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> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted pe

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old set. The tension between money and what you make has been boiled away completely. We lean much more heavily on where someone has worked ("ex-Google") vs their tech chops, which (like management), have given up on trying to actually evaluate. We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact. We sold out the culture, which paved the way for it to be hollowed out by LLMs. There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. We need to stop being complicit in propagating that noxious cloud of inevitability and nihilism that is choking our culture. We need to call out the bullshit and extended psyops ("all software jobs are going away!") that have gone on for the past 2-3 years, and mock it ruthlessly: despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical. In short, it's time to wake up.

underlipton 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dugidugout 11mo ago
  Odd line to be dancing upon.
  - underlipton 11mo ago
    Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)
robot-wrangler 11mo ago
I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible. Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying. You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat
- majormajor 11mo ago
  I don't really see it any different than the Windows/Unix, Windows/Mac, etc, flame wars that boiled even amongst those with no professional stake it in for decades. Those were otherwise serious people too, parroting meaningless numbers and claims that didn't actually make much of a difference to them. If anything, the AI takes are more much more meaningful. A Mac/PC flame war online was never going to significantly affect your career. A manager who either is all-in on AI or all-out on it can.
  - robot-wrangler 11mo ago
    OS and IDE wars are something people take pretty seriously in their teens and very early careers, and eventually become more agnostic about after they realize it's not going to be the end-all predictor of coworker code quality. It predicts something for sure, but not strictly skill-level. Language-preference wars stick around until mid-career for some, and again it predicts something. But still, serious people are not likely to get bogged down in pointless arguments about nearly equivalent alternatives at least (yaml vs json; python vs ruby). Shallow takes on AI (whether they are pro or anti) are definitely higher stakes than all this, bad decisions could be more lasting and more damaging. But the real difference to my mind is.. AI "influencers" (again, pro or anti) are a very real thing in a way that doesn't happen with OS / language discussions. People listen, they want confirmation of biases. I mean there's always advocates and pundits doing motivated reasoning, but usually it's corporate or individuals with clear vested interests that are trying to short-circuit inquiry and critical thinking. It's new that so many would-be practitioners in the field are eager to sabotage and colonize themselves, and forcing a situation where honest evaluations and merit-based discussion of engineering realities are impossible
quantummagic 11mo ago
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.
- cool_dude85 11mo ago
  >Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?
  - andai 11mo ago
    I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me. I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice. I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :) For straightforward stuff, they can handle it. For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up. -- To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...) I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151
    - nasmorn 11mo ago
      AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad
deleted 11mo ago
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JustExAWS 11mo ago
I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work. No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them. As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction. I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc. If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.
- twosdai 11mo ago
  I really agree with your point. I think that this forum being hackernews and all though lends itself to a slightly different kind of tech person. Who really values for themselves and their team, the art of getting stuck in with a deeply technical problem and being able to overcome it.
  - JustExAWS 11mo ago
    You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs. If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game. If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.
everdrive 11mo ago
>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.
- idiotsecant 11mo ago
  Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet. Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.
  - pixl97 11mo ago
    > That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem. Ah yes, we'll also skip out on eating too.
    - idiotsecant 11mo ago
      There's a mountain of software work you can do that doesn't involve participating in this rat race. There's nothing that says you need to make 500k and live in silicon valley. It's possible to be perfectly happy working integrating industrial control systems in a sleepy mountain town where cost of living is practically nothing. I am well qualified to make that statement.
      - YouAreMammon 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
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Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
We need to change the underlying system. We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible. Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  > We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. The thing about capitalism is that unecessary webshop isn't getting any customers if it's truly unecessary, and will soon be out of business. We can appreciate Ghostty, because why? Because the guy writing it is independently wealthy and can fly jets around for fun, and has deigned to grace us with his coding gifts once again? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice piece of software, but I don't know that system's any better.
  - Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    Capitalism looks like it does because humans don't have perfect knowledge (we don't know the best shop). Also competition is a core driver for cost reduction and progress in capitalism. And on a big picture pov: There is only one Amazon, Alibaba etc.
- vladms 11mo ago
  Each time someone says "we" without asking me I find it at least insulting. With this mindset the next step might be to tell me what I need, without considering my opinion. Yes, the current system seems flawed, but is the best we came up with and is not fixed either, it is slowly evolving. Yes, some resources are finite (energy from the sun seems quite plenty though), but don't think we will be ever able to define "fair". I would be glad with "do not destroy something completely and irremediably".
  - Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
    [dead]
CamperBob2 11mo ago
