"Please don't give me a present on my birthday. Anyone with a credit card could get me the same thing if you hand them the url."
i'm personally okay receiving presents on my birthday even if they were purchased from a store on the internet, and i'm okay receiving software presents on github.com even if they were purchased from a store on the internet.
I'm just so tired of these lazy, worthless comments about any AI-written software.
Look, I've been writing open source software for 20+ years, and after getting seriously burned out by it, I picked it up again with Claude (proof: https://github.com/jleclanche)
I can tell you a few things from that:
1. I'm writing better software than before, because AI is less lazy than I am. It's not necessarily always smarter, but writing correct software has gotten so stupidly cheap that it doesn't make sense not to do things right... so when you tell AI to do things correctly, it tends to know what you're talking about.
2. I'm more curious than before, because AI gives me time to explore many paths, very fast. A project like this one, like someone else said elsewhere in the comments, is more about the journey than the destination.
There is no "write me an X11 server but do it in rust and post on hn" prompt that does the thing. There's a journey of building, learning, understanding.
I'm not saying the resulting software is particularly valuable, but the journey is. This is HN, and you're shitting on someone who is using the most powerful pieces of technology we've achieved to go on a journey of discovery of X11 internals for the past 2 months. It's just shameful.
And yeah, if I were the author, I'd run claude over all the transcripts and extract a story with what's been taught and learned throughout. But I'm not the author. Just someone enjoying living in absolute science fiction.
The fact that you're being downvoted for sharing a constructive opinion and the rest of the "hurp durp this is slop" comments aren't is vastly more of a problem on HN than curious contributions like Yserver.
Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.
This is also describing an interview scenario where the interviewee is trying to throw everything at the wall hoping to stick. Sure there is discretion in how much to elaborate, but it is a performative act, where someone is trying to demonstrate that they have deep knowledge about a topic and can appreciate nuance that not everything is black and white.
Not OP also but it typically signals that you're not confident with your answers. If I am actually curious about it, I'd ask a followup question for them to expand.
Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications.
I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".
I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.
I absolutely do want to work with people who want to think jointly about interesting questions for a couple of minutes. Give me your long-winded (thoughtful!) answers. Let me see how you think. Let me see how well I (and others) can think through things with you. That's what the point of an interview is, IMO. And I've been gainfully employed in tech for 15 years now with that attitude, often in environments with other like-minded folks, often involved in the hiring decisions that have led me to work with those other like-minded folks.
So in the same interest of helping post-grad job seekers, do what you've gotta do to get yourself paid, but maybe don't presume that vibe_that_works speaks for every hiring manager.
That does sound like a bad org tho, sorry to say that.
Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.
Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.
But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D
Just trying to fix the misunderstanding: I am not saying that you will have a literal 25 seconds meeting with your boss's boss. I am just making a math argument taking typical orgchart ratios.
So let me take this a step further. You want to meet your boss' boss for 10 minutes to present them something. 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time. So if your initial idea was to "take maybe 1-2h" to prepare for this -> You are underprepared by at least one order of magnitude.
This is a very strange mindset. Even if you want to treat everything as sort of billable hours this doesn't really make sense because the average boss's boss's isn't paid anywhere near 144x. If a SWE spends 100 hours to save their boss's boss one hour, they're wasting a ton of money.
I mean I am no expert, but to me it sounds like the org you're describing seems to lean away from the "engineering" side of things and into the "org for the sake of org".
Which might not be ideal, because "orging for the sake of org" to my understanding consumes significant resources not going into building products/marketshare/shareholder value.
But then again, I'm no hiring manager in such a structure, so this is probably just an uninformed take.
> I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes".
But why?
Most of my most fulfilling experiences in tech have come out sitting down and hashing out a problem with someone else (including with managers/leaders).
It sounds like a miserable org if I am not expected/allowed to have an actual back and forth conversation with my boss. If I'm employed to be on a team working on an aligned common goal, why would I not use that collective skill and experience to my fullest advantage?
You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.
I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1
This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.
Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.
Wrong question if you actually like capitalism or value keeping it going. The question should be how to make the necessary reforms to capitalism to not have people try to attempt "the other ways" you're going to try to debate. The problem, it seems, is that Capitalists can't fathom a world where they might be prevented from doing maximum extraction.
I know what I'd be using those billions for!! To virtue signal like hell that I was the most nature conservationist billionaire in existence. Not "how can I say this is conservation and monetize it", real conservation with true stewardship of the land. But also that thinking is probably why I'm not a billionaire.
If you read other things these industrialists say, it’s clear that their actual argument is a xenophobic/white supremacist one. The panic is entirely political, not economic. We have no shortage of viable immigrants to keep the economy going.
An agreeable platitude, but such a people are not born, they’re made as their neighborhoods close off, their favorite restaurants and stores disappear, their children are excluded from playdates with school friends, and they’re rejected from employment in favor of one of the tribe.
Also do consider that you’ve advocated for the elimination of people holding a belief that is far more common in the world in aggregate than in the few high HDI countries
None of this happen because "they are strangers in their own land" (which is just a cowardly way to complain about brown people).
This happen due to economic pressures and incentives. The neighborhoods are closed off because it became too expensive. Stores and restaurants disappear when rents gone up and most people prefer to buy shit on Amazon or use delivery apps for food.
