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↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How to talk to anyone, and why you should (theguardian.com)
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I find the community on Clubhouse understand this better than anyone (well, this is true for Reddit and HN too). Clubhouse especially though because people are bat shit crazy on there and somehow conversations happen.
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Clubhouse is still around?!
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Yes, it’s niche like Slashdot it seems. Good fun, might be worth making an HN room.
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That the copyright notice on their site still says "2025" probably says a lot. I was kinda expecting to find an AI pivot when I opened that landing page.
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For what it’s worth, they are living a AI pivot. TOS just changed so they keep transcripts of all voice and actually pop it into an LLM to subjectively determine your karma points. They are absolutely selling audio data for fine tuning purposes imho, and they are absolutely training on all audio. It’s a AI shovel selling company for sure.
Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE) (health.aws.amazon.com)
The important quote from the timeline: Mar 01 9:41 AM PST We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally.
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> we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely this would require human intervention and I am a bit worried what if the strike can happen again and human lives might be lost. IIRC there have been cases in history where sometimes a same location is targeted across multiple days. Obviously, AWS might have local employees working in the region but would there be an evaluation of this threat itself within the relevant team in AWS. What if they try to bring the service back but then missiles are struck again and what if human lives might be lost on it. Let's just hope that it could be part of a evaluation as well.
Has this ever happened ever in history of Cloud providers before this because of war? They mention that the datacenter had fires and sparks and they are mentioning hours of downtime but given the situation, How does that prevent the situation from happening again. It's best for people to use safer regions than the middle east in the moment as missiles might target the same datacenter seeing that some damage was caused. Moving forward, will there be a demand (all be small) for nuclear bunker esque datacenters which can withstands missiles? I know absolutely nothing about constructing underground but can explosives not be used to create underground datacenters comparatively cheaply? One can also use revamped Nuclear bunkers (although the scale of AWS datacenters might be huge tho who knows) Had some ideas which show that this idea might be interesting, https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00406-2 I am curious but what are the safety attempts made by Internet Exchange Providers or (had to search it up) but Submarine Cable landing stations, to me it feels like blowing these up leads to internet downtime across whole country / between providers.
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Data centers are usually built to withstand local natural risks e.g. weather. All bets, SLAs, and insurance are usually off when it comes to acts of war.
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Historically in the US, some portion of Bell installations were designed to be resistant to attack. But it comes at large expense for construction and maintenance. Underground facilities also bring increased risk of flooding. Competition and deregulation and lack of attacks leads towards less robust installations to reduce costs. Geographically redundant installations help as long as all installations aren't targetted; and are valuable for other operational concerns other than just attacks.
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> but given the situation, How does that prevent the situation from happening again You don't. Instead, you make sure your failover or DR setup is regularly tested and works.
Interesting adjacent theory is how much are datacenters becoming military target to strike as part of disrupting initial defenses. It doesn't seem it was the case in this instance, but I could see this becoming a more important target in future. Seems like it should be somewhat easier to bomb 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services. Again, this is just me thinking out loud on a tangent and this doesn't have much to do with this story, but I felt it was an interesting thought to share nonetheless.
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This is the data center version of https://xkcd.com/538/ . Realistically if there is a hot war what you’re saying seems accurate.
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The more interesting question, is how many datacenters are just plonked next to a high-value military target? For infrastructure reasons, we plonk datacenters down next to airports big enough to fly major hardware into, and near where the big oceanic cables come ashore… and for strategic reasons those are also the perfect places to place military bases
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IIUC part of the reason ballistic missiles have multiple warheads is that some of them detonate high up to knock out air defenses and other electronics allowing the rest to fall through to their targets. The last time we tried this experiment as a species was the starfish prime tests in 1962 which caused some electrical havoc in Hawaii. These days our systems are probably more delicate and sensitive? All that is to say, in a scenario where nukes are going off I'm not sure you'd even need to target any datacenters in particular.. they're probably all toast by default.
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That's so interesting. Are any of the US military (or other satellite state of the US) systems running in "normal" datacenters or do they have a few protected DoD datacenters in the US?
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Found this relevant article: https://serverlift.com/blog/military-modular-data-centers/ (AWS Military Modular Data centers) I do think that though, atleast from the Anthropic decision prior, we know that Anthropic which was used by DoD should be on normal AWS datacenters. I am saying this because, Dod Threatened to force take the source code of Anthropic if they don't agree to aggregious demands so that means that they don't have the source code. Perhaps DoD used Anthropic within AWS Military modular DC's but I find it extremely unlikely. I am almost certain that even with OpenAI who bent its knee to DoD, its still hosted on regular infrastructure and DoD is using these AI models on pretty sensitive tasks (During the Venezeula Maduro's capture, Anthropic/Claude were used iirc to handle some data analysis) IMO Tho, Any Employee from Anthropic/OpenAI might know better tho about how these models are deployed.
> one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. God forbid we'd ever say that it was struck by a missile or a munition in an act of war.
