zkry (u/zkry) - Readit News

zkry commented on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? mastodon.world/@knowmadd/... · Posted by u/novemp

seyz · a month ago

LLM failures go viral because they trigger a "Schadenfreude" response to automation anxiety. If the oracle can't do basic logic, our jobs feel safe for another quarter.

Wrong.

zkry · a month ago

At least this Schadenfreude is better than the Schadenfreude AI boosters get when people are made redundant to AI. I can totally see some people getting warm fuzzies, scolling Tiktok, watching people crying having lost not only their job, but their entire career.

Im not even exaggerating, you can see these types of comments on social media

zkry commented on Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management businessinsider.com/andre... · Posted by u/cl42

megaloblasto · 7 months ago

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

zkry · 7 months ago

I don't think this line of reasoning holds. The only thing people should look at are peer reviewed studies, lots of them ideally, and with no conflict of interest. Who's getting productivity gains? What kinds of work are they doing? What doesn't work so well? All of these questions should be investigated by studies. People feeling productivity gains doesn't imply the gains exist.

Otherwise it sounds like "many people have had their lives changed by {insert philosophical/religious movement}, so if you're not finding it true you should look into what's wrong with you."

zkry commented on Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024) sgt.hootr.club/molten-mat... · Posted by u/Vedor

themafia · 7 months ago

> LSP (Language Server Protocol) was the final nail in the coffin of Emacs for me.

It was the opposite for me. Emacs + LSP + many other common conveniences all bind together so beautifully and efficiently that I can't imagine using any other IDE at this point.

zkry · 7 months ago

And I have to say that the whole trope of "Emacs may be able to do anything but you have to configure a lot to get it to work" has has got to be pure exaggeration at this point with things like eglot. I had the most painless experience setting up LSP for Java (among many others).

zkry commented on Software Rot permacomputing.net/softwa... · Posted by u/pabs3

xenodium · 7 months ago

While Emacs itself is not entirely immune to software rot (external dependencies and all), it’s truly amazing how little to no rot is experienced by elisp software (packages). If you find an Emacs package written 15 years ago, the chances of successfully running out of the box are incredibly high.

zkry · 7 months ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. As long as you're not depending on any external packages things are very stable. Like, if you're package depends on adding advice to some other package's random internal function, then yeah, it could easily break.

It's a great feeling knowing any tool I write in Elisp will likely work for the rest of my life as is.

zkry commented on 6 weeks of Claude Code blog.puzzmo.com/posts/202... · Posted by u/mike1o1

jansan · 7 months ago

A lot of things that the author achieved with Claude Code is migrating or refactoring of code. To me, who started using Claude Code just two weeks ago, this seems to be one of the real strengths at the moment. We have a large business app that uses an abandoned component library and contains a lot of cruft. Migrating to another component library seemed next to impossible, but with Claude Code the whole process took me just about one week. It is making mistakes (non-matching tags for example), but with some human oversight we reached the first goal. Next goal is removing as much cruft as possible, so working on the app becomes possible or even fun again.

I remember when JetBrains made programming so much easier with their refactoring tools in IntelliJ IDEA. To me (with very limited AI experience) this seems to be a similar step, but bigger.

zkry · 7 months ago

On the other hand though, automated refactoring like in IntelliJ can scale practically infinitely, are extremely low cost, and are gauranteed to never make any mistakes.

Not saying this is more useful per se, just saying that different approaches have their pros and cons.

zkry commented on Jane Street's sneaky retention tactic economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/yawaramin

pavel_lishin · 9 months ago

We're currently (very slowly) working to deprecate our Elixir codebase.

I wasn't around when it was adopted, but it definitely felt like someone joined the company, evangelized Elixir, hired maybe half a dozen people who were really good at it, and then left.

Eventually, our Elixir experts evaporated, leaving maybe two people who truly understand it and can do difficult work in it. That's not sustainable.

Someone else in the comments here said that a good developer can be productive in any language, and that's true - but why hobble people? It's like saying a good surgeon can be productive with a butterknife and a pot of boiling water, or a good artist can be productive with a charred stick.

zkry · 9 months ago

From reading this, it sounds more like a management problem more than anything else. For example, retention goals should be such that all a companies experts (at anything, not just language) don't evaporate overnight and hiring goals should be such that experts are retrained and re-hired.

I think the analogy is also off a bit. I't be more apt to say a good surgeon should be expected to use electrosurgical units from different manufacturers, which is a completely fair expectation.

zkry commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k

tdeck · 10 months ago

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it.

If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in innovative products and improvements to existing products. And we'd expect that to be in a way that would be obvious to customers and users, not just in the form of some blog post or earnings call.

For cost center work, this would lead to layoffs right away, sure. But companies that make and sell software should be capitalizing on this, and only laying people off when they get to the point of "we just don't know what to do with all this extra productivity, we're all out of ideas!". I haven't seen one single company in this situation. So that makes me think that these decisions are hype-driven short term thinking.

zkry · 10 months ago

I find that this is on point. I've seen a lot of charts on the AI-hype side of things showing exponential growth of AI agent fleets being used for software development (starting in 2026 of course). Take this article for example: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer

Ok, so by 2027 we should be having fleets of autonomous AI agents swarming around every bug report and solving it x times faster than a human. Cool, so I guess by 2028 buggy software will be a thing of the past (for those companies that fully adopt AI of course). I'm so excited for a future where IT projects stop going overtime and overbudget and deliver more value than expected. Can you blame us for thinking this is too good to be true?

zkry commented on Edamagit: Magit for VSCode github.com/kahole/edamagi... · Posted by u/tosh

zkry · 10 months ago

Magit is truly a magnificent application and it's telling how it's ideas are ported to other editors.

Reference to the previously posted "You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy"

> Emacs is a Gnostic cult. And you know what? That’s fine. In fact, it’s great. It makes you happy, what else is needed? You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy.

Juxtaposing Emacs with the adjectives obsolescent, and undead is sad to read. Emacs is constantly reinventing and readapting itself, and just like Emacs takes and incorporates the best ideas from other tools, ideas from Emacs find their way to other environments.

zkry commented on Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs? · Posted by u/bjackman

zkry · 10 months ago

Use cases like the ones you mentioned having are truly amazing. It's a shame that the AI hype machine has left us thinking of these use cases as practically nothing, leaving us disappointed.

My belief is that true utility will make itself apparent and won't have to be forced. The usages of LLMs that provide immense utility have already spread across most the industry.

zkry commented on At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work nytimes.com/2025/05/25/bu... · Posted by u/milkshakes

specialist · 10 months ago

Yes and (adjacently):

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.

zkry · 10 months ago

I feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.