We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs. What I don't get is why I should care.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  The question about why you should care about others and not just yourself has literature stretching back thousands of years. Maybe start with one of the major world religions?
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    Which one do you suggest? Many of them come with a nasty non-compete clause.
- trinsic2 11mo ago
  Have you seen the latest AI slop in game design lately, destroying human creativity? Have you seen how this tech is being used to control narratives to subjugate populations to the will of authoritarian governments? This shit is real. We are slowly sliding into a world where every aspect of our lives are going to be dictated by people in power with tools that can shape the future by manipulating what people think about. If you don't care that the world is burning to the ground, good luck with that. Im not saying the tech is necessarily bad, its the way in which we are allowing it to be used. There has to be controls is place to steer this tech in the right direction or we are heading for a world I don't want to be apart of.
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    Have you seen the latest AI slop in game design lately, destroying human creativity? This just in: 90% of everything is crap. AI does not, cannot, and will not change that. Have you seen how this tech is being used to control narratives to subjugate populations to the will of authoritarian governments? Can't say as I have. The only authoritarians in this thread are the ones telling us what we should and should not be allowed to do with AI.
ineedasername 11mo ago
"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs" This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about. Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack? That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  What’s your solid contribution to the discussion?
  - ineedasername 11mo ago
    Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress. If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.
- trinsic2 11mo ago
  Man, there is something true in what he is saying though. Can't you see it? I like the idea of some of this technology. I think its cool you can use natural language to create things. I think there is real potential in using these tools in certain context, but the way in which these tools got introduced, no transparency, how its being used to shape thought, the over-reliance on it and how its use to take away our humanity is a real concern. If this tech was designed in an open way and not put under paywalls and used to develop models that are being used to take away peoples power, maybe I'd think differently. But right now its being promoted by the worst of the worst, and nobody is talking about that.
jrm4 11mo ago
"Dignifies work done by developers?" Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money." "Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)
JohnBooty 11mo ago
we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. I don't think that is at ALL at odds with using AI as a coding assistant! I am not going to tell you I am a coding god, but I have been doing this for nearly 30 years and I feel I'm pretty competent craftsman. AI has helped me to be a better craftsman. The big picture ideas are mine, but AI has helped immensely with some details.
asdfman123 11mo ago
This is the fate that befalls any wildly successful subculture: the MOPs start showing up, fascinated by it, and the sociopaths monetize it to get rich. The original geeks who created the scene become increasingly powerless. Relevant article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
zero_k 11mo ago
YES. The "This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative" is so incredibly true. I went to a privacy event about Web3, and the event organisers hired a photographer who took photos of everyone (no "no photo" stickers available), and they even flew a drone above our heads to take overarching videos of everyone :D I guess "privacy" should have been in quotes. All the values and aesthetics of the original set of people who actually cared about privacy (and were attracted to it) has been evaporated. All that remained are the hype. It was wild.
supern0va 11mo ago
"We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact." I actually disagree with this pretty fundamentally. I've never seen hacker culture as defined by "craftsmanship" so much as about getting things done. When I think of our culture historically, it's cleverness, quick thinking, building out quick and dirty prototypes in weekend "hackathons", startup culture that cuts corners to get an MVP product out there. I mean, look at your URL bar: do you think YC companies are prioritizing artisanal lines of code? We didn't trade craftsmanship for "Business Impact". The latter just aligns well with our culture of Getting Shit Done. Whether it's for play (look at the jank folks bring out to the playa that's "good enough") or business, the ethos is the same. If anything, I feel like there has been more of an attempt to erase/sideline our actual culture by folks like y'all as a backlash against AI. But frankly, while a lot of us scruffy hacker types might have some concerns about AI, we also see a valuable tool that helps us move faster sometimes. And if there's a good tool that gets a thing done in a way that I deem satisfactory, I'm not going to let someone's political treatise get in my way. I'm busy building.
blackqueeriroh 11mo ago
> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Developers waste a lot of time writing a bunch of boilerplate code that they hate writing and that doesn’t make them happy and has nothing to do with craftmanship. We also just spent 60 years in a culture that dignified work done by developers to the extreme, and honestly that produced some of the most narcissistic minds the world has ever seen: Thiel, Andressen, et al - and why? Because we dignify work in a capitalistic culture by increasing wages. You want to talk about a culture that values craftmanship? Let everyone have the time and the freedom and the security to build whatever they want to build, instead of what they have to build in order to have health insurance. > We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. Uhhhhhh…..excuse me? > despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical. More money was invested in the dot-com boom, and in the lead up to the railroad era, before anyone could ride. So this isn’t new.
- alganet 11mo ago
  I think this boilerplate thing got lost in translation some time ago. We dislike _the presence_ of boilerplate, not the time spent writing it. If another thing writes it for you, it implies that _now boilerplate exists_, and it sucks. It makes me unhappy when it exists. It makes me unhappy if it appears in seconds. That said, there is some potential for using AI to reduce boilerplate and help create more meaningful software. However, that is definitely not the way things are shaping out to be.
underlipton 11mo ago
Get some black dudes involved. Black dudes know how to keep it real. (It will be interesting to see many people are able to accurately draw the conceptual line between what part of my sentiment is a joke and what part is serious.) EDIT: Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. And you had an entire group of people, whose existing ethos was based on appropriating and remixing and building something from the metal up, right there.