I have no fucking idea what you are talking about children being excluded from playdates.
Rejected employment "in favor of the one of the tribe" is plain bullshit.
Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.
>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans,
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature.
Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
>This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. J
The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.
The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.
You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.
>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.
More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.
>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.
Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.
>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.
Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging
It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!
> The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen.
And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met. So it's not just not impossible, it's by far the likeliest scenario.
> Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly.
The whole population of the world slowly rose from some 10-50 million before 1 CE to some 100 million by 1000 CE, to maybe some 2-300 million by 1700 CE. And then it suddenly reached 1B in 1800, 2B in 1920, 4B in 1974, 8B in 2022. This is a massive population explosion, with the doubling rate increasing rapidly, especially before the 2000s.
> People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years.
This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history, a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again. And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s (note that the record is currently 74), while men can and often do reproduce well into their 60s+.
Now, is it better if people who want to have children have them when they're younger, probably in their late 20s? Absolutely - mostly to keep generational gaps manageable, to benefit from grandparents' help, etc. But it's not in any way a strict biological necessity, and as fertility science advances, we have every reason to believe this will continue to improve.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
>And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met.
No. It's never happened in the history of the human species. It's unprecedented. When human population dropped, it recovered... but only because the fertility rate was still high. Fertility rate isn't population... a sub-replacement fertility rate is literally and exactly "this population no longer grows at all".
You're gibbering nonsense right now, and somehow it sounds intelligent to you.
>This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history
It's non-ideal. Awful? Dunno. But they can, it's documented fact, and a mere 20 years after that it becomes functionally impossible at scale. That's the window of reproduction, but I guess it's easy to try to change the subject because if people start thinking about icky teenage pregnancies then they can stop thinking about their looming extinction.
>a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again
I can promise that it will soon never happen again, because your entire species will become extinct in just a couple centuries. Your perfect utopia is coming, and more quickly than you might have hoped.
>And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s
No. They've become able to in exceptional circumstances. This isn't the same thing as "able to reproduce". For it to matter, it would have to be every woman capable of this, every time. This problem won't go away because 1 in 60 affluent women will have a geriatric pregnancy.
>This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
It's not hyperbolic. Not even a little. One of us is, but it's not me. And it's bizarre that you think it is... I live among lunatics. Go back and read your horseshit... you're talking about how there's nothing wrong and everything's just fine because some women can carry babies to term at age 74.
It recovers when having 1.1 kids per person on average does not mean making substantial sacrifices in quality of life over your entire life. Since many people will still not have kids, that sounds like 3 kids per couple being affordable in a comfortable, enjoyable, not stressful manner.
Right now you can guess that for many couples, 2 kids becomes close to unaffordable, and 3 becomes nearly unmanageable. Individually, you will see couples choose to do it and even to do it in ways that others both envy and chastise; but overall, it's not happening.
It requires many things to change not just in economy, but in society as a whole. It's not going to happen in a society devoted to growth, that's for sure.
> When civilization falls to the point that nobody can make birth control pills, if not before.
This won't save us. By the time civilization can't make birth control pills, it also means we've lost advanced medical care and now maternal/infant mortality kicks in. Nearly every baby born now survives into adulthood, barring rare misfortunes. But the idea that obstetrics will still be cruising along while we can't crank out simple pharmaceuticals is nonsense.
The trend is accelerating. We'll see 0.1 fertility rates in our lifetimes, you and me, and I'm old. We'll see central Africa hit sub-replacement fertility rates in 25 years. And even then we'll still have to listen to retarded jackasses tell us how it's no big deal, population will bounce back once things clear out. Buried deep in the human psyche is some truly superhuman level of obliviousness and denial of reality, and no logic or long term observation or plain facts are a match for it.
I'd take that bet. Except... the term of the bet is "in our lifetimes", which means that it ends when one of us dies, which means that collecting is going to be a problem.
For the record, I'm 64. "In my lifetime" is somewhere between 1 day and 40 years.
No, this should absolutely not terrify anyone, at all. The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth, which is going to fail one way or the other eventually. It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids than any of the other possible fail states.
The solution is to fix the economic system, not to worry that teenagers aren't getting accidentally pregnant so much anymore.
Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics. The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans to maintain our current economic system is absolutely asinine.
>The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth,
This is plainly, factually wrong. A sub-replacement fertility level isn't "the growth has stopped". It's "rapid shrinking has started, shrinking of the sort that causes even more shrinking". That's the concern.
> It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids
If they have fewer than 2.1 on average, that's not better. It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.
>The solution is to fix the economic system
What you're pushing doesn't fix the economy, it makes it worse. When there aren't enough workers to maintain infrastructure, there will be rolling brownouts. It's food rationing because there aren't enough workers to keep agriculture going. It's "there are no more consumer goods because the factories were hollowed out"... which leads to "there is no retail and no retail jobs".
A shrinking, aging population wrecks an economy.
>Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics.
"Robots will save us!" is juvenile fantasy. You're deluded.
>The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans
No one was talking about "increase the number of humans". Maybe you're just really bad at math. We're talking about "keep the number of humans steady, because shrinking locks us into a never-recovering vicious spiral of shrinking til we hit 0". Which is where we are now.
> It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products.
Have you considered just answering truthfully?
Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading?
That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship.
“I assume it's because he is seeking to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment.”
