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Does using print() in Python means I need to understand the Kernel? This is an absurd thought.

That might be an absurd comparison, but we can fix that.

If you were being charged per character, or running down character limits, and printing on printers that were shared and had economic costs for stalled and started print runs, then:

You wouldn’t “need” to understand. The prints would complete regardless. But you might want to. Personal preference.

Which is true of this issue to.


>If you were being charged per character, or running down character limits, and printing on printers that were shared and had economic costs for stalled and started print runs,

and the system was being run by some of the planet’s brightest people whose famous creation is well known to disseminate complex information succinctly,

>then:

You would expect to be led to understand, like… a 1997 Prius.

“This feature showed the vehicle operation regarding the interplay between gasoline engine, battery pack, and electric motors and could also show a bar-graph of fuel economy results.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW10)


Wait what? You don’t use the model to investigate new areas of the code you are unfamiliar with, because you can’t trust the model? How freaking bad is Gemini and internal tooling at Google?

With Claude code, or codex, I am able to build enough of an understanding of dependencies like the front end, or data jobs, that I can make meaningful contributions that are worth a review from another human (code review). You have up obviously explore the code, one prompt isn’t enough, but limiting yourself is an odd choice.


The lack of trust isn't because of its abilities. The lack of trust is because OpenAI publicly suggested publicly about licensing our code bases. They hinted at a rug pull along the lines of "if you use our generated code, we would like to get a % of revenue you make from it"

As for Claude - as mentioned I do use it. But, I remember they use your code for training their models. I am not ok with this. We just have different priorities.


The UK (at least London) is cheaper than Seattle, and far cheaper than NYC.

Prices have gone skyhigh since lockdown. In fact, it's funny seeing the British media going on about "Cost of Living crisis" all the time, but failing to acknowledge one of the most obvious causes of it.

I predicted a massive price hike way back in the summer of 2020, because somehow we were going to have to pay for the lockdown, and many people didn't believe me. Now it's here, people are trying to tell me it was too long ago, even though economics can run in ten or twenty year cycles.


That's going to depend heavily on where you live in Seattle or NYC. London has some of the most expensive real estate in the world and I can say from experience that you get much more of an apartment for your money in NYC or Seattle than in London (lived in all three).

Yup, you are correct to not generalize, because Austin is one of the cheapest "cities" in America.

Not for a while, prices have gone way up here.

Once every infowars article and video is on the onion, they will instantly make sense. How long does it take to retrain foundational models and SEO to understand that those articles are absolutely trash?

> A redesign that gets replaced 2 years later is a catastrophe.

People forget how quickly Uber scaled, and the user impact of not being able to track your trips could be catastrophic to retention. There's a class of tech-influencer who think they can dissect past decisions on a blog post without being in the room when the technical constraints were being laid out. This is Monday morning quaterbacking at it's most grotesque.


> There's a class of tech-influencer who think they can dissect past decisions on a blog post without being in the room when the technical constraints were being laid out

The cost they are laying out are not that prohibitively expensive. I’ve known corporations where people spin up test clusters that cost 5K a month and forget about it. A business critical service can definitely ignore costs in the short term if they bring in customers. The standard practice is to just ship something quickly and optimize for the cost later if it helps bring in revenue/customers.

Besides, the napkin math isn’t always true. If you’re an enterprise customer for AWS, you get massive discounts, especially in the time frame they’re talking about. And when it comes to partnerships, I remember back in the day AWS used to let you do pretty much anything for free if it meant they could parade your project to other customers.


Yeah, I don't know the specific trade-offs here, but taking on some tech debt for two years of successful growth is not necessary a bad deal.

You can read the article and see it's not a tech debt trade off but someone not doing a back of the envelope guesstimate about how much DyanmoDB would cost to run their payments system on it.

I think X paid for itself, so it worked our for him.

