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You can't trust their claimed savings either. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contract...

show me an example? Go to the link i provided and show me where they misrepresented savings. You can go directly to FPDS-NG from their saving reports.

NYT is a trash media outlet, which obviously leans everything anti-elon.


Isn't this the exact opposite point of your previous comment, and consistent with what the parent comment is saying? If they're willing to ruin careers over incorrect allegations then certainly they are willing to investigate true problems.

Wikipedia already has thousands of bots running around cleaning things up - seems like AI is not really a significant change here.

Automation is not AI and pre-LLM-era AI is not LLM AI. The arguments for why LLM AI will broadly worsen things are well known. You may not agree with them, but saying things won't change much is pretty empty.

why will it worsen up?

Unleashing a hallucinating LLM to make edits will creates so many subtle problems on such a scale that it may not be possible to clean it up once other edits are made on top.

They clearly stated that this is not the intention. The closest thing to this would be translation help. But even then they’ll undoubtedly include a notice like “this has been translated with the help of AI.” Along with a prompt to encourage the human to help improve upon the translation.

I think you may have missed the point of the original comment - presumably those archaic instruments and interfaces would show a much higher value of experience over cognitive ability. The fact that this isn’t the case for computer tasks overall suggests that interfaces on average are pretty good (or there is some other factor they failed to include - maybe they are all similarly bad which means everyone comes in with more than zero experience, etc.). Full disclosure I didn’t read the article.


How is the movie industry an example of this? There are great movies still coming out every year, and the main commercial trends have been around IP exploitation that may or may not be reducing movie quality but certainly not due to lower barriers to entry.


Looks like there is a BSides in Baltimore in a couple of weeks - I will check it out, thanks!


The area being densely populated would be a point against ejecting, wouldn't it?


As an American I also hope it goes well - I'd like them to get that beachhead, or be able to import one and get it serviced in north america.


>If TSLA was valued like other car companies (90% of TSLA revenue is from auto sales), would Musk look like a business genius?

Yes? In that world he built tesla into only a 60 billion dollar company, along with his work at X/paypal and SpaceX. That's still incredible. (Obviously that skill hasn't transferred to government work though.)


In that world he built tesla into only a 60 billion dollar company

Only $60 billion??? You're selling him way short.

At it's peak earlier this year, Tesla market cap was $1.5 TRILLION --- valued at more than all the world's major auto manufacturer's COMBINED. All while commanding only about 4% of unit sales.

Can you say O-U-T-R-A-G-E-O-U-S-L-Y over priced?

Since then, TSLA has lost almost half it's value --- and by any sane measure, it is still OUTRAGEOUSLY over priced.


It's really hard to say how much was meme valuation and how much was people actually believing his statements about Full* Self-Driving, cars becoming an appreciating asset (!), humanoid robots. Plenty of people believe his ~lies~commercial puffery.


"Plenty of people believe his ~lies~commercial puffery."

Plenty of these "believers" don't have money to invest in TSLA stock.

Most of those who have invested are so-called "professionals" whose job it is to avoid falling for "puffery". These "professionals" will eventually be forced to own the fact that they have been bamboozled by a con artist. And once this starts, the wheels are going to fall off the Tesla car really fast.


Its really distressing that there's seemingly zero enforcement over the incredible campaign of lies Musk has used to sell Tesla and SpaceX, HyperLoop, and others.

Musk was claiming Cybertruck had a million preorders! A million! Yet there are ~50k sales, a 20:1 ratio. https://www.wired.com/story/where-did-the-one-million-people...

Musk keeps getting away with dumping the investors, with saying whatever crazy shit he wants. And so far, the market regulators havent once bothered to care.

Meanwhile, National Labor Board has been investigating Tesla for firing employees who complained online about sexually despairing comments. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has investigating Tesla factories for racism including slurs, racist graffiti, and nooses. uS Transportation Board has been investigating accidents caused by Actually Smart Summons and self driving modes. FAA has been investigating illegal rocket launches in Florida, & reviewing requests to turn the once experimental star base launch site into a much busier production site. CFPB would have been involved in regulating X's move to become a banking app. FEC has been investigating Musk offering $1M/day to voters who sign up for his PAC. SEC has been investigating failure to give timely notice in the Twitter acquisition, costing investors billions. EPA has been investigating multiple Tesla sites (very) improperly disposing of hazardous waste. All agencies have recent seen cuts from Musk's DOGE, with many of these investigators forced out. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-03-27/elon-musk-...


Imo the stockmarket has long since detached itself from any sort of fundamentals as a main engine. Elon is a personality cult, and cults defy economic physics, until they don't. That cultishness extends itself well into the world of tech stocks as well. How many tech stocks are also proced similarly? Companies with negative profits still worth billions...


The post I responded to estimated it was 13x overpriced, so I divided the current market cap by 13. I'm sure Ford and GM were at one point above 10x PtE also.


His work in X was failure (except of political goal of raising up far right) and he seemed to be more of obstacle in paypal then reason for success.


Spending $30/mo means this person has definitely not dug in very hard on Claude Code. My partner and I are spending more like $30/day using it for vibe coding.


Agreed. $10-20 a day here.


$30/day would not be a worthwhile return on investment for such a tool


Obviously this depends on the return you are getting. For us it has been incredible. We have mostly been working on greenfield / small apps and making decisions to use popular technology we believe to be correct even though we don't have much experience working with them previously. This is probably the perfect environment for vibe coding. I acknowledge that there are potentials for gotchas with any new technology, but I suspect AI has saved us from 10x as many as it may potentially be steering us toward.


Let's say a decent software engineer gets paid $100k per year (40hr weeks, 50 weeks a year.)

$100,000 / (50 weeks * 40 hours) => ~$50 per hour.

Extremely conservatively, if this saves a developer ~30 minutes per day, it pays for itself. If you spent $100 per day, it would still be worth it.


> Extremely conservatively, if this saves a developer ~30 minutes per day, it pays for itself.

And when it sends the same developer down a rabbit hole of "something weird is going on" for a couple days (using your math - 2 x 8 * $50 / hr = $800), does it still pay for itself?


The blog author didn't think so, but there's good anecdotal + empirical evidence that working with LLMs boosts *overall productivity*. (A recent study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5188231)

If you lose 8 hrs to weirdness, but save 10 hrs somewhere else, then yeah it does pay for itself.

My argument is that it doesn't need to improve overall productivity much to have positive ROI. Whether you agree that these tools improve productivity or not is another question.


> If you lose 8 hrs to weirdness, but save 10 hrs somewhere else, then yeah it does pay for itself.

> My argument is that it doesn't need to improve overall productivity much to have positive ROI.

That makes sense.

Problem is, there exists a paradox when relying upon LLM's to make software solutions:

  People use them to "save time."
  
  Saving time by outsourcing understanding to LLM's 
  circumvents learning.
  
  Without learning, the tool becomes a crutch.
  
  When the crutch breaks, there is nothing behind it to fall 
  back onto.


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