uludag (u/uludag) - Readit News

uludag commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

baq · 2 days ago

Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line

uludag · 2 days ago

I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need.

There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc.

The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start adopting agentic AI tools, but as things stand now, I'm not seeing any pressing need.

Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.

uludag commented on Eight more months of agents crawshaw.io/blog/eight-mo... · Posted by u/arrowsmith

uludag · 2 days ago

> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.

It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)

Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.

It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.

uludag commented on Who's Coding on Their Phone? · Posted by u/raunaqvaisoha

raunaqvaisoha · 9 days ago

I've been thinking with the advancements of agents being more capable of being left alone and just treated like a co-worker, is anyone actually finding themselves doing the assingment tasks from their phone, away from their laptop.

uludag · 8 days ago

This logic seems reversed though. If someone is primarily vibe coding, why wouldn't a phone be just fine?

Either way, there are still completely legitimate reasons why one would want to code on their phone, with or without AI.

uludag commented on Needy Programs tonsky.me/blog/needy-prog... · Posted by u/robenkleene

florians · 3 months ago

And soon even your oven will require an account with subscription so that the built-in camera can notify you when the bread is browning and it asks for permission to lower the temperature

uludag · 3 months ago

I'm imagining it even worse: you have to pay a subscription to get your oven to go above a certain temperature and for it to "fast pre-heat" and to not have it show you ads.

uludag commented on AI model trapped in a Raspberry Pi blog.adafruit.com/2025/09... · Posted by u/harel

acbart · 5 months ago

LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.

uludag · 5 months ago

I wonder what would happen if there was a concerted effort made to "pollute" the internet with weird stories that have the AI play a misaligned role.

Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation.

Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?

uludag commented on The demo scene is dying, but that's alright datagubbe.se/sceneherit/... · Posted by u/zdw

gjsman-1000 · 5 months ago

And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.

It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?

The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?

(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)

uludag · 5 months ago

The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.

If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.

uludag commented on Google's new AI mode is good, actually simonwillison.net/2025/Se... · Posted by u/xnx

lxe · 5 months ago

Current explosion in AI in general is "good". We tend to over-criticize and nit-pick it as what I believe is a natural response that comes from a "communal subconsciousness" -- even if us as individuals won't admit it, as a culture we are scared and averse to what's happening.

uludag · 5 months ago

I think this communal subconscious response is coming from a valid place though. I will call the current explosion in AI if:

  - it causes mass unemployment and social unrest
  - leads to a further concentration of wealth and increase in wealth inequality
  - it means I have to work more, produce more, all for the same wage or less
  - it's implementation leads to large societal harms such as increased isolation/loneliness
  - it ends up being overhyped causes a large economic crisis

These scenarios aren't fantasy and a lot of them are being talked about. Technologies can just be a net bad. The critics aren't some reactionary, scared mob against the enlightened. I think a lot of us have seen the playbook tech companies use and our probabilities that a company will end up being just plain bad are a lot higher now.

uludag commented on Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI wheresyoured.at/why-every... · Posted by u/speckx

Jimmc414 · 5 months ago

Cursor burning cash to subsidize Anthropic's losses to subsidize Amazon's compute investments is their problem, not mine.

The people writing all of these "AI is unprofitable" pieces are doing financial journalism similar to analyzing the dot-com bubble by looking at pets.com's burn rate. The infra overspend was real as well as the bankruptcies, but it existentially foolish for a business to ignore the behavioral shift that was taking place.

I have to constant remind myself to stop arguing and evangelizing about AI. There is a growing crowd who insists that AI is a waste of money and that AI cannot do things I'm already doing on a daily basis.

Every minute spent explaining to AI skeptics is a minute not spent actually capitalizing on the asymmetry. They don't want to hear it anyway and I have little incentive to convince anyone otherwise.

The companies bleeding money to serve AI below cost prices won't last, but thats all more the reason use them now while they're cheap.

uludag · 5 months ago

I think the main fear is that these products will become so enshitified and engrained into everywhere that, looking back, we'll be wishing we didn't depend so much on the technology. For example, the Overton window around social media has shifted so much to the point that it's pretty normal to hear views that social media is a net negative to society and we'd be better off without it.

Obviously the goal of these companies is to generate as much profit as possible as soon as possible. They will turn the tables eventually. The asymmetry will go in the opposite direction, maybe to the extend that one takes advantage of the current asymmetry.