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I actually like the way they said it. I don't know if it's a different cultural tradition, but the cool steely-eyed fact-based conversation always really felt so much more inspiring: Conrad: I got three fuel cell lights, an AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out. Aaron: Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux. Modern culture in the movies and whatnot is that someone should be yelling "Everything's failing. Give me something, Houston. All lights are on! MAYDAY MAYDAY!" and some sort of flavour commentary like that. But reading engineering updates that go like this feels like watching maximal professionalism under fire: > At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally. Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event. EC2 Instance launches will continue to be impaired in the impacted AZ. We recommend that customers continue to retry any failed API requests. If immediate recovery of an affected resource (EC2 Instance, EBS Volume, RDS DB Instance, etc.) is required, we recommend restoring from your most recent backup, by launching replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones, or an alternate AWS Region. We will provide an update by 12:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share. This has that same mechanical tone of an ice-cold captain dealing with a proximate situation providing exactly the information they know. No flavour commentary. Amazing. I fucking love it.
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High signal/noise ratio is extra important when things are going badly
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Maybe a missile, maybe a drone, maybe debris Doesn’t really matter, we know trumps latest war is the cause
When I first learned that there were AWS Middle East regions, my first thought was "wow they are more optimistic than I am ."
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Google Cloud also has middle east locations. As does Azure, Oracle and Alibaba. Afaik, IBM Cloud does not. I think those five and AWS are the top 6 global public access clouds.
A new Polymarket account made over $500k betting on the U.S. strike against Iran (twitter.com)
Has anyone analyzed the odds on particular days to see if there’s a chance that the timing was influenced by the amount to be made on the betting market and not the other way around?
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Are you seriously suggesting that someone timed this military strike in order to make $500k?
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I don't think that the suggestion is true, but it's far from outlandish. Are you seriously suggesting the US president rugpulled his supporters with crypto? Are you seriously suggesting the entire US government and academia is tied to a sex trafficking ring? Are you seriously suggesting that the current US president's cabinet contains 20 appointees whose main qualification is being Fox News personalities? Etc etc.
When I worked the military (not the US), we'd get some briefs from time to time on risks like espionage. They'd present us with cases, and It always surprise me just how little money people are willing to risk their lives and careers for. You'd think people that are willing at worst to become traitors, but at best break confidentiality laws - and face years in prison - would do it only for life-changing money. Nope, not even close. People have gone to prison for a fraction of $500k. If someone truly made this bet with inside information, they for sure broke laws. Not only did they do that, they could have jeopardized parts of the mission. No doubt in my mind, part of OSINT gathering for most intel agencies is to monitor these betting markets.
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I mean, one of the purported utilities of this sort of betting market is that they "make hidden information public", so they explicitly encourage "insider" trading. But I don't see how it's that useful to know (or "know" with a fair amount of uncertainty) of the attack only 71 minutes before the news break.
Doesn't mean everyone's always paying attention. Also, do you have a link that someone lost $500k? Because it's not in the original link.
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If someone made 500k, then someone lost 500k. Any money you win gambling has to come from someone else, it doesn't just appear.
To be fair, Trump usually chickens out. But in this case I guess there wasn't enough pushback. And the thing that made it if not obvious certainly rather likely was the aircraft carrier movement which isn't exactly subtle, though very often just used for intimidation. The thing which is at least a little surprising is the talk about aircraft carriers being very vulnerable to attack with drones / cheap missiles / etc. didn't materialize and if it were going to, Iran would be the one to realize it unless a full on world war were to erupt.
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> To be fair, Trump usually chickens out. I feel like he mostly chickens out on tarrifs or things that have a large potential for high costs or where the opponent has some actual leverage. Here he is blowing up Iran. Iran doesnt really have the ability to blow up america in return. This is exactly the sort of thing i would expect him to follow through on. > The thing which is at least a little surprising is the talk about aircraft carriers being very vulnerable to attack with drones / cheap missiles / etc. I think that is because it was largely wishful thinking. At least when it comes to Iranian capabilities. I dont think people who were experts in the field believed Iran had the capabilities to seriously harm american aircraft carriers.
Just ban these services. There’s no legitimate purpose in betting on people being shot or blown up. And the only people who could win reliably, are the people doing the shooting.
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I look forward to your future policies based on the "no legitimate purpose" doctrine.
To soften the economic blow in a fast paced media cycle.
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Saturday is the first day of the working week in Iran which is why Israel struck at daytime when senior leadership was in a working meeting.
No one is forcing anyone to bet on prediction markets. People use polymarket fully aware of the near certainty of insider trading.
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A sucker is born every minute, and I personally don't think it's great to create more effective channels for funneling money from suckers to corrupt politicians.
We thought betting markets would bring out our best predictions. Instead they’re exposing our inherent corruption.
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if it is not regulated, you can always safely assume that it is a scam / corruption :) almost universally applicable
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The traditional espoused financial market purpose of these prediction markets is based on the premise that actors on it will have inside information. The point is for business with vested interests (and therefore often inside information) to use these markets to hedge for things that will materially affect their profitability. For example, in this case, suppose you ran a company that was shipping goods through the Middle East, and a war would disrupt your business. You would then place bets on there being a war, so that if it does happen you will recover some of your losses. You might know inside information because your work in the region, but that is expected.
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Those aren't mutually exclusive. The best predictions are going to be those based on non public information.
Yeah, trying to beat the market on actually predicting will get you pretty lame returns. Probably do better in non zero sum games like the stock market. At least there you get the benefit of the market always going up eventually. No, the best way to win on Polymarket is purely by insider trading. Which is why it's a useful thing to watch. Insider news.. That said, the definition of 'insider trading' is always tricky. At what point does it become insider? Some things people call insider others just call clever detective work.