Fair enough, so if there were one “right” answer, that would be the one to give whether true or not.
But here there is no obvious right answer. If the employer is looking for a particular answer, the poster doesn’t know what it is. In that case, the best thing to say is simply the truth, particularly when the truth that the poster gives here is completely reasonable.
You call the response "cagey and evasive", but that is for an objectively a bad interview question, one wrung below "How many years experience do you have prompting Anthropic Opus? We are an Opus shop." People are not locked into their current way of using AI and it is trivial to match how one works with AI to match employers requirements. It's a question that deserves an idealized non-answer
as a rule the interviewee should be assessing for goodness of fit, as well as the interviewer. If my simplified nuanced answer to why I limit my usage of LLMs was poorly received, I wouldn't want to take a job somewhere likely to make me miserable.
"Unless I was really excited for flipping burgers, the menu options, the new McKidney, non-working ice-cream machines, and the legacy of Ronald McDonald, I wouldn't want to take a job somewhere likely to make me miserable".
A lot of jobs don't work based on those criteria. In a bad job market, IT jobs don't either. Especially if it's your 20th application with no response.
Unless I'm looking after about 6 months and my savings isn't as healthy as it once was. Or one of my kids is sick. Or pretty much anything happens costing money.
Then I'll be miserable for a little while as I continue my job search.
Practicality, sometimes, is more important than ethics when other people rely on you.
This thread is about new grads. Have you talked to anyone looking for junior positions lately? They don't get to choose employers anymore. Heck, many of them will not even get a chance to enter the field if the current junior hiring situation continues.
> But it doesn't make sense to do a job you'd hate. Just be honest, land the job where you're happy.
In this economy it's really a luxury to nitpick about the job when there are bills to pay, mouths to feed, a roof over one's head is a must. The well of have a lot more options regarding this.
That assumes using/not using ai will make me hate the job. Which is not true at all for me. Would be perfectly happy either way. (Or rather to say my happyness would depend on other factors.) Obviously i wouldn’t want to be the only team member not using AI in a team using AI or vice versa.
Oh but they will: https://gracenote.com/. These people sit and watch TV, note down every event taking place then sell the data. Search for Infostrada and how it came under Gracenote. That's where the info like "this is his first X since the game Y Z years ago" comes from.
If you're good enough at it, I suppose someone would. (There are television critics after all.)
But I'm just curious: if someone were to give you a living wage to do nothing but watch TV all day for the rest of your life, how many years do you think might go by before you would start to ask yourself, Is this really what I want to spend my one, exquisite, irreplaceable life on?
I typically seek employment for the free electricity, coffee, internet, water, microwave usage and coverage from rain. Some employers even offer showers!
The best benefit about working in a large office is that nobody checks the basement.
I think honesty is still probably correct - if you're struggling to figure out how to hedge.
I think you'd rather have good odds at some companies and 0% at others, rather than abysmal but non-zero odds at all companies.
And as an added bonus, you might get hired at a company where you're actually a good fit, rather than one you weasled your way into, and get to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment for a long time!
It's pretty easy as an interviewer to spot when a candidate is hedging on a question, and it's the kind of thing that might get discussed in the post-interview debrief.
"Wouldn't give a straight answer on question X" isn't an instant no-hire, but it's not a positive signal.
This doesn't make sense in practice. He hedged so not sure need to look at other factors vs he picked a side and he selected the opposite of what we wanted no-hire or he answered what we wanted small positive signal need to look at other factors.
It was a question of the form trying to figure out how you deal with "X", and he denied X having ever happened, despite that being a core part of his current role.
He was an internal candidate, we were interviewing him to see if we could trust him with more responsibility (more X specifically), since the new role shouldn't cover up X when it happens. The role involved doing X for himself AND for other people.
Similar to the form of "tell me about your biggest weakness" and you responding with "I have no weakness".
I guess it's a bit different when it's an internal candidate.
I've been on the recieving end of clueless folk trying to make me feel small when I've just been looking for a job, so I might be a bit sensitive about it! Sorry for any offense given. Thankfully I'm beyond that craziness now and can just do what I want for work.
instead of telling him out loud, "hey we see you're hedging and applying bullshit interview speak, your answer isn't sufficient", we asking in increasingly obvious but different ways.
It was an internal candidate so it would be awkward to tell him to his face he was floundering.
I mean maybe that is because I live in a still mostly not failed state (Germany), but I can't imagine that these things would be _so bad_ that living in fear of saying the wrong thing would be something worth considering.
Plus, and leaving that aside, I have my doubts that even if you did that, that that company would stay alive for very long.
Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively delusional people (like e.g. a boss that flips if you don't say the right word with regards to the current hype) to shreds eventually.
The US has no social safety net. Healthcare comes from your employer. Everything is centered around having a job. Opinions on AI diverge significantly and someone’s response to this question would be pivotal to me in a hiring role. The market is not great for job seekers. The hiring manager can wait for someone who aligns with their company’s perspective on this.
> Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively delusional people (like e.g. a boss that flips if you don't say the right word with regards to the current hype) to shreds eventually
"Eventually" yes, but while this phrase may have been about the stock market, it also applies to management: "the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent".
One concept I only learned a few years ago was the difference between "mistake theory" and "conflict theory". Rational decision-making is the former, political decision-making, including office politics, is the latter. It's important to know which of these kinds of battle you're fighting, or you'll make the wrong type of move.
