mind-blight (u/mind-blight)

mind-blight commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

Deestan · 4 days ago

I am now making an emotional reaction based on zero knowledge of the B2B codebase's environment, but to be honest I think it is relevant to the discussion on why people are "worlds apart".

200k lines of code is a failure state. At this point you have lost control and can only make changes to the codebase through immense effort, and not at a tolerable pace.

Agentic code writers are good at giving you this size of mess and at helping to shovel stuff around to make changes that are hard for humans due to the unusable state of the codebase.

If overgrown barely manageble codebases are all a person's ever known and they think it's normal that changes are hard and time-consuming and needing reams of code, I understand that they believe AI agents are useful as code writers. I think they do not have the foundation to tell mediocre from good code.

I am extremely aware of the judgemental hubris of this comment. I'd not normally huff my own farts in public this obnoxiously, but I honestly feel it is useful for the "AI hater vs AI sucker" discussion to be honest about this type of emotion.

mind-blight · 4 days ago

It really depends on what your use case is. E.g. of you're dealing with a lot of legacy integrations, dealing with all the edge cases can require a lot of code that you can't refactor away through cleverness.

Each integration is hopefully only a few thousand lines of code, but if you have 50 integrations you can easily break 100k loc just dealing with those. They just need to be encapsulated well so that the integration cruft is isolated from the core business logic, and they become relatively simple to reason about

mind-blight commented on Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5 theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

benjiro · 17 days ago

> GPT-5 is a bit better -particularly around consistency - and a fair amount cheaper. For all of my use cases, that's a huge win.

What is more or less a natural evolution of LLMs... The thing is, where are my benefits as a developer?

If for instance CoPilot charges 1 Premium request for Claude and 1 Premium request for GPT-5, despite that GPT-5 is (with resource usage), supposed to be on a level of GPT 4.1 (a free model). Then (from my point of view) there is no gain.

So far from coding point of view, Claude does coding (often) still better. I made the comparison that Claude feels like a Senior dev, with years of experience, where GPT 5 feels like a academic professor, that is too focus on analytic presentation.

So while its nice to see more competition in the market, i still rank (with Copilot):

Claude > Gemini > GPT5 ... big gap ... GPT4.1 (beast mode) > GPT 4.1

LLM's are following the same progression these days like GPUs, or CPU ... Big jumps at first, then things slow down, you get more power efficiency but only marginal jumps on improvements.

Where we will see benefits, is specialized LLMs, for instance, Anthropic doing a good job for creating a programmer focused LLM. But even those gates are starting to get challenged by Chinese (open source) models, step by step.

GPT5 simply follows a trend. And within a few months, Anthropic will release something probably not much of a improvement over 4.0 but cheaper. Probably better with tool usage. And then comes GPT5.1, 6 months later, and ...

GPT-5.0 in my opinion, for a company with the funding that openAI has, needed to be beat the competition with much more impact.

mind-blight · 17 days ago

I'm not even considering the coding use case. It's been fine in cursor. I care about the days extraction and basic instruction following in my application - coding ability doesn't come into play.

For example, I want the model to be able to take a basic rule and identify what subset of given text fits into the rule. (E.g. find and extract all last names) 4o and 4.1 we're decent, but still left a lot to be desired. o4-mini was pretty good at not ambiguous cases. Getting a model that runs cheaper and is better at following instructions makes my product better and more profitable with a could lines of code change.

It's not emotionally revolutionary, but it hours a great sweet spot for a lot of business use cases

mind-blight commented on Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5 theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

lm28469 · 17 days ago

That certainly how it feels to me. Every demo seems like it's presenting some kind of socially maladjusted silicon valley nerd's wet dream. Half of it doesn't interest non tech people, the other half seems designed for teenagers.

Look at this image of Zuckerberg demoing his new product: https://imgur.com/1naGLfp

Or gpt5 press release: "look at this shitty game it made", "look at the bars on this graph showing how we outperform some other model by 2% in a benchmark that doesn't actually represent anything"

mind-blight · 17 days ago

GPT-5 is a bit better -particularly around consistency - and a fair amount cheaper. For all of my use cases, that's a huge win.

Products using AI powered days processing (a lot of what I use it for) don't need mind blowing new features. I just want it to be better at summarizing and instruction following, and I want it to be cheaper. GPT-5 seems to knock all of that out of the park

mind-blight commented on Wired Called Our AirGradient Monitor 'Not Recommended' over a Broken Display airgradient.com/blog/wire... · Posted by u/sklargh

ahaucnx · 19 days ago

Achim from AirGradient here. Good to see that my post has been submitted here. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

I spend quite a long time writing this post and it actually helped me to see the bigger picture. How much can we actually trust tech reviews?