underlipton 11mo ago

[flagged]

dugidugout 11mo ago
Odd line to be dancing upon.
- underlipton 11mo ago
  Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. (The post you replied to got flagged to death. That's gotta count for some Punk Points.)

robot-wrangler 11mo ago

I realized recently that if you want to talk about interesting topics with smart people, if you expect things like critical thinking and nuanced discussion, you're currently much better off talking literature or philosophy than anything related to tech. I mean, everyone knows that discussing politics/economics is rather hopelessly polarized, everyone has their grievances or their superstitions or injuries that they cannot really put aside. But this is a pretty new thing that discussing software/engineering on merits is almost impossible. Yes, I know about the language / IDE / OS wars that software folks have indulged in before. But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme and are there even in otherwise serious people. And in general anti-intellectual sentiment, mindless follow-the-leader, and proudly ignorant stances on many topics are just out of control everywhere and curiosity seems to be dead or dying. You can tell it's definitely tangled up with money though and this remains a good filter for real curiosity. Math that's not maybe related to ML is something HN is guaranteed to shit on. No one knows how to have a philosophy startup yet (WeWork and other culty scams notwithstanding!). Authors, readers, novels, and poetry aren't moving stock markets. So at least for now there's somewhere left for the intellectually curious to retreat

majormajor 11mo ago
I don't really see it any different than the Windows/Unix, Windows/Mac, etc, flame wars that boiled even amongst those with no professional stake it in for decades. Those were otherwise serious people too, parroting meaningless numbers and claims that didn't actually make much of a difference to them. If anything, the AI takes are more much more meaningful. A Mac/PC flame war online was never going to significantly affect your career. A manager who either is all-in on AI or all-out on it can.
- robot-wrangler 11mo ago
  OS and IDE wars are something people take pretty seriously in their teens and very early careers, and eventually become more agnostic about after they realize it's not going to be the end-all predictor of coworker code quality. It predicts something for sure, but not strictly skill-level. Language-preference wars stick around until mid-career for some, and again it predicts something. But still, serious people are not likely to get bogged down in pointless arguments about nearly equivalent alternatives at least (yaml vs json; python vs ruby). Shallow takes on AI (whether they are pro or anti) are definitely higher stakes than all this, bad decisions could be more lasting and more damaging. But the real difference to my mind is.. AI "influencers" (again, pro or anti) are a very real thing in a way that doesn't happen with OS / language discussions. People listen, they want confirmation of biases. I mean there's always advocates and pundits doing motivated reasoning, but usually it's corporate or individuals with clear vested interests that are trying to short-circuit inquiry and critical thinking. It's new that so many would-be practitioners in the field are eager to sabotage and colonize themselves, and forcing a situation where honest evaluations and merit-based discussion of engineering realities are impossible

quantummagic 11mo ago

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

cool_dude85 11mo ago
>Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?
- andai 11mo ago
  I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me. I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice. I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :) For straightforward stuff, they can handle it. For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up. -- To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...) I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151
  - nasmorn 11mo ago
    AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad

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JustExAWS 11mo ago

I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work. No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them. As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction. I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc. If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.

twosdai 11mo ago
I really agree with your point. I think that this forum being hackernews and all though lends itself to a slightly different kind of tech person. Who really values for themselves and their team, the art of getting stuck in with a deeply technical problem and being able to overcome it.
- JustExAWS 11mo ago
  You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs. If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game. If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.