Also, FWIW, I live in Germany and my unemployment insurance has run out because the job market is just that bad right now; I'm fortunate that I have enough passive income to support myself, but even then if my partner's unemployment insurance ever runs out I can't support both of us.
No, if anything, I would say a very unfortunate trait of existence right now is that reality does NOT tend to punish corporations for being completely idiotic, at least not very fast at all.
Look at musk's companies. They will basically never (on any near timescale...) produce GAAP profitability and yet their IPO is in the trillions. To the point that S&P refusing to suspend their GAAP profitability requirements means the index will basically never see this company in it (which I'm quite pleased about).
The power of already-accumulated capital is simply more powerful than things like "don't be completely pants-on-head stupid about a recent fad" "don't seig-heil in front of the world stage" "there's no point in having people come to an office just to spend all day on zoom" etc etc etc.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and companies can remain irrational longer than you can go without contributing to your 401k.
"Built enough" may sound like the same thing as "giving out housing for almost free", but it isn't. Also, cheap temporary emergency housing for a sudden extra burst of refugees may be inappropriate for permanent occupancy, I believe this is an example, it's certainly containerised/temporary *something*: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HUyQS6Sc1w1Y8GUH6?g_st=ic
That said, an idea has come to mind: UK and Italy have had schemes where a home can be purchased for £1/€1 under the condition the new owner repairs them (the repairs would cost 20-150k). Given some of the really bad stock I've seen in some searches, this may be a good idea for Germany too.
Last time I was in Germany I saw elderly people going through garbage bins in the park I sat at. I think you overestimate the safety net in Germany. In my European country the elderly sit at cafes drinking coffee, not going through bins.
Update:
Every street corner has a yellow garbage bin for recycling. That is where your plastic bottles go. Seems like a better system than having elderly going through bins.
Not OP but many people eligible for social benefits don't seek it, for all kinds of reasons (not knowing about it, pride, ideology, peer pressure, ...)
The government that runs the benefits programs. They make you jump through hoops to get any benefits. The first hoop is even knowing that a program exists that you qualify for.
Keep in mind that not every old person who searches garbage bins is actually poor. Some of them just have dementia. I personally know such people in my home town.
This a very condescending and privileged comment. The job market is much different when you're just starting out, and it's especially brutal these days for new grads.
Maybe it’s condescending, but it’s valid. I have made sacrifices throughout my career to maintain maximum integrity, and the least I can do is be proud of it, since I don’t have riches or possessions to be proud of.
Yeah I rage quit my job 27 years ago and have been a struggling honest consultant ever since. Clients who want actual solutions to their problems come to me. Does that sound arrogant? Well I also have no savings and don’t own a house.
I don’t regret most of my choices, but I am aware that if somebody paid me enough money I would walk away from my principles. It would have to be a LOT of money.
You were replying to “The job market is much different when you're just starting out”. The past is not now, and you are not just starting out, so your comparison of their position and yours is invalid IMO.
> and will do it again.
Good for you for sticking to your guns, I'm about to do the same with a company that has all but said “dig into AI or get left behind”¹, but those starting out as freshly minted grads likely do not have the luxuries that we might have² and the jobs market is freakishly competitive for them right now³ in a way that I don't think it ever has been before.
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[1] time will tell if I leave of my own volition before getting kicked!
[2] experience (both actual experience and experience “talking the talk”) to help getting the next gig, a mortgage paid off so making ends meet is easier, etc.
[3] It had been heading that way for a while, the recent explosion of GenAI+agnetics has made it worse.
Lack of adequate calories and nutrition negatively compound. You lose the ability to focus, you increase your medical risk.
I experienced that in my childhood. It’s terrible. I did very poorly academically when I did not have access to food. It’s astonishing to me how fast my academic performance improved after consistently having access to food.
Saying you would rather put yourself at risk instead of hedge your answer on a minor interview question in order to increase your chances of getting a job offer seems like an issue with prioritization.
That's fucked up. If those are your values, that's all well and good, but you can't expect someone else to make the same decision.
Job interviews are a performance where you demonstrate you understand what professional expectations are and can abide by them. It's not dishonesty to not respond "I drink too much" when they ask "what's your biggest weakness?" just like it's not dishonesty to respond "can't complain" when someone asks "how are you today," even if you have a lot to complain about.
Once I interviewed someone and they described their tax fraud scheme to me. We didn't go with that candidate. Not per se because they committed tax fraud; because they demonstrated terrible judgment.
Having any kind of integrity is expensive, financially, emotionally and sometimes physically.
Software development is not that high-stakes of a job anyway. There is always another interview. I got another one soon enough, where the employee AI policy fully aligned with mine, so telling the truth was an easy, pleasant experience.
Imagine you are a pilot or doctor. Any kind of interview reply that doesn't fully align with your values now carries a real risk for human lives.
What I'm telling you is that it isn't an issue of integrity, and that only makes sense from a false premise - that the strictest, most blunt response is what is truest, what is being asked for, or a reflection of your alignment with the organization's values. That's really not the case. If I asked you how you were doing would you tell me about the traumas you're currently processing? Would you feel like it was a violation of your integrity if you didn't?
If that's what your values are, okay, I'm not going to tell you how to live, but it would be premised on a misunderstanding of what "hi, how are you today?" means.
I am not worried about what my pilot said in a job interview, I'm worried about what the check pilot thinks of their performance. Worrying about what they said in a job interview is like worrying about what they scored on the SAT. Once that hurdle is cleared, it instantly becomes irrelevant, because it was never measuring what we're actually interested in. It's a filter for people who are completely unqualified, it doesn't really measure a level of performance or alignment.
Culture begins at the front door, corporate or personal.
I would expect absolute sincerity from pilot or a doctor during the interview, including history of mental health and professional mistakes. Authority over lives of people must come with full transparency. If you are caught lying or misrepresenting your experience and skills, not only you would lose your job, you should be blacklisted from occupation as well.
In every skill, everyone benefits from honesty, both employers and employees. But I am aware this is a minority view.
Again, while I respect that that is your view of sincerity, I don't agree, and I'm not talking about lying, which is obviously inappropriate. Framing is not the same as lying (though taken to an extreme it becomes a lie of omission). There's also just a misunderstanding of what is being asked by questions like "what's your biggest weakness?" Language can be ambiguous, just because a very literal and extreme interpretation of a question exists doesn't mean that is what is being asked.
I don't think we're going to bridge this gap but I also don't think that's really necessary. People have different values and it is what it is.
What if the way you use AI isn't particularly important to you? Are you willing to sacrifice employment for a principle you wouldn't draw as a line in the sand?
Sometimes it's okay to say "I don't know" and it's okay to say "I don't care" and it's okay to say "It doesn't matter much to me".
Every interview is corpospeak where you infer the intended meaning of words anyway.
We live in an ecosystem where we (engineers/developers) can promote ourselves and display our skills/acumen/values/professionalism/responsibility in an unequivocal way. Regardless of your experience level.
I bootstrapped myself from poverty to Staff software engineer, past the age of 45.
Is that privileged? Or sheer will and force of effort?
Privilege, yes. You had the privilege to dedicate time to learning skills required, obtaining an education, probably bias during hiring processes, etc.
Even though your position might be the result of effort on your part, you do have to acknowledge that you’re privileged to be in a position to expend that effort on what you want, instead of something else, like finding fresh water daily, or whatever. It’s not sheer will that you were born in a (even marginally) more favorable environment than others.
The term “privilege” here doesn’t just mean a trust fund nepo baby.
How far could you reduce this down? Do you only clap for malnourished Ethiopian babies that can't find waterthat grow up into full silicon Valley software engineers?
You can be dismissive all you want, but the point is to acknowledge you don’t understand everyone’s situation and you can’t make sweeping generalizations like “I did it and I can judge you if you _didn’t_ do it”.
OK how about some real achievements in life, is raising kids the hard way? Career is but a small portion of QoL and overall achievements as human beings, basically all of us software devs these days live have very above-average incomes although most feel like they are deserved or even not enough. So studying from poverty to software is an achievement and big move, usually, but what specific position afterwards is not that important or impressive, its just a question of a) mental capacity, mostly genetic and b) effort put into work, while not elsewhere.
Ie I increased my salary, doing same job, all 100% perm position, roughly 30x compared to my first fulltime software dev job after university. Who cares? It doesn't mean anything, just an afterthought. I am father of 2 small kids, and trying my best to be a good father and role model, often succeeding, sometimes failing. Its by far the hardest effort of my life, it takes relentless 20-25 years and I see otherwise brilliant folks failing at this hard left and right.
Also I wish folks in IT were a bit more humble and considered other engineering careers, with +- same effort taking to get a degree, and much worse career progress/compensation/freedom to choose one's path. Arrogance is much more rare there.
Hacker news is full of people having given up, building torment nexii and coping/rationalizing _incredibly_ hard.
So while I agree that privilege is certainly a factor, so is what I've just said.
A lot of people here live very cushy lives that cushion them from very pointy thoughts and questions.
As someone who too has to live in this world, I'd rather they didn't.
Highly paid enginners hiding behind "I have no choice I would be hungry" are usually just lying to themselves.
And you dont even get these nearly as often from people who work in lower paid positions. Or who are actually making moral tradeoffs that affects their income.
I have seen engineers take paycut or risk it because of this or that moral conviction. Not wanting to lie to customer, refusing job for gambling company, working one day less per week so that he volunteers for biblical something.
Just telling management no or just communicating about your work with ai or lack of it are not even one of those.
When I was starting out in my career it was "take the first job offer that comes along or starve/become homeless" so no, sometimes the personal cost would be unreasonably high to expect of anyone
This effectively does mean that I was not a moral actor at the time
I believe that I must be truthful because of my faith, though I understand people feeling pressure otherwise. I have had to quit places that I found lying to part of the employees before.
It is very sad to me that people do feel that pressure, and how the current job market is.
On topic with the article, I would love to be able to trust AI with more, but have found that I have some useful moments with it, but more because of Internet search not being how it used to be for quality.
I think it depends. The people that I know that have made significant sacrifices to live along their morals are usually people who 1) are intensely bitter when others will not sacrifice as much as them; 2) are completely understanding of people who will not sacrifice as much as them or acknowledge that they simply have less to sacrifice than others. For example someone who is willing to live the "dirtbag" lifestyle out of their car to dedicate to their outdoorsman activity who is either bitter others have the relative financial security or feel immensely grateful they have consistently good enough health that allows them to be outdoors with so little resources.
