May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)
The sycophancy, the grinding inevitablity of assimilation, the homogeneous entity that speaks out of a billion mouths. It's all there.
It's a large difference in concept but potentially only a small difference in outcome.
I always got advanced AI vibes from Devs, that it was a mind interfacing with reality in some sort of weird inception / simulation / manifestation way.
[0] https://qntm.org/responsibility
Guys I thought it was the fire next time.
> I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.
It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?
(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)
It's not like our corporate leadership is being subtle in any way about their openly stated end goals here. We are simply instructed to continuously burn our enormous piles of "thought tokens" for their machines. The same machines only made possible by the theft of humanity's collective works at unimaginable scales. We must hold up these statistical facsimiles of human work, now rendered by machine, as the inevitable future output of humanity. To do otherwise is the way of the luddites.
The gods of unbounded growth, efficiency and productivity have come to demand our sacrifice. Who are we to stand in their way when countless skilled laborers before us have fallen to automation? Our number has been called as it were, and to reject what they demand is to reject "progress" itself. The march continues as it has since before the dawn of industrialization, relentless and indifferent to any and all that are crushed beneath it.
I don't know when the last bastion of "inefficiency" will fall, but at some point humanity may collectively grow to regret some forms of automation. Time will tell.
There's a certain simplicity and beauty in honing and stewarding a craft towards mastery that automation doesn't provide. I feel this is an innately human desire. Many cultures in the past used to place a great emphasis in this very personal endeavor. Sadly it seems each decade we slowly suppress these basic human needs, too tantalized by Western values of having ever "more" of everything, much to our detriment.
I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.
As I haven't been a typical full-time employee in software development for some time, could you possibly just like leak the entire email where this was announced or something? (open invitation to others who could too, if parent cannot) I'm very curious to see how it was announced and what possible reasoning they could have for that.
Don't get me wrong, I use agents for lots of coding too, but forcing people to use tools they might not want to use doesn't feel like the right way. I was also allowed to use vim whenever I wanted for most of my career, something that feels more and more rare when speaking with people just starting their careers now.
I don't want to be doxxed lol, so ironically I'll be sharing in the sense that on one hand I am unsettled by the mandate, on the other hand, for a tiny startup it's seems the state of the industry, less so company specific.
Startups (think they) are in a fight for their life, so the mandate comes from everyone contributing 10x or whatever. The expectation is that agentic coding should 3x/5x/10x your feature output, because that's how we're going to win.
I have many thoughts. But I'll focus on that last one: the mandate is literally more features, more code, because it gets us closer to winning. In my small engineering circles, surprisingly, this is like the defacto stance. All things considered, might as well ship more code!
tbh I have been struggling with the state of software in the agentic era. I'm pro LLM, there's undeniable leverage in its coding abilities. I do want to write this post! I'll start with hopefully this distillation:
In the agentic era, if shipping code is a commodity, then why ship more code? we can say this for the entire concept of "build" - we've commoditized building anything software related, i don't understand how this translates to therefore BUILD MORE.
So then the more nuanced conversation is that taste and judgement is the leverage. i agree with this. But its hand wavy in that we can't agree on what taste is. and also accelerationists hold true that all can be encoded. more agents. i don't even disagree with this entirely.
What I'm missing is that AI-native software engineers are going to brute force their way to PMF, to judgment, taste, enlightenment, consciousness.
But why is this a straight line? Just add more agents. add a "designer", a "sales" and "user researcher" agent. just add more agents.
You don't know what you don't know, is my retort. It's surreal to me that we're living through the equivalent of the smartest software engineers effectively giddily prompting, with full conviction mind you, "add more pop!" to make their thing better.
Just needs more pop!
LLM code can be leveraged, but pretending that tokens are just going to turn into money printers at some point is not productive. The primary source of software's value to an end user is the thought that was placed into it. Where does that go for the AI-natives? As you say, they are seemingly brute forcing software engineering, at least so far.
One thing I have been considering is how LLMs primarily change the "build vs buy" calculus for a fair number of software niches, particularly things like developer tooling and small libraries and packages. Partially due to a projected increase in supply chain attacks, and partially due to the changing standards of engineers. There's no longer anything stopping someone from working with an ugly or clunky syntax, presuming it's a well documented standard. So many "developer experience" tools are going to hit this - Tailwind primarily comes to mind.
