Yeah I have a whole lot of trouble imagining this replacing traditional video games any time soon; we have actually very good and performant representations of how physics work, and games are tuned for the player to have an enjoyable experience.
There's obviously something insanely impressive about these google experiments, and it certainly feels like there's some kind of use case for them somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where they fit in.
> TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects.
I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products!
It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.
A good manager understands the tech and what it takes to implement it on a high level, at least enough to not get BS'd.
This instinct can be developed due to direct experience as an engineer, but it can also be due to experience as a product manager or something else, as long as they have some curiosity to actually learn the big picture stuff.
Now with AI chatbots there's little excuse for a manager to be completely clueless about this stuff, but still there are a class of these people who just can't be bothered to care about anything other than moving units of work around boards.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:
TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.
An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
> For many users, this is their primary news source.
That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.
> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.
Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.
Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.
If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.
Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.
Nope, didn't move the goalpost, let's set that aside.
> The post you were replying to stated:
Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote.
> But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for anything - instead I called out that regardless of how TikTok operates you still have access to whatever information you want. If you choose to silo yourself, whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the fact that you still have access to information.
Reminder of the OP:
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is untrue because all governments and all social media platforms regardless of where they exist or who owns them curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding information from the public".
HN like a lot of SV / VC culture was more libertarian leaning than right leaning. Low taxes, minimal oversight, etc. - true largely of workers and capital alike.
The open embrace of the fascist / nativist right in SV has been more recent, and it has empowered this second Trump administration. The calculation is presumably that they can curry favor and consolidate power.
Industrialists have always benefited from aligning with rightwing authoritarian governments. SV has not shown as a whole to be immune to this. The parallels with historical occurrences is blindingly obvious, down to the speech patterns.
The left / right split isn't really meaningful in the United States right now.
The split is currently between people who believe in and want a functional and equitable government, and those who are fine with a kleptocracy as long as they are personally the beneficiaries (or at least, the people they dislike suffer worse).
People like Frum were quick to notice this and get on the correct side of it. Unfortunately, there are not enough Republicans who feel the same way to make much of a difference.
It must just be a coincidence that literally everyone supporting this is on the right politically. Isn't this sort of weasel wording part of the problem? Conservative voters are the problem. Full stop. Without them, there is no Trump.
nit: Fascist voters who think of themselves as "conservative" are the problem. Actual conservatives wouldn't support Trump attacking institution after institution, both domestic and international.
My point isn't to defend the behavior of the people who have called themselves conservative for the past ~forty years. Rather it's meant to reclaim the term for what has now clearly become the middle of the Overton window. For example, never before having voted for a major party candidate in a national race in my whole life, I voted Biden in 2020 and Harris 2024. I consider these solidly conservative votes, and partially attribute them to my getting older and more conservative.
It's quite honestly amazing how much conservative propaganda has warped the liberal mind. So many liberals actually believe that conservatives just want a slow measured pace of change and to balance budgets, but that's literally never been what they have actually legislated for or accomplished. Liberals are the only people in my lifetime who have actually held those values. They are also the only ones who believe conservatives hold those values. Conservative's know better. And they demonstrated it with their vote. You can no-true-Scotsman until you're blue. There has literally never been a time in this nations history when that was an accurate depiction of conservatives.
Consistently throughout this country's history, conservatives rally to oppose rights being shared with a broader group of people. Conservatives fought a civil war to maintain slavery. They fought for Jim Crow laws. They fought against anti-miscegenation laws. They fought against women's right to vote. They fought and are still fighting against gay rights and recognizing trans people as humans. Literally every single time there is a minority "at risk" of having a better lot in life, there are conservatives turning out to fight against it. When the fuck will you give up the benefit of the doubt on conservatives?
> how much conservative propaganda has warped the liberal mind
Maybe? I feel like my only real assumption is that there is some coherent set of values that describe conservatism. But maybe that is still falling into a trap of applying a liberal value of intellectual consistency to the "conservative" position (cf "Wilholt's law").
I would often read conservative media / forums from about 2008-2016, and saw merit to many of their arguments. And for others I could at least put on my empathy hat and see where they were coming from. At the same time I would see plenty of excesses and blind spots in progressive media and forums. So it really did feel like a "both sides" dynamic, where they both earnestly wanted freedom but always failed to catch the roadrunner (thanks to corrupt politicians that tended to only move in the corporate-authoritarian direction).
But sure, with the whole-hog rise of Trumpism I'm now confronted with the possibility that perhaps the kernel of conservatism isn't based on any sort of lofty ideals at all, but rather the starting point is always the ingroup-outgroup thing - even if locally-coherent logical arguments branch off of it.
But even if this is true for the vast majority of conservatives, surely it is not true for at least some "liberal minded" conservatives who do apply those values consistently? And even if they're only a small segment, with the way elections get decided isn't it still worthwhile to try and reach them by pointing out the failings in what they're ultimately supporting? (eg flagrant rejection of the 2nd amendment, previously with Breonna Taylor and now with Alex Pretti)
> Consistently throughout this country's history, conservatives rally to oppose rights being shared with a broader group of people. Conservatives fought a civil war to maintain slavery. They fought for Jim Crow laws. They fought against anti-miscegenation laws. They fought against women's right to vote. They fought and are still fighting against gay rights and recognizing trans people as humans. Literally every single time there is a minority "at risk" of having a better lot in life, there are conservatives turning out to fight against it.
Let me explicitly state that I agree with where you're coming from morally on these specific points - I'm certainly not trying to whitewash or defend these things. But I don't see how these points support your main point - they're all instances of trying to prevent social change. But before Trump, it doesn't seem like they were openly trying to turn the clock back (at least more than one lifetime). Now perhaps that's just me viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. But it really feels like there was a sea change with Trump, and I think it makes sense to try and appeal to people for whom the reality distortion field may be fading - especially as the Trumpists continue to shamelessly kill American citizens.
> But even if this is true for the vast majority of conservatives, surely it is not true for at least some "liberal minded" conservatives who do apply those values consistently? And even if they're only a small segment, with the way elections get decided isn't it still worthwhile to try and reach them by pointing out the failings in what they're ultimately supporting? (eg flagrant rejection of the 2nd amendment, previously with Breonna Taylor and now with Alex Pretti)
This is cope, they don't exist, it's just comforting to believe they do. And if they ever existed, they would never, ever vote for a Democrat.
The "principled" conservatives will never save us. There are fewer of them than principled liberals. Go watch The Bulkwark. The anti-Trump conservatives have had their balls cut off and they have zero influence on anything. Nor should they. They still want the fucked up things conservatives want. They just want a more polite face pushing it.
> No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products.
Yes. It was a helpful UI abstraction for people uncomfortable with lower level tinkering. I think the big "innovations" were 1) the file format and 2) the (free!) registry hosting. This drove a lot of community adoption because it was so easy to share stuff and it was based on open source.
And while Docker the company isn't the behemoth the VCs might have wanted, those contributions live on. Even if I'm using a totally different tool to run things, I'm writing a Dockerfile, and the artifacts are likely stored in something that acts basically the same as Docker Hub.
> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. A lot of folks are on it, usually not exactly following the scientific method. We'll get evidence eventually.
I try to think about other truly revolutionary things.
Was there evidence that GUIs would dramatically increase productivity / accessibility at first? I guess probably not. But the first time you used one, you would understand its value on some kind of intuitive level.
Having the ability to start OpenCode, give it an issue, add a little extra context, and have the issue completed without writing a single line of code?
The confidence of being able to dive into an unknown codebase and becoming productive immediately?
It's obvious there's something to this even if we can't quantify it yet. The wildly optimistic takes end with developers completely eliminated, but the wildly pessimistic ones - if clear eyed - should still acknowledge that this is a massive leap in capabilities and our field is changed forever.
> Having the ability to start OpenCode, give it an issue, add a little extra context, and have the issue completed without writing a single line of code?
Is this a good thing? I'm asking why you said it like this, I'm not asking you to defend anything. I'm genuinely curious about your rational/reasoning/context for why you used those words specifically?
I ask, because I wouldn't willingly phrase it like this. I enjoy writing code. The expression of the idea, while not even close to value I assign to fixing the thing, still has meaning.
e.g. I would happily share code my friend wrote that fixed something. But I wouldn't take and pride in it. Is that difference irrelevant to you, or do you still feel that sense of significance when an LLM emits the code for you?
> should still acknowledge that this is a massive leap in capabilities and our field is changed forever.
Equally, I don't think I have to agree with this. Our field is likely changed, arguably for the worse if the default IDE now requires a monthly rent payment. But I have only found examples of AI generating boiler plate. If it's not able to copy the code from some other existing source, it's unable to emit anything functional. I wouldn't agree that's a massive leap. Boilerplate has always been the least significant portion of code, no?
> We are paid to solve business problems and make money.
> People who enjoy writing code can still do so, just not on a business context if there's a more optimal way
Do you mean optimal, or expedient?
I hate working with people who's ideas of solving problems is punting it down the road for the next person to deal with. While I do see people do this kinda thing often, I refuse to be someone who claims credit for "fixing" some problem knowing I'm only creating a worse, or different problem for the next guy. If you're working on problems that require collaboration, creating more problems for the next guy is unlikely to give you an optimal output; because soon no one will willingly work with you. It's possible to fix business problems, and maintain your ethics, it's just feels easier to abandon them.
Cards on the table: this stuff saps the joy from something I loved doing, and turns me into a manager of robots.
I feel like it's narrowly really bad for me. I won't get rich and my field is becoming something far from what I signed up for. My skills long developed are being devalued by the second.
I hate that using these tools increases wealth inequality and concentrates power with massive corporations.
I wish it didn't exist. But it does. And these capabilities will be used to build software with far less labor.
Is that trade-off worth the negatives to society and the art of programming? Hard to say really. But I don't get to put this genie back in the bottle.
> Cards on the table: this stuff saps the joy from something I loved doing, and turns me into a manager of robots.
Pick two non-trivial tasks where you feel you can make a half-reasonable estimate on the time it should take, then time yourself. I'd be willing to bet that you don't complete it significantly faster with AI. And if you're not faster using AI, maybe ignore it like I and many others. If you enjoy writing code, keep writing code, and ignore the people lying because they need to spread FUD so they can sell something.
> But I don't get to put this genie back in the bottle.
Sounds like you've already bought into the meme that AI is actually magical, and can do everything the hype train says. I'm unconvinced. Just because there's smoke coming from the bottle doesn't mean it's a genie. What's more likely, magic is real? Or someone's lying to sell something?
> Sounds like you've already bought into the meme that AI is actually magical, and can do everything the hype train says. I'm unconvinced. Just because there's smoke coming from the bottle doesn't mean it's a genie. What's more likely, magic is real? Or someone's lying to sell something?
There are a lot of lies and BS out there in this moment, but it doesn't have to do everything the hype train says to have enough value that it will be adopted.
After my (getting to be long) career, there's a constant about software development: higher level abstractions will be used, because they enable people to either work faster, or they enable people who can't "grok" lower level abstractions to do things they couldn't before.
The output I can get from these tools today exceeds what I could've ever gotten from a junior developer before their existence, and it will never be worse than it is right now.
Sorry, couldn't resist :P But I do, in fact, agree based on my anecdotal evidence and feeling. And I'm bullish that even if we _haven't_ cracked how to use LLMs in programming well, we will, in the form of quite different tools maybe.
Point is, I don't believe anyone is at the local maximum yet, models changed too much the last years to really get to something stable.
And I'm also willing to leave some doubt that my impression/feeling might be off. Measuring short term productivity is one thing. Measuring long term effects on systems is much harder. We had a few software crises in the past. That's not because people back then were idiots, they just followed what seemed to work. Just like we do today. The feedback loop for this stuff is _long_. Short term velocity gains are just one variable to watch.
Anyway, all my rambling aside, I absolutely agree that LLMs are both revolutionary and useful. I'm just careful to prematurely form a strong opinion on where/how exactly.
> The confidence of being able to dive into an unknown codebase and becoming productive immediately?
I don't think there's any public evidence of this happening, except for the debacles with LLM-generated pull requests (which is evidence against, not for this happening).
The Copilot CLI team has been making great strides towards improving our agentic harness! I'm curious, what have you found are the biggest shortcomings with it these days?
If your org has a relationship with MS/OpenAI (many do!) you can also use OpenCode with GPT-5.2 for some pretty impressive results.
Once you see what is currently possible with this technique you will understand that programming as a field is doomed, or at the very least it's becoming something almost unrecognizable.
There's obviously something insanely impressive about these google experiments, and it certainly feels like there's some kind of use case for them somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where they fit in.
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