everdrive 11mo ago

>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.

idiotsecant 11mo ago
Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet. Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.
- pixl97 11mo ago
  > That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem. Ah yes, we'll also skip out on eating too.
  - idiotsecant 11mo ago
    There's a mountain of software work you can do that doesn't involve participating in this rat race. There's nothing that says you need to make 500k and live in silicon valley. It's possible to be perfectly happy working integrating industrial control systems in a sleepy mountain town where cost of living is practically nothing. I am well qualified to make that statement.
    - YouAreMammon 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

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Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago

We need to change the underlying system. We do not need to do things no one needs. We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. We need a system which allows the earth resources being used as efficient and fair as possible. Then we can again start apprechiating real craftmanship but not for critical things and not because we need to feed ourselves but because we want to do it.

fragmede 11mo ago
> We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application. The thing about capitalism is that unecessary webshop isn't getting any customers if it's truly unecessary, and will soon be out of business. We can appreciate Ghostty, because why? Because the guy writing it is independently wealthy and can fly jets around for fun, and has deigned to grace us with his coding gifts once again? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice piece of software, but I don't know that system's any better.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
  Capitalism looks like it does because humans don't have perfect knowledge (we don't know the best shop). Also competition is a core driver for cost reduction and progress in capitalism. And on a big picture pov: There is only one Amazon, Alibaba etc.
vladms 11mo ago
Each time someone says "we" without asking me I find it at least insulting. With this mindset the next step might be to tell me what I need, without considering my opinion. Yes, the current system seems flawed, but is the best we came up with and is not fixed either, it is slowly evolving. Yes, some resources are finite (energy from the sun seems quite plenty though), but don't think we will be ever able to define "fair". I would be glad with "do not destroy something completely and irremediably".
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
  [dead]

CamperBob2 11mo ago

We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. I'm tempted to say "You're not helping," as my eyes roll back in their sockets far enough to hurt. But I can also understand how threatening LLMs must appear to programmers, writers, and artists who aren't very good at their jobs. What I don't get is why I should care.

jimbokun 11mo ago
The question about why you should care about others and not just yourself has literature stretching back thousands of years. Maybe start with one of the major world religions?
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  Which one do you suggest? Many of them come with a nasty non-compete clause.
trinsic2 11mo ago
Have you seen the latest AI slop in game design lately, destroying human creativity? Have you seen how this tech is being used to control narratives to subjugate populations to the will of authoritarian governments? This shit is real. We are slowly sliding into a world where every aspect of our lives are going to be dictated by people in power with tools that can shape the future by manipulating what people think about. If you don't care that the world is burning to the ground, good luck with that. Im not saying the tech is necessarily bad, its the way in which we are allowing it to be used. There has to be controls is place to steer this tech in the right direction or we are heading for a world I don't want to be apart of.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  Have you seen the latest AI slop in game design lately, destroying human creativity? This just in: 90% of everything is crap. AI does not, cannot, and will not change that. Have you seen how this tech is being used to control narratives to subjugate populations to the will of authoritarian governments? Can't say as I have. The only authoritarians in this thread are the ones telling us what we should and should not be allowed to do with AI.

ineedasername 11mo ago

"There is a way out: we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs" This is the exact sentiment when said about some other profession or craft, countless people elsewhere and on HN have noted that it's neither productive not wise to be so precious about a task that evolved as a necessity into the ritualized, reified, pedestal-putting that prevents progress. It conflates process with every single other thing about whatever is being spoken about. Also: Complaining that a new technology bottlenecked by lack of infrastructure, pushback from people with your mindset, poorly understood in its best use because the people who aren't of your mindset are still figuring out and creating the basic tooling we currently lack? That is a failure of basic observation. A failure to see the thing you don't like because you don't like and decide not to look. Will you like it if you look? I don't know, sounds like your mind is made up, or you might find good reasons why you should maintain your stance. In the later case, you'd be able to make a solid contribution to the discussion.

jimbokun 11mo ago
What’s your solid contribution to the discussion?
- ineedasername 11mo ago
  Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress. If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.
trinsic2 11mo ago
Man, there is something true in what he is saying though. Can't you see it? I like the idea of some of this technology. I think its cool you can use natural language to create things. I think there is real potential in using these tools in certain context, but the way in which these tools got introduced, no transparency, how its being used to shape thought, the over-reliance on it and how its use to take away our humanity is a real concern. If this tech was designed in an open way and not put under paywalls and used to develop models that are being used to take away peoples power, maybe I'd think differently. But right now its being promoted by the worst of the worst, and nobody is talking about that.