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It's not useful to watch, almost by definition. If you're an insider obviously you want to sit on the information as long as possible and make a big bet just before it will be revealed. For example: the account in TFA whose bet was 71 minutes before the first news article about the attacks. So how useful is it really to see a big bet and know that probably the thing in question will happen in the next hour? The only kind of use case I can see for these markets is what another commenter mentioned, as a kind of strange insurance by betting against what you hope will happen. But even then, the finicky rules and untrustworthiness of the Polymarket admins make them much less reliable than a traditional insurance policy...
What I mean is they placed multiples bets saying "US strikes Iran by $DATE" and set a window of various dates with each overlapping over the other in order to help hedge against earlier bets failing. Betting a strike would be on Friday also tracks - anyone who's been outside the West knows they have Friday/Saturday off in Muslim and Jewish countries. It's the same way we in the West tend to conduct strikes on Saturday. Edit: Ah I get what you are saying now.
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I responded to exactly what you mean. The lowest probability date was the Friday because Friday was almost over, it had the highest ROI. It didn't have liquidity for their full amount capital. They searched for liquidity in other markets that would resolve "yes" to the same event. It wasn't a hedge, it wasn't uncertainty, it was liquidity seeking.
The Panopticon Is Here: How the US Government Built an AI Superweapon (matt728243.substack.com)
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Contrary to the other opinions, I don't get any indications that the article is written by AI, and the normally very reliable Hive AI doesn't detect the article as AI either.
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I'm against surveillance as much as anyone else, but this article is clearly entirely AI written. I suggest the author just give us their prompt instead.
This appears to be an AI article designed to get clicks. I get that it says something we like, but you're literally upvoting someone for typing in a clickbaity prompt.
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Agree. This is a good use case for the flag button. Substack is becoming full of LLM newsletters. For a while some of the fastest growing newsletters on Substack were very obvious AI slop.
When does MCP make sense vs CLI? (ejholmes.github.io)
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I've yet to play with Emacs MCPs thoroughly. Having said that, after initial exposure to agent skills directing agents to just use CLI/emacsclient, I no longer think I need to go deeper into MCP. emacsclient via CLI has been working remarkably well. Did a little video on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymMlftdGx4I
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Thoughts on Agent Context Protocol (ACP)?
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Very good points, but, I think this blog is pretty focussed on the developer use case for LLMs. It makes a lot more sense in chat style interfaces for connecting to non-dev tools or services with non technical users, if anything just from a UX perspective.
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And for anything at all complicated, what’s even better than a CLI is a JS or Python library so the thing can just write code.
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Advancing capability in the models themselves should be expected to eat alive every helpful harness you create to improve its capabilities.
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https://github.com/mcpshim/mcpshim - converts MCPs to CLI - best of both worlds
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I've come to the same conclusion as op, created a CLI tool to work with Chrome sessions. It works well, and I'm planning to do some token comparison on this vs an MCP approach. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
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Neato! https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser is a similar take here, and much better than the playwright MCP.
> I tried to avoid writing this for a long time, but I'm convinced MCP provides no real-world benefit IMO this is 100% correct and I'm glad someone finally said it. I run AI agents that control my entire dev workflow through shell commands and they are shockingly good at it. the agent figures out CLI flags it has never seen before just from --help output. meanwhile every MCP server i've used has been a flaky process that needs babysitting. the composability argument is the one that should end this debate tbh. you can pipe CLI output through jq, grep it, redirect to files - try doing that with MCP. you can't. you're stuck with whatever the MCP server decided to return and if it's too verbose you're burning tokens for nothing. > companies scrambled to ship MCP servers as proof they were "AI first" FWIW this is the real story. MCP adoption is a marketing signal not a technical one. 242% growth in MCP servers means nothing if most of them are worse than the CLI that already existed
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Fully agree. MCP servers were also created at a time where ai and llms were less developed and capable in many ways. It always seemed weird we'd want to post train on MCP servers when I'm sure we have a lot of data with using cli and shell commands to improve tool calling.
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Thanks for reading! And yes, if anyone takes anything away from this, it's around composition of tools. The other arguments in the post are debatable, but not that one.
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MCP provides a real-world benefit. Namely anyone of any skill level who can create agents is able to use them. CLI? Nope.
If the author is just using Claude Code on their own personal computer, they can do whatever they want. As soon as there is a need to interact with the outside world in a safe, controlled manner at enterprise scale, the limitations of CLI quickly become obvious. I wish people get more informed about a subject before they write a long blog post about it.
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You're right, but it still doesn't mean MCP was a good design even in that space. We could've done better.
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Here’s your chance to educate us. It’s not at all obvious what sorts of limitations you’re talking about.
This is like comparing OpenAPI and strings (that may be JSON). That is, weird, and possibly even meaningless. MCP is formally defined in the general sense (including transport protocols), CLI is not. I mean, only specific CLIs can be defined, but a general CLI is only `(String, List String, Map Int Stream) -> PID` with no finer semantics attached (save for what the command name may imply), and transport is “whatever you can bring to make streams and PIDs work”. One has to use `("cli-tool", ["--help"], {1: stdout})` (hoping that “--help” is recognized) to know more. Or use man/info (if the CLI ships a standardized documentation), or some other document. But in the they’re both just APIs. If the sufficient semantics is provided they both do the trick. If immediate (first-prompt) context size is a concern, just throw in a RAG that can answer what tools (MCPs or CLIs or whatever) exist out there that could be useful for a given task, rather than pushing all the documentation (MCP or CLI docs) proactively. Or, well, fine tune so the model “knows” the right tools and how to use them “innately”. Point is, what matters is not MCP or CLI but “to achieve X must use F [more details follow]”. MCP is just a way to write this in a structured way, CLIs don’t magically avoid this.
