It’s fun and games, but you have to bear in mind that joke candidates never expect to win.
It’s entirely possible that every anti-Farage voter could coalesce behind him. Upon winning, he would have his name and face be publicly known. He would attract a huge amount of (global, even) media attention. He would suddenly have a serious job with real responsibilities. And he would have the unbridled rage of everyone in the UK who has decided that 100 years of the Tory/Labour cycle has run its course and meaningful change is needed. To give an indication of the electoral weather, Reform UK has led the national opinion polls for more than a year.
I’m not sure he has the balls for all that, but we will see.
I agree...
I use a Pi4B 8GB as a home server with a number of duties.
Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.
> Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
It doesn’t feel that way to me. I remember reading the recent thread about Bun being rewritten in Rust with LLMs. Definitely not a 50/50 split of positive and negative comments. It was a pile-on.
I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.
> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in?
Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?
I think the biggest factor is fear. When we first started discussing LLMs a few years ago, it was easy to be amused and reassured when looking closer at all the inaccuracies. The models have improved at an alarming rate. Some of us have spent decades automating the roles of others, and now it turns out our own medicine doesn’t taste very nice. The timing is also terrible because the rise of these tools is coinciding with a dramatic post-COVID tightening of the jobs market.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.
As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly.
That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.
So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.
I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.
On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).
I use a Pi 4B as a 24/7 home server in a country where domestic electricity is expensive (and worsening).
Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.
Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?
I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.
It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.
> That's one interpretation of the irish refs. I think the more obvious one is that the first result was very close and needed to be clarified.
Ah yes… and if the result was close but happened to be the one the Establishment wanted, do you think they would have called for a confirmatory vote just to be sure? Of course not.
> That also fits with the second one being emphatic.
The Playbook says spend more on comms, emphasise Project Fear, and call for another vote. Repeat until you get what you want.
> You're allowed to think that Lisbon warranted referenda in the member states
How very gracious of you…
> The government didn't take a blind bit of notice.
I think you’ll find that Parliamentary votes were required for the action to take place, and there were three years of deadlock during which the majority of MPs supported remain (an inverse of the popular vote) and certain MPs like Benn and Grieve led to legislation that made it very difficult to negotiate in the UK interests (no deal off the table, so a weak bargaining position).
Article 50 may have been triggered the year after the referendum, but the UK didn’t actually leave until 2020.
> Not by a mile, lol.
LOL indeed. 33.5 million people cast a vote, which was 72% of all people registered to vote. That doesn’t sound “pathetic” to me, unlike your comment in general. It reeks of someone who loses interest in democracy when it doesn’t align with what they want.
> You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation.
It might be worth examining the word “countries” there.
Both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU Constitution by referendum in 2005. It was then regurgitated as the Lisbon Treaty (with only superficial changes) in 2007, which was ratified with no public vote.
The Irish people initially rejected both the EU-empowering treaties of Nice and Lisbon, and a followup vote was considered necessary. You get two bites of the democratic cherry if you have enough power.
A majority of the British people voted to leave in 2016, and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.
You might be spotting here a difference in desires and power between the governors and the governed.
The original Bomba was the genius work of a Polish man, but was no use from 1938-1939 when the Enigma cipher was strengthened. At which point the Turing-Welchman Bombe was developed. The Battle of the Atlantic ran between 1939 and 1945.
For the much harder Lorenz cipher used by German High Command from 1940, the Colossus machine was developed by Tommy Flowers at the GPO and became operational in 1944.
None of which involved the US Navy, which was my original point.
It’s entirely possible that every anti-Farage voter could coalesce behind him. Upon winning, he would have his name and face be publicly known. He would attract a huge amount of (global, even) media attention. He would suddenly have a serious job with real responsibilities. And he would have the unbridled rage of everyone in the UK who has decided that 100 years of the Tory/Labour cycle has run its course and meaningful change is needed. To give an indication of the electoral weather, Reform UK has led the national opinion polls for more than a year.
I’m not sure he has the balls for all that, but we will see.