Readit Newshabitue commented on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing spectrum.ieee.org/it-mana... · Posted by u/pseudolus
I study and write quite a bit of tech history. IMHO from what I've learned over the last few years of this hobby, the primary issue is quite simple. While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not. People do not regularly pull apart old systems for learning. Typically, software folks build new and every generation of software developers must relearn the same problems.
This is an interesting distinction, but it ignores the reasons software engineers do that.
First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.
Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.
I listened to an interview with a researcher a while back who hypothesized that human reasoning probably evolved not mostly for the abstract logical reasoning we associate with intelligence, but to “give reasons” to motivate other humans or to explain our previous actions in a way that would make them seem acceptable…social utility basically. My experience with next token predicting LLMs aligns with human communication. We humans rarely complete a thought before we start speaking, so I think our brains are often just predicting the next 1-5 words that will be accepted by who we’re talking to based on previous knowledge of them and evaluation of their (often nonverbal) emotional reactions to what we’re saying. Our typical thought patterns may not be as different from LLMs’ as we think.
IIRC the researcher was Hugo Mercier, probably on Sean Carroll’s fantastic Mindscape podcast, but it might have been Lex Fridman before he strayed from science/tech.
This just doesn't explain things by itself. It doesn't explain why humans would care about reasoning in the first place. It's like explaining all life as parasitic while ignoring where the hosts get their energy from.
Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.
This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"
habitue commented on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/weinzierl
It's also not clear to me why using "skills" would consume less context once invoked.
It's just instructions with RAG. The more I read about this the more convinced I am that this is just marketing.
Skills wont use less context once invoked, the point is that MCP in particular frontloads a bunch of stuff into your context on the entire api surface area. So even if it doesn't invoke the mcp, it's costing you.
That's why it's common advice to turn off MCPs for tools you dont think are relevant to the task at hand.
The idea behind skills us that they're progressively unlocked: they only take up a short description in the context, relying on the agent to expand things if it feels it's relevant.
habitue commented on Flowistry: An IDE plugin for Rust that focuses on relevant code github.com/willcrichton/f... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
These kinds of tools should be standard in understanding code
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habitue commented on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel lwn.net/Articles/1040120/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
They could rewrite all the code, and then change the license. Patents might still apply (but patents are short enough that I expect if any existed they have expired). However ZFS is a lot of code that is often tricky to get right. It will be really hard to rewrite in a way that the courts don't (reasonably/correctly) say wasn't a rewrite it was just moving some lines so you can claim ownership, but it is possible. By the time anyone knows enough about zfs that they could attempt this they are also too tainted by the existing code.
So of course they won't, but it isn't impossible.
I mean, bcachefs is basically the equivalent of rewriting all that code, without explicitly trying to be a clone. Same for btrfs
habitue commented on Anti-*: The Things We Do but Not All the Way blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/gregwolanski
Labeling them "anti-X" kind of makes them sound negative, which is not how I see all of those things at all. This HN comment might eventually be published by me or not, but even if I don't hit "add comment" after writing all of this, doesn't mean it was a bad comment or I didn't value the time spent writing it, it just meant I myself didn't figure out the point of actually publishing it.
But all those websites, apps, blog posts and what not that I've created/written but never published, are still useful and was time well spent. People have almost an obsession with "finishing" and "shipping" something, otherwise it was worthless time spent on it. Calling those things "AntiApps" would make me feel bad about it, instead of feeling like I feel about them now, that in the moment they were "done" and I completed whatever I wanted to complete with it, it just wasn't the typical final artifact other people would need to have in order to feel like something is "finished".
Sometimes doing things just to do it is better than forcing yourself to reach some "completed" state you didn't even aim for when you started out.
I think Co-* is probably better, though more obscure I guess
So, yeah. They just made it up because it felt right. (Which, I guess is what one would expect from AI related stuff these days.)
You’re definitely right though: it doesn’t take a deep dive into the history of computing and programming languages to find higher-than-assembly level languages emerging at the very dawn of computing.
I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real