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I would spend less time with theory and more time with practice to understand what people are getting at. MCP and CLI could, in theory, be the same. But in practice as it stands today, they are not. > MCP is just a way to write this in a structured way, Nope! You are not understanding or are actively ignoring the difference which has been explained by 20+ comments just here. It's not a controversial claim, it's a mutually agreed upon matter of fact by the relevant community of users. The claim you're making right now is believed to be false, and if you know something everyone else doesn't, then you should create an example repo that shows the playwright CLI and playwright MCP add the same number of tokens to context and that both are equally configurable in this respect. If you can get that right where so many others have failed, that would be a a really big contribution. And if you can't, then you'll understand something first-hand that you weren't able to get while you were thinking about theoretically.
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CLI tools are designed to provide complete documentation using —help. Given LLMs are capable of fully understanding the output then how is the MCP standardization any better than the CLI —help standardization?
The token budget angle is what makes this a real architectural decision rather than a philosophical one. I've been using both approaches in projects and the pattern I've landed on: MCP for anything stateful (db connections, authenticated sessions, browser automation) and CLI for stateless operations where the output is predictable. The reason is simple - MCP tool definitions sit in context permanently, so you're paying tokens whether you use them or not. A CLI you can invoke on demand and forget. The discovery aspect is underrated though. With MCP the model knows what tools exist and what arguments they take without you writing elaborate system prompts. With CLI the model either needs to already know the tool (grep, git, curl) or you end up describing it anyway, which is basically reinventing tool definitions. Honestly the whole debate feels like REST vs GraphQL circa 2017. Both work, the answer depends on your constraints, and in two years we'll probably have something that obsoletes both.
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What about --help? Isn't that a perfect parallel to discovery of available tools in an MCP server?
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Yup. I’ve been using CLIs with skills that define some common workflows I use and then just tell Claude to use —help for understanding how to use it. Works perfectly and I end up writing the documentation in a way that I would for any other developer.
Making those tools first-class primitives is good for (human) UX: you see the diffs inline, you can add custom rules and hooks that trigger on certain files being edited, etc.
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I’ve found that humans are pretty good at reading through the output of bash commands. And Claude Code keeps insisting on truncating the output for some reason.
I can't believe everyone is talking about MCP vs CLI and which is superior; both are a method of tool calling, it does not matter which format the LLM uses for tool calling as long as it provides the same capabilities. CLIs might be marginably better (LLMs might have been trained on common CLIs), but MCPs have their uses (complex auth, connecting users to data sources) and in my experience if you're using any of the frontier models, it doesn't really matter which tool calling format you're using; a bespoke format also works. The difference that should be talked about, should be how skills allow much more efficient context management. Skills are frequently connected to CLI usage, but I don't see any reason why. For example, Amp allows skills to attach MCP servers to them – the MCP server is automatically launched when the Agent loads that skill[0]. I belive that both for MCP servers and CLIs, having them in skills is the way for efficent context, and hoping that other agents also adopt this same feature. [0]: https://ampcode.com/manual#mcp-servers-in-skills
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> both are a method of tool calling, it does not matter which format the LLM uses for tool calling as long as it provides the same capabilities. MCP tool calls aren't composable. Not the same capabilities. Big difference.
MCP has one thing going for it as an agentic API standard: token efficiency The single-request-for-all-abilities model + JSON RPC is more token efficient than most alternatives. Less flexible in many ways, but given the current ReAct, etc. model of agentic AI, in which conversations grow geometrically with API responses, token efficiency is very important.
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But they're not token efficient. Take the terraform example from the post. Plan JSON is massive. You're not saving tokens by using a Terraform MCP and shoving an entire plan into context. Composition allows for efficient token use.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Long Range E-Bike (2021) (jacquesmattheij.com)
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It's weird that these restrictions apply: 25km/h, 55km range? The Evolve Carbon skateboard tops out at 50km/h, and 80km range. Granted, you have to be a little bit crazy to ride that fast on a skateboard, and having owned an earlier version, I guarantee it's not pleasant riding that far on one. But people do it. Someone must be putting out faster/longer distance bikes that don't look like/ride like mopeds. Okay, a quick google and this seems somewhat moped-ish but 200 mile range, 28mph top speed: https://aniioki.com/products/aniioki-aq177-pro-max-electric-bike?variant=43173289164951 Crazy price, but a real bike with 300 mile range and 36mph top speed: https://shop.optibike.com/shop/r22-everest/
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2021?
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The aerodynamic situation of a bicycle is so disadvantageous that the easiest way to get a long range e-bike is to simply ride more slowly. People internalize beliefs about energy-range ratios from electric cars, but they don't translate well to bicycles.
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... put your (e)bike on a train, that's where the range come from. Very cool experimentation but in term of making the practice sustainable best to rely on the infrastructure. It's a bit like in sports having to use the big muscles, e.g. you climb with your legs, not with your fingers no matter what super strength grip you have.
