Your precedence note is fair but it seems likely the whole "ancient aliens" subject was in the air around that time; pseudohistory has existed as long as history and this particular strand just emerges with the sci-fi boom and particularly the post-war fascination with UFOs.
Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.
A humble way for devs to look at this, is that in the new LLM era we are all juniors now.
A new entrant with a good attitude, curiosity and interest in learning the traditional "meta" of coding (version control, specs, testing etc) and a cutting-edge, first-rate grasp of using LLMs to assist their craft (as recommended in the article) will likely be more useful in a couple of years than a "senior" dragging their heels or dismissing LLMs as hype.
We aren't in coding Kansas anymore, junior and senior will not be so easily mapped to legacy development roles.
Sorry but no. Software engineering is too high dimensional such that there is no rulebook for doing it the way there is for building a bridge. You need to develop taste, much like high level Go players do. This is even more critical as LLMs start to spit out code at an ever higher rate allowing entropy to accumulate much faster and letting unskilled people paint themselves into corners.
I think of it a bit like ebike speed limits. Previously to go above 25mph on a 2-wheeled transport you needed a lot of time training on a bicycle, which gave you the skills, or you needed your motorcycle licence, which required you to pass a test. Now people can jump straight on a Surron and hare off at 40mph with no handling skills and no license. Of course this leads to more accidents.
Not to say LLMs can't solve this eventually, RL approaches look very strong and maybe some kind of self-play can be introduced like AlphaZero. But we aren't there yet, that's for sure.
I don't think that conflicts with what I said but perhaps counters with something I didn't; your ebike analogy implies a recklessness that the junior with the attributes I mentioned will be averse to. Conversely the senior with the full grasp of LLMs and the "taste" and judgement will naturally be ahead.
But the comparison I made was between the junior with a good attitude and expert grasp on LLMs, and the stick-in-the-mud/disinterested "senior". Those are where the senior and junior roles will be more ambiguous in demarcation as time moves forward.
The entire argument is framed through an anti-open-source view which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
It's an unfortunate presentation that makes it more difficult to sympathise with - and ultimately it may not matter; either somebody else will fill the gap or the LLMs he resents will help coders create their products without the libraries he seems to think are valueless without a set financial cost.
It's a sad world (or sad Internet) that when people do anything there's always a question of how to monetize it. Upload videos of you being goofy? "You should start a series! Make them longer than 8 minutes and you can qualify for YouTube ad money!". Write a blog? Similar stuff. TikTok? Go viral and maybe you'll find someone to pay you for... something.
And there's incentive reversal, I once saw someone who vlogs daily, his aim was to qualify for YouTube ad money, so everyday he rants for at least 8 minutes about how his life sucks and girls hate him (but that's fine because they just want to scam him for alimony anyway)...
> which sees participation as entirely motivated by money.
I think it’s rather that people need to eat. He admits that some wealthy devs will continue to work for free (do charity basically) but for those who want to make a living from OSS it will be harder and harder.
But yea as you said ultimately it probably won’t matter that much.
They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight.
Sometime along this path monetizing open source became a thing. Now it is apparently becoming less lucrative. OK. That's the nature of changes, but IMO it does not kill open source. It might eventually make it even better, as commercial open source has become too widespread and money corrupts. My 2c.
Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.
And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).
I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.
Stallman was propagating the ideal of Free and Open Source Software, where the notion of Freedom was paramount. I think that is the Free the poster you are responding to was talking about, not as in Freeware (usable without paying, but not necessarily open source).
This is demonstrating the difference that still exists between free software and open source. People who use GPL/AGPL want it to be shared and spread vs others using source as means to an end other than more/better software. There is still a problem with AI/LLMs though that basically de-GPL such licensed source.
You're thinking of open source projects that only need a few hours of work per week. Anything more than a few hours a week either requires someone to give up their full time job to work on it (switch to part time jobs/consultation is an option), or having multiple contributors which still require significant effort to coordinate at the end of the day.
Let's say Tailwind CSS gives up and stops the project, do you think there'll be someone else picking it up, knowing how Tailwind failed in the first place? LLMs don't create new things, they remix what are already available. It's delusional to think that you should use LLMs to create a whole UI library just for your application and spend enormous effort not only maintaining it but also train new team members to use it down the road.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay.
In my experience, people are willing to contribute up to 10 hours/week to individual volunteer projects they care about. That may increase to up to 20 hours/week for a year or two when they assume a key role.
A full-time job takes a third of your waking hours. Then you probably need to spend another third on various maintenance activities, leaving you with the equivalent of a full-time job to spend as you see fit.
Of course, when you have a volunteer-run project, your priorities will be different from projects that people do for a living. You will probably focus on what the contributors find interesting or important, rather than what someone else might find useful or valuable.
Open source is charity, it's unreasonable, even entitled, to demand someone work on it full time without pay
Of course, but equally it's also unreasonable and entitled to assume that if you work on it full time (or any time at all) that that work deserves or will receive a fair (or any) financial return. That's not what open source is about, and the featured post seems to miss that.
I also thought immediately of WikiTok and was confused by this exchange and the grammar in the quote here; I thought they were claiming to have made a VSCode extension called Wikitok. I understand now!
Polymarket settles bets via a blockchain-based voting mechanism which, in theory, reduces to a simple YES/NO decision based on two inputs: the contract wording and whether the specified conditions were met by the relevant date.
While that sounds neutral in principle, in practice it’s vulnerable to interpretation of ambiguous wording and to classic vote-weight effects, where financially motivated participants can tilt outcomes away from the most reasonable reading in order to profit.
It’s actually a genuinely interesting system and an unresolved design problem - one that Polymarket doesn’t yet seem to have fully solved.
They're also buying risk. It's just during the last 10 years buying a home has happened to be a fantastic investment, an easy way for an individual with the ability to get a 200k loan to turn that into 400k+ with 0 effort, especially during COVID. The market could crash and purchasing would become a risk for everyone but the wealthiest once again.
You've now reached the core of hacker news. Profiting from other people's need to have a place to live is actually great. Anybody against it is a racist and also a nazi. The real evil people are those who work and pay taxes and rent. The true heroes are the landlords. Now the dictator is trying to steal the profits from the landlord heroes. If you're a real hacker, you stand tall for the landlords and the corporate investors. Otherwise, we'll denounce you!
our goal was to build technology to safeguard American freedom and prosperity...
...America deserves more. While Silicon Valley hype centers around LLMs, AGI, and SSI, our focus remains on visual intelligence—understanding the world we see with our eyes, what we call Visual Super Intelligence
It's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify fellow citizens.
I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep pockets' fruit punch.
I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug “war” that had things going towards the police state thing. Police departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic
The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny".
This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.
Note the lack of links and that all of these Maduro reports originate from X which is rampant with polymarket grifters claiming secret insights into how the big bets are made.
Perhaps somebody here can provide a Polymarket link (not screenshots) to the proof?
I'm not saying the BBC has been scammed here but the only link I've found to the alleged account 404s. Perhaps its been taken down by Polymarket?
Anyway for anybody new to this, even if this checks out please - as ever - be cautious about the claims of easy money.
Thank you! Should have thought to check the archive myself. The link I'd found before also had a referrer on it from the X account which also made me suspicious.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/personal-details-of-thousands-...
reply