bodge5000 · HackerTrans

I like to think, or hope, that its just a vocal minority and that the majority of engineers are at least more considerate with their AI use than going all in. It kind of makes sense too, "I programmed X entirely using AI" is a more compelling proposition for an article than "I programmed X the same way people have been doing for decades", so of course you're going to hear more from them.

bodge5000

avant-hierdiscuss

> An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week.

From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3.

Even thats highly task dependant, and doesn't scale as you'd expect (eg 1 hour == 2 hours, but 1 month =/= 2 months), and at times even using AI can slow things down, at its worst case more severely than at it'd speed you up at it's best.

Now if you're willing to throw like-for-like out the window, that 1h==1w could be achieved easily, maybe even more. But then again, I feel like I could do a lot more in an hour if I didn't care about quality either, not as fast as AI but much faster than I am currently.

bodge5000

avant-hierdiscuss

Absolutely, I've been stuck on one problem for years now (why I haven't just abandoned it is another matter, the long story short is that I just can't) and yeh, like you say, I've been in some deep pits I can attribute to that, and I do find myself, especially but not always in those times, looking at others in the same field doing so much better seemingly effortlessly. But those times I get a glint of a solution, even if it doesnt end up becoming anything, are incomparable to any other hobby I've ever had. Whether thats worth it is up to the individual I guess, but I think for most people, when they find "their thing", it usually is, or at least isn't something they can choose not to do.

Can't have the rainbow without the rain as they say

bodge5000

avant-hierdiscuss

Aside from the human side of it which is often nothing to do with programming itself, I'd say anything that is captivating is only so because its agonizing. If you have a problem to solve and instantly know the solution, there was no problem, just manual labour left not done (using that in the most technical sense). Solving problems is captivating, but it has to be hard or there'd be no problem at all.

bodge5000

avant-hierdiscuss

> it's 2026, and if you still think you can just stick your head in the sand and wish for these ugly bad things to go away, well, I have bad news for you

I'm not entirely sure I agree with Codeberg's decision here (and mean that genuinely, not as a polite way of saying I dont agree with it), but this is a really poor argument I've heard for years now. Forcing adoption of something just because you declare it as "the way things are now" isn't a compelling case to anyone but the paranoid, which entirely conflicts with his next statement...

> All this unbridled hatred for AI and Web3 reeks of neo-Luddism.

The "accept it, AI is here to stay" is an appeal to fear far moreso than anyone against AI. I can understand where the pro AI crowd is coming from, reducing the anti AI crowd to being "scared of the unknown" is downright ignorant

bodge5000

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

I don't mean this with any disrespect, but people love to find ways to overcomplicate things that work perfectly well. And maybe for some reason that overcomplicated version works better, but for many it's at best a waste of time, at worst an active distraction from the thing your trying to do.

bodge5000

il y a 8 joursdiscuss

Depending on how into 40k you are, you might be surprised to hear that many fans (though arguably closer to tourists, but that's another topic) don't see 40k as a satire at all, or at very least consider the Imperium to be overall a force for good, which I guess in a grim way only adds to the parody that you can be so on the nose about it and the propaganda still holds

bodge5000

il y a 9 joursdiscuss

I could be misremembering but I seem to recall them saying that their sizing (the reason you had to buy the special sizing kit) was slightly smaller than normal, and now it turns out the rings are coming out slightly bigger, could it be that all along we should've just used normal US ring sizing?

bodge5000

il y a 10 joursdiscuss

In the former case, which seems more likely, does it not fall to reason that like any tool there'll be some that will benefit from it and some that it just won't work as well for, but are equally as good at their job? Like that neovim, unless your an absolute zealot you wouldnt insist that everyone use it, or hire someone based off it, but those who do work well with it do find it to be a boost to productivity.

Also importantly, can it be a neovim? Neovim hasn't had literal trillions invested over it in the space of just 5 years, local llm's aside can those smaller productivity gains justify the huge investment put into them, and which will continue to be needed for further model development?

bodge5000

il y a 10 joursdiscuss

Doesn't do much to visualise the ref though who certainly had something to do with that win, but yeh the real loss did come in when we swapped our attack for defence, as soon as they got one in we were done at that point

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

I meant irreversible to the individual, ie they can't be shown they're corrupt and change their ways

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

The real question is whether the threshold before it causes irreversible corruption is before or after the point where you can make real change. The latter is obviously quite terrifying as it essentially means that democracy will always be corrupt (unless time is a factor perhaps)

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

It makes sense to not want to create an admin dash, but to avoid having to keep track of thousands of feature flags in your db, it seems all you're doing here is moving them to another db

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

> If money remains backed by AI goods and services

Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?

> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.

Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.

The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money

EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.

The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

I could quite easily ignore all this in the interest of not going through the pain of finding yet another password manager, but having your new CEO specialise in M&A is really hard to ignore.

bodge5000

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

> it seems the PMs are already halfway there to implementation

Halfway there feels way overblown, and only seems to further devalue to work that devs do. Having clearly written requirements would be fantastic, and even as someone less pro AI even I can see great utility for it here, but its not halfway there to implementation. Not even 25% in all honesty, since edge cases and unforeseen consequences can cause changes to the spec midway through development.

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