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Where exactly is this train that I should put my e-bike on?
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Not everyone lives near mass transit nor in a city
Sort of a hijack, but it rides on the awesomeness that e-bikes can bring about. They truly are incredible if you have never gotten to ride one. E-bikes with throttles should not be refereed to as e-bikes E-peds, e-motos, electric motorycle, whatever. Just don't call them ebikes. The problem is people (especially kids) getting what are essentially electric motorcycles, thinking they are ebikes, and then causing all sorts of chaos on roads and bike paths. This inevitably leads to the public hating "e-bikes" and the government passing totally confused laws about "e-bikes". This also leads to kids getting killed because mom and dad bought them an "e-bike" and let them loose on the roads with it. Pedal assist ebikes are incredible, and really just turn weak cyclists into strong cyclists, while still providing exercise. It's a revolution for society, but we have to be careful to not totally fumble it with electric motorcycle death machines.
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I think there are many more factors to it than that. I own a Radwagon, a cargo e-bike and I take my kids to school on it. It’s both pedal assist and has a throttle and maxes out at 20mph. I find the throttle very useful because the bike is pretty damn heavy with two kids on it and moving from a standing stop is much easier when I can give it a quick throttle burst then start pedalling. All that said, I do agree the term is overloaded. The bike lines in NYC often have people riding electric mopeds in them and that feels dangerous. Their max speed is clearly way above 20mph and they’re bulky. They belong on the road with other mopeds. So IMO the definition of ebike should factor in max speed more than it should throttle vs not. (And also, seconding the awesomeness of ebikes. My kids love riding on it and it’s allowed us to take so many trips that would have been difficult otherwise. It’s also allowed us to avoid buying a car, for now at least)
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As an oldster who used to do weekly century rides and lost that ability due to nerve damage in my foot (thanks to decades of wearing pointy Italian riding shoes), I’d love it if we could focus on simply enforcing laws that exist rather than saddling arbitrary blanket regulations on lawful citizens. I built an ebike and hell yes I put a throttle on it because it enables me to ride more technical trails. This bike has dramatically increased my quality of life. Please leave me alone and if someone uses a throttle bike in an illegal manner give them a ticket.
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I really like a low speed throttle, like 3-5mph max is fine. 20mph is too fast and results in ebikes basically designed a motorcycles that cannot be pedaled. The throttle is so nice to have to get started quickly like turning left at a light, if you didn't have time to downshift before stopping, on a hill, or if the bike is heavily loaded with stuff. Its also nice to be able to use to slowly move between cars with your feet off the pedals to keep balance if needed.
“E-bikes with throttles should not be refereed to as e-bikes” This is simply wrong and does a disservice to the growing eBike interest. The US-federally defined classes are proper and while IMO overly limiting (max speed should be 60kph and still classified as an eBike as it’s simply safer in traffic), they adequately classify what is an eBike and what is not, and having a throttle does not make something not an eBike, but max speed and power. People have this urge to classify their limited version of what something is by how they use it with some desire to belittle others, and want to limit everyone else who have completely different requirements and capabilities and desires. eBikes in most US states can be ridden on sidewalks, in bike lanes, in traffic, on trails, and across a grassy meadow. There is no justifiable reason to require someone to have different eBikes to be able to do all those things with comfort and safety and capability and utility when a well engineered eBike can do all of them. That they might be safer with circumstantially restricted speeds, such as overtaking pedestrians, etc. again does mean multiple eBikes should be mandated to be able to do each of them. In the US, hopefully the next administration will buy a vowel and realize they need to set federal standards and eliminate this hodgepodge state and county and city and park and street and neighborhood capricious variety of who can ride what when and where, and with what gear and at what times and for what reasons. If decisions are made that no one under 13 can ride an eBike, and then only to school until you’re 16, and you must wear a helmet until at least 19, then at least there will be consistent rules for people to argue for and against.
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60kmph / 37mph is very fast for somebody who might just be wearing a bicycle helmet (hopefully). If traffic is going that fast, I think it may just not be the appropriate place for a bicycle to be. I've gone that fast on an e-bike before, and it doesn't feel comfortable nor safe.
I don't understand that point. Why do e-bikes become better or more safe when you have to rotate your legs? Its really frustrating and silly that I have to go through the motions (literally) of riding a bicycle if I want to get the priviledge of using a bike lane or going without a license plate. (At least that's the case here in Germany AFAIK). They could go ahead and make "fast electric bikes" and "slow electric bikes" or something as categories and that would make sense - but hinging the decision on whether your legs or your wrist is turning is illogical. I think it is actually morally charged - like you have to put in the work if you want the privilege.
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It's because absolutely everyone understands the proportional nature of "press pedals to go" while nobody without special training understands "turn wrist to go", especially not the crucial details of "untwist wrist to stop" and "by the way don't yank open the throttle while attempting a sharp turn".
How much riding does it take to hold 25mph? 12 months of solid riding? (This is being generous, many people will never hold this speed) How much riding does it take to twist your arm 30 degrees? You don’t see a difference?
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Why does it matter how much riding it takes? The point in distinguishing the different classes is about where the bike should fit into the ecosystem. Should it ride on the shoulder, interacting with pedestrians and slower bikes, or should it ride on the road, interacting with cars and motorcycles. It doesn’t matter how much riding it takes, it matters how fast and controlled it is moving compared to the other traffic in that class.
