stocksinsmocks (u/stocksinsmocks)

stocksinsmocks commented on AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study cnbc.com/2025/08/28/gener... · Posted by u/pseudolus

elif · 19 hours ago

Do you have any evidence of this because the rationale seems like a coping strategy or conspiracy theory how it's being suppositioned.

stocksinsmocks · 14 hours ago

The entire account department at my firm has moved to Poland. That’s nice for them, but as a US citizen it does mean the writing is on the wall. On the plus side I learned a fun fact. Malgorzata is a more common name than I had ever imagined.

IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.

stocksinsmocks commented on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust lubeno.dev/blog/rusts-pro... · Posted by u/bkolobara

BinaryIgor · 2 days ago

Don't most of the benefits just come down to using a statically typed and thus compiled language? Be it Java, Go or C++; TypeScript is trickier, because it compiles to JavaScript and inherits some issues, but it's still fine.

I know that Rust provides some additional compile-time checks because of its stricter type system, but it doesn't come for free - it's harder to learn and arguably to read

stocksinsmocks · 2 days ago

Yes, but more importantly writing a program that compiles in Rust guarantees you a front page spot on HN.

stocksinsmocks commented on Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech news.fsu.edu/news/educati... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

stocksinsmocks · 2 days ago

You’re absolutely right!

stocksinsmocks commented on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions github.com/ghostty-org/gh... · Posted by u/freetonik

QuercusMax · 8 days ago

I recently watched a mid-level engineer use AI to summarize some our code, and he had it put together a big document describing all the various methods in a file, what they're used for, and so forth. It looked to me like a huge waste of time, as the code itself was already very readable (I say this as someone who recently joined the project), and the "documentation" the AI spit out wasn't that different than what you'd get just by running pydoc.

He took a couple days doing this, which was shocking to me. Such a waste of time that would have been better spent reading the code and improving any missing documentation - and most importantly asking teammates about necessary context that couldn't just be inferred from the code.

stocksinsmocks · 8 days ago

I hate to break it to you, but this guy probably wasn’t working at all. That sounds like a pretense to goof off.

Now I could believe an intern would do such a thing. I’ve seen a structural engineer intern spend four weeks creating a finite element model of a single concrete vault. he could have treated the top deck as a concrete beam used conservative assumptions about the loading and solved it with pen and paper in 30 minutes.

stocksinsmocks commented on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions github.com/ghostty-org/gh... · Posted by u/freetonik

jerf · 8 days ago

I've been struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me.

But then my wife sort of handed me a project that previously I would have just said no to, a particular Android app for the family. I have instances of all the various Android technologies under my belt, that is, I've used GUI toolkits, I've used general purpose programming languages, I've used databases, etc, but with the possible exception of SQLite (which even that is accessed through an ORM), I don't know any of the specific technologies involved with Android now. I have never used Kotlin; I've got enough experience that I can pretty much piece it together when I'm reading it but I can't write it. Never used the Android UI toolkit, services, permissions, media APIs, ORMs, build system, etc.

I know from many previous experiences that A: I could definitely learn how to do this but B: it would be a many-week project and in the end I wouldn't really be able to leverage any of the Android knowledge I would get for much else.

So I figured this was a good chance to take this stuff for a spin in a really hard way.

I'm about eight hours in and nearly done enough for the family; I need about another 2 hours to hit that mark, maybe 4 to really polish it. Probably another 8-12 hours and I'd have it brushed up to a rough commercial product level for a simple, single-purpose app. It's really impressive.

And I'm now convinced it's not just that I'm too old a fogey to pick it up, which is, you know, a bit of a relief.

It's just that it works really well in some domains, and not so much in others. My current work project is working through decades of organically-grown cruft owned by 5 different teams, most of which don't even have a person on them that understands the cruft in question, and trying to pull it all together into one system where it belongs. I've been able to use AI here and there for some stuff that is still pretty impressive, like translating some stuff into psuedocode for my reference, and AI-powered autocomplete is definitely impressive when it correctly guesses the next 10 lines I was going to type effectively letter-for-letter. But I haven't gotten that large-scale win where I just type a tiny prompt in and see the outsized results from it.

I think that's because I'm working in a domain where the code I'm writing is already roughly the size of the prompt I'd have to give, at least in terms of the "payload" of the work I'm trying to do, because of the level of detail and maturity of the code base. There's no single sentence I can type that an AI can essentially decompress into 250 lines of code, pulling in the correct 4 new libraries, and adding it all to the build system the way that Gemini in Android Studio could decompress "I would like to store user settings with a UI to set the user's name, and then display it on the home page".

I think I recommend this approach to anyone who wants to give this approach a fair shake - try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel. The AI is almost the only tool I have in that environment, certainly the only one for writing code, so I'm forced to really exercise the AI.

stocksinsmocks · 8 days ago

I have vibe coded things like a personal finance forecast with interactive graphs in less than 30min of effort. I have 3 kids and would never have considered learning React to do that as a hobby project.

There are so many unusual or one off use cases that would have normally required me to spend several hours locating and reading API documentation that I now just hand off to the AI. I am a big believer in their value. I’m getting more done than ever.

stocksinsmocks commented on Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, and growing rapidly pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas... · Posted by u/Anon84

stocksinsmocks · 14 days ago

“ In a 2022–2023 survey of medical residents at tertiary hospitals in southwest China, 46.7% of respondents self-reported buying and selling papers, letting other people write papers, or writing papers for others”

This line gave me pause. So basically everyone is deceiving everyone else all the time? At least on the plus side, it did make me feel a little more optimistic about AI slop. A machine-written report rife with errors and fabrications is apparently at a parity with real human performance.

stocksinsmocks commented on Illinois limits the use of AI in therapy and psychotherapy washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/reaperducer

hathawsh · 16 days ago

Here is what Illinois says:

https://idfpr.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idfpr/news...

I get the impression that it is now illegal in Illinois to claim that an AI chatbot can take the place of a licensed therapist or counselor. That doesn't mean people can't do what they want with AI. It only means that counseling services can't offer AI as a cheaper replacement for a real person.

Am I wrong? This sounds good to me.

stocksinsmocks · 16 days ago

I think this sort of service would be OK with informed consent. I would actually be a little surprised if there were much difference in patient outcomes.

…And it turns out it has been studied with findings that AI work, but humans are better.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11871827/

stocksinsmocks commented on GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/kgwgk

Uehreka · 20 days ago

This is a genre of article I find particularly annoying. Instead of writing an essay on why he personally thinks GPT-5 is bad based on his own analysis, the author just gathers up a bunch of social media reactions and tells us about them, characterizing every criticism as “devastating” or a “slam”, and then hopes that the combined weight of these overtorqued summaries will convince us to see things his way.

It’s both too slanted to be journalism, but not original enough to be analysis.

stocksinsmocks · 19 days ago

I did get a strong sense of gilted nerd. Why didn’t they give ME those billions in research funding? Nobody sees that I am the smartest boy because they’re just a bunch of dopes. Opinion people are something I think we could all do with less of.

stocksinsmocks commented on Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce openai.com/index/providin... · Posted by u/gmays

bikeshaving · 23 days ago

How do you get an AI model to serve ads to the user without risking misalignment, insofar as users typically don’t want ads in responses?

stocksinsmocks · 23 days ago

I don’t want ads in my search either, and yet here we are.

stocksinsmocks commented on LLM Inflation tratt.net/laurie/blog/202... · Posted by u/ingve

stocksinsmocks · 23 days ago

> One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression

Ah, yes. It is an achievement in signals in a way.