rc-1140 · HackerTrans

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

Even software people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I think people like the article author are either single or have no dependents, and it's a big reason I cannot take many of these posts seriously. Much like the story of Peter Pan, the authors of these posts are college students who never grew up and had to be responsible.

rc-1140

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

The next step is to forbid generated/AI-edited posts.

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5 bulan yang laludiscuss

I don't really understand what it is with CompSci graduates and their bizarre aversion to handwriting, note taking, and any kind of skill that's derived from arts disciplines or "average joe" office systems.

Shorthand notation exists and it's more than possible to develop your own. I'd trust a OBS recording going in the background over some AI slop that has some chance to micro-hallucinate what it's hearing. It also sounds like a skill issue that the author can't control the pace of his own meetings to where being able to take good notes is seemingly impossible.

The author's AI use cases seem like a band-aid to cover bigger problems. Let's not even get into the part of the blog post where the author has started delegating internal thinking and reflection to conversations with a LLM.

rc-1140

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Saying it again, I think we're in need of a moratorium on "AI Has Changed The World Forever" posts. All of them read the same and offer nothing past "I asked a LLM to make a midsize feature, I haven't looked at the code but it compiles on my machine and that should terrify you" - buddy, we've had people pushing code that compiles on their machine and occasionally goes quickly read or unread in PRs, that terrifies me now.

rc-1140

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they consider close to that level of perfection, that's when they say they're done.

While this may be an unfair generalization, and apologies to those who don't feel this way, but I believe STEM types like the OP are used to problem solving that's linear in the sense that the problem only exists in its field as something to be solved, and once they figure it out, they're done. The OP even described his mentality as that of a "Thinker" where he received a problem during his schooling, mulled over it for a long time, and eventually came to the answer. That's it, next problem to crack. Their whole lives revolve around this process and most have never considered anything outside it.

Even now, despite my own healthy skepticism of and distaste for AI, I am forced to respect that AI can do some things very fast. People like the OP, used to chiseling away at a problem for days, weeks, months, etc., now have that throughput time slashed. They're used to the notion of thinking long and hard about a very specific problem and finally having some output; now, code modules that are "good enough" can be cooked up in a few minutes, and if the module works the problem is solved and they need to find the next problem.

I think this is more common than most people want to admit, going back to grumblings of "gluing libraries together" being unsatisfying. The only suggestion I have for the OP is to expand what you think about. There are other comments in this thread supporting it but I think a sea change that AI is starting to bring for software folks is that we get to put more time towards enhancing module design, user experience, resolving tech debt, and so on. People being the ones writing code is still very important.

I think there's more to talk about where I do share the OP's yearning and fears (i.e., people who weren't voracious readers or English/literary majors being oneshot by the devil that is AI summaries, AI-assisted reading, etc.) but that's another story for another time.

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6 bulan yang laludiscuss

There's a great Twitter/X post floating around that I saw a few days ago that I've come to agree with:

"IMO it should be considered quite rude in most contexts to post or send someone a wall of 100% AI-generated text. “Here, read this thing I didn’t care enough about to express myself." - https://x.com/littmath/status/2010759165061579086?s=20

Rather than ignore it, I'd deem it rude that something as low-effort as an AI generated blog post was shared here. I may not be able to set rules, but I wish we could flag posts like these. Some faux-gineer told their agent of choice to write up another fearmongering post about software developers and AI; I feel like my time was stolen from me.

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6 bulan yang laludiscuss

> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.

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8 bulan yang laludiscuss

Absolutely not.

1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.

2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.

Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.

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10 bulan yang laludiscuss

Places like this (hackernews) and Reddit are where concepts like 996 become normalized and picked up by everyone else, including unrelated industries. I think this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP and not given any time to fester because "startup founders need to work 996 to secure revenue" or whatever.

No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.

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4 tahun yang laludiscuss

I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything.

However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case.

The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling.

The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities.

We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.

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4 tahun yang laludiscuss

Star Wars Republic Commando but with true co-op. There are games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galatic, and Killing Floor that are objective/wave-defense co-op shooters, but there isn't anything on the market that has a cool structured campaign or meaningful challenge to it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had an interesting co-op mode where you and a friend could be deployed into a customized campaign level, accomplish the objective, and exfiltrate. I'd love a game to really own this: good characters, fun gameplay, custom levels, mutators, etc.

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4 tahun yang laludiscuss

These have existed already: Natural Selection, its sequel Natural Selection 2, and Nuclear Dawn. The idea is nice but the actual gameplay isn't fun or sustainable because there's too much interdependence on having a top-notch commander AND having a team of exceptional FPS players; you can't really find two teams of 12 people who can all carve out time to play.

The gameplay is sustainable for a little bit in terms of randoms joining servers but all that's left of NS1 and 2 are extremely niche competitive scenes that don't reach the scale of what you want and Nuclear Dawn has no playerbase. It's a nice idea and NS1 produced some of the best competitive FPS players for a few games (Quake 3/CPMA/Live, Team Fortress 2) but ultimately it lacks the fun factor needed to keep a substantial amount of people playing.

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8 tahun yang laludiscuss

For my interests, I guess I can't see the value in a mobile user; maybe in some really one-off cases in my interests it would be prudent for a unified view? The most I've seen a Reddit board do is have fancier sidebar links. My thoughts when it comes to having differentiated Reddits are forum-like features such as shoutboxes, hyper-specific file uploads, or even flat-out disabling Karma on that board (dunno if that one is already possible).

Sure I can have a forum with all of these features, but not the ease of use or traffic that Reddit gets. Like I hope I got across in my previous post, still undecided and hesitant on Reddit as a whole, even to this day.

rc-1140

8 tahun yang laludiscuss

Reddit has always been a strange place to me, even as it has grown to be a cornerstone of socialization on the internet. I didn't grow up with it, I'm still not a huge fan of the layout even after the redesign, the way comments work still annoys me, and there are still plenty of stereotypical Reddit users that I do not want to associate or be associated with. However, I can no longer deny that it serves no purpose or that it is arbitrarily bad: it has a bevy of information I simply can't get anywhere else, "everyone" uses it in some manner so it's not an unknown in conversation, and it's got plenty of niche communities that might appeal to my interests.

In the process, it's eaten up all sorts of one-off forums and communities that don't wave the Reddit flag because it's just way easier to make a Reddit board for your interest/community. Reddit also doesn't have cute features like emoticons, their markdown isn't as intuitive as BBCode tags to me, and the versatility of a given Reddit board is limited to what can be done with CSS and each board's Wiki. Files have to be hosted elsewhere (game mods, game recordings via SourceTV and similar, etc.), though this isn't anywhere near as big of a deal as I'm making it.

Am I joining the e-Dinosaur ranks?