I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
I disagree hard.
I am a tinkerer wannabe entrepreneur and I'm having the time of my life.
I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.
Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.
I set it up long before these AI things was a thing...
But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...
I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.
We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.
Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.
> I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent
I do chat with the web interfaces of LLMs quite a bit as my workflow. I’m always baffled by how rarely it arrives at the correct solution.
I pose a question with code snippets, it gives me some incorrect answer. I pose a better question, and it gives me another wrong answer. Wash rinse repeat several times; not until the LLM gets the right answer, but until I pose the question specific enough that I can answer it myself.
I do find this loop of question refinement quite beneficial, but man it makes me terrified of vibe coded applications. 9/10 times the LLM doesn’t even get in the ballpark of the problem, let alone the solution.
Not only that, but even when you get the LLM to give you the right answer, if you ask it to turn that answer into actual code committed to your repo, it usually destroys something else in the process.
The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.
I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.
Tinkering is more or less synonymous with dabbling, which is used more these days. Synonyms with tinkerer would be amateur, hobbiest, dabbler. There’s definitely an implied interest in how things work, but also strongly implies that one is not serious about what they’re doing.
More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.
I agree artisan can be a bit pretentious, but calling someone an artisan != calling someone pretentious, whereas calling someone a craftsman (to some people) == calling someone blue collar, someone who works in the crafts/went to craft school.
Since there is an entire AI community[0], claiming 135,000 members, that labels themselves 'tinkerers', any pejorative meaning in tinkerer is long gone. Probably in the same way as 'hacker' was once a rather pejorative term to the general public.
The definition of tinkerer is “An unskilled person who tries to fix or mend”. Someone making a slack channel with a diminuative moniker does not change the meaning of the word.
You would not want a surgeon who says that they’ve tinkered around with surgery. You would not want a pilot who says they’re tinkered around with piloting.
Synonyms are quite literally beginner; dilettante; novice; pretender; uninitiate.
I am not challenging the definition, only your "pejorative" connotation, which is simply incorrect. Everyone is a beginner at some point. Does that make "beginner" pejorative?
Depends. If you’re using is disparagingly, then yes, it is a pejorative.
For example from the original analogy, if you told an entrepreneur that because they didn’t use AI, they were not an entrepreneur, but instead “unskilled” or a “beginner”, that would be disparaging; pejorative.
It's a better marketing indeed, but that doesn't answers the op's question.
Between something opensource and trusted, and a proprietary potential backdoor that can send the data back to the Zuck himself you'd probably want to choose the former (cause you never know with closed sources).
I'm glad that he has shared the link as for me it's definitely useful. It's not a competition and I don't care what media talk, that's not about money.
There isn't any hope for something called "yj_nearbyglasses" if nobody outside of technical people know about it so OSS is kind of a moot point here.
Outside of that, this project giving scary warnings is something I cannot recommend to others.
> Between something opensource and trusted and proprietary backdoor that can send the data back to the Zuck himself you'd probably want to choose the former.
Only HN veterans care about this, not people in the real world.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
I would buy your argument, if bitcoin were the only cryptocurrency.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
> could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
State actors can just hurt your famiily. State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
That actor has to know that you have something to be touched for in the first place. Which is not the case if you buy crypto without KYC unlike with the classical brokerage, for example.
> State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
Is paranoid and not serious. Yes, they can do a lot in theory, but on practice even basic level opsec avoids it.
In reality if somebody from the state is already after you explicitly for real, you are going to die or be in prison. I can't really argue with that. Most people are not under active confrontation with the governments, but under passive snooping and pity everyday legal risks that make their lifes miserable.
In most cases they don't send hitmen neither for "foreign agents" labeled people from Russia, nor for sanctioned Russians outside from the US, for example. My point is about people who are not active fugitives, but, you know, want to keep their stuff with them without risking neither their country bank freeze, nor western-based financial infra freeze because they hold the wrong passport.
If russia or china has a real interest because relevant amount of people start using it, they would easyl be able to stop this.
Chinese firewall is real.
Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.
And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.
Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.
Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.
> Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.
I'm on your side, but this kind of hyperbole weakens your argument. Tell me about the spyware in pytorch, react, zstd, or llama3.2:1b and how you shouldn't touch this except within a VM.
