18 months ago: it can do some things but it’s generally not useful.
12 months ago: wow; this can write ok code that a human has to do a lot of review to make sure it’s ok.
6 months ago: holy fuck I’m shipping great stuff with only the occasional redo.
3 months ago: Jesus Christ this is actually pretty fucking great. I have to work entirely differently; becoming a manager of my single agent launching sub agents.
1 month ago: my god I am shipping more, faster, and more useful than ever.
Today: we have fleets of highly effectively domain expert agents working entirely autonomously and shifting between fleets depending on domain, available usage remaining, and we’re shipping 10x with 100% better reviews than before—expanding by the day and self-improving its own harness.
—-
Next week: the agents will prioritize code golf.
The week after that: everything is written in ASM.
We’ll come full circle in 3y
e: fyi; this is my personal progression with LLMs.
This is what I don't get with the kind of posts you are replying to.
I have experienced directly what the evolution of cloud based software, and now AI based tooling, has done to team sizes on delivery projects.
Cannot understand how they don't get how all the performance improvements directly correlates to smaller team sizes, in shareholders driven economy.
So far I have been lucky, and just hope to have enough savings when time comes, as finding jobs after 50s wasn't already easy without having to add AI on top.
Most of the world does NOT optimise for efficiency, particularly at the big end. Really big hyperscale companies (and some startups) are unusual because they at least sort of try, most of the world is not even trying.
The org structure is optimised to reduce or even minimise individual agency, explicitly at the cost of efficiency.
Teams have fiefdoms, private repos that the rest of the org can't see. You are not granted permission to see what permissions you have. Byzantine department structures. Shipping "hello world" to production takes 3-6 months and nobody can imagine it working any other way.
There's actually no central directory of teams or processes. To get anything meaningful done, you need the co-operation of maybe 8 teams but there's no consistent way to engage them all. You have to negotiate with them all in different ways, they're like little warlords, sitting and guarding access to some vital resource you need. They have established a ticket-based interface with a 7 day SLA on top of a perfectly good vending API that could do what you need in seconds. Sometimes a blocking team has a 3 month backlog so your project will just have to wait.
Everything is always in the process of being restructured, so no end to end 6 month process happens the same way every time.
These organisations could use AI to run the end to end process in minutes. Heck, they could just put APIs on top of what they already have. But the way they WANT to use it is to keep doing what they're doing but with EVEN MORE form filling and paperwork.
You would think they would get outcompeted, but no. The "IT organisation" sits like a brain slug on top of an enterprise with substantial regulatory, capital and execution moats.
Big cuts of course do happen in these places, but it's often for optics (we need to signal that we care about efficiency, and AI is a great excuse). But you can't protect yourself by being efficient and good at your job, because the cuts were not about output.
Because I don't live in a world where my team needs to grow for me to feel more successful? My teams have been small and tight-knit at every place I've been an Eng leader. I left a job with 13 engineers and they're at >90 now, apparently doing less; but, that's just what I hear second-hand.
Was it a conscious or unconscious decision to reply to a chain with an argument of "headcount is obviously reducing" with "I don't need headcount to grow to be happy" without addressing the gap between those two at all?
> I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.
So do I, but I've been in two companies that had to let me go because the investors said they didn't want my role to exist any more. Plus two other roles where the company straight up ran out of money.
I unfortunately have been in enough situations where team sizes get to shrink, unless there is some escalation going on.
First it was offshoring, then managed cloud environments and servless, followed by ready made SaaS products, low code/no code iPaaS cloud products, and now agentic runtimes.
The ones doing content translations, asset management were the first, followed by classical infrastructure people, then most backend roles, and so it goes.
Not everyone makes the transition. In the rise of AWS, someone I know's last task at this one company, a company they'd poured their heart and soul into; it was to move everything off the on-prem servers that he'd procured and the company had been running in for years. He moved it all onto AWS, got rid of that hardware, and then he was out of a job.
I think it is because programmers are not that good at economy or running a business. Their bosses are though and they don't see a productivity tool, but a way to reduce their costs.
Speaking of code golf, I had it optimize Diskitude into a <8 kb (still uncompressed) executable, add some features, and improve scanning performance all while increasing size. An LLM will gladly make extremely optimized software, you just have to ask for it.
> The week after that: everything is written in ASM.
This is an genuinely good minimalist good editor that is created in mostly assembly that was created with the help of AI[0]
I maintain a fork of it which basically adds scratchpad ability to it and is something that I use daily myself for what it's worth[1]
My fork was created with the help of GLM 5.3 (an open-weights model)
The future is already here in some sense. I could in theory add more features but I intentionally add not more features because asm is still slightly difficult for it to write but in some sense the tradeoff has been/could be worth it. It was more of an experiment really and I am really impressed by it.
in many ways, forcing AI to write asm does make you now think intentionally of features and ironically prevents feature creep and makes you think of stability of the product (atleast right now for me anyways)
i wish this was my experience, it's basically the opposite. im shipping a little faster -- but spending endless amounts of time reviewing LLM-generated code that usually isnt production ready.
