All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.
Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".
Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s
(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)
Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.
Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.
and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)
and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!
I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?
So far just 3-4 at this point, some I guess figure out what I try to do when I ask for their company name and HN username, none of them been YC companies so far AFAIK. I don't know why they send specifically me emails, I guess either some automated system or they themselves see I spend way too much time on HN already, maybe just based on the amount of comments, I do have quite a bit of free-time :)
The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:
1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.
2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.
3. Really strong image generation capabilities.
That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.
I’ve heard about that “open secret” and I don’t understand.
What’s the incentive for Anthropic to pump up the token usage on their top end plan? Is it to move Pro users up to Max? That’s the only plausible idea I can think of.
Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.
> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.
There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.
Software engineering is the practice of taking a concrete problem, converting it into a set of rules (a world model), and then converting those rules into something a computer can execute for a human user.
As long as AI cannot dynamically generate a true world model on the fly, it will continue to fall short.
As I've started a greenfield project lately, and it's been almost entirely LLM driven development, I have concluded that there is no process or step that actually enables them to actually understand a problem.
Humans can think abstractly, parsing a problem space and condensing it into a solution. That is, I can take 10 different seemingly unrelated problems, and determine they're all the same class of problem, and then create a novel (ish) solution for that problem. LLMs simply cannot build that world model AND even when explicitly told the solution, they can't actually hold the model while authoring code.
They're fake thinking, and no amount of harnesses, or increasing the number of models is going to change that.
There was a post here before: tech companies have become adept at taking a thick thing (like friendship) and boxing it up to give you the same surface level feelings but it's not _real_ it's a thin version (following an influencer, social media). And you feel like you're friends with these people, but real friendships are not so simple, they're not so messy.
LLMs are robbing us of thick thinking and convincing us that thin thinking is something real. I don't think anyone can legitimately claim that LLMs are improving their product's actual problem modeling space, beyond just being a randomness / entropy generator where a human can actually choose.
Human written books, code, art are fundamentally shaped by having a true understanding of the abstract problem space and compressing it down it a way that makes sense to other humans. LLMs are just word salad masquerading as intelligence. Letting them into our world is a mistake that will take years to correct.
For a long time I've been thinking about like how to solve modern problems with modern technology, but maybe in the end the solution is to just like turn everything off and get outside more
People said the exact same thing about web searches, and I think there's a lot of devs who would instant search for every issue they hit.
Isn't this just better web search?
On the other hand, it definitely feels like it might be too big a step in the spoon feeding direction.
Writing code without AI feels like art, and writing it with AI feels like painting a wall: get it done quickly, cheaply, and good enough that people don't see issues.
It's the art part of engineering that's being lost, AI has no appreciation of elegance. It has no empathy for cognitive overhead of bad code or poor-fit design patterns.
But should code be art? As much as there are '100s of ways to skin a cat', it is also deterministic at the end of the day. It either does, or does not, do what it was designed to do.
Sculptors can turn clay into wonderful pottery. Masons can turn it to brick. Both have their purposes, and it is wrong to assume everyone with a ball of clay is looking to make pottery.
I understand at the moment, part of the 'art' of code is ease of legibility, being concise, well documented, following standards, etc. But when I need a quick script to automate a process I've done 100 times, I personally can fumble around in python for an hour or two, or give the current trendy LLM a few shots and get to the same result. For me, I am happy to do it "quickly, cheaply, and good enough that people don't see issues." Even things like iOS Shortcuts, Home Assistant automations, etc.
I wouldn't build a start-up based on vibed code, though. I get the extents
imo it feels like art because there are an infinite number of needs to keep in mind when writing code and everyone prioritizes them differently. Even when the output is the same, different implementations will have different effects elsewhere: performance, legibility, security, type safety, error prone, etc.
So I would say "it either does, or does not, do what it was designed to do" isn't the full picture. I'm not sure it needs to truly be art though.
