much more wealthy, so these cousins of course inherited (so to speak, their parents aren't dead) the wealth and status, but gosh, they do everything they are told to do, what to study, etc. While those who did fall frequently when babies these days have generated about half of the wealth the others inherited and they are vocal, really nice professionals and of course awesome people to spend time with.
Girls were more protected than boys, regardless of everything else.
I'm not disputing that, my gripe is with the part ">20 y/o people can't speak for themselves and are overly shy". Can we really put an entire generation under this flag? Idk... I've met some 20 somethings and they seemed pretty functional to me.
You conveniently left out the the "we have many" part of that sentence you quoted. No one is suggesting it's the entire generation, or that there aren't plenty of 20-somethings who socially very functional.
But there is evidence out there that Gen Z has higher levels of shyness and social anxiety than previous generations. I personally believe overprotectiveness is one causative factor among others, although I'm not sure whether the evidence is there.
My interpretation was many as in "the vast majority", which would qualify for "put an entire generation". Of course you can't have every single person fall under such a category, this is absurd and you are deliberately not giving me the benefit of the doubt just to nitpick.
But in any case, is this even true? That this generation of 20 something, as OP said, "can't speak for themselves and are overly shy"? That's my gripe. I don't think it is, at least not in such an immediately obvious way. Hope it clarifies. If it doesn't I can only wish you a happy life.
My take is that demand is also increasing, so maybe they are making incremental improvements to model quality while focusing on improving inference costs. Prices are increasing though because even if they achieve a very efficient model, they are still selling at a loss.
Shameless plug slightly related to this pain of subscriptions. I've been cooking https://github.com/gchamon/buzz for a few weeks. It's a replacement for zurg or debridmediamanager. It also serves as an alternate frontend for real debrid so you can load the legal copies of the movies you own using honest trackers.
Full disclosure, I haven't written a single line of code there, but it's been refactored and improved a lot, so it isn't your average vibecoded project, it's been brought up with agentic engineering and countless hours of manual testing.
Maybe it sends the payload after coming back online, but for I can for instance leave with only my galaxy watch 6, which doesn't have esim, and I'm able to make payments as long as I connect it with my phone before leaving the house.
I think the comment's saying that they leave the phone at home, and the watch works by itself as long as it was connected to the phone before leaving the house.
> it happened when we achieved a level of such constant stimulation (...) that we’re never bored and never engage the default mode network.
I don't know... I don't disagree, but I think this has been repeated so much that I believe everyone, at least everyone that is actively participating in HN discussions is aware of this.
So if we are aware of this and we consciously choose to keep engaging in dopaminergic activities, without having some time to be bored, I think it starts to become a choice. We can blame tech for starting this trend of stealing our attention, but once we become aware of this, we can only blame ourselves for perpetuating it.
Or at least, aware that this argument continues to be made with tenuous evidence and anecdotes. And yet, people are being more productive (actually productive) with AI. Release schedules are increasing, bugs are getting fixed faster, security issues identified and patched sooner, so on and so forth.
I’m not denying (at all) that unused skills languish. I take issue with AI being characterized as a magic eraser that mystically makes people forget what they have already learned. I’ve just done a study and concluded that dogs gets dumber when I throw a ball. What’s my evidence? They stop staring at me to chase it. The ball definitely made them forget who I was, so we shouldn’t allow dogs to have balls anymore.
Can AI make developers lazy in new ways? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? I don’t write things in ASM because I can be “lazy” and write 50x more useful instructions with a few lines of a modern language. I doubt I’d be able to write working ASM anymore without a serious refresher. Did newer languages erase my memory of ASM and make me “lazy”, or did my efforts evolve to make use of the newest technology regardless of “lost” skills?
Can AI make developers lazy in new ways? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? I don’t write things in ASM because I can be “lazy” and write 50x more useful instructions with a few lines of a modern language. I doubt I’d be able to write working ASM anymore without a serious refresher. Did newer languages erase my memory of ASM and make me “lazy”, or did my efforts evolve to make use of the newest technology regardless of “lost” skills?
I would argue that's a misuse of AI. If the point of an engineer is to know how things work behind a piece of software, then shipping code without an understanding how it all works is a failure.
You wouldn't trust an engineer a bridge that an engineer vibe-engineered would you?