jrm4 11mo ago

"Dignifies work done by developers?" Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money." "Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)

JohnBooty 11mo ago

we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. I don't think that is at ALL at odds with using AI as a coding assistant! I am not going to tell you I am a coding god, but I have been doing this for nearly 30 years and I feel I'm pretty competent craftsman. AI has helped me to be a better craftsman. The big picture ideas are mine, but AI has helped immensely with some details.

asdfman123 11mo ago

This is the fate that befalls any wildly successful subculture: the MOPs start showing up, fascinated by it, and the sociopaths monetize it to get rich. The original geeks who created the scene become increasingly powerless. Relevant article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

zero_k 11mo ago

YES. The "This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative" is so incredibly true. I went to a privacy event about Web3, and the event organisers hired a photographer who took photos of everyone (no "no photo" stickers available), and they even flew a drone above our heads to take overarching videos of everyone :D I guess "privacy" should have been in quotes. All the values and aesthetics of the original set of people who actually cared about privacy (and were attracted to it) has been evaporated. All that remained are the hype. It was wild.

supern0va 11mo ago

"We routinely devalue craftsmanship because it doesn't bow down to almighty Business Impact." I actually disagree with this pretty fundamentally. I've never seen hacker culture as defined by "craftsmanship" so much as about getting things done. When I think of our culture historically, it's cleverness, quick thinking, building out quick and dirty prototypes in weekend "hackathons", startup culture that cuts corners to get an MVP product out there. I mean, look at your URL bar: do you think YC companies are prioritizing artisanal lines of code? We didn't trade craftsmanship for "Business Impact". The latter just aligns well with our culture of Getting Shit Done. Whether it's for play (look at the jank folks bring out to the playa that's "good enough") or business, the ethos is the same. If anything, I feel like there has been more of an attempt to erase/sideline our actual culture by folks like y'all as a backlash against AI. But frankly, while a lot of us scruffy hacker types might have some concerns about AI, we also see a valuable tool that helps us move faster sometimes. And if there's a good tool that gets a thing done in a way that I deem satisfactory, I'm not going to let someone's political treatise get in my way. I'm busy building.

blackqueeriroh 11mo ago

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Developers waste a lot of time writing a bunch of boilerplate code that they hate writing and that doesn’t make them happy and has nothing to do with craftmanship. We also just spent 60 years in a culture that dignified work done by developers to the extreme, and honestly that produced some of the most narcissistic minds the world has ever seen: Thiel, Andressen, et al - and why? Because we dignify work in a capitalistic culture by increasing wages. You want to talk about a culture that values craftmanship? Let everyone have the time and the freedom and the security to build whatever they want to build, instead of what they have to build in order to have health insurance. > We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs. Uhhhhhh…..excuse me? > despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical. More money was invested in the dot-com boom, and in the lead up to the railroad era, before anyone could ride. So this isn’t new.

alganet 11mo ago
I think this boilerplate thing got lost in translation some time ago. We dislike _the presence_ of boilerplate, not the time spent writing it. If another thing writes it for you, it implies that _now boilerplate exists_, and it sucks. It makes me unhappy when it exists. It makes me unhappy if it appears in seconds. That said, there is some potential for using AI to reduce boilerplate and help create more meaningful software. However, that is definitely not the way things are shaping out to be.

underlipton 11mo ago

Get some black dudes involved. Black dudes know how to keep it real. (It will be interesting to see many people are able to accurately draw the conceptual line between what part of my sentiment is a joke and what part is serious.) EDIT: Just interested in seeing if it could tease out the portion of the HN crowd who go apoplectic any time they're forced to remember that black people exist, the portion that only know us in the abstract ("He's right! Black people DO 'keep it real!'"), and the tiny minority that will actually understand the point I'm trying to make. I suppose that's bad communication, but you could also say that the medium is (part of) the message. Suffice it to say, maybe now that DEI is gone, actual good-faith efforts to recognize the hacker ethos in disparate groups, and to bring those individuals into the culture, could take place. The corporate-ization of hacking couldn't have taken place (and could be undone) with an injection of some counterculture. And you had an entire group of people, whose existing ethos was based on appropriating and remixing and building something from the metal up, right there.