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I think the crowd will split into those who just cared about it being rust and those who wanted some kind of leverage to tempt others into doing something. The former crowd will cease being, while the latter looks for something new to push.

I believe that one does not need to be overly concerned here. As with most things you will never satisfy zealots so it is sufficient to reconsider every once in a while when the status quo changed enough to warrant the effort (i.e. the actual arguments change).

It is always a choice to participate in these "culture wars" or whatever you want to call this. If you can stick to a decision you can limit the impact quite a bit, I've come to realize.


I've never been someone to tell others to rewrite in Rust but I am a huge fan of the language and have in fact rewritten a lot of things in Rust. I'd be happy for another programming language to excite me as much as Rust has for the last 10 years, and then maybe I'd join that evangelism club instead :). Not sure how PL evolution is going to go in an era of coding agents though, very curious how that'll play out.

They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone. Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change. It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention.

There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.

Why would you create such a blatant red herring?


Red herring how exactly? The conversation is literally:

”> In reality, they want to be dictators. Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.”

Edit: to expand on what I mean. I read so much negativity and hyperboles here on the EU. It is full of problems absolutely but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame. EU has problems but what large organization works better? US? India? China? Brazil? I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.


A red herring is a bait planted specifically to derail a conversation. I will make an example to demonstrate this in a setting which is less loaded. Beware that all analogies are flawed in essence, so a direct transfer to our conversation will be difficult, especially since I am trying to be blatant. But since I want to answer your question of where the red herring lies I feel like that is the easiest way:

A (raising an issue): This hole in the wall sucks, I can't stand it. At least if we were in a tent we could sew it shut.

B (planter of herrings): So you'd rather live in a tent than in a house? Don't you know that tents are generally worse than houses?

C (the innocent bystander lead astray): I also much prefer houses. You hear so many bad things about them, but in the end nothing is better. No caves, no huts, and certainly no tents. I'd pick a house any day of the week.

Did you notice that we are no longer talking about the hole in the wall? The hole could be required for mold-prevention, it could just be an oversight that is actually fixable, it might be a trade-off. But since we are no longer talking about the hole we will never know.

> ... but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame.

This is you talking about the hole in the wall. I am also not convinced by the original argument, but I do believe that there is some substance to be explored.

> ... I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.

This is you falling for the red herring. We don't know if the original poster lives in the EU. We don't know if they prefer it to a dictatorship, but it also does not matter. The original qualms are that there is seemingly no single point you can go to to stop the endeavor once and for all, which in this context is encryption backdoors within the EU. We could be talking about how the same mechanics that make this so frustrating are useful elsewhere; find out or explain why the things are the way they are. We could be uncovering a valid flaw in the system just waiting to be fixed; conclude that things don't have to be this way. Instead, we ask ourselves if we like living in the EU better than in other places. We've lost the plot, so to speak: There is no more insight to be had.

This is what makes a red herring so obnoxious to deal with. It is an easy trap to lay if you don't want to think about something or hinder someone, but takes so much effort to recover from. In the tent-example it is easy to see that we completely derailed and stopped talking about what matters. Unfortunately, reality is much more subtle and not everyone has the same goals in mind. At least on HN I'd like to try and keep discovery in focus and once we reach the stage where it's only about opinions there is nothing more to discover.


Very well put.

I don't find it particularly surprising that a company tries to influence legislation influencing their business.

What the headline is missing is that, according to the article, Meta is paying influencers to advertise for existing parental controls. If the issue is not that there are no controls, but that parents don't use them because they don't know about it, then I see hardly any evidence to support such a pretentious title.

Parents are supposed to care about what their kids do. The government can only mildly reduce this burden. To be honest, I think that there might not be enough information on how to effectively parent on the internet and this seems like a low hanging fruit to try. In the end a ban might be the best option, but exhausting other options first seems worth a shot.