So instead of focusing on AI as a productivity tool, focus on AI as a means of adding rigor and understanding to your workflow.
> If the point of an engineer is to know how things work behind a piece of software
That might be the point of an engineer in some orgs, but mostly the point of an engineer is to ship a product or release that matches someone's vision of what should come next, and doesn't cause additional noticeable problems in the next quarter or three.
> You wouldn't trust an engineer a bridge that an engineer vibe-engineered would you?
If it was as easy to stress test/battery test/materials test/etc a bridge as it is to test code - then yes. I'd trust an engineer who vibe-engineered a bridge.
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The problem with mapping digital problems into meat-space is that there is inherently a few orders of magnitude of cost automatically added to anything that happens in meat-space.
I can spin up an arbitrary number (10, 10k, 500k) docker instances, X with fuzzed inputs, Y with explicit edge cases, Z with tolerance testing, etc etc. And if that doesn't work - I can fix and push a button and it just happens again.
If a bridge engineer could do that with bridges - yes I'd expect them to be vibing just as hard as we are now.
Absolutely. These days engineers use AI and simulation to design new types of engines, jet nozzles, etc. Treating it not like a tool is the mistake, and the assumption many make is that “other people must be making that mistake too”.
No, but I’d certainly trust an engineer to use software with in-built algorithms to design a bridge instead of using a typewriter, calculator, and a pencil. What you argue is your perception that this means everything is vibe coded and an engineer doesn’t understand any of it. My thought would be that this sentiment seems more telling of your views or how you use it than someone else. I’m not saying it isn’t possible for you to be right in circumstances, but rather you seem to assume your view fits all circumstances.
That the point of the engineer is to know how all of it works? So one must know the specific details of how every hard disk driver is implemented, with the algorithms being used, and have checked all the math and inspected all that code, just to be able to “read file”? Do you also argue that million+ line codebases should be inspected through every dependency and every file, line by line, and run through a debugger, before making a single line change anywhere?
Seems more like an extensive exercise in self-flagellation on the company’s dime than would be appropriate, but that’s just my opinion.
We all have our domains. A person can absolutely use AI within their domain and understand its output perfectly as much as having written it themselves.
The need for knowledge in those domains also changes over time. The need to understand a domain at a depth is directly proportional to the depth of the changes you are making to a stack. I don’t need to know how the hard drive spins to write a program. I don’t even need to understand that hard drives exist to write most programs these days, because it is not an area of concern. All of the implementation and efficiencies happen at a level below, or another below that, or within a trusted dependency. The people working on all those things understand those domains better than I ever could have the time to.
Maybe you could better explain where vibe-coding significantly differs from the above as another “layer” of separation?
Look, I’m not arguing vibe coding is “good” in and of itself by any means, but just basically that it’s not all vibe coding, and those of us that understand that don’t really have as much need to argue about the inevitable or that things change.
> this argument continues to be made with tenuous evidence and anecdotes.
The linked Wikipedia page has plenty of evidence and studies and you can find plenty more with a basic web search. This is not something someone just made up; if you don’t know there are a multitude of studies on the harms of social media, you haven’t looked at all. Which is fine, it’s our prerogative to not search for information, but don’t turn around and say it doesn’t exist or is anecdotal.
> And yet, people are being more productive (actually productive) with AI.
You said, ironically without providing evidence, in the same paragraph that you complained about evidence not being provided for something else which has plenty of it. Furthermore, there are several studies suggesting AI may in fact decrease productivity, but I’m not going to link to those because the more important point is AI has nothing to do with the conversation. The original poster mentioned AI, but this branched thread is exclusively about the “liking to learn” part.
> And yet, people are being more productive (actually productive) with AI. Release schedules are increasing, bugs are getting fixed faster, security issues identified and patched sooner, so on and so forth.
I didn't see anything in parent chain that implied this. Nor did I see it "characterized as a magic eraser"; I saw it framed as something that impedes learning, and that was tied back to constant simulation.
> Or at least, aware that this argument continues to be made with tenuous evidence and anecdotes
The arguments I read and the argument you seem to be replying to seem to be different things.
If they don't want to, go for it. I'm all up for the freedom to choose your poison, as long as it doesn't restrict someone else's freedom of choice (like jumping off a building and landing on someone, killing you both). What I'm saying is that if you recognize booze is bad for you, but you don't do anything about it because heck there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK it seems to me like it's mostly your fault, because you'd know where yo get help if you really wanted to. That is, of course, assuming where you live has good policies for treating people with such diseases.