I agree. I thought the electric motorcycle problem was overstated by people complaining online at first. Then they became popular around my house and I agree it’s a huge problem. I’m fortunate enough to live around a lot of walking and mixed use trails for bikes and pedestrians. Recently they’re unsafe to use in the evenings because you have to be ready to jump out of the way of groups of kids (plus a few adults who should know better) going 45mph on electric bikes with throttles. They don’t even pretend to be e-bikes any more. The big problem is that there is zero enforcement. If there was at least a chance that someone breaking these laws could lose their bike or have to pay thousands of dollars in fines I think we’d see a lot less of it. Right now everyone knows that they’re not going to get caught, so it’s a free for all.
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The problem is the rider not the bike.
I would be a bit worried that the extra weight compromises the structural integrity of the frame. 2kWh are heavy
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That's why at https://infinite-battery.com we designed a fireproof and waterproof casing for our repairable batteries
New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue (sciencedaily.com)
I've heard that the improvements in cancer survival are mostly a statistical trick centered around earlier detection. That people aren't actually living longer with cancer, they're living longer while we know they have cancer. Is there any truth to that?
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Short answer, no. Long answer, it's a variable you need to consider when doing data analysis, and it depends on what exactly you're talking about, but it's absolutely not true for improvements in cancer survival general. One alternative method is to look at per-capita death rates, for example: Reduction in US and UK childhood cancer death since 2000 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-children-under-10-years-old?time=2000..latest Reduction in several countries' age-standardized breast cancer death since 2000 (Why did it increase in South Africa? I'm not sure, maybe socioeconomic factors) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/breast-cancer-death-rate-in-women?time=2000..latest Reduction in global age-standardized cancer death rate since 2000 (Scroll down to second graph. Since the population is getting older, age-standardization makes a fairer comparison) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates 2000 is an arbitrary year I picked for clear visual changes without needing to haggle over statistics. If you want to feel optimistic, switch the childhood cancer death graph to 1960-now. This method has different possible failure points. It could be that less people are getting cancer, or that people who would get cancer are dying of other causes, or reporting of cause of death has changed, though this is very unlikely for some figures, such as leukemia death rates for children in the US. Statistics is hard. Overall though, the evidence is very good that cancer survival has improved a lot due to better treatments since 2000. If you have a more specific claim you're dubious about, I'd be willing to look into it for you. I'm very enthusiastic about this topic.
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I'm not exactly dubious about anything really, it was just something plausible I had heard a while ago and, while I don't recall where I heard it, I must have given it some credence for it to stick with me.
I just got nerdsniped for an hour writing up a comment about how cool they are.
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https://xkcd.com/356/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cancer_treatment_development I won't debate what merits a major breakthrough. I will say, that while there hasn't been any major developments in the past five years, I can't draw any conclusions from that tidbit of information.
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That cuts out in 2015, but 5 year survival rates keep increasing with the USA just crossing 70%. Though across longer timeframes some of that is from early detection; even limited to late stage diagnosis the statistics still show significant improvement. https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.70043
It's around 10-15% for the whole drug I-III flow (13.8% according to [1]), but that varies dramatically based on therapeutic area. On the order of a third of infectious disease vaccines might be approved but only maybe 5% of oncology therapies because the latter often have a different standard for approval so it's cheaper to run trials. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6409418/
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That's interesting, but I was talking about the success rate of someone with a terminal illness going the clinical trial route. Sorry, I now see that my question was not so precise.
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For cancer, it doesn't seem to impact survival odds at all [1]. In other fields it may improve metrics a small bit but that's largely because in clinical trial patient selection, they're very careful to exclude anyone with an even remotely confounding factor (like weight/BMI). [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/joining-cancer-trial-doesn-t-improve-survival-odds
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Setting up phones is a nightmare (joelchrono.xyz)
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I'm dreading having to buy a new rugged Android phone. I have one where all the stuff I don't want is turned off. F-Droid, Firefox, FairEmail, DuckDuckGo, no Google account. Getting a new phone into that configuration may not be possible. The major brands are more and more locked down, and the minor brands can't be trusted. I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing. Suggestions?
Another annoying thing: very few apps are copied from old device to new devices and bring their settings and most importantly login. Of about 80 apps on my device, only five or so are ready to use after a migration. Going through dozens of apps, doing logins, 2FAcand changing settings is a PITA. Devs do a poor job on that front.
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Developers basically need to opt out not to use that feature. 2FA apps do that for understandable reasons (including on iOS). In my experience just about everything but WhatsApp and maybe Signal work out of the box for apps downloaded through GPlay.
My mother can no longer do the stuff she used to on her iOS phone because it is so complicated compared to the iPhone 4 I gave her a long time ago. I screen her emails with her consent, very easy to do with Fastmail that imports her Yahoo mail into a folder she doesn't see and then I move okay emails to her inbox.
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Have you tried Assistive Access mode? https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/assistive-access-iphone/devcd5016d31/ios
Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers. I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
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Google has APIs to do the same. In fact, it works on most apps. The biggest exceptions are security sensitive apps (2FA, password managers) and WhatsApp for some stupid reason. If you're a HN Android user who turns off any form of data sharing like me, you wouldn't notice, though, as this requires the "back up my data" checkbox during setup of the old and new phone to work conpletely. Another issue on Android is that iOS allows for syncing data through the user's iCloud, which can be gigabytes in size, but Google has you use the Google Drive API which sucks and involves handing over credit card info. The Android file transfer has another trick that Apple doesn't seem to do, which is fully offline local sync rather than going through the cloud. This has reliability issues and requires both devices to stay on and nearby while the transfer is in progress, but on slower internet connections the process can be a heck of a lot faster thanks to modern wifi speeds.
“Phones” in the title is doing lots of heavy lifting. “Android phones” is the key missing piece. I love Free software too, and I wish I could run more of my life on it, but it’s no longer my hobby. I like cars, too, but I don’t work on a hobby car. The author’s experience is why I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business. The cost of more freedom (in this case, from proprietary toolchains and data lakes) is needing to exercise more control (compiling custom Android images). I just, honest to god, don’t want to spend the time on it. A kid, a house, cats, getting old. I like that someone else has solved multi-device backup and restore, and I feel happy watching it happen so perfectly, even if I’m not the one controlling it.
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a big chunk of apples valuation is that they can just tell you to bend over the day they decide to aquire half a trillion dollars, fire half there workers, and demonstrate the creative way there user agreaments are bieng interpereted, and that you can get a trump phone if you dont like it. this is the company that has signed an exclusive deal to provide phones for the ZGF, zionist genocide force, so dont even bother, ok?
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iOS now has a ton of dialogs and set up steps and the occasional dark pattern in selling you various cloud based subscriptions to Apples various services. Having said all that, yes Android is pretty bad. I think it's the in the nature of platform owners to get their hooks into yoh as much as possible. When I set up Linux Mint, there was none of this.
Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude (glthr.com)
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My intuition is it comes down to error-correcting encodings etc. We're dealing with lossy systems that get off track, so including parity bits helps. Ex: <message>...</message> helps keep track. Even better? <message78>...</message78>. That's ugly xml, but great for LLMs. And for all these things... these intuitions need backing by evals in practice, and part of why I begrudgingly flipped from JSON to XML
Transformers look like perfect tech for keeping track of how deep and inside of what we are at the moment.
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Transformers are able to recognize balanced brackets grammar at 97% success rate: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=kaILSVAspn This is 3% or infinitely far away from the perfect tech. The perfect tech is the stack.
The evidence suggests that XML was never that popular though for the general audience, you have to admit. For Web markup, as an industry we tried XHTML (HTML that was strictly XML) for a while, and that didn't stick, and now we have HTML5 which is much more lenient as it doesn't even require closing tags in some cases. For data exchange, people vastly prefer JSON as an exchange format for its simplicity, or protobuf and friends for their efficiency. As a configuration format, it has been vastly overtaken by YAML, TOML, and INI, due to their content-forward syntax. Having said all this I know there are some popular tools that use XML like ClickHouse, Apple's launchd, ROS, etc. but these are relatively niche compared to (e.g.) HTML
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MS Office and Open-/LibreOffice are using zipped xml files (e.g. .docx, .xlsx and .odt). Svg vector graphics is xml, the x in ajax stands for xml (although replaced by json by now). SOAP (probably counts as the predecessor of REST) is xml-based. XML was definitely popular in the "well used" sense. How popular it was in the "well liked" sense can maybe be up for debate, but it was the best tool for the job at the time for alot of use cases.
AI is making junior devs useless (beabetterdev.com)
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Every week, I read an article on the consequences of reliable coding agents in SWE industry. All such discussions on HN leads to a fundamental suspicion of the empirical scaling laws of LLMs or the infinite greed and short-sightedness of the market in inflating a bubble. I'm tired.
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It feels like to me that junior devs don’t understand what they even need to learn. They just use agentic coding to get things done, without any deeper knowledge. The worst is, they think they know exactly what they need to learn, and also think they can make good decisions.
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It also makes junior devs unobtainable. Because who in their right mind is going to start a career in CS these days?
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Idk, anyone who wants to understand and apply the most powerful and transformative technology in human history…?
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1. There isn't much to understand about this technology. 2. Unlike in the past, you can't program the technology without having billions in cash.
It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1]. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically. First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing inflation by a lot) but suddenly no jobs. It became a bit of a joke to poke fun at such people who had a ton of debt and worked as baristas but this was a shallow "analysis". It was really a systemic collapse. Those entry-level workers are your future senior workers and leaders. Those jobs have never come back. The rise of DVR/TiVo and ultimately streaming brought on a golden age of TV in the 2000s. It was kind of the last hurrah for network shows that produced 22 episodes a year before streamers instead produced 8 episodes every 4 years. But what made this system work was an ecosystem. Living in LA, Atlanta and a few other places was relatively cheap so aspiring actors and writers and entertainmnet professionals could get by with secon djobs and relatively low income. These became the future headline actors and senior professionals. Background work and odd jobs were sufficient. Background work also taught people how to be on a set. Studios still had large writing staffs. Some writers would be on set. Those writers were your future producers and showrunners. Part of what supported all of this was syndication. That is, networks produced shows and basic cable channels would pay to rerun them. Syndicating some shows was incredibly profitable in some cases (eg Seinfeld). So the streamers came along and stripped things down. They got rid of junior positions. They adopted so-called "mini writing rooms". Those writers didn't tend to ever be on set. The runs were shorter and an 8 episode series couldn't support a writer in the same way a 22 episode series could. The streamers then were largely showing just their own content so residuals and syndication fees just went away. All of this is short-term thinking. Hollywood has been both a massive industry and a source of American soft power internationally by spreading culture, basically. I think the software engineering space is going through a similar transformation to what happened to the entertainment industry. A handful of people will do very well. AIs will destroy entry-level jobs and basically destroy that company and industry's future. I predict in 10-20 years we'll see China totally dominating this space and a bunch of Linkedin "thought leaders" and politicians will be standing around scratchin their heads asking "what happened?" [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
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[delayed]
My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people. Sure, we didn't sign up for this, it's not a fun job what I've described, but why should management care? They have their own problems and A.I is threatening their jobs as well.
