9dev (u/9dev) - Readit News

9dev commented on Slop Terrifies Me ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifie... · Posted by u/Ezhik

Muromec · 12 hours ago

It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there

9dev · 9 hours ago

It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.

I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

newsclues · 11 hours ago

I’m going to ignore the stupidity and point out the problem of time.

If you spend your time educating yourself and working, you don’t have time to reproduce and raise children. Thus declining birth rates

Reality isn’t an incentive narrative. Go research declining birth rates and female education attainment and you will find charts that make it clear

9dev · 11 hours ago

If your answer to that problem is less women should attain higher education and take care of raising children instead, we just fundamentally disagree. Women have an equal right to education and working as men do.

The charts you refer to show an environment where the responsibility for care work is heavily skewed to the detriment of women. If men took up a bigger part of raising children, it would be easier for couples to do that. But the vast majority of men don't.

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

newsclues · 12 hours ago

Are you upset about biology or the logic that follows the reality of human biology?

9dev · 12 hours ago

What now, human biology dictates men lead and women bear children? I'm upset some people carry that pathetic incel narrative over to HN.

9dev commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk

mattlondon · a day ago

Even if I am only slightly more productive, it feels like I am flying. The mental toll is severely reduced and the feel good factor of getting stuff done easily (rather than as a slog) is immense. That's got to be worth something in terms of the mental wellbeing of our profession.

FWIW I generally treat the AI as a pair programmer. It does most of the typing and I ask it why it did this? Is that the most idiomatic way of doing it? That seems hacky. Did you consider edge case foo? Oh wait let's call it a BarWidget not a FooWidget - rename everything in all other code/tests/make/doc files Etc etc.

I save a lot of time typing boilerplate, and I find myself more willing (and a lot less grumpy!!!) to bin a load of things I've been working on but then realise is the wrong approach or if the requirements change (in the past I might try to modify something I'd been working on for a week rather than start from scratch again, with AI there is zero activation energy to start again the right way). Thats super valuable in my mind.

9dev · 15 hours ago

I absolutely share your feelings. And I realise I’m way less hesitant to pick up the dredge tasks; migrating to new major versions of dependencies, adding missing edge case tests, adding CRUD endpoints, nasty refactorings, all these things you usually postpone or go on procrastination sprees on HN are suddenly very simple undertakings that you can trivially review.

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

raincole · a day ago

Higher education is strongly associated to lower fertility rates. Especially for women, but for men too. So no the argument doesn't ignore the existence of smart women. Smart women (and men) just far less likely to reproduce, statistically speaking.

9dev · 15 hours ago

> […] overflowing with smart guys. […] smart guys build […] he's the smartest guy […] local rich guy would start a business […]

It’s pretty clear this entire crude theory is based on a thinking system that has little place for women in active positions.

And if your immediate reaction to that is annoyance because it seems like an insignificant detail, maybe reflect on that for a moment.

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

ThrowawayR2 · a day ago

"Comparison is the thief of joy" as they say. Some dude has the world's highest score in Pac-Man in the Guinness Book Of World Records. It doesn't mean that I can't play Pac-Man to beat my own personal high score and enjoy the process because the game is fun in it's own right.

9dev · a day ago

That's sure true in theory, but given the prevalence of status symbols, many people thrive on comparing themselves to others. I'd argue society was better off when the only people you could reasonably compare yourself to were the three neighbours down the street (out of which only one would be into Pac-Man), not the world's ten thousand best players showing off only their best streaks on your Instagram feed all day.

9dev commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

vbezhenar · 2 days ago

> why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency

Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

> would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting the power saw in favour of a hand saw to retain their artisanal capability?

Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition, but let's be real, a lot of companies are horribly inefficient and that does not make them bankrupt. The world of producing software is complicated.

I know that I deliver. When I'm asked to write a code, I deliver it and I responsible for it. I enjoy the process and I can support this code. I can't deliver with AI. I don't know what it'll generate. I don't know how much time would it take to iterate to the result that I precisely want. So I can't longer be responsible for my own output. Or I'd spend more time baby-sitting AI than it would take me to write the code. That's my position. Maybe I'm wrong, they'll fire me and I'll retire, who knows. AI hype is real and my boss often copy&pasting ChatGPT asking me to argue with it. That's super stupid and irritating.

9dev · a day ago

> Because I deny that? It's not fun for me.

I totally emphasise as a fellow developer, but I doubt you realise what an incredibly privileged position it is to just refuse working if you don't have fun doing it. And it doesn't really make for a convincing argument to keep you employed either.

> Why not? If that makes enough money to keep going.

If all other competing carpenters use power tools, you're going to loose contracts. We've had a few incredibly easy decades as software developers where market pressure wasn't really a thing, but that is about to change when the cost of producing code drops considerably.

> You might argue that in theoretical ideal market companies who're not utilizing every possible trick to improve productivity (including AI) will lose competition […]

You're moving the goalposts here. We're not talking about wringing every last drop of efficiency out of employees. We're talking about businesses not tolerating paying for licenses for AI agents to enable developers to sip Lattés while their computer does their job. That's a fundamentally different proposition.

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

stego-tech · a day ago

This is another facet of the fierce opposition to AI by a swath of the population: it’s quite literally destroying the last bit of enjoyment we could wring from existence in the form of hobbies funded through normal employment.

Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks, followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI - which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market due to scarcity.

And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and companies spew out AI slop using their work and without compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).

Late stage capitalism’s sole respite was consumerism, and we can’t even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources and capital. It’s no wonder people are pissed at AI boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that’ll lift everyone up: it’s already kicking people down, and nobody actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be disrupted to protect humans.

9dev · a day ago

I think this started a lot earlier actually. A few generations back, many people played an instrument, or at least could sing. It didn't matter that none of them was a Mozart, because they didn't had to be. For making music or singing together in a family or a friend group, it was wholly sufficient to be just good, not necessarily great.

But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?

9dev commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

malfist · a day ago

This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.

Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.

And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town

9dev · a day ago

…not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence of smart girls as well

9dev commented on How to effectively write quality code with AI heidenstedt.org/posts/202... · Posted by u/i5heu

recursive · 2 days ago

If the power saw ran itself without any oversight, the carpenter shop wouldn't accept any type of employees.

9dev · 2 days ago

But that’s the exact opposite of what the GP was arguing; you will be expected to stick with the agent more, not less.