It's worse than that even. It is 'things are bad, therefore we can't begin to improve'. Weirdly enough that never goes in the other direction. The day that people realize that people without a lot of money are also people things will start to improve. And this is rather more than less likely to happen because I suspect there will be a lot more people without a lot of money soon compared to today.
They're not 'hospitable,' they're 'advantageous' due to being lower tax rates. If anything, lower tax rates make places less 'hospitable' in the long run.
That’s not true. For example, Washington State has no corporate tax: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-corporate-inc.... But companies aren’t exactly flocking there. Florida meanwhile is seeing a huge boom, but its corporate taxes are around the middle of the pack. California has always had pretty high marginal tax rates, even back in the 1970s when it was a solid red state. It used that money to do things like make big investments in higher education.
Being hospitable is more about whether the state makes it a pain in the ass to do business.
Taxes are the least worst part of doing business. It's all the other subjectively defined and capriciously enforced regulatory BS that drives business away. You can't run a business let alone get financing to create one when a huge chunk of your costs are a question mark.
Not always. Low tax can allow enough economic activity as to bring in more income than higher taxes. This is most obvious when you take a tax rate of 90% and reduce it, and there is big debate on where it breaks down when rates are already lower.
A state can justify and sustain higher taxes on the wealthy by offering government services which indirectly benefit the wealthy (the externalities you mention). But it doesn’t follow that an arbitrarily poorly-ran government can sustain arbitrarily high taxes on the wealthy.
There’s some manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions to the problem of taxes and services.
California, for example, spends a lot of money to get not-great public schools, and has housing costs that are out of control. So if you’re importing new hires from other states, and pay them a lot to live here, and personally pay high taxes on top of that… that doesn’t seem like a Pareto-optimal point.
At some point, the wealthy will decide to move someplace that looks more Pareto-optimal. Better externalities, lower taxes, or both.
FTA: For years, policymakers and economists have debated the shape and peak of the Laffer curve, a theoretical model suggesting that if top tax rates increase beyond a certain point—called the revenue-maximizing rate—they will yield negative marginal revenue.
A new paper from economists at the Joint Committee on Taxation finds that the Laffer curve is flatter than previous theories have suggested, meaning the revenue-maximizing “rate” might be a broad range rather than a single point.
Lawmakers looking to raise taxes might find it difficult to raise substantial revenue from top rate increases; however, broadening the base, examining untaxed sectors, and reducing the tax gap represent promising pathways to closing the gap between revenue and spending.
---
I'm glad they highlighted that instead of increasing the tax rate, broaden the tax base. For example, if they treated borrow-spend-die as income. We could keep a lower tax rate. The same argument could be made for eliminating the estate tax. Treat inheritances as income for tax purposes.
The type of people who move from CA to WY for the tax benefits are the type of people who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates). That means WY can offer more government services to the rest of its residents, making it more hospitable.
> who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates)
They rely massively on government services. They depend on an educated workforce. They depend on law and order to prevent their workplaces from bandits. They depend on massive navies that allow goods to be shipped across the world without concern. They depend on courts to enforce contracts so that they can build their business on contracts rather than having to establish personal trust with everybody they do business with. They depend on a stable currency. They depend on a regulated finance market. They depend on a massive pacified customer base.
I've only scratched the surface, there's lots more.
>The type of people who move from CA to WY for the tax benefits are the type of people who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates).
Ah yes, the government services the people will need after these locusts move in and price generations of locals out of their homes.
Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.
It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.
I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
It's a movie with at least one surprising twist, which seems to be fairly central to enjoying the experience, and people who've seen it don't want to spoil it for others. Hence they're vague in their descriptions. It's as simple as that.
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
SPOILERs kinda: Notably, it's all in the presentation and form of everything that went on. There were about ten different moments in the packed theater where something was said or happened where the entire audience was... silent. tense. I've never felt that sort of palpable and shared tension anywhere in my life like that.
>I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
Yes, these comments look like a very serious well-funded astroturfing campaign.
That's interesting. I find most of those that you listed, aside from Valentina (I am NOT a fan), as something I can put on basically everything--and actively do.
Out of the hot sauces, Tabasco is my least used these days. 30y ago, it was really all that was available; but, now, we have such a wide and varied option set at just about every restaurant that I find myself almost never using it.
Buddy; governments move over decades and centuries, not minutes and hours. You cannot measure the effect of government action in the immediate like you want to.
The fact that the government is moving to collect these data as well as partner with third-party private industry (e.g., Palantir) to avoid direct data collection that runs counter to current/settled law, you have to begin to piece together the future.
Regardless of your apparent desire to avoid accountability for the US government's actions, potential or actual, these are truths for which the citizenry need to protect themselves against both by their own individual actions as well as the collective actions of their voting behaviors.
I believe what you are talking about there is forensic genealogy. That doesn't track down people who are in the database, but finds people who are distantly related and then, through genealogical information, figures out who the suspect could be.
In other words, the people who put their DNA up help track down dangerous criminals. This doesn't sound like something people would object to. I certainly wouldn't.
