3 ms·

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went

by axegon_ 4mo ago

Makes perfect sense, all things considered. I've only joined a handful of hackathons. My best experience was in Amsterdam in like 2022, where half our team went to sleep and me and another guy spent the entire night locked up in a venue with 200 other people building stuff and bashing our heads against the table, looking for optimizations, hacks, half-assed solutions to near-impossible problems. In recent years, I've lost interest: And at this point I don't think I'll ever join another one: I recently got an email about one that finished and the winner was a guy who created something like an "AI team of engineers". What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? As a friend of mine likes to say, "you hit rock bottom and started drilling into the rock now". At least with hardware, people are actually making something and have to use their brains.

junon 4mo ago
Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|
- axegon_ 4mo ago
  True. And it has the same safety implications as in software and security but more obvious since the slop creeps it's way into the physical world: One of my main hobbies is drones. Lately less flying cause of a long track record of crap weather every weekend for like 6 months so I'm more on the building side of things. I would not trust a slop machine to design and build something that weights 4 kilos, carrying a highly flammable lithium(ion or polymer) battery and fly it in a remote field even. Off the top of my head, I can think of 200 ways this could go wrong. And most people with a functioning brain that have watched the news will agree with me. The line between "Claude sloppus is so good man, look at this awesome thing it did" and "Lost control of the drone, it flew into an airfield and crashed into the engine of a plane taking off" is incredibly thin. What pisses me off is that if this happens, regulations will hit those of us that know what they are doing and will make sure this never happens, and not the geniuses who think slop is a viable solution for everything. Same story with the never ending leaks and supply chain attacks which are a direct consequence of sloppers.
- tracker1 4mo ago
  A lot of my personal time, and a few others that I know, is being spent either updating, replicating or simulating the classic BBS experience today... while not really simulating the Modem itself.. trying to get the way a certain terminal looked in the old days is a bit of arcane knowledge combined with the time to make it work. AI does a pretty good job of a lot of it... I've mostly been using Rust for my target language, the biggest parts so far in terms of rework/retries has been getting the "experience" how I want it, which isn't really a 1:1 of the classic experience, but updated. Like mouse scrolling for scrollback controls, etc. There's also been a lot of activities in enhancing the BBS software that remains today (Synchronet, Enigma, Mystic and a MajorBBS remake) along with continued classics and some door games.
klustregrif 4mo ago
> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.
- axegon_ 4mo ago
  It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".
  - necovek 4mo ago
    You suggest doing it with water, perhaps? The same one we use in the toilets? Yuck!
- qsera 4mo ago
  But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...
  - 7thpower 4mo ago
    That may not actually cut trees.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Yes. They wrote an AI prompt to cut a tree and gave a presentation about how this is the future of tree cutting. They did not cut the tree, nor build a robot that cut the tree. They fantasised about building a robot that builds a robot that cuts the tree.
- Silamoth 4mo ago
  Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot. Setting up config files for a tool is not making something. That’s like if I spent hours setting up my IDE, build processes, a CI/CD pipeline, and even unit tests. That might be cool and enhance my productivity down the line. But I still haven’t made anything.
afavour 4mo ago
Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.
- boscillator 4mo ago
  > A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
  - afavour 4mo ago
    I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Aren't most hackathons pseudo-startup pitching competitions? At the very least, they've always been about established companies trying to extract value from newcomers.
- dghlsakjg 4mo ago
  To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.
  - newtonianrules 4mo ago
    And it drives the mini-MENSAs of the world insane.
  - 9rx 4mo ago
    Absolutely. Which is why the hackathon was conceived: to serve as an escape from the real world. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
plopilop 4mo ago
10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking about, and talking with confidence was all it took. We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
- axegon_ 4mo ago
  I mean, this is hardly surprising. Who takes the most points is an accumulative score from subjective opinions(judges, audience, etc.). We didn't win the one in Amsterdam but got second: Around 50 teams began, 20 managed to deliver something, even if the winner is picked at random, that's a 5% chance, which is a very high random chance. When you toss in several senior developers(who at the time worked together in the same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.
  - plopilop 4mo ago
    My point is that flashy presentations already were an issue before the rise of LLMs. The evaluation of a hackathon relies on presentations and subjective opinions rather than pure benchmark of technical assets, there is nothing new under the sun here. You can now win with 20 skills.md files now, you could win with "it would be great to use this sexy tech" 10 years ago.

