Buddha recommended to his followers a diet which consisted of a breakfast and a second meal at noon if needed. That is, for their health, primary meal early in the day and fasting the remainder. It's interesting that this advice seems fairly supported by science.
> Because there is other code those experts want to write, and they don't have time to write it all... but what if they could just give a fairly straightforward prompt and have the LLM do it for them?
Then pretty soon they wouldn't be the experts anymore?
Maybe? But you could make the same argument that programmers today aren't "experts" at computers because they don't know how to build CPUs.
There is no reason to believe you can't gain expertise while still using higher and higher level abstractions. Yes, you will lose some of that low level expertise, but you can still be an expert at the problem set itself.
The way I see it, this is only possible because you can trust the lower layers work reliably and predictably enough that you can move up.
If your operating system was regenerated every day slightly differently and with certain things working and others not, you’d quickly revert to the lower predictable abstraction.
> We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors
In some countries that may be possible (if only for now). Where chips are produced makes that an impossibility for most. That is, you can have certain guarantees if you run the chip fab, although if you are downstream of that, it can be a tall order to guarantee your chips are sovereign. So, while I like the sentiment that you have some sort of control behind your router, I'm really unsure how true that is given the complexity of producing modern day chips. Disclaimer, not an expert, just an opinion.
I would even say unless you truly have full custody of the transportation of components as well, that is unlikely. Israel’s pager bombs in Lebanon were supplied via a third party, not the manufacturer.
This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through.
>Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary.
Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper.
>Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic.
You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work.
When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes.
Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet.
If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.
I love the ethos of this movie. That it was about hacking and building things for fun, not for money and profit. This to me is what hacking and programming has always been about. It's too bad that overinflated salaries and the hype that if you go into software you will make a lot of money has watered down the culture to an extent. And now, with the advent of AI and vibe coding, it's been increasingly difficult (for me) to maintain that sense of newness and enjoyment in the craft when I see million line AI diffs.
Along the lines of ethos, there's also the narrative of freedom of information and anti big money corporation (the plague). I hope that this energy to fight the system and tyranny of control the system represents never dies. Particularly as we watch the darkness of a tyrannical government continue to unfold here in the U.S.
I've managed to kick all social media except Github. That for me is the most difficult if you want to collaborate on software projects.
No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
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