I would argue that your 2 first examples are exceedingly apt. Sure, sculptors can turn clay into works of art and masons can build cathedrals. However, a potter can throw a basic jug to hold wine that doesn't have any care out into it besides being functional, and a mason can build a retaining wall.
These second examples aren't any less valuable, they solve real problems and improve people's lives. However, they aren't really art. Writing code is the same thing. I'm not creating art when I hack together yet another CRUD app that is basically plumbing together existing modules with a tiny bit of logic sprinkled on top, but it improves how our business functions and makes the employees who use the software more productive. That isn't art, but it's useful.
There is code out there that is art. But most programmers aren't writing it. We're writing the boring everyday stuff. Very few masons built cathedrals, but building a retaining wall is useful too.
It's basically any technology. The whole point of technology is essentially to reduce friction.
I have something ranging from learned helplessness to total indifference about taking care of horses, or how to appropriately pitch a tent to survive a cold night, because modernity doesn't require me to care about these things.
>What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos?
Well, for its own storage: it's an immutable OS that you can configure via a single YAML file, it automatically provisions appropriate partitions for you, or you can even install the ZFS extension and have it use ZFS (no zfs on root though).
For application/data storage there's a myriad of options to choose from[0]; after going back and forth a few times years ago with Longhorn and other solutions, I ended up at rook-ceph for PVCs and I've been using it for many years without any issues. If you don't have 10gig networking you can even do iSCSI from another host (or nvmeof via democratic-csi but that's quite esoteric).
>How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term?
It's Linux so pretty good! No complaints and everything just works. If something is down it's always me misconfiguring or a hardware failure.
It was years ago but I recall high CPU usage being an issue in particular.
In general it's just not as battle tested as ceph and I needed something more bulletproof.
However I will say this: I'm sure that issue with the CPU usage was fixed (I was watching the GitHub issue) and you might not need your distributed FS to be CERN ready for your lab; AND the UI and built-in backups Longhorn offers are great for beginners so I'd suggest giving it a try if you don't already know you want ceph or OpenEBS Mayastor for the performance and so on.
My tech friends and I cannot wait for this agentic bubble to pop. Much like the dotcom bubble, there's absolutely value in AI but the hype is absurd and is actively hurting investments into reasonable things (like just good UX).
The hype and zealotry remind me of a cult. And as I go higher up the chain at my big tech company, the more culty they are in their beliefs. And the less they believe AI can do their specific jobs, and the less they have actually tried to use AI beyond badly summarizing documents they barely read before.
AI, as far as I can tell, has been a net negative for humans. It's made labor cheaper, answers less reliable, reduced the value we placed on creativity and professionals in general, allows mass disinformation, and mostly results in people being lazier and not learning the basics of anything. There are of course spots of brightness, but the hype bubble needs to burst so we can move on.
My belief that's kind of settling in after a few years of observation is that I absolutely believe the "hype" claim that AI is a force multiplier. However, lots of things out there are terrible and shouldn't be force multiplied (spam, phishing, scams, etc) or say like, people that are very bad at their jobs. If people like this's output is multiplied, it clearly can and will be very bad. I have seen this play out at a small scale already on some teams I've worked with.
For the maybe ~1-5% of people out there that have something valuable to contribute (that's my number, and I fully believe it) then I think it can be good, but those types also seem to be the most wary of it.
What depresses me is all these people that are leading us with these stupid decisions re: AI will get bonuses and promotions after the bubble pops. All the useless effort getting AI everywhere will be forgotten, no one will care or remember the idiotic decisions and we will all be chasing the new new thing.
Sincerity will not win in the end. VC money and the quest for insurmountable tech driven cash flows is what drives everything. The age of software being driven by sincere engineers trying to build is dead outside niche projects.
It's a tool not a replacement.
Job losses due to productivity may be inevitable, but that's not the same as being replaced by AI, that's being displaced.
reply