I am already getting very interesting results from the survey I posted and already planning to write a follow up post.

mind-blight · 19 days ago

Super smart move. I hadn't heard of you folks before, but I'm interested in your product - open source and repairability are high on my list for home monitors. I'm lying in bed awake right now sir to an air quality issue, so it's top of mind.

The only thing you're missing for me is radon detection. I just bought a house and tests came in below remediation levels, but the report showed a lot of spikes and variance. So you have any plans for a model with radon detection in the future?

mind-blight commented on IRS head says free Direct File tax service is 'gone' theverge.com/news/717308/... · Posted by u/microsoftedging

kyrra · 24 days ago

But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.

Eg: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...

If there was also a free flow available, why would the government need to build an alternative?

mind-blight · 24 days ago

Because those other companies actively violated agreements they made with the government in the 2000 to offer those services for free. They regularly tricked people into paying and lost a class action lawsuit over it.

It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse

mind-blight commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike

anon84873628 · a month ago

The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet.

You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet."

Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat.

But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.

mind-blight · a month ago

Sure, avoiding processing is just a heuristic. I just have trouble faulting people when it send to be a good one for maintaining a healthy diet.

I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine.

But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled.

Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic

mind-blight commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike

trallnag · a month ago

Enjoy your home-made herbs and spices instead of dangerous lab-made drugs, I guess

mind-blight · a month ago

I honestly want to know why you think trying to consume foods that have been through fewer processing steps is equivalent to rejecting medicine. Those are absurd comparisons to me.

If I have a medical issue, the risks often outweigh the rewards. Chemo ain't good for you, but it's better than cancer. Artificial food coloring isn't necessary, and multiple dyes appear to contain carcinogenic contaminates. I can appreciate that chemo exists and avoid artificial dyes.

The US food industry also has historically introduced a lot of unhealthy and/or poisonous additives that were later banned or recalled. Formaldehyde was added to milk in the early 1900s because the industry didn't want to adopt pasteurization. Partially hydrogenated oil as margarine was advertised as a healthier butter alternative in the 50s and 60s.

There are cool things that come out of food labs (Xanthum gum is one of my favorites), but it seems weird to be condescending towards people for taking a reasonably cautious approach towards food - especially when there's historical and scientific evidence that backs the approach

mind-blight commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike

kaladin-jasnah · a month ago

The company's products in my and other people's views have caused a significant wane in vegetarian and vegan burger diversity. Gone are the chickpea and black bean burgers on menus—your only choice is Beyond Meat-esque burgers.

As someone who doesn't actually really like how Beyond Meat tastes, it's unfortunate that it's the only option sometimes. As someone who likes food variety and practically needs it, eliminating choice is the worst.

I have to concur about processing as well. Indian cuisine has so many unprocessed and nutritious meals that are vegetarian. So does Ethiopian cuisine. Mediterranean foods, Tex-mex, and lots of South American food can be made vegetarian. There are great ideas for burgers from here too. See https://www.shopdeepfoods.com/product/aloo-tikki-141-oz?pid=....

I've wanted to try some of the NYTimes vegetarian and vegan burger recipes when I get the chance. My point is, Beyond Meat seems to reduce the better-testing and less processed competition.

mind-blight · a month ago

Can't agree enough. I just don't think that beyond meat is good. I'm a meat eater who grew up vegetarian and still enjoy eating vegetarian food. A well done black bean burger (my favorite blend is with quinoa) is delicious. I'd eat that over a regular burger plenty of times.

If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.

mind-blight commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike

robertoandred · a month ago

> getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty

Sounds like processing to me

mind-blight · a month ago

Cool, we have a semantics issue. Processing can mean "any change to a food item" such as chopping, cooking, etc. In these kinds of conversations, it's often used as "significant alterations that are not possible or common outside of a food lab". E.g. I can do cured meats, or add corn starch to a soup at home. I'm not going to make partially hydrogenated oils or pink slime for chicken nuggets.

If you're being genuine and trying to point out that it's difficult to draw a clear line between "good" and "bad" processing - absolutely! Processes that have been used for a long time (decades, hundreds, or thousands of years) are generally well understood and safer. Newer processes and changes have risks. So, "can I do this in my kitchen" is a great heuristic for trying to walk a very fuzzy line.

If you're deliberately misunderstanding the intent to further an argument, get outta here with that BS :P

mind-blight commented on Beyond Meat fights for survival foodinstitute.com/focus/b... · Posted by u/airstrike

mgraczyk · a month ago

What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.

mind-blight · a month ago

Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous:

- Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference

- The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research

- Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you.

One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm