It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
• AI subtly erodes our cognitive strength by making delegation seem like self-generated thought.
• After repeatedly turning to AI for answers, the first thing that erodes is tolerance for not knowing.
• True judgment is built by wrestling with uncertainty, not outsourcing discomfort to machines.
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:
---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
While most of California's population is packed in cities near the coast, the "other California," as some say, is rural, lots of it, and both the densely populated and the sparsely populated areas have unique problems to solve.
I have lived in both. IMO, the universal mail-in ballot is great in many ways, and please don't forget that the current regime of 2020 election deniers equates "voter fraud" with "We disagree with the results".
Two paradigms apply to the cult:
1. Every accusation is a confession.
2. An entire group is defined by a designated outlier. (Think "Willie Horton")
But technical issues of very late vote count are above my pay level to diagnose and fix, even to what extent any fixing is worthwhile. Think Pareto Principle. You want to fix the 20% of causes that lead to 80% of the problem. Both neglect and perfectionism are common enemies.
If a significant portion of the population doesn't trust an election system, it's not a functioning system. It makes absolutely no difference whether those doubters are 100% correct or 100% wrong in their beliefs. If there's a sizable portion that don't trust it, and instead of taking measures to secure the elections and prove to those people that they're secure, you just call them stupid cultists and keep the system the same, you do not have a functioning system.
If the critics don’t respond to facts or data, what makes you think they will once you “secure” the election? Even those recounts after the 2020 election — which found no substantial fraud — did nothing to convince them. The media tells them there is fraud, despite the evidence, and they believe it. If the media lies to this entire part of the voter-base, what you do won’t convince anyone.
Catering to propagandist’s lies is hardly productive or useful; you’ll just sink to greater and greater lows trying in vain to win them over, to the detriment of society.
The problem is that the US election system is a fundamentally flawed system, and with pre-existing distrust those "facts and data" might as well be equivalent to a "trust me bro".
My country had a similar voting trutherism cult. They sent goons to a whole bunch of polling stations to "prevent it from being stolen". They observed the whole process - as is everyone's right - and reported the counting results back live to the mothership. The outcome? Exactly the same numbers as the official count.
They got to observe everything and saw nothing weird, and with the way the elections are set up there was zero possibility of missing any kind of fraud. All arguments were trivially countered by a "But your buddy was right there, why didn't he say anything?".
The voting fraud cult died because there was no room left for lies. Properly-secured elections are fundamentally incapable of being stolen. They aren't secure because you can't find evidence of fraud, but because fraud is impossible.
Cult gonna believe what the leader and propaganda ministry say.
Denial is top of the list of cult traits. Also, projection.
These two are blatantly obvious, and the cult members don't see it because it's always THE OTHER GUY'S fault. Everything is. Fascist playbook reads the same almost verbatim.
Cults are very closed systems, and "breaking out is hard to do".
Reminds me of the time I booted up a Sun-2 workstation from tape.
All that was available for text editing was ed. (Surprise!)
I learned a lot about ed real fast.
Though this won't happen again, the lesson is "Learn the basics"
I learned a ton about unix command line utils via the "Unix Text Processing" book, not just troff. We had DWB troff later on, and it really was an education for me. I read in various lab data sets and created reports (with plots) in short order while others were repeatedly and tediously clicking away in Word or other.
I had no access at the time to fancy mathematical software tools. (recommended, especially FOSS)
> Create up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities for young Canadians.
This sounds like buying at the peak -- as we fall from the peak in the AI version of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Until we hit the bottom, I predict electrical power generation and transmission, or "Mechanical Canuck" style checkers.
I am reminded of the story that Apple was using Cray computers to design the next Apple products and that Seymour Cray said that Cray was using Apple computers to design the next Crays.
Count the number of people doing financial calculations on home computers versus logging into the mainframe. Do you remember VisiCalc?
I believe that common tasks, the ones that have meaning in everyday life, will move to personal devices, leaving the big jobs to big outfits who either deploy them internally (who doesn't love an arms race?) including governments, which do engage in arms races and mass surveillance.
And additionally, give away "AI swag" like Jeffrey Epstein allegedly gave candy to little girls [0][1]
"Free when you buy our phones/tablets/computers/glasses" and "Better than the other guy" [2]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414607
[1] https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/06/nearly-1-in-5-us-ado...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413555
[4] I was born in Boston. Cheers!
reply