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It already happened. The old timers correctly observe that modern applications are bloated and inefficient because of all the heavyweight frameworks, excessive abstraction layers, and "left-pad culture" where external dependencies are pulled in to do the most trivial things but that these things enabled less capable developers to effectively build software to fulfill industry demand. LLM-only coders are just the next step in the devolution.
I feel the same way, I have many years of experience, and I have gone from writing everything by hand to using claude code all the time (my latest company is very pro doing everything with AI). Since I have been a software architect for the past 7-8 years it feels in some ways that that experience makes using claude code a lot more productive than for my non-architect colleagues, as I am able to steer it much more effectively whether directly in sessions or via custom skills / mcp. The big issues right now for me are hiring and manager expectations, I changed positions last fall due to mass layoffs and it took me 3 months to find one: having leetcode interviews in the current climate seems completely useless, even more than it was in the past, and system design interviews are so formulaic it also feels like a crapshoot. Plus every job getting hundreds of AI generated applications makes actually being considered in the first place quite difficult. Manager expectations are also ridiculously inflated nowadays, it seems most action items that come are claude written with fantastical random statistics (if you add caching you can make your backend 98.3% faster!), and it takes so much time to fight this and unrealistic team velocity expectations. Interesting times, I do feel lucky I have had a long career, but I very much fear the ladder being pulled up even more than it has been when outsourcing because widespread. I know everybody says "things always change, new opportunities will open up to compensate for the ones that are being lost" but this time it does feel different, and not in a good way.
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Things are changing so fast and so chaotically with this technology. I'm also writing everything now using Claude code, and I've been thinking a lot about what this means for my work moving forward. One thing I've noticed, is that I will just keep hammering and hammering on my work until I force myself to quit. Even on the weekend I feel the pull to go work on it. I'm just less sort of mentally exhausted by work, I suppose, but I don't think that's particularly healthy if it leads to me working way more than I should. On one hand, I think that's a reflection of how powerful and exciting this technology is, but on the other hand, I think that it triggers some different kind of reward function in my mind that I'm not used to. In any case, I think if one wants to continue to have a career in this industry for years to come, it's basically table stakes to become fluent in using these tools.
Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.
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I’ve had some who are useful almost out of school. The amount of tickets is always growing and have someone pick up those “when things calm down I swear I’ll address this” tickets is always helpful. If they can’t get anything done by themselves in the codebase then it gets much harder. I do also think that some people have completely forgotten all the context they didn’t have when they started off xx years ago so mentoring is not always very good
It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children. The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different. It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
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It's basically a "Tragedy of the Commons" situation across the board.
The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments. E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built. But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women. Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons. The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again. Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that. Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp
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Your comment is incredibly misogynist and sexist. Here's a more fact-based good summary for some potential reasons for the declining fertility rate: https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move. That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife. Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
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FWIW, one of my (male) friends is about 5'2" and met his wife on OKCupid. She's about 4'10". Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
dude, you need to touch grass
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He tried, but was rejected.
> There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" That fallacy isn't in there. Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". And that's definitely another contributer to declining birth rates/families - because neither of them will feel remotely as committed to each other then they would've otherwise. None of these are singular causes. They're all contributing to the whole situation. Which is precisely why I never made any such fallacy in my earlier comment.
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> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".
And it’s not a waste of their time to have to give detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then having to check their work thoroughly? If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.
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No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste of time I'm very sorry for you that you think that way
You pay contractors and caterers - that’s a poor excuse ti have dead weight.
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You just replaced one task that an AI is useless for with a different task that an AI is useless for. The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.
What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
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Completely misses the point of training someone
This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade. > The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion” > That's how companies fail. The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company. BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program. In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass. After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.
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If the median tenure is 3 years and the software business still is very profitable then people must be net useful within that 3 years. A lot of people also just don’t want to job hop much and honestly the interview culture keeps me from hopping more. I do still fall in the 3 years per hop but I’ve always had a good reason to- ie. layoffs, company going in a worse position than when I started, shit management at various levels, forever compounding responsibility…
And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do the work of two juniors without the communication overhead + do all of the project management, dealing with stakeholders, etc. But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.
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And you can actually hand things off to them: this problem is now your problem. With AIs you’re herding cats
I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its own sources, AI is ensuring that future generations are locked-in subscription models to do the most basic technical tasks. This is all obvious, yet we speed up every chance we get.
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It's the opposite. The less competent the average developer the more valuable coding LLMs become (as the only way for those bad developers to generate ok code). Eliminate the developers and even bad coding LLMs become valuable.
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