oorza · HackerTrans

Which of these political entities is in a better situation because of an open phone rather than partnering with Apple and Google? Anyone with the funding to make a Linux phone happen loses money and/or power making it happen. And users do not care, less than 2% of users will ever leave iOS or Android for Linux unless it's a substantially easier and more accessible experience for them, and we all know that will never happen.

oorza

3 mesi fadiscuss

They're becoming more popular in Florida, as a poured concrete geodesic dome is basically immune to a hurricane.

oorza

3 mesi fadiscuss

Are we at the point where there are external constraints that cash can't solve?

oorza

3 mesi fadiscuss

See: Claude Cowork trying to establish an entire new group of people in their ecosystem.

oorza

3 mesi fadiscuss

Is it the models themselves or the tools around them? There's that patch[1] that floats around for Claude Code that's supposed to solve a lot of these problems by adjusting its tool-level prompts. Also, if it were the models themselves, wouldn't Cursor users have the same complaints (do they? I haven't heard anything but the only Cursor users I talk to are coworkers)?

I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have overcorrected at the cost of quality.

1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

oorza

4 mesi fadiscuss

> Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me

The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.

In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...

oorza

4 mesi fadiscuss

> the problems it did flag mostly would be caught by minimal testing

Testing is more expensive up front and in maintenance than type annotations. A test suite comprehensive enough to replace type annotations would have an ass load of assertions that just asserted variable type; if you were involved in early pre-TS Node, you remember those test suites and how they basically made code immutable.

> (2) it regularly missed deeper problems

This is a skill issue. If your types do not match runtime behavior and you choose to blame the programming language rather than your usage of it, that's on you. There are a lot of unsafe edges to TS, but a diligent and disciplined engineer can keep them isolated and wrapped in safe blocks. Turn off `any`, turn on all the maximal strictness checks, and see if your code still passes, because if what you said about infinite scroll is true, it won't.

oorza

4 mesi fadiscuss

TS doesn't "bin off" duck typing, it's a fundamentally structural type system. It's statically analyzed ducks, all the way down - when nominal behavior is preferred, people have to bend over backwards. Either you are using the wrong vocabulary or I don't think you've bothered to actually learn Typescript. In any case, it's the programming language that successfully brought high-level type system concepts like type algebra, conditional types, etc. to their widest audiences, and it deserves a ton of credit for that. The idea that JS and Ruby and Python and PHP developers would be having fairly deep conversations about how best to model data in a type system was laughable not that long ago.

oorza

4 mesi fadiscuss

There's a certain amount of variance in the way that people utilize these agents. Put five people in a room and ask them to compose the same prompt and you have five distinct prompts. Couple this with the fact that models respond better/worse to certain prompts depending on the stylistic composition of the prompt itself. And since people tend to write in the same style, you'd get people who have more luck with one model over another, where one model happens to align more readily with their prompt style.

To wit, I have noticed that I tend to prefer Codex's output for planning and review, but Opus for implementation; this is inverted from others at work.

oorza

6 mesi fadiscuss

I'm not sure you need AGI to clear that bar; I'm not sure you need more technology than currently exists beyond iterative improvements to things like how expensive it is to train a model.

But let's say it's free-ish to train a model, so you decide that that's how you're going to write the next Marvel movie. You train an LLM specifically on screeplay writing, teaching it to cross reference literary techniques with audience reaction, you teach it the sum total of Marvel canon, you teach it the sum total of the American cinema canon, you train it on all the social media reaction to either, and so on. You teach it to specifically engineer screenplays for Marvel movies that Marvel audiences will do maximum Marvel fanboy shit about. Do you genuinely believe such a dedicated model couldn't output a Marvel movie that everyone would love as much as Endgame?

Obviously, in the economy of 2026, it is cheaper for Disney to hire flesh-and-blood writers instead of doing this madness. But one day it won't be - and this is hardly even the tip of the iceberg. The ability to finely hone models quickly and on-demand (potentially on a per-prompt basis) would unlock another tier of accuracy and performance from LLMs, and for some/most artistic tasks, I think that gets you to "indistinguishable from mass market media."

oorza

6 mesi fadiscuss

The "smart but lazy" person in an agentic AI workplace is the dude orchestrating a dozen models with a virtual scrum master. It's much more possible today to get a 40h work week's worth of work done in 4h than it ever has been before, because the gains that are possible with complex AI workflows are so massive, particularly if you craft workflows that match problems specifically. And because it's absolutely insane to do such a thing with modern tools and the lack of abstractions available to you, even insaner to expect people to do it, so you can't set proficiency targets on that rubric. You might have to actually work 40h at the onset, but I definitely work with someone who is considered a super hero for the amount of work they do, but I know they dick around and experiment all day every day, because all they do is churn Cursor credits into PRs through a series of insane agents. They're probably going to get a bonus for delivering an impossible project on time, as a matter of fact.

> Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.