by axegon_ 4mo ago

junon 4mo ago

Unfortunately that will be short lived too. There's a lot of people toying with LLMs to develop hardware without understanding it too :|

axegon_ 4mo ago
True. And it has the same safety implications as in software and security but more obvious since the slop creeps it's way into the physical world: One of my main hobbies is drones. Lately less flying cause of a long track record of crap weather every weekend for like 6 months so I'm more on the building side of things. I would not trust a slop machine to design and build something that weights 4 kilos, carrying a highly flammable lithium(ion or polymer) battery and fly it in a remote field even. Off the top of my head, I can think of 200 ways this could go wrong. And most people with a functioning brain that have watched the news will agree with me. The line between "Claude sloppus is so good man, look at this awesome thing it did" and "Lost control of the drone, it flew into an airfield and crashed into the engine of a plane taking off" is incredibly thin. What pisses me off is that if this happens, regulations will hit those of us that know what they are doing and will make sure this never happens, and not the geniuses who think slop is a viable solution for everything. Same story with the never ending leaks and supply chain attacks which are a direct consequence of sloppers.
tracker1 4mo ago
A lot of my personal time, and a few others that I know, is being spent either updating, replicating or simulating the classic BBS experience today... while not really simulating the Modem itself.. trying to get the way a certain terminal looked in the old days is a bit of arcane knowledge combined with the time to make it work. AI does a pretty good job of a lot of it... I've mostly been using Rust for my target language, the biggest parts so far in terms of rework/retries has been getting the "experience" how I want it, which isn't really a 1:1 of the classic experience, but updated. Like mouse scrolling for scrollback controls, etc. There's also been a lot of activities in enhancing the BBS software that remains today (Synchronet, Enigma, Mystic and a MajorBBS remake) along with continued classics and some door games.

klustregrif 4mo ago

> What he presented was 20 markdown skills.md bs files. I mean seriously, being literate is enough to get you the gold medal? Yes? If your problem is that there a tree in road and one guy builds a autonomous robot to remove it and the other guy just goes and moves it, the “dumb” guy wins. We are at a point in history where a couple of markdown files solve problems better than hundreds of hours spent by experts in building dedicated solutions. But you win based on the results not based on how much effort you put into it.

axegon_ 4mo ago
It's what I call "speed running towards watering plants with Gatorade".
- necovek 4mo ago
  You suggest doing it with water, perhaps? The same one we use in the toilets? Yuck!
qsera 4mo ago
But the winner didn't remove the tree. They just built a an AI team of tree-cutters...
- 7thpower 4mo ago
  That may not actually cut trees.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Yes. They wrote an AI prompt to cut a tree and gave a presentation about how this is the future of tree cutting. They did not cut the tree, nor build a robot that cut the tree. They fantasised about building a robot that builds a robot that cuts the tree.
Silamoth 4mo ago
Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot. Setting up config files for a tool is not making something. That’s like if I spent hours setting up my IDE, build processes, a CI/CD pipeline, and even unit tests. That might be cool and enhance my productivity down the line. But I still haven’t made anything.

afavour 4mo ago

Most hackathons have been this way for a long time. I recall spending a weekend working out some really thorny data classification problem but got nowhere, all the winners had slick presentation slides and a 30 second code demo of a glorified CRUD app.

boscillator 4mo ago
> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.
- afavour 4mo ago
  I get that… but that’s basically a startup pitching competition. It’s not a hackathon.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Aren't most hackathons pseudo-startup pitching competitions? At the very least, they've always been about established companies trying to extract value from newcomers.
dghlsakjg 4mo ago
To a large degree, this is how the real world works too.
- newtonianrules 4mo ago
  And it drives the mini-MENSAs of the world insane.
- 9rx 4mo ago
  Absolutely. Which is why the hackathon was conceived: to serve as an escape from the real world. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.

plopilop 4mo ago

10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking about, and talking with confidence was all it took. We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.

axegon_ 4mo ago
I mean, this is hardly surprising. Who takes the most points is an accumulative score from subjective opinions(judges, audience, etc.). We didn't win the one in Amsterdam but got second: Around 50 teams began, 20 managed to deliver something, even if the winner is picked at random, that's a 5% chance, which is a very high random chance. When you toss in several senior developers(who at the time worked together in the same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.
- plopilop 4mo ago
  My point is that flashy presentations already were an issue before the rise of LLMs. The evaluation of a hackathon relies on presentations and subjective opinions rather than pure benchmark of technical assets, there is nothing new under the sun here. You can now win with 20 skills.md files now, you could win with "it would be great to use this sexy tech" 10 years ago.