> Ps does HN offer the capability of completely deleting the account and all of the comments ?
They claim to allow deleting the account (just the name, they keep the comments up), but in practice they ignore requests. Source: personal experience.
> I take it you haven't seen the world of HTML cleaners [1]?
Are you seriously comparing deterministic code formatters to nondeterministic LLMs? This isn't just a change of scale because it is qualitatively different.
> Kansas certainly didn't develop their website [2] using an LLM.
Just because the software industry has a problem with incompetence doesn't mean we should be reaching for a tool that regularly hallucinates nonsense.
> IMO, the real problem with software is the lack of a warranty.
You will never get a warranty from an LLM because it is inherently nondeterministic. This is actually a fantastic argument _not_ to use LLMs for anything important including generating program text for software.
> It really shouldn't matter how the software is made
It does matter regardless of warranty or the qualities of the software because programs ought to be written to be read by humans first and machines second if you care about maintaining them. Until we create a tool that actually understands things, we will have to grapple with the problem of maintaining software that is written and read by humans.
No, a lot of people on this website value very highly their completely irrelevant nitpicks. I’m starting to think it’s just the kind of mind the tech industry attracts, because I’ve noticed it in some coworkers as well.
GDP per capita is an almost completely meaningless metric if you don’t also include cost of living and some way of measuring the quality of goods and services it acquires for you.
You are correct, but universities did use to actually teach. SICP is still relevant 40 years later, and it was because the professors who created the class and textbook actually gave a fuck, knew what they were doing, and were still allowed to do their jobs. I really do think this is a recent phenomenon, but I have no idea how to get back what we once had from the parasite class.
That all sounds obvious and inevitable, but it also relies on the return from capital out-earning the return from labor by quite a lot. This hasn’t always been true, but it does seem likely to continue.
Well, the return on enough capital will always out-earn the return from labor by quite a lot. Labor doesn't scale the way capital does. You can have 10 billion invested instead of 1 billion, but you can't work 80 hours a day.
But more, most of labor is saving single-digit percentages of the return from labor, if they are investing at all. The people who had capital to invest a generation ago, and left it invested for a generation, kind of by definition kept all of that capital invested for a generation.
So I don't think it's as simple as "return from capital > return from labor". (Or maybe I'm demonstrating that it is exactly that, and I'm just thinking of it using different words.)
But you can work for more than one person. Professional athletes and move stars in particular seem to have that figured out quite well, working for many millions, if not billions, of people when they work in a professional capacity. Labour scales quite nicely when doing work that a lot of people want to have done.
Often better than capital, even! The stadium can only hold so many people. He who owns the capital often has less ability to scale than the worker.
True - though only for certain types of labor. Entertainment, sports, software, the arts, but not many others.
You can't scale the labor of being on an assembly line, or the labor of being a lawyer or a doctor or a farmer or an auto mechanic. (You may be able to replace them with software, but that's not the same thing.)
(And, yes, you can "scale" them in a way by giving them better tools. A farmer today with a combine is easily 100x a farmer 150 years ago with a sickle - probably more like 1000x. There's not another factor of 10 available to scale them up right now, though, no matter how hard they try.)
They claim to allow deleting the account (just the name, they keep the comments up), but in practice they ignore requests. Source: personal experience.