I'm clearly not talking about the _truly_ lazy people. I'm talking about classifications within the group of already successful creative/STEM professionals that are the ones who are going to be maximally impacted by AI. Obviously you're not as lazy as you could be if you manage to have a 20 year software career, but that doesn't mean you aren't fundamentally lazy or have a terrible work ethic, it just means you have a certain minimum standard you manage to hold yourself to. That's the person I'm talking about - the person who works twelve hours a day more isn't going to be able to meaningfully distinguish themselves any more. The quantity of their work becomes immaterial, so what matters is the quality, and the smarter, lazier dude is going to have better AI output because he has smarter inputs.

oorza

6 mesi fadiscuss

I don't disagree, but I would argue that the reason people prefer human works over AI works is the dynamic I mentioned in the original comment. I play a lot of idle games and it's not uncommon for one to start becoming popular, it's revealed that it's vibe coded, and the community turns against the developer; one game dev was bullied out the community and deleted his entire online presence because he wasn't ashamed of using Claude. It isn't about anything but the mob mentality of "AI bad."

The point you make about "romance" novels is true: there's tools like SmutFinder which are effectively exactly what you describe. You can be as specific or generic as you like, you can lay out the specific plot points and chapters or let the AI do it for you, or you can build the entire story one paragraph at a time like a super interactive choose your own adventure novel. And it's all modeled on smut, specifically built for the AI to design the user's specific fantasy. Smut books are arguably the lowest and easiest bar to clear in terms of audience-acceptable quality, but this technology existing in this space today assuredly means it'll be available for science fiction novels of acceptable quality in short order and eventually science fiction films, and eventually all media.

But the presence of personalized works in an AI marketplace makes what I said more salient because it serves as yet another bar to clear for someone else's artwork to become relevant to me. Why would I consume your space opera when I can make my own that's "better" according to my judgments? There's obviously reasons for me to buy an author's work even in an AI world because I want to be surprised, but if there are dozens / hundreds of options from equally qualified creators, what makes yours special?

oorza

6 mesi fadiscuss

> I think there's still a very high chance that someone willing to refine their AI-co-generated output 8-10+ hours a day, for days on end, will have much more success than someone who puts in 1 or 2 hours a day on it and largely takes the one of the first things from one of the first prompt attempts.

That's the truth right now, but that's merely a limitation of the technology. Particularly if you imagine arbitrarily wide context windows such that the LLM can usefully begin to infer your specific preferences and implications over time.

> The most successful people I know are in a category you leave out: the people who will put in long hours out of being super-intrinsically-motived but are ALSO naturally gifted creatively/intelligently in some domain.

Those are the people I mention at the end, those that clear the bar into being uniquely special. From what I hear from my friends that have been teaching for about twenty years now, you're lucky if you get more than one or two of those every ten years.

oorza

6 mesi fadiscuss

I think the story makes a good point, but I'm not sure it's even the primary point the story was trying to make.

> “Writing a book is supposed to be hard,” he said.

> “Is it, though?” said the AI. The novelist wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected a touch of exasperation in the machine’s voice.

> “Perseverance is half the art,” he said. He hadn’t had much natural talent and had always known it, but he had staying power.

It's this right here. I don't think any LLM-based AI is going to be able to replace raw human creativity any time soon, but I do think it can dramatically reduce the effort it takes to express your creativity. And in that exchange, people whose success in life has been built on top of work ethic and perseverance rather than unique insight or intelligence are going to get left behind. If you accept that, you must also accept its contrapositive: people who have been left behind despite unique insights and intelligence because of a lack of work ethic will be propelled forward.

I think a lot of the Luddite-esque response to AI is actually a response to this realization happening at a subconscious level. From the gifted classes in middle school until I was done with schooling, I can always remember two types of students: those that didn't work very hard but succeeded on their talents and those that were otherwise unexceptional beyond their organizational skills and work ethic. Both groups thought they were superior to the other group, of course, and the latter group has gone on to have more external success in their lives (at least among my student peers I maintain contact with decades later). To wit, the smart lazy people are high-ranking individual contributors, but the milquetoast hard workers are all management who the smart lazy people that report to them bitch about. The inversion of that power dynamic in creative and STEM professions... it's not even worth describing the implications, they're so obvious.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that AI can eventually serve to level the playing field for everything. It outputs novels, paintings, screenplays - whatever you ask it for - of such high quality that they can't be discerned from the best human-created works. In this world, the only way an individual human matters in the equation is if they can encode some unique insight or perspective into how they orchestrate their AI; how does my prompt for an epic space opera vary meaningfully from yours? In other words, everything is reduced to an individual's unique perspective of things (and how they encode it into their communication to the AI) because the AI has normalized everything else away (access to vocabulary, access to media, time to create, everything). In that world, the only people who can hope to distinguish themselves are those with the type of specific intelligence and insight that is rarely seen; if you ask a teacher, they will recant the handful of students over their career that clear that bar. Most of us aren't across that bar, less than 1% of people can be by definition, so of course everyone emotionally rejects that reality. No one wants their significance erased.

We can hand wring about whether that reality ever can exist, whether it exists now, whatever, but the truth is that's how AI is being sold and I think that's the reality people are reacting to.

comments