dasil003

10 ms·

121.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I sort of agree that the surface area and incidental complexity of stacks give more space to plug more developers in than was true in the 70s and 80s. But I disagree strongly this invalidates Brooks Law. Certainly there are cases where ad
122.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Safety is a nice idea but it’s not structurally pursuable at this point. Everything is moving too quickly and we don’t exactly know what is useful or not, just like we don’t know what’s safe or not. Anyone pursuing safety will be outcompete
123.
by dasil003 8mo ago
“I learned it from watching you dad!” —An LLM
124.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Sure, but clueless leadership is not a new thing. While big companies with structural moats can shamble along with a surprising amount of dysfunction (which is why they tolerate so many muppets in middle management), even they rely on some
125.
by dasil003 8mo ago
This feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out of social media entirely). I wish there wasn’t this tension between scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of tech were a little less winner-takes-all. But su
126.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't understand the appeal of the always-on AI assistant at all. Even leaving privacy/security issues aside, and even if it gets super smart and capable, it feels like it would have a dista
127.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Yeah I think being annoyed by software is far more prevalent than wishing for more software. That said, I think there is still a lot of room for software growth as long as it's solving real problems and doesn't get in people&#x27
128.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I sort of agree the random pontification and bad analogies aren't super useful, but I'm not sure why you would believe the intent of the AI CEOs has more bearing on outcomes than, you know, actual utility over time. I mean those
129.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if someone had AI write a bot to post a complaint on every HN thread about how the articles smells like AI slop. It's so tiresome. Either the article is interesting and useful or not, I don't really
130.
by dasil003 8mo ago
This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural
131.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I gotta say you really nailed a solid explanation for what I felt reading the OA but would not have been able to articulate it this clearly. As someone who personally had a history of wanting to be right, sometimes at the expense of being e
132.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Is it really fair to saddle the conscientious objectors with this critique? What about the people that stay and continue to profit exponentially as the negative outcomes become more and more clear? Are the anti-AI and anti-tech doomers wh
133.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Um, I guess this might useful to some number of readers, but I don't think it's universal and I don't think it's a secret—more like its one of a few dozen pithy focus hacks that regularly make their way through the blogo
134.
by dasil003 8mo ago
True enough, though I think Tailwind suffered something of a black swan event of having lifetime pricing plus AI coding assistants hitting an inflection point that immediately and thoroughly decimated the value prop of their core monetized
135.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Putting on a PM hat is something I've been doing regularly in my engineering career over the last quarter century. Even as a junior (still in college!) at my first job I was thinking about product, in no small part because there were
136.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Sure, but long term business success aside, I’m sure most of the folks working at this company would die for a fraction of the adoption curve docker had.
137.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one. I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convinc
138.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Basically you feed it a massive volume of application code. It turns out there is a lot of commonality and latent repetition that can be teased out by LLMs, so you can get quite far with that, though it will fall down when you get into mor
139.
by dasil003 8mo ago
> [...] by asking the right questions [...] Now you've put your finger on something. Who is capable of asking the right questions?
140.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Architects and engineers are not construction workers. AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works. I’ve spent enough time working with cross-functional stakeholders to know
141.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I don't feel threatened because no matter how tools, platforms and languages improved, no matter how much faster I could produce and distribute working applications, there has never been a shortage of higher level problems to solve. No
142.
by dasil003 8mo ago
In big companies there is always waste, it's just not possible to be super efficient when you have tens of thousands of people. It's one thing in a steady state, low-competition business where you can refine and optimize processe
143.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I agree with both you and the GP. Yes, coding is being totally revolutionized by AI, and we don't really know where the ceiling will be (though I'm skeptical we'll reach true AGI any time soon), but I believe there still an
144.
by dasil003 8mo ago
This take is pretty uncharitable. I write high quality code, but also there's a bunch of code that could be useful, but that I don't write because it's not worth the effort. AI unlocks a lot of value in that way. And if th
145.
by dasil003 8mo ago
The Anna Karenina principle looms large in software engineer projects. Basically there are an infinite failure modes that can occur due to small actions or wrong thinking by one or more influential people, but there is only one way to make
146.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Yes I remember those days! I joined a startup whose first product was a Facebook app in 2007. We were right around the corner from Facebook HQ on Forest and High, and we were alpha partners for the launch of Pages. We created a feature f
147.
by dasil003 8mo ago
Because it was a middlebrow dismissal of the GP
148.
by dasil003 8mo ago
I get the sentiment, but if you can't acknowledge that AI is useful and currently a lot better than search for a great many things, then it's hard to have a rational conversation.
149.
by dasil003 8mo ago
No doubt! Collective action is a solved problem! Why do people do things other than the obvious Right Things we can all agree on? Must be some kind of mass psychosis…
150.
by dasil003 9mo ago
I've been invested largely in US index funds for a while now, and I've definitely thought about this. My conclusion is S&P 500 is too big too fail, everyone with various forms of power in the US (economic, political, etc) are

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