>there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK it seems to me like it's mostly your fault
This is an absurd statement. What good is the willpower of a single human in the face of a billion dollars of capital aimed at a society with a penchant for drinking?
People are not isolated systems. We live in a society.
> because you'd know where yo get help if you really wanted to. That is, of course, assuming where you live has good policies for treating people with such diseases.
You are probably not the kind of person that would read "Antichrist" and think that Nietzche was a satanist. Or that just because it's called National Socialist party, that the nazis where left-leaning, I'd wager. So why read statements in isolation?
You are pitting your randomly acquired will power and your in large part unintentional stumbling through life against all of human kind's psychology knowledge, against billions of dollars spent on advertising and advertising research. That is at this point tens maybe hundreds of millions of years of acquired human knowledge how to manipulate you versus your very randomly acquired 'will power'.
Have you seen the quotes coming out of the richest/most powerful companies on the planet? These are very intentional impacts by companies more powerful than entire nations.
I don't think 'but your willpower' stands a chance if you want to be connected to the modern world.
So if you are helpless in a world dominated by the billionaires and the clerics of psychological research, what's the hope for the average person? Should we just accept our fate and waste away in endless Instagram feeds, alcohol, drugs, gambling and all forms of addiction? These need to be managed at society level, banning or taxing goods. But no amount of regulation can compensate for someone determined to destroy himself. So yeah, it's your fault. But it's also society's fault. And at the end of the day the most effective thing you have is your choice.
This framing is doing so much PR work for the alcohol/tobacco/social media companies of the world. Effectively removes any blame from the corporations making billions of dollars off harming our societies.
It doesn't, or it shouldn't, but you are right, they subvert any responsibility the individual has so they can offload their responsibility into them. But my mistake here is not realising that people under abstinence doesn't behave as if they had any choice. In any case, my original comment was about social media only, which I think has a lot of psychological pressure over the individual, but doesn't have the pharmacological component.
> So if we are aware of this and we consciously choose to keep engaging in dopaminergic activities, [..] I think it starts to become a choice.
...or a subtle addiction that also creates the impression of productivity/progress/social interaction...
If so, then all applicable studies on addiction should be taken into consideration as well, but their context probably doesn't even begin to cover the size of the issue here.
> I think this has been repeated so much that I believe everyone, at least everyone that is actively participating in HN discussions is aware of this.
I promise you that is incorrect. People who actively participate on HN are a group more diverse than is often given credit, and I strongly believe there is nothing “everyone knows” here.
Just nine days ago, someone on HN was vaguely aware of the idea but did not know it’s called the default mode network. How many more aren’t even aware of the idea?
Not knowing the name means you’re not aware of all the details, intricacies, studies and ideas pertaining to it.
Finally, even if everyone knew about it that would still not be reason to not talk about it. Talking and doing something repeatedly is how you create habits and change behaviour. Same way you should still call out when someone does something bad even if “everyone knows they do it”.
> I think it starts to become a choice. (…) we can only blame ourselves for perpetuating it.
That is called blaming the victim. There are multiple billion dollar corporations and industries actively working to get you addicted, bombarding you from every side. It’s not a simple choice of “I’m not going to engage”, rather you have to actively disengage from what’s thrown in your face all the time. It’s exhausting. You’re falling into their trap and repeating the words they want you to. It’s like a supermarket which offers 99% junk and only a tiny section of always the same selection for healthy eating (not a hypothetical, I have several like that nearby) then blaming buyers for not eating more healthily. It’s not a fair choice if you’re constantly pushing and finding ways to trick people to in one specific direction.
And again, not everyone is aware of what is happening. Most people aren’t. And even those who are (which, again, is not even everyone on HN) aren’t immune.
Fair enough. It's always tricky to generalize like this, so I wont defend that position.
However, for those who know, I don't think this is blaming the victim. I think victim blaming is a form of debate simplification in this case, just like "this is life" or "shit happens".
