Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

Posted by signa11 9 hours ago

Comments

Comment by spudlyo 5 hours ago

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.

Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

Comment by ianbutler 5 hours ago

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

Comment by dpark 2 hours ago

> * Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent.*

I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.

Comment by bluefirebrand 3 minutes ago

> I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent

I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments

Comment by bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago

I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.

I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.

Comment by hungryhobbit 2 hours ago

I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real.

(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)

Comment by foobarian 48 minutes ago

Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.

Comment by thejazzman 12 minutes ago

I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..

Comment by zelphirkalt 55 minutes ago

We really need to let go of the notion, that FAANG necessarily has especially skilled engineers. Their products indicate, that this is not the case. Look at what kind of shitshows Google search and YouTube are for example. Or how FB is only bots now. Do these things still rake in money? Yes. But that's rather due to history and entrenchment, than sheer quality of these platforms/tools. Something all of FAANG have failed at is content moderation. Their quality actually sucks.

Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.

I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.

Comment by brailsafe 4 hours ago

> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.

Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.

Comment by autoexec 5 hours ago

> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.

Comment by conqrr 5 hours ago

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

Comment by repeekad 5 hours ago

If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.

Comment by kentm 1 hour ago

The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made.

People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.

Comment by wk_end 5 hours ago

The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.

...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.

Comment by enbugger 3 hours ago

I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?

Comment by aaron695 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by leecommamichael 5 hours ago

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently.

Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.

Comment by Lerc 5 hours ago

This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.

Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.

While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.

Comment by giantg2 2 hours ago

"an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values"

This just seems normal and expected.

Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

Comment by saghm 1 hour ago

> Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.

You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.

Comment by giantg2 1 hour ago

"you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them."

Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.

Comment by lkey 2 hours ago

"becoming an adult" is a thing people do, this will include no longer agreeing with everything your parents taught you. This is mundane and what you have described.

"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.

Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.

This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.

Comment by giantg2 1 hour ago

"have a right to my own body and choices?"

Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.

Comment by lkey 48 minutes ago

I am not surprised. I'm aware that the US never adopted:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no?

Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general?

If you have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?

These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.

Comment by giantg2 14 minutes ago

The laws are to complicated to go into a full yes or no. But they mostly are. There are some things not covered by law which generally are controlled, such as the clothes, toys, and food bought for the kid.

Comment by jlhawn 5 hours ago

I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

Comment by SwellJoe 21 minutes ago

He shouldn't talk about his own experience? Why not? Why is it in poor taste to talk about a difficulty he went through?

Comment by joshcsimmons 5 hours ago

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.

I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

Comment by r2_pilot 4 hours ago

From my perspective, I do not perceive the world as "falling apart" and I wonder how much of your perception of the state of things (as if there was a universally defined "perfection" to strive towards instead of humans creating these concepts) falling apart is derived from your faith, which has a vested interest in presenting itself as a real-feeling thing in order to promulgate its existence. As a meme, it appears to be persistent in the environment for roughly 2k years, so clearly there's some fitness to its host species. And contrast its feelings of apocalyptic end times to Buddhism, where things are more cyclical rather than ending soon, and I wonder how your feelings would be affected were you to have been raised in that environment instead.

Comment by foobarian 46 minutes ago

I feel like religion is the original corporation. You even have weekly 1-on-1s with your manager!

Comment by zoobaloo 4 hours ago

While I can't speak to the universality or novelty of the world falling apart, I feel the same way.

Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.

We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.

Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.

Comment by wofo 3 hours ago

I liked the talk and was about to post a link to it in the $dayjob slack, but this threw me off as well. Still watched it to the end, and I still recommended it to a friend (along with the Youtube channel of the "Software should work" conf), but I'm saddened that the talk paints Christianity as something that is inflicted upon you and that you should strive to get rid of.

It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.

Comment by crawfordcomeaux 1 hour ago

What if we treat all religions as programming languages for humans? Then a degree program for programming humans at the Omniversity would likely put you through several different religions and then through syncretisms of them.

Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.

Comment by RazorBucksICO 3 hours ago

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.

Comment by SwellJoe 19 minutes ago

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

Comment by philipp-gayret 2 hours ago

He changed what he says his values are when dating women, to make dating woman easier for himself. Why he mentioned it, I don't know. He holds IMHO strange views on internet culture and portrays it as morally superior to not be part of any group mentioned; PUA/any forum/Christianity as a whole. A strange introduction for a software talk.

Comment by watwut 2 hours ago

> Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian

Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".

And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there

Comment by burner54828182 2 hours ago

I don’t think he’s trying to gain your approval, if that’s what you mean.

Comment by sh34r 3 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by spongebobstoes 4 hours ago

I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.

Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.

I love computers.

Comment by austy69 3 hours ago

I loved the talk as well. The recommended music video by Ninajirachi was really cool as well! Have a good day fellow computer enjoyer :)

Comment by smalltorch 6 hours ago

Generally agreed with most of the points.

Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.

I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.

Comment by TimTheTinker 5 hours ago

Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.

Comment by helloplanets 5 hours ago

In the same vein, Jonathan Blow's modestly named "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.

Comment by christophilus 4 hours ago

One of my favorite talks.

Comment by DangitBobby 4 hours ago

I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.

Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".

Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.

Comment by sporadicism 3 hours ago

I didn't find any of the arguments for optimism compelling, even if I wanted to agree with the talk's message.

Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.

Comment by skinfaxi 1 hour ago

> Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.

Can you elaborate on this?