  > Nikita Bier @nikitabier
  >  
  > If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
  > Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
  > Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X. 
  > X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.
I wouldn't be so sure when "any other country except US" usually apply to everything on the Internet, except Twitter after the power transfer

1: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/2037764895064867061


I'm pretty sure that claim about Japanese Twitter activity was true for most of the site's history pre acquisition

No. JP activity was always second to US, only the biggest "out there". Same is true for all Twitter-like social media, such as Mastodon and Bluesky. Even VRChat doesn't have a majority Japanese userbase. Japan actually becoming the top majority anywhere is an anomaly and a major reversal of power balance.

Still blows me away that Google had complete dominance in Brazil and then just threw it all away and shut it down a few years later.

Google Plus? I wouldn't be sure if that was a strategic blunder or if they were seeing something us in the public didn't. I remember it was more popular among not-so-tech savvy male of parental to retirement ages, which are still masses but not the sweet spot in terms of demographics. Besides they have YouTube and its comment section full of kids, which is the sweet spot.

Orkut, which nobody now remembers.

Orkut

Source?

It paid in influence, not dollars. Billionaires don't buy newspapers or social media platforms because they think they are good businesses.

Do you think if the agency hired a consultant to build this , a consultant couldn’t have made the same mistakes?

Lack of security theater is a good thing for most businesses


Usually they would just use an off the shelf product and extend it, so they wouldn’t produce the absolute horror story described in the article, no.

I’m not even sure what your last comment means, are you contending that it is a good thing this company violated multiple laws with sensitive patient data?


> Usually they would just use an off the shelf product and extend it

AI does the same thing an agency or dev would do. Those vibe coding platforms have a template for these things which is usually Vite + React with Supabase for the backend, the same as a dev might use because surprise the LLM trained on the dev's work.

OP's point is that you're not guaranteed a good outcome hiring an agency or solo dev either, in fact I would say you're almost guaranteed a bad outcome either way.


Apparently your assumptions about AI are completely wrong, if you read the article it produced terrible code.

Right, because the user provided terrible prompts. A dev / agency wouldn't have done much better.

There's lack of security theater and there's:

> All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one curl command away from anyone who looked.

They are not the same thing.


You've got to wonder from where did the "AI" parroted that.

A Stackoverflow wrong answer?

If a consultant made the same mistakes I'd expect the consultant to be held accountable, not the client business that hired the consultancy - they knew they didn't have the requisite skills and so outsourced to an "expert" (and therefore can't be judged for not knowing how to secure their software since they did everything possible)

In this case the "client" is fully liable for the security issues.


It is possible. If you select consulting that you know nothing about, and they know nothing about programming and vibe coded it for you... and maybe you dont even have a contract to held them responsible and maybe they dont really have a company either... Then I can imagine something like this.

It is physically possible for a consultant to write bad code. But you'd hope that a consultant could understand that medical data is extremely important to keep secure, and actually write it to have some level of security

Sure, but you'd hope that the LLM could understand that too.

And yet it seems it didn't

I'll bet you anything it did. If you ask any recent coding model to do this project is will strongly advise you to give up.

I appreciate a good UX improvement, and I respectfully appreciate you building this for your own use case.

But Dawg? Really!


If we don't innovate, someone else will. This is the very nature of being a human being. We summit mountains, regardless of the danger or challenge.


>If we don't innovate, someone else will.

Terrible take. You don't get to push the extinction button just because you think China will beat you to the punch.

>This is the very nature of being a human being. We summit mountains, regardless of the danger or challenge.

No, just no... We barely survived the Cold War, at times because of pure luck. AI is at least as dangerous as that, if not more. We have far exceeded our wisdom relative to our capabilities. As you have so cleanly demonstrated.


You assume there is the option of not pushing the extinction button. Nobody asked chimps if they wanted humans around. This processes are outside control.


Humanity stopped germ-line human genetic engineering (possible since the early 1970s) and humanity can (and should) stop OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

Datacenters that use literal gigawatts of electricity are not exactly easy to conceal from the authorities.


Until recently Claude wasn't building itself. A group of people with agency were.


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