Sure there are billions of dollars invested in attention stealing mechanisms, just as there are billions of dollars invested in gambling sites, in alcohol, tobacco and highly processed foods, or in the scamming industry. However, while we need as a society need to discuss mechanisms to control and maybe prohibit these practices, a functional adult human beings should be expected to create safeguards to protect themselves against this. Maybe the phrasing wasn't the best, but my point stands. Once you are aware of things that aren't good for you, you can really only count on yourself to do something about it.
we can also apply regulations but they are also not enough, otherwise people wouldn't OD on controlled substances. At one point the individual needs to start taking responsibility for their actions.
> gambling sites, in alcohol, tobacco and highly processed foods, or in the scamming industry
Those are great examples because they show that leaving it all up to the individual is not enough. All of those are regulated by the state because we as a society recognised they were doing their damnest to screw everyone else for their own gain. Social media is going the same route, with several countries already introducing bills to prohibit them to minors.
There is another discussion to be had if we’re going about it the right way (I certainly do not support privacy invasion in the form of age checks), but it does show we’re recognising its harm.
Exactly, but I still think those are two slightly different conversations. If we are talking about harmful habits at a more general level, I'll defend that we need to be very restrictive in those examples. Online gambling, alcohol use and such shouldn't be allowed to advertise, it should pay almost prohibitively expensive taxes etc...
But if we are talking about the individual, the one inserted in the society, which is temporally bound, the conversation changes. We have to admit that it isn't enough to wait for laws and culture to change in order for the individual to be able to protect him/herself. To be a functional adult is to recognize what's around us that is harmful and do our best to protect ourselves. This is why if people recognize the harm social media is doing to their attention and to their ability to be bored they only have themselves to blame if you don't take action, because only blaming the multi-billion dollar industry for the habits they exploit won't do much for the individual.
You've clearly never been addicted to anything. You seem to have little understanding of, or empathy for, those who have become addicted.
I quit smoking cigarettes. It took years. It was incredibly difficult on an emotional level, and took a lot of failure and disappointment to finally make it through. And I almost lost all my progress when I relapsed after my Dad died unexpectedly.
Every pair of eyes that you see walking down the street has an entire universe behind them that we cannot see. It is not simple like you assume.
I suggest you recognize your exceptional self-discipline and relatively unaddicted lifestyle as the stroke of good fortune that it is; you are genetically predisposed or developmentally more well-prepared than most. Recognize that others are less fortunate than you in that regard, but no less deserving of aid, comfort, and a legal avenue to seek recompense from unscrupulous actors.
You might disagree with my point, but you don't know me and you can't really lecture me on empathy. You just glossed over the parts of the argument where I am for discussing public policies that we can implement to care for those that suffer from addiction. But at the individual level, after recognizing the hardships of being addicted to anything, the ultimate choice and responsibility to do something is yours.
Your cigarette addiction might have started because of social pressure or because of advertisement, but every choice to light another one or not was entirely yours. Just like it's your merit to quit it, it would have been just as well your fault if you kept on smoking after recognizing you needed to quit.
> Your cigarette addiction might have started because of social pressure or because of advertisement, but every choice to light another one or not was entirely yours.
This is contradictory. Once you are addicted, the choice is no longer “entirely yours”. That’s what being an addict means, your physiology and your wants are in conflict and require constant active vigilance to contradict. Your head begins to rationalise and you’ll even forget you wanted to stop. If it were simply “entirely your choice”, addiction wouldn’t be an issue.
The advertising and other factors which caused you to become addicted don’t stop after you are addicted. So if you’re willing to admit that external factors may trigger the problem, you must be able to comprehend those factors also contribute to stopping you from solving it. But now you have your own biology as another obstacle.
I agree with you that the previous commenter made unreasonable assumptions about you, but I agree with them that at least in this particular conversation you’re not demonstrating empathy for the addict. What you’re essentially saying, repeatedly, is that they’re choosing to be addicts because they don’t simply choose to stop. This is not true, and you’ll quickly realise that if you engage with addicts, especially if they’re someone you knew from before. There is a transformation, addiction turns you into a different person you don’t always recognise.
I am rereading my comments and you guys are right. What I meant to say and got sidetracked by doubling down on the "your fault" argument is that you can't help someone that doesn't want help. In this sense it's the responsibility of the person that got some kind of addiction to first recognize that they need to want to get help, only then help is effective. But yeah, you are right saying that you are like a different person on a abstinence episode.
Wish I could rephrase my comments, but at least I know next time I will treat this topic with more care.
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