One of the main arguments pro-Meta is that they at least try, even though a strong argument can be made that they don't try hard enough. I find it difficult to believe that preventing children from interacting online via social networks is achievable. As long as adults demonstrate the availability of these things kids might want to imitate/have the same interactions. I'm glad I don't have any stakes in this topic at the moment - foreseeing evasive behavior from either side is going to be a nightmare.


I'm a parent, and Parental Controls are garbage across all services I've used. They seem intentionally confusing and their options feel disconnected from the usage of the products at all. Since nobody uses these controls there is very little support available, so every permission issue I encounter requires me to deep dive and often still fail.

Parental controls for EA games are shit.

Parental controls for Amazon are shit.

Parental controls for Netflix are shit.

Parental controls for YouTube are shit.

Parental controls for Roblox is especially shit. They have games like "Gay Test" and "Femboy Test" marked as All Ages which is bananas to me.

The end result is that my kids can't use these services without an adult present, which defeats the purpose of having Parental Control in the first place.


Basically as a parent you don't want your 11 year old daughter chatting with adults. Unfortunately the internet cannot really accommodate this.


Surely the King is doing it, so that must be the correct way. Look, the King even wears clothes and is totally not naked at all.

That the world runs on Kubernetes is no qualitative statement about the correctness of its Raft implementation. You can say that it's clearly good enough to not matter most of the time, but that is a different statement. No matter who you look at, they're just cooking with gas like you do, and they can make mistakes in just the same way.

Now; I'm only attacking your argument. I do neither know nor particularly care about the correctness of that implementation itself. There's been better refutations of the claim you replied to in other answers anyway.


It's not even a qualitative statement about Kubernetes.


Kubernetes doesn't solve any technical problem, so the language it's written in is irrelevant.


I have a bunch of volumes that I'd like to get automatically attached and mounted to nodes on which their respective workload runs (which are automatically scheduled) who automatically fetch and mount their config files and secrets from a HA DB on demand. I also need some internal loadbalancing and integrations with something like certbot for all of my web workloads. Id also like to make sure that I get metrics and logs from every workload in some form.

Thats basically it for starters, what non-technical solution do you propose?


If k8s works for you, then go for it.

But k8s was invented so that "dev" and "ops" teams could play nicely when they are different org structures, with their own budgets, deadlines, etc.

If it solves some technical issue then that's incidental.


So you propose to just let Ops personnel handle attaching volumes and renewing certificates, that these arent technical problems but just one of team structure?

Please, do describe your solution for the concerns above. So far Ive only seen equivalents of Greenspun's tenth rule


What I meant is that the fact that the world is running on Kubernetes is not a qualitative statement about Kubernetes.


If you can predict other things by understanding something, is it truly lossy compression?


So we are reduced to code monkeys mindlessly re-typing what an LLM wrote to increase potential understanding...

Whatever this approaches, it is not a state of software engineering I find desirable.


I think this characterization misses the feedback loop that exists.

The OP is not sitting in a one-way flow of info:

    LLM->human->code 
but rather a the center of a feedback loop:

    LLM<-->human<-->code.  
Human-is-the-loop, not human-in-the-loop. Each iteration of that loop is fully driven by the human. Human creativity is involved in both directions.

I'd argue that anytime we drive an LLM through more than one turn (and/or more than one session) we are really doing a human-is-the-loop thing. The OP's extreme case of begin the only thing editing code is on a spectrum with the other extreme being vibe coding (never looking at output code, but still interacting with that output in some way).

Off the spectrum is what I call LLM-vomit. A human one-shots something and puts it out for others to see, suffer and clean up or ignore. This is code that is encountered literally out of context and can only be further improved (if that is even attempted) by approaching it from first principles. Such code is akin to people using LLM to generate an answer delivered to another human. Both flavors (sorry) of LLM-vomit are bad. I can prompt my own LLM to do that, don't do it for me.