And this is not the discrimination we were talking about, unless we have now defined the tracking down of murderers and rapists as "discrimination".
No, you don't put your DNA up with the intent of it tracking criminals, your DNA is in the system and it can be used by law enforcement, could be at a price, would hopefully be with a warrant, but or could be and has historically been done without user consent or a warrant (like was going on with GEDmatch).
And no it's not - I'm not sure why you narrowed it down so far to use cases with consent and a warrant. That's obviously not what I'm referring to at all. The initial point was about sold off to discriminate "God knows where," public private etc.
it's already legal to discriminate in life insurance based on genetic data. Here's quest diagnostics bragging about how good that division is doing at providing lab data, both real and current: https://blog.examone.com/blog/2022/12/20/50-years-of-laborat...
It's a rather bold move to look at the American healthcare system, the state of privacy regulations, and the general practices of like everyone involved and decide that you don't have to worry about your DNA ending up being used for some bullshit you didn't consent to if you let some random third party put it in their database.
It's not like they're putting the evidence through a proper trial before using it to find people. A lot of them are innocent. And I'm pretty sure guilt doesn't imply dangerous either. And if they're a not-distant relative, for most crimes I probably don't want to be a big factor in them getting locked up.
Differently from what? Which part of my post are you trying to disagree with?
When I talk about some cases not being dangerous and not wanting to help with most crimes for close relatives, I'm not talking about being an active bomber.
> Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
This is not only offensive, but dehumanizing, reductive, and the co-opting of trauma in a hyperbolic way.
No one reading this is a fucking slave to their company. They may very well be in a third world country or a repressive regime; but, let’s be honest: those folks are not the intended audience here.
This is more of the, “quiet quitting trope,” rephrased in an objectively horrendous way.
Roman Empire slavery is not the slavery of the Americas, your traumas are not everyone’s traumas
if your day isn’t at your discretion you are a slave in that older system, the popularity and normalization of that in our culture doesn’t change this. chattel slavery occurring in your country’s history doesn’t change this. there are many people at all socioeconomic brackets that have addressed it for themselves, based on the starkness of the observation.
Are you? You are most likely not a slave to that specific company, but you are definitely slave to the system, you can’t leave your current job without securing another, or in few months you will be literally homeless, and if you have a family, they will leave you too aka your life is over. Even if you have your own business, you are slave to the investors or the ones pay your contracts. Go a little higher in this “food chain” and you are slave to banks, get debanked or sanctioned, and no matter what, most likely you will end up homeless. Hell, even having low credit score “real life good boy score” is enough to prevent from accessing many basic needs from buying/renting houses to new jobs or others.
You are truly free if you are not afraid to lose your basic human needs (shelter, food, security, etc.) if you stop working either voluntarily or lose your job.
Is there really such a fine-line between slave or not?
What if the economy gets so bad you have to work 16 hours a day just to afford food? What if you can't afford to have kids? Pets? What if your apartment is 150 square feet?
After a certain point a free person under capitalism has less than certain historical slaves, and has a worse life.
Well, we have 2026 now. And since 263 years the SI (system international) units are a thing. Everything else is outdated and gross, since it only complicates calculations. It's about time switch to modern times.
That said, the Lake of Constance (shared by Switzerland, Germany and a bit of Austria) is at the deepest location 251 m deep. There is however nothing terrifying about that. And it's about twice as deep as your Portsmouth Mine.
Hah! Not every day my neighborhood gets a shout out on HN. I’ve swam in that pit in the video. Neck deep you can see your toes. Found a couple pipe bombs… definitely gets a lot of attention from bored people.
Generating the AI music wasn't illegal. Using bots to inflate /listens/ of an AI-generated song probably is against a platform's TOS, but isn't inherently illegal.
However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.
From the statement: At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts.
So the bots he actually used were most likely illegal (though it's true other bots might not be).
I used to specifically re-rip DVDs that had menus. They were hideously designed, overly complex, or just pointless when I just wanted the content to start when I put the disc in. Why?
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
I tried Apple TV's free trial and it really gets in the way of everything, so much so that I canceled. It's pretty annoying how modern streaming platforms try to ruin the vanilla viewing experience as much as possible. If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime which you have to click out of to hide. Like hey, I just watched a feature-length film. Let me watch the credits in peace.
> If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
18 months ago: it can do some things but it’s generally not useful.
12 months ago: wow; this can write ok code that a human has to do a lot of review to make sure it’s ok.
6 months ago: holy fuck I’m shipping great stuff with only the occasional redo.
3 months ago: Jesus Christ this is actually pretty fucking great. I have to work entirely differently; becoming a manager of my single agent launching sub agents.
1 month ago: my god I am shipping more, faster, and more useful than ever.
Today: we have fleets of highly effectively domain expert agents working entirely autonomously and shifting between fleets depending on domain, available usage remaining, and we’re shipping 10x with 100% better reviews than before—expanding by the day and self-improving its own harness.
—-
Next week: the agents will prioritize code golf.
The week after that: everything is written in ASM.
We’ll come full circle in 3y
e: fyi; this is my personal progression with LLMs.
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