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plomme commented on Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8f... · Posted by u/kevinak
echelon · 4 days ago
> it's creepy.

It's awesome.

People's ick around bodies, which are machines, have always held us back.

It wasn't until we started cutting them open that modern medicine was developed.

We might have brain uploads already had we not been so averse to sticking brains with electrodes.

I'll go further: had we not been so scared of cloning, we'd probably have cured cancer and every major ailment if we'd begun cloning monoclonal human bodies in labs. Engineered out the antigens and did whole head transplants. You could grow them without consciousness or deencephalize them, rapidly grow them in factories, and have new blood / tissue / organ / body donors for everyone.

New young bodies means no more cancer, no more cardiac or pulmonary age. It's just brain diseases left as the final frontier once we cross that gap. And if we have bodies as computers and labs, we'd probably make quick work on that too.

Too tired to lay out the case / refute, so past discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

plomme · 4 days ago
I don't think anyone objects to curing cancer and better figuring out how our bodies work, but getting into conciousness/ mind uploads/ simulated humans is another can of worms ethically speaking. I'm assuming you've already read the fantastic story about Lena by qntm [1], if not, enjoy some existensial dread.

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

plomme commented on This time is different   shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/... · Posted by u/speckx
prescriptivist · 14 days ago
This is a funny point that you're making (for me, anyway), because prior to early December, probably 5% of the lines of code I wrote in a week were AI-generated by cursor. Then I started using Claude Code. Fast forward to today, I would say 98% of the code that I've shipped in the last three weeks has been written completely by Claude Code.

Prior to three weeks ago, I had used speech-to-text to do accomplish approximately 0% of the work I've done in my 20 years of coding. In the last three weeks, well over half of the direction that I've given to Claude Code has been done with speech-to-text.

plomme · 14 days ago
How are you doing speech-to-text with Claude Code?
plomme commented on Lena by qntm (2021)   qntm.org/mmacevedo... · Posted by u/stickynotememo
ben_w · a month ago
I think the cloning example is a good reference point here.

IIRC, human cloning started to get banned in response to the announcement of Dolly the sheep. To quote the wikipedia article:

  Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts. Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly, announced in 2007 that the nuclear transfer technique may never be sufficiently efficient for use in humans.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

Yes, things got better eventually, but it took ages to not suck.

I absolutely expect all the first attempts at brain uploading to involve simulations whose simplifying approximations are equivalent to being high as a kite on almost all categories of mind altering substances at the same time, to a degree that wouldn't be compatible with life if it happened to your living brain.

The first efforts will likely be animal brains (perhaps that fruit fly which has already been scanned?), but given humans aren't yet all on board with questions like "do monkeys have a rich inner world?" and even with each other we get surprised and confused by each other's modes of thought, even when we scale up to monkeys, we won't actually be confident that the technique would really work on human minds.

plomme · a month ago
In case you, as I, has not kept tabs of the progress of cloning since Dolly: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/29/horse-clonin... or https://archive.is/dwHsu.

Horse cloning is a major industry in Argentina. Many polo teams are riding around on genetically identical horses. Javier Milei has four clones of his late dog.

plomme commented on Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?   quantamagazine.org/is-par... · Posted by u/mellosouls
ggm · a month ago
I am sure others will say it better, but the cat-in-the-box experiment is a shockingly bad metaphor for the idea behind quantum states and observer effect.

I will commit the first sin, by declaring without fear of contradiction the cat actually IS either alive or dead. it is not in a superposition of states. What is unknown is our knowledge of the state, and what collapses is that uncertainty.

If you shift this to the particle, not the cat, what changes? because if very much changes, my first comment about the unsuitability of the metaphor is upheld, and if very little changes, my comment has been disproven.

It would be clear I am neither a physicist nor a logician.

plomme · a month ago
Well you are in luck because that was the point of Schroedingers cat; it was constructed to show the impossibly odd implications of quantum mechanics.

From the wikipedia page: “This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's philosophical views on quantum mechanics.”

plomme commented on Art of Roads in Games   sandboxspirit.com/blog/ar... · Posted by u/linolevan
zabzonk · a month ago
Be like the Romans - make them all straight lines :-)

Of course the Romans didn't give a shit who's property rights they might be violating. I live in Lincolnshire UK, where Roman roads are still used. The last one that got changed was years ago when they had to put a kink in Ermine Street (now the A15) at RAF Scampton when they extended the runway to accommodate Vulcan bombers.

plomme · a month ago
The romans did care about property lines! Romes’ second aqueduct was held up when land owner Crassus refused to give up private land for its construction. Check out the article for a fascinating read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct
plomme commented on We mourn our craft   nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright
Nextgrid · a month ago
LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper.

If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.

The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).

plomme · a month ago
I think it’s naive to think that not every part of our jobs will worryingly soon be automated. All the way up to and inckuding CEO. This is not exciting.
plomme commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used   blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk
dasil003 · a month ago
I agree with both you and the GP. Yes, coding is being totally revolutionized by AI, and we don't really know where the ceiling will be (though I'm skeptical we'll reach true AGI any time soon), but I believe there still an essential element of understanding how computer systems work that is required to leverage AI in a sustainable way.

There is some combination of curiosity of inner workings and precision of thought that has always been essential in becoming a successful engineer. In my very first CS 101 class I remember the professor alluding to two hurdles (pointers and recursion) which a significant portion of the class would not be able to surpass and they would change majors. Throughout the subsequent decades I saw this pattern again and again with junior engineers, bootcamp grads, etc. There are some people no matter how hard they work, they can't grok abstraction and unlock a general understanding of computing possibility.

With AI you don't need to know syntax anymore, but to write the write prompts to maintain a system and (crucially) the integrity of its data over time, you still need this understanding. I'm not sure how the AI-native generation of software engineers will develop this without writing code hands-on, but I am confident they will figure it out because I believe it to be an innate, often pedantic, thirst for understanding that some people have and some don't. This is the essential quality to succeed in software both in the past and in the future. Although vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry dramatically, there is a brick wall looming just beyond the toy app/prototype phase for anyone without a technical mindset.

plomme · a month ago
I don’t think there will be an “AI native” generation of developers. AI will be the entity that “groks pointers” and no one else will know it or care what goes on under the hood.

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plomme commented on Godot 4.6 Release: It's all about your flow   godotengine.org/releases/... · Posted by u/makepanic
cheeseomlit · a month ago
Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.
plomme · a month ago
I'm developing a game in Godot using C# and my experience with it is very good. I guess it depends on how deeply you integrate with Godot. I try as far as its possible to write my game headless. My opinion may change when I have gotten to the point of actually shipping a game though, so this take needs a grain of salt.
plomme commented on Tesla ending Models S and X production   cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla... · Posted by u/keyboardJones
FL33TW00D · a month ago
How can you say camera only navigation won’t work with such finality when humans manage just fine every day! You literally have an existence proof of it working.
plomme · a month ago
Both the vision and cognition hardware in humans are vastly superior, and don't get me started on the software.

I never understood why they would choose to fight with "one hand behind your back". More sensors = more better

u/plomme

KarmaCake day99March 12, 2025
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Freelance software engineer based in Oslo, Norway.

Homepage: https://www.plomme.com

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