Comment by keinzirp 6 hours ago

Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video?

[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092

Comment by some_furry 6 hours ago

https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo

Comment by kristoff_it 6 hours ago

(reposting my comment from lobsters)

For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.

Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.

I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).

Comment by keinzirp 6 hours ago

Thank you!

Comment by jwsteigerwalt 1 hour ago

After 3 years in a US public company’s IT department between 2013 and 2016, I had been working in private closely help companies with revenue between $100 and $500 million the last few years. Cashflow to invest in good systems and software, but conscious about investments.

I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.

Comment by flossly 3 hours ago

I hope this guy gets an option to inherit the FSF.

But in a way that does not diminish his work on Zig.

Comment by staticshock 2 hours ago

The comments here indicate a surprisingly, in my view, mixed reception, for such an unambiguously good talk?

The main thrust is simple:

- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.

- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.

- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.

We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.

A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.

Comment by mikewarot 7 hours ago

So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)

As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.

The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.

Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release

  Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment

Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...

[3] https://genode.org/about/road-map

Comment by listic 7 hours ago

I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.

Comment by newsy-combi 5 hours ago

Blue pill: The supplier of the thing you want is friendly and has your best interest in mind. (Suppliers can be corporations, government, the opposite sex,...)

Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.

Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.

White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.

Comment by lightedman 5 hours ago

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"

This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

Comment by kibwen 3 hours ago

> Man can make it; man can break it.

Man can make mathematical proofs that will not be broken. Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem. Software is just hifalutin math. There can exist software that, for a given mathematical specification, can be proven correct, and will not be disproven.

Comment by tptacek 4 hours ago

OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

Comment by javcasas 4 hours ago

Why a collision? Abuse it where it is being used. Infect the chain of certificates that guarantees that the hash you are checking is actually the one you want. Send a million legit documents with bad hashes, so that the forged one looks like another legit one. Infect the library that calculates hashes so that these specific documents have a special hardcoded hash.

Comment by tptacek 4 hours ago

Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).

Comment by javcasas 3 hours ago

Well, if you are that picky, then you will have to wait. MD5 was created in 1991, the first collision was found in 2004.

Comment by tptacek 3 hours ago

You want to pick a date and make a bet?

Comment by javcasas 3 hours ago

You are the one discarding every date. I'll take the opposite bet: it will eventually happen, on some date.

Comment by tptacek 3 hours ago

I haven't discarded any date. Pick one, and an amount to bet!

Comment by javcasas 2 hours ago

> OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

- Why a collision?

> Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).

Thus implying there are man-made systems that are not breakable, and furthermore SHA-2 is one of them.

> I haven't discarded any date.

Going back so quickly?

Comment by tptacek 2 hours ago

I'm sorry, you've lost me. I was responding to the claim that any man-made system was breakable. The most obvious example of a man-made system that is unlikely to be breakable in our lifetimes (so, I'll say, "ever") is SHA2. Then someone responded that SHA2 wasn't an interesting target. It doesn't have to be; it just has to be man-made, or concede the narrowing of the original claim.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by dijksterhuis 5 hours ago

his flagged "goodbye" submission mentioned at the circa 26 minute mark for those who are curious https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645

and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.

edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments

> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”

Comment by weinzierl 5 hours ago

"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.

Comment by javcasas 4 hours ago

Shield is the wrong word. At some point, the shield must fall, and then the young are no longer young, but are still näive.

There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.

Comment by fellowniusmonk 8 hours ago

Crazy to see how many people miss 26:15.

Comment by gregdaniels421 8 hours ago

This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.

People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.

If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.

I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.

Comment by as1mov 7 hours ago

> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.

What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.

Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.

Comment by fellowniusmonk 7 hours ago

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it.

In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.

I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".

I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".

It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.

It's ok to show generosity.

It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.

Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.

Comment by bee_rider 6 hours ago

Although, I do with these LLM companies would be better about licensing their derivative works (the models) under GPL, when they ingest GPL’d code.

Comment by nz 7 hours ago

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue.

The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].

To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.

LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.

[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.

Comment by 986aignan 4 hours ago

> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.

[1] https://bactra.org/research/2026-03-10.html

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03296

Comment by fhdkweig 6 hours ago

In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.

At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.

Comment by fhdkweig 5 hours ago

And I hope I am just being a Chicken Little, but if LLMs become the go-to place for searching, we will lose traditional web search engines. They won't be profitable if not enough people use them. For those who don't remember how the web was before Google's search engine, we had search engines that really didn't work, web rings, and people's list of random bookmarks. The web is much too complex and big to ever be able to go back to those methods. The web will be effectively unnavigable and dead. All we will have left will be the unattributed knowledge distilled in the LLM with no way back to the old methods. And please tell me I'm wrong.

Comment by novaRom 6 hours ago

> It clearly memorized the code

This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).

Comment by jasonmp85 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by jagadaga 7 hours ago

I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.

Comment by dang 6 hours ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Note this one: "Don't be snarky."

Comment by nz 4 hours ago

Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).

Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?

Comment by jagged-chisel 4 hours ago

> … kept secret from employees [to] mitigate Goodhart's Law

While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.

Comment by nz 3 hours ago

I mean, my point is that we would all be better off without any of the KPIs, and stack-ranking, and so on, in large part because they are not reliable metrics, and making them reliable is itself a difficult problem to solve. You need engineers that seek to understand your business, your problem, and are willing to use that understanding and their experience of building software, to solve those problems in as permanent and correct a way as possible.

The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.

Comment by 4 hours ago