For example I think the decision to stick to certain morals is very hard if someone has a disabled dependent, are disabled themselves, or require consistent access to healthcare. There are different lines for different people of course. Our ire shouldn't go towards individuals who make these decisions but the people in power who force others to be in a position where these decisions need to be made.
This isn't a value item for most people. Employer doesn't want ai used great handcoding or employer wants ai used great prompt coding.
My truth is I don't care either way . I get the sense that's the same for parent poster. They just want a job and to say the right thing to get past the hiring filter. Even if I did have a truth its not something I would put above being remote, pay and how a company develops software. I'd rather not have a truth and not have a daily standup.
It’s also possible to not really hold that strong an opinion on things. Not everything is a pitched battle where doing what your employer wants means you’ve sacrificed your integrity.
From far away, it's hard to tell the difference between integrity and anti sociality. Even though I believe "software engineering integrity" exists, you can see how it's hard to tell that apart from "software engineers who stir dramas or are annoying to work with."
It's still just a bad answer across the board. Having opinions and being able to articulate and defend them clearly is itself an extremely important hiring signal regardless of a company's stance on generative AI. An AI-forward company will be looking for an answer like "I haven't written code manually since 2025, I use ..., I stay on top of new tools without drowning in hype by ..." If that's not your answer, you probably aren't a good fit for those companies, but companies that would be a fit will still want a similar level of decisiveness. Much better to give an honest answer that will sound good to the right people than a wishy-washy answer that will sound bad to everyone.
To give you just a little more context than other commenters -
You answer truthfully when you're interviewing from a position of power. Either you're already employed somewhere and you're taking your time exploring your options to see if maybe you can end up somewhere a little better, or you're an employer with applicants lined out the door and you want to winnow them down to the best match. In either case, you don't care too deeply if an individual interview sucks, you just move on.
Truth is always the first casualty of war. And when someone is out of work and fighting for their ~life~ livelihood, or a founder is trying to convince the first customer or the first engineer to take a risk on them so that they can get their baby off the ground, the truth dies real quickly.
> Have you considered just answering truthfully? ... That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship.
It's a job, not a relationship. It's best not to confuse the two.
In any workplace, you will occasionally have to do things you find boring or objectionable. And if you're hoping to find a corporation that is a "perfect match", it will only hurt more when they unceremoniously fire you because the quarterly revenue growth is 1% off or because you cracked an off-color joke.
> It's a job, not a relationship. It's best not to confuse the two.
A relationship is defined as two parties that interact.
It's not friends, it's not romantic, and it's definitely not family, but a job _is_ a relationship.
That said, GP is absolutely correct that you can fall into toxic relationships with your employer. Especially in the US where, realistically, we're forced to rely on our employer for too many things (e.g. healthcare coverage), employers can and do take advantage of the situation.
You're being pedantic. By your standard, I also have a relationship with the DMV, and to avoid a "toxic relationship" (parent's language), I should be honest with them about all the times I rolled past a stop sign.
I agree with their "two parties interacting is a relationship". Hell, I have a "relationship" at the checkout as they scan my groceries. But it's not deep or long lasting, so as you'd expect either party makes near zero effort.
Secondly, they never said that every relationship requires perfect honesty in all things. I'm not volunteering to my checkout person that I will eat that party bag size chips in one sitting. They don't need to know and it's highly likely they don't care. I'll be gone out of their life in a minute.
However, your entire relationship with your employer is roughly based on "benefits for work". It is a recurring interaction, probably over a significant length of time. So it seems reasonable to be honest about how you work to avoid making the relationship toxic from the start.
But then I also agree with "Do whatever it takes to survive." and if toxic relationships mean you keep breathing, well it sucks but there it is.
I am fortunate to not be in that "survival" position so honesty works for me.
Define objectionable? Not ethical is not illegal but maybe if you are okay with it, do it for yourself. Illegal is just dumb, you are still responsible. So at least, if you are doing, make sure you are appropriately compensated.
I don't think having trouble knowing how to tailor your message to your audience because of limited information implies it isn't truthful. Answers to jobb interview questions are usually very manicured and rehearsed but I don't think they're generally lies.
> Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading?
This just sounds like a standard tech interview. Mind reading to find and perform the secret “signal”. Nobody flips out if you don’t find it, they just move on to one of the other 1,000 candidates for the role.
I remember the graduate recruitment days - If you told the truth you were the only candidate they saw all day that wasn't the captain of the football team, top of the class and voted most likely to succeed - aka the worst candidate they saw all day.
Interviews work both ways: employers select employees, employees select employers.
Unfortunately often employees forget that part of the goals of an interview. An employer never forgets its goal.
Of course the asymmetry stems principally from who pais whom and secondarily from who can wait more to find a better fit. Sometimes that's the employee.
If one is not desperate to get a salary immediately, it helps thinking that the company applied for an interview and agreed to let the interviewer come and inspect their premises, their personnel and their processes. The right questions derive from that realization. By the way, that's what auditors do.
Even a truthful answer can require a lot of long-winded disclaimers because an interview is a new relationship without shared context. You have to state the obvious because nothing can be taken for granted.
