No. Halloween has long passed from being a pre-christian Celtic harvest feast day to a tacky plastic costume and kids sugar festival. Nothing sacred before AI about Halloween. And seriously, AI ruining Halloween is just silly.
I see this thread as a manifesting of fear that AI will inevitably own software engineering. We'll hang on to some of the peripheral areas for a few years but it's over. Seeing reminders of this in the AI images generated for decoration must be hard for some.
Again, no, "what to build" is the humans input, but it's not just grunt work that modern AI tooling is good at... Architecture and what to avoid are also strengths of AI.
> Architecture and what to avoid are also strengths of AI.
Absolutely not at all. Every single day that I work with Claude, there is abundant evidence that AI sucks at these. Ask me for examples if you need them.
The first links shows a basic failure of reasoning, which would have gone unnoticed if I was just vibe-coding.
The second link shows weak architectural sense and an inability to see the big picture.
The last link in particular is telling: the agents worked with me (over weeks to months) to implement a db abstraction layer without ever bringing up the fact that as it stands, that would have never worked with any indexes at all. I did not constrain them to my choices, but they never stopped me with that design. It took my eagle-eyed attention to their offhand comments to notice this problem, which then required a lot of rework to fix.
Unfortunately, all three comments have apparently been flagged by somebody for some reason and I can't read them. This is my least favorite aspect of hacker news. It's exhausting, honestly.
Like a sibling comment replied, you can set "showdead" to "yes" on your profile and click update" so see flagged comments. Not sure why they were flagged.
Cells are amazing. Even mitochondria are amazing, BUT let's not get carried away with the sci-fi nonsense. You're projecting computer science on to biology because "we're all programmers here" and to the HN crowd (myself included) we like to see the world through comp-sci metaphors. But that's just hyperbolic and inaccurate.
It's funny because the poster he shows (the Roche Biochemical Pathways)- I had that on my wall in college in 1992 and by the end of my biochemistry class, I could explain nearly all of it. The elucidation of the metabolic cycles and photosynthesis stand as one of the world's most impressive achievements (yet, with all that known, engineering biology remains devilishly complex).
Hyperbole? I'd disagree. Chemical reactions can be measured as sets of computations. The real problem comes with scale and scales of said computations.
God (any god) is a comforting mythology to help explain the things in life that are hard to come to terms with, but it's a mythology, it's no different to believing in Harry Potter, or Dionysus.
Bringing the concept of God into a biology discussion is sort of embarrassing. "Intelligent design" is for the unimaginative mind. We must always be open to being wrong, evolution fits what we know now, but I'm sure in a century we'll have a better understanding and it'll be a more complete understanding, but what it won't need is a divine eternal.
The world's not flat, there is no god. Can we get back to science now.
"""the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet's surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics. Doesn't that all sound like something that might have been said about God?
And yet the Maker has no mind, as well as no body. In some ways, its handiwork is incredibly poor design by human standards. It is internally divided. Most of all, it isn't nice.
In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"
But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes."""
You also get Jason Arday with DEI so not sure that's the answer. I'm sure Watson wasn't the first person of either gender to take credit for more than their rightful amount. DEI is just another example of institutional isms - putting people in positions that they have no rightful claim to just because they belong to one of the protected classes is a terrible answer.
It only takes a short look at, say, the current US Secretary of "War" or of Health and Human Services to realize that the meritocracy you're trying to defend is a delusion.
Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?
Sure, it parses, the same way !isNotEnabled compiles. Doesn't mean I'd want to read it in a PR. You should read the book 'Clean Code' by Uncle Bob if you haven't already.
The sentence may be valid but it has poor readability. That was my point.
It's !believes(!isSerious(mentalHealth)) which is both poor code and writing.
'I think mental health is a serious concern' would be preferred.
Both are true. It's a less than desirable structure, but it's not going to lose somebody used to writing code. You simplify the expression when you find something like this, but to simplify it you had to understand it first.
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
- Loss of social skills with growing online interactions versus in-person, face-to-face once they are out of a school setting.
- Loss of independence with many young folks not being able to afford to move out. Yes, many cultures have dealt with this, but US culture needs to adjust dating with living at home with parents.
- Loss of capital if they cannot find well-paying jobs to support that independence
- Loss of third spaces (e.g. malls used to be a big one when I was growing up)
- High price of meeting f2f -- fuel, cars, etc. are all very expensive compared to when I was growing up
I dunno, these are things that I can think of. I think social media and dating apps have also really changed the male-female dynamics, allowing both sides to be more selective too early in the dating loop, effectively decreasing odds of actually landing a date by over-filtering.
Life tends towards 80/20 so that isn't actually as bad as it sounds. What is important is what I've seen elsewhere--what the low end of the curve looks like. Basically zero. A very fertile market for the hucksters that claim to offer answers. And when faced with an impossible problem the usual reaction is to deny it exists at all. Anyone who recognizes the problem is "depressed". Same as we saw "try harder" after the housing collapse threw a bunch of unemployment into the system. It's not like trying harder will magically make jobs appear, at best it can shuffle around who is unemployed.
Expectations on both sides have changed, but the idea that women don't have to "settle" anymore has encouraged them to chase the top 10% of men, often fruitlessly. Online dating data from OKCupid infamously showed that playing out in numbers, where as pre-OLD their dating (and attention) pool was constrained to their hometown bar, college campus, etc. There's a parallel to the online job market: you used to be able to walk in with a resume and at least be considered, but now you're competing with 1,000+ resumes from across the country.
I have no sources for this but just the understanding I get from talking with some folks born after 2000. Most people are online or doing more individualistic activities so meeting single people organically is difficult. Dating apps are wildly skewed based on gender and have changed peoples dating behavior. I think there are other factors too but I think the combo of those two have left a lot of people discouraged and exhausted trying to date
People just want to give up all responsibility these days. If you use the model to do harm to someone else or commit a crime I would think it a lot more reasonable that you be held responsible, instead of making yourself the victim and blaming the manufacturer.
Negative response to low-effort AI-involved work is not what “AI doomerism” means.
A college student who is also very clearly (fron the links beyond the blog) a very active and enthusiastic AI user that thinks common (if correctly identified as less than ideal) UI trends from before vibecoding was common are indicators of “AI slop” and not just design being the done by people who aren’t very good at it (which, to be fair, includes but is not limited to AI slop) is unsurprising and nothing like doomerism.
You can disagree with the factual interpretations ans subjective interpretation in the piece without trying to tie it into a completely unrelated social phenomenon.
The site is utter shit. Total amateur hour. Terrible contrast, barely anything guiding the eyes, the padding to the sides is inconsistent. So is the entire design language from leading with some numbering that never goes beyond 01, round buttons, round input elements, interrupted by somewhat decorated layered elements which then leads to some kind of terminal window that doesn't resemble any terminal UI I've ever seen or used. It's all filled by various sloppy mentions of keywords that barely form some coherent narrative.
This page looks like some junior cobbled it together based on a hastily written ticket by some overworked product guy.
I see this thread as a manifesting of fear that AI will inevitably own software engineering. We'll hang on to some of the peripheral areas for a few years but it's over. Seeing reminders of this in the AI images generated for decoration must be hard for some.
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