It's a sort of "erosion" of niches in the current landscape - although to me this does not really work out for the worse in the long term, since again, the thinking in the process will need to just go somewhere else.
Motivation was people being so allergic to tests and automation, that making them use superpowers produced better code, but also started adding a test pyramid.
The mandate was actually phrased in a way that you must produce industry standard code, and if you struggle with it you can use cc to bridge the gap.
Honestly I worry that this way devs will produce higher quality code, but will not understand why, how to measure the “quality” and steer towards it themselves.
At this point though the founders were pretty adamant with the code quality and lack of tests so this seemed like a reasonable way for the company, and I am curious to see how such a mandate affects code, deliverables and individual’s knowledge.
So far it seems to be working as intended, but it is early days.
Frankly if your devs weren't doing this stuff before, forcing them to do it with AI assistance is probably going to be counter productive. If it is possible to produce good quality code and tests and such with LLMs, it is not likely by forcing LLMs on people who didn't care about code quality or tests before
People here are warning about this daily. And outside this tech bubble full of people trying to profit from it, higher percentages of people elsewhere do realize and do care.
I can't wait to put myself into a sim world and give myself super powers.
Statistically, I should already be one of them. But where are my powers? It's another Fermi paradox for sure.
The workaround is to schedule the creation of many many copies of myself, each with its own sim world, just after I fall asleep. So I will have an arbitrarily certain chance of waking up as one of those copies, and the ability to fly.
LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.
> I. DEFINITION:
> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.
> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)
- Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01
Programming is technology but not "occult" technology, and I don't really see the added value of treating it as occult. Quite the opposite actually, most good programmers I know acquired their skill because they have a decent grasp about the entire system rather than treating most of it as a black box.
This is simply a reflection of my beliefs though, not an objective reality of the world. I trust that the TRM for my chip accurately reflect the details I can't observe for myself. Many devs don't even go that far down and trust that their OS, or programming language to behave as they expect. We're all dealing with black boxes on some level.
To quote a reasonable definition from an actual scholar on this subject, Jesper Sorensen:
Thus, magic is generally conceived of as referring to aThis pretty much perfectly describes how programming is perceived by normal people. I could also quote Malinowski, who argued that magic must have a kind of "strangeness" to differentiate it from non-ritual speech. And programmers regularly describe difficult bits of code as magical (e.g. magic constants, or fast inverse square root) even though these are easily explained in most cases.
Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program will have. Magic is not like that: even if the practitioner claims to understand how it works, their success rate is typically abysmal. AFAIK there are zero faith healers or other magic types whose claims consistently hold up when inspected, but programmers and other engineering types do it all the time. That's the objective difference right there, even if normal people struggle to discern the two.
All technology is like this to some extent, but a lot of technology is grounded enough for the average person to see the rough operation of it. You look inside a washing machine, there's a part that spins around. Attached to it by a rubber belt is a smaller part that spins around, and has electric wires on the other end. Your explainer points to that and says "that's an electric motor - it converts electric power into spinning motion" and you say "ok".
How do you do that with code?
I guess the difference between magic and science to me is that "not everyone can learn magic", but the core bit that makes science work is that in principle everyone can learn it. In practice of course we cannot know everything and so have to rely on the expertise of others, but that is a limitation in the humans and not in the knowledge. Meanwhile for "magic" you have to be chosen by the gods/genetically gifted/cursed/whatever.
In a universe where magic is just another skill that anyone can learn, that reasoning goes right out the window of course.
Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells.
Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler).
By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal" implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)
Try thinking for yourself, instead.
Off-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand my vocabulary.
(The term "bikeshedding" is insufficiently defined, in that it implicitly excludes the social reasons always underlying human behavior, which is why I these days prefer the word I used. Honestly, having been away from it now something over a year, even the simple jargon of the field begins to take on a queasy pseudocolor in my mind, the stinking sinus-stinging yellow-green of a revolted gut revolting. Thinking back over the rattle of acronyms and half-words that used to shape my days comes to be like thinking back over times I have been feverishly ill. Perhaps for once in my life I am on the leading edge of something.)
I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the point of being intolerable. Right up there with "narcissist" and "gaslighting".
Another example would be "Ponzi scheme", which I've seen abused for any situation the speakers seems unsustainable, even when there isn't any records fraud.
Exactly correct.
Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act; whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...] Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."
White nerdy kids have just been relatively less desperate up to now, socioeconomically speaking. You used to have to be a real hardcore loser, as a not otherwise messed up white boy, to embrace Crowley or hermeticism or any of that other shit that's only interesting to the poor kids and the crime kids and the kids from fucked-up families, who hang around smoking cigarettes together just off school property. (Hello.)
But now, as we exit the second "gilded age" for the second "great depression," the prospect of success in "straight" life, the white folks standard college/job/marry/kids/Epstein-client script, proves a mirage, and the same immiseration of opportunity comes for American whites that American blacks have always known. Thus proliferate get-rich-quick schemes among those certain they are deserving - i.e., con games among suckers, Crowley's native element. Given how much his speed habit led him to write, it's no surprise he comes roaring back. (He did have a sense of character and of history, hence making sure he left behind an appealing - as appalling! - set of lies.)
I have a lot more respect for B.I.G., who at least in my recollection never pretended he was other than one in a million. But when somebody like any of these guys starts saying he sees himself in you or vice versa, you had better keep your knees tightly together and a hand over your drink.
That is to say, this is the first I'm hearing of this Crowley guy directly, but I have heard murmurs of "magick" down stream in video game culture. So while I agree with the broad social analysis, and have even brushed the aesthetic diffuse through culture, I don't really see any practitioners or other indicators to suggest this is being taken seriously.
Thank you for expanding on this!
So even though they're a small minority they infest politics, business, and the media, and create a culture in their own image.
Most proposed solutions end up in superficial tribal arguments about standard economic and political positions. Not about the underlying issue, which cuts right across the usual battle lines.
"They" are against me.
Ironically I could cite a very specific group this applies to: fitness influencers in the wake of ozempic. "Natural weight loss" and FUD about the drug took off when it hit mainstream awareness because it really was a direct threat to them. Of course this group also tends to heavily abuse other drugs as they age out - because being a trim fitness inflencer is easy in your 20s, keeping it going into your mid-30s is a lot more difficult.
learned helplessness is really a problem, but personally all I have gotten is scorn and hatred for trying to make a difference/improve things that I managed/had control of. All people care about is precious number go up/ignoring the future while everyone around me is looking at me like I have two heads for not blindly following the insanity
what do we honestly do?
This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.
It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.
Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.
Not sure about the details with Freifunk, but Guifi has collaborating companies who basically operate like ISPs but connect you to Guifi + you get a internet connection via the Guifi peering the installer helps you with.
The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly) don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.
The context for a new kind of internet is very different now, than when the internet started. That changed context provides an opening for new ways to do things.
A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for. As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too firmly entrenched, etc.
Article mentions Searle and Chalmers, but we literally have at least two centuries of critical thought that expressed itself through Nietzsche, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, and many others (obviously I am mentioning those I am most familiar with). If you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, you'll find that slop isn't something that had arisen in last few years. If you read Discipline and Punish you'll find that surveillance and coercion isn't a problem that was born with internet or Palantir. And Baudrillard had few words to say about simulation and reality.
But STEM crowds for decades cried we don't need such thinking, and science and technology are all that we need. Historians, philosophers, culture critics etc. supposedly have nothing to offer us. Who needs to read Marx or Marcuse if sci-fi novels offer all you need, maybe sprinkled with some PG essays and blogpost from you favorite tech blogger, and we happen to live in the best of possible worlds with the best of possible economic systems.
NSFW blog content on HN? Really?
https://aphyr.com/posts/379-geoblocking-the-uk-with-debian-n...
> This is, to be clear, a bad solution. MaxMind’s free database is not particularly precise, and in general IP lookup tables are chasing a moving target. I know for a fact that there are people in non-UK countries (like Ireland!) who have been inadvertently blocked by these lookup tables. Making those people use Tor or a VPN sucks, but I don’t know what else to do in the current regulatory environment.
Update: there's a section called "Pornography". It does not contain pornography.
But as much as I dislike the OSA: if you're not subject to UK law, why do you (website author) care what our government thinks of your website? It's not like they can do anything to you.
But, topics of a sexual nature—nothing really NSFW, just mentions of various fetishes that online people have developed and popularized, and the possibilities for AI to realize those fetishes and potentially spawn new ones—are discussed in the blog post, so it may be illegal to present to minors under the OSA.