This isn’t an AI problem. You can’t ask anyone to “be truthful” on any subject because everyone sees through their own world perspective.
Two people might say “they love camping!!”
But does it mean…
- Going camping twice/year and partying by the river?
- Or going 20 times per year, sometimes on 4 week long trips?
Both types of people will, with complete honesty, tell you “they love camping” and only you, the asker of the question, can decode what that means. ayli can’t
The two job interviews I had recently - the interviewers were clearly AI maximalists. My answer each time had been to the effect of "yeah I use it but I make sure to check it over thoroughly since it can make mistakes" and I'm guessing that wasn't the answer they were looking for.
It's a gamble of the dice as to whether the engineering manager is equally realistic about LLMs or has unrealistic expectations about what LLMs can or can't do.
We all filter and “nudge” the truth during interviews. We all cater our responses to the person in front of us. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Your interviewers sure aren’t.
It's funny cause I just interviewed some people last month and I asked the same exact question. And the answer to your question is probably. The technology is so new that I expect people to have a variety of different opinions.
From the 3 people I interviewed, all of the answers are very similar which is along the lines of: Kinda, but we need to be careful of using it, privacy, hallucination, etc.
All very safe answers and doesn't say anything new to me. If they had been more specific about why and their experiences with it, I'd probably favor them more due to their experience with it. It'd also signal to me that they form their own opinion rather than simply following the crowd.
It sounds like you're an AI-happy employer though. What if their truthful answer was that they never tried to use LLMs and refuse to because they waste water or because of an overconfident view of their own skills, or they don't want to help a clanker steal their job? These are all popular beliefs that can easily come from following the right crowd rather than forming their own opinion. In fact, from what I usually hear of people's opinions, they almost never come up with them themselves, you can practically predict people's opinions on some topics just from what they look like (what social group they belong to) or what other unrelated opinions they've already told you.
I guess that's the point though? If their opinion only comes from common popular opinions, then that signal is quite useless to me.
In this case though, I'll admit that it would be a negative signal if they never tried it even once and refuse to do so. You can't make a solid opinion on things you never try after all. It would be different if they at least gave it a shot and disliked it.
Yes. Hedging results in a middle-of-the-road answer that, at best, comes across as lukewarm. Companies want to hire people they're excited about and are convinced fit into their culture. An honest answer will get you more strong noes but also more strong yeses, and strong yeses turn into offers. Hedging, produces only weak yeses and noes, which tend to end in no offers especially in tighter job markets like the one we're in.
While this industry surely is frustrating and full of pitiful fraudsters, I don't think that what you're saying is fair or leading us anywhere.
Most of our stuff in this world actually does work, and the reason why it does is that skilled (teams of) people that care have built it.
Meaning that these people can be found in many _many_ places.
The skilled interviewer is rare. But if truly skilled they understand why people hedge and would not consider that dishonesty but a skillset the company might need. A semi-skilled interview might pick up on that and assume the worst.
Very few jobs are looking for opinioned most are looking at people who might fit in unless you are hiring to distory from without.
Because almost every HR department now has a directive to only let people through the screening process who say they are using "fully agentic workflows" even though that's moronic.
Unless we do our own benchmarks, we have to take all the marketing fluff from the frontier labs at face value, and all public benchmarks degrade eventually as labs optimize towards them. OP’s approach is wasteful because it is brute force, but post says that an ELO is kept, so this is also an experiment, and I don‘t see what‘s wrong with that. You learn which model performs well in which settings which may save resources later. It‘s also wasteful to keep working with the wrong model/harness/tools for too long.
In an interactive session, adding "Fine, but make the button red" after the model generated a first solution more than doubles the tokens used. As the model now not only gets the original code and the feature request but also the updated code plus the change request as input tokens.
Sending a feature request to an LLM and then sending the feature request again with "The button shall be red" only doubles the tokens used.
I wrote my own agent, and it sends data to LLMs in this order: "General Prompts (How to write good code)" + "The Code" + "The Feature Request". This means the KV cache will be used even when the feature request changes.
And output tokens are usually way less than the input tokens.
So I think that my approach is very lightweight on token usage compared to an interactive session.
It would be interesting to measure it for the other agents out there. Sending a feature request two times vs an interactive session.
That’s usually not true due to caching. It may be true if you leave a large gap in between, but if you send “make it red” right after, then it’s purely incremental
The cost is nothing compared to the outcome and time savings. What I see is that people with no money want to jump into this pool but they aren't having a good time. That is generally the case when you are poor.
I've been wondering for a while if ignoring most of that bubble and whatever it cooks up might be a wrong move on my part.
Glad to see that it's just noise.
I suppose the biggest effects these skills have is to prime the user to expect something positive.
Actually kinda like what we do with LLMs. Just put a word in their context window and they suddenly start behaving different because probabilities changed.
People have all right to be angry if basic responsible adult things like "quarantine the server spreading large amounts of malware" do not happen within the reasonable timespan that passed.
Not even a news. A hint. Nothing. Radio silence.
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There is a house. It is currently on fire (since over 24h).
So far, people have talked about how, conceptually, house fires are bad.
You can still enter the house just fine.
People saying "hey what about locking the door to not trap more people in it" are being shunned for the crime of breaking someones workflow.
The owner of said house is nowhere to be seen.
Passerbys stating "oh my god that house is on fire! get water!" are either ignored or reminded that there is no problem and they should move along.