I think some sort of visual paradigm is where we will end up. Something like Star Trek, where the system architecture and modules are visually represented in 3D space, and you see how the organization changes with realtime low-latency animation representing the changes as they are made. So you are still in control but just at a higher level. I see some prototypes and weak implementations of this sort of thing but surprised at how little is out there.


I kno you're not suggesting the visual system would drive coding at all or that it'd be a way to visually code (see: scratch). You seem to mean it as a visualization of the current code base. I'm hoping Google's code wiki is the first step in this direction. One thing I always thought was a problem with visual systems like this was understanding the codebase's architectural design at a level yu can't programmatically get out via a syntax tree analysis. Google's code wiki seems to be using an LLM to figure out the high-level structure of the code and then building the flowchart and diagrams from that understanding. Obviously there's gonna be issues and misunderstanding but I think that's the first step in the direction you're talking about. First it's text, mermaid diagrams and 2d. Next it's a 3d visual world of your codebase. AWESOME stuff. Someone @ Google.


The problem with all existing GUI coding system is that they make it really hard to make anything other than the types of things they were designed to make. You could do it, but you have to leave the path and get into the weeds of how the system works, which usually has several layers of opinionated code structures on top of the underlying language it's compiling to.

An AI visual/GUI coding system might be able to address that at a more modular level, but it would still come at the cost of transparency and reproducibility.


I'm not suggesting the visual system would driving the coding at all. I'm saying that it would be a visualization of your current code base as built by the LLM.


Agreed I want an IDE but only architecture. I suspect it’ll get superseded though eventually too.


Don't worry. No one will want human code in just a few years. This bizarre fixation that humans are decent at coding is a myth. Retype what the machine tells you? I would rather garden or move rocks around.


I used to like listening to music and reading books. Now my AI agent does it for me and it's so much faster at it than I used to be.


“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately”

― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


> This bizarre fixation that humans are decent at coding is a myth.

I wonder where the LLMs got their training data from.


It's the state of junior devs who shouldn't have been hired over someone better qualified for the role.

I can easily see a ton of cases of nepotism and EEOC violations being brought to court when the AI is taken away.


Well it's a transitional methodology during the early stages of a major shift in software engineering. Just look at what almost everyone is complaining about with AI coding, and then the inadequacy of their proposed solutions - this is just begging for new tooling that we'll probably consider obvious in a few years.


heaven forbid we use our meat to actually completely understand it in the first place


I think that's a stretch. People can care, but be unwilling to spend the time researching it or accept the trade offs that come with small browsers (which are often unsupported for applications you might want to use). There are many things someone might care about and at some point you have to prioritize. This topic in particular is practically a cold war where you always have to catch up on how things are, lest you loose it all. The required effort is disproportionate to the result.

P.S.: No true Scotsman spotted


It's a nag-box that appears every time someone visits a new website. Of course people are going to click it away as fast as possible. In the few cases you repeatedly visit a website one might want to reconsider, but by then it's out of mind due to not being shown after giving consent.

It is known that warnings and pop-ups that show up almost all the time yield diminishing returns. I think it was named "normalization of deviation" by some folks in a blog a while ago, and I believe that name fits. If you get warned about missing https all the time, or that something might be dangerous (even though it does precisely what you want it to do), it will loose its effect by the time you actually need it.

You can argue this is malicious compliance, but if you want it to go away it would probably be easier to go for banning tracking and personalized ads altogether. Eliminate the reason for this behavior, so to speak.


You can always set the editor in your --global or --local config though:

  git config core.editor "vim"
I do agree that using the default editor is a mostly a bad choice due to it being vi/vim rather often.


I know, but as you say that still presents a barrier to entry.

A lot of talented developers that I've worked with use visual git clients exclusively, so imagine their horror when presented not only with an editor they don't use, but also a text-based menu (`git rebase -i`).


I think the only missing thing for me would be to group commits, essentially squashing them for a clean history while allowing to unsquash them in case you need it.


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