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Idk man. I don't think any of this is real.
And I don't even use arch, lol. And after this thing exposed the institutional rot, neither should you or really anyone.
Unless you like ending up locked inside a house fire. I guess they provide warmth in the cold harsh reality of the 2026 internet.
The server actually hosting the rootkit executable is npmjs.com, run by a for-profit company, and they still take about 24h to act on our reports, while reported AUR packages have been processed in about 1-2h by people that work unrelated dayjobs on top of this, to self-subsidize their open source work.
Sorry you're displeased with us not writing blogposts faster on top of all this. The situation is already exhausting enough without people like you.
Look, man, I understand all that, but pulling the plug is something that takes at most 90s. Let's say 300s to add the "Warning: There is an attack. We're working on it. Systems are down for now" box
After that, you have all the time in the world to prioritize dayjobs etc.
It's not about dropping everything and fixing the root cause. It's just about taking stuff offline so that the immediate danger is mitigated.
That is not too much to ask.
It's not "people like me" having weird opinions there.
Shut it down. Then fix whenever there is time to do so.
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But hey. Finally a statement from someone with some amount of position in the org I guess?
I wouldn't want to be in your shoes for sure, but that's beside the point. Nothing here is unreasonable other than the ostrich-style incident response lack-of-process.
And I don't mean stupid corporate process. I mean "common sense adults are in the room" process. Throw waterbucket at burning server reflex.
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I mean I can see that your userbase absolutely sucks and could imagine that one would be scared of getting roasted for "interrupting their workflow", but this is not the way.
Their workflow is irrelevant.
As said, I'm all here for maintainer empathy, but only after the fire is put out first.
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Anyway, "institutional rot" is not an insult but a diagnosis. I'd love to be proven wrong on that, but I don't see it.
And trust me, I do know first hand how thankless this non-job is and what hell one goes through.
I have skin in the game. I just don't have a horse in the arch race.
"Hey, let's take down all of npm, because there's a package that installs something malicious, and some people may install it without reviewing it first. The thousands of other people relying on this service can wait."
Do you not realize how crazy of an request that is?
You do realize that the people relying on the service also get served wormable malware, right?
The service is already disrupted.
It is not that a disruption could be _avoided_. The discussion makes no sense.
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Hell, even if I would be completely wrong in that assessment (not sure how, but let's assume that's the case)
You can still put up a banner. "Hey, FYI: We're under attack".
If not right away, then at the very least the moment media reports on it. And if media reported wrong, the banner says "Don't worry people. Media got it wrong."
> You do realize that the people relying on the service also get served malware, right? The service is already disrupted.
Huh? No they don't. I'm not sure what part of the attack your misunderstood, but most people are going to be completely unaffected by this. None of the infrastructure or anything like that got compromised. I updated my AUR packages 2 hours ago, and didn't get served any malware.
Again, there's probably some kind of malware on npmjs at any given time. You don't just shutdown the entire server because of that, that's madness.
As said, I don't think discussing this makes sense, as our perceptions of reality seem to be fundamentally incompatible.
But regardless, let's try a different perspective: PR/Public perception
The moment multiple well-known media outlets start publishing a story stating that "stuff is happening", the situation changes.
At that point, regardless of how you personally feel about this, the narrative is "people are affected".
This forces your hand.
Which is not(!) to say that it would mean that you would have to accept what the media says. The media could be full of shit talking nonsense. *But* at that point, you need to either correct them, or do the correct action as per their narrative.
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I don't think that PR/Public perception is the main relevant perspective here - in fact I'm just mentioning it, because all the much stronger much more technical arguments seem to be lost on you.
But there you go.
Your argument makes no sense, because "ackschually I'm unaffected" is just russian roulette survivorship bias, but even if it _would_ make sense, the system logic of the next outer layer cans that take.
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Anyway. The fact that people (not just you, mind you) are so busy playing "well ackschually" while there is an active wormable attack going on is precisely why I said "institutional rot". Although, I think I need to correct that to "cultural rot".
Priorities are broken. The wrong metrics are being optimized here.
I would love to hear more about this from the actual Arch maintainers instead of random users with opinions, but.. not sure where that communication would be. I didn't find any. And I did go looking!
Why are you still misunderstanding when other replies already explained?
AUR has always been AT YOUR OWN RISK.
To use your analogy, the house is an underwater cave with a big scary sign warning you that you will die, you go in without training, and blame the cave for not being safe.
Even if there's a lot of noise there's clearly something real there. People are shipping more working products than was previously possible, they're debugging faster than was previously possible, and various other things. I mean you can go fishing for things to confirm your skepticism if you want but it's pretty clear to me.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that you can't filter signal from noise.
So the actual problem statement is not "how do I keep up" but "how do I correctly tune my filter", which is solvable.
The biggest challenge there I think is that many people are not prepared for just how sharp and uncompromising that filter needs to be, but that too is solvable.
If you're not going to experiment at all you're not going to be able to do that. Agentic coding was basically a joke the first time I tried it. Now it isn't.
There is no need to put this code on GitHub. Everyone with an API key can achieve the same if you hand them the prompt.
This is like committing build artifacts to version control.
On top it's such a lame idea. "What if rewrite in rust applied to X server". Fits on a napkin. Man what a nothingburger :(
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