A charitable reading would be that gp is talking about products from Facebook where they have the technological ability to abuse you in whatever way they want, and not open source projects that they happen to have had some involvement in but which are fully auditable and known not to contain spyware.
Took me a very small amount of time to figure out pytorch was a one man effort that actually was discouraged by Facebook initially, and the dev no longer works there
There is a sort of conceit here that tech is everything. There doesn't need to be "no jobs", it could just (or mostly) be the tech sector that is impacted and jobs are displaced. In the history of concentrated sector losses, the US public hasn't been kind to those displaced. The world marches on, no matter how important we think we are.
You are right, my answer was meant for parent's "“AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”" and "If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.". I mean it in a broader sense than just IT workers. The world will be fine without us if that's where it all stops.
If at some point most enterprises run as "agent, make me money" without any humans, then money is a dead concept.
Why does that matter? b2b sector doesn't make any sense if there is no "clients" at some end point. There is no money in the end of the chain if everybody is jobless. And if 99% of the population don't have magic numbers, the magic numbers concept just doesn't make sense.
The whole modern society and capitalism exist on assumption of meritocracy: an entrepreneur takes the risks and provides the organization and gets the reward. If there is some perfect machine that always brings profits, there is no risk. Everybody can make such "organization" saying "/goal make me money". The current model also assumes that if you learn and work hard enough, then you get a success of some level. That assumption of the meritocracy also breaks.
If there is no organizational work, nor risks, nor meritocracy, nor "fair reward for hard work" the whole model fades. There are might be different rational choices. One is probably to liquidate the owners of the companies; nationalize the model's output and distribute the profits, for example. Still many questions about everyday life for completely jobless society will arrive then. It might be something else, but people generally do what they see fair, and they also want to eat something.
Ownership is a fragile idea, Russian Empire shows that pretty clearly. It exists only when most of the society agrees that the ownership is fair or when you have enough force to maintain it against those who don't, which is not the case when the majority is on the other side.
You are packing so many assumptions into here about how the world works that are just wrong, I have no way to really respond.
Your strongest point is “will people stand for a world with no jobs, where only a percentage of the population owns most things?” And the answer is who knows, people stand for a massive amount of inequality right now, and technology for suppressing the masses is getting much better every year. It’s a big unknown imo, and probably contingent on too many things to predict at all.
So far LLM’s have been really bad at creating the most important things in life. Like food, shelter, security, electricity, water, medical breakthroughs, better politics, better connection etc. etc. etc.
So AI’s will have some impact on the economy but it’s debatable how much and how long it will take.
We use money to exchange resources (actual or promised) in form of credit to each other.
If most of the population doesn't participate in the exchange, money is worthless. You can make numbers, but those are meaningless without the underlying exchange.
It's effectively a disruption of a modern society.
There is no way of redistributing those resources but violence if there is no economy.
Say, you have 98 people who have literally nothing and no established way to obtain basic needs, and 2 people who has something based on whatever.
Say, these 2 people can close their needs by asking a magic machine to do something for them, or even exchange some goods between each other, but there is no economic sense to hire anybody.
Those 98 left aren't going to sit and die, watching.
No but what if those 2 hand out bread and circuses, use the super-intelligence they can afford (using super intelligence smarter than anyone alive) to keep the masses controlled, and are protected by all of the wonderful new machines of war (like ai controlled autonomous drones).
Also what if it’s not 2 vs 98, but something more like 10 vs 90, or 30 vs 70? Or 50 vs 50?
And this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a generation, or at least a few decades.
Anyway, the point isn’t this will happen, the point is that really bad outcomes that are almost impossible to walk back from are completely within the realm of possibility. And we have no real way to predict where we’re headed. So people are rightly very afraid.
What's wrong with having more sovereignty over your data and infrastructure? You don't need to stop working on the mentioned issues together but cutting foreign spies the access to your citizens data and reducing their leverage.
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.
For example, the banking app I have refuses to be installed from the Play Store on GrapheneOS due to "not-certified" device, but works perfectly fine when installed by Aurora.
The check seems to be purely store-based and never enforced later.
Do you trust the banking app installed from Aurora enough to do your online banking?
I don't, and I really wish there would be a decent way to verify that the installed/provided apps are legit. For me this is the biggest downside of using GrapheneOS, which I'm otherwise extremely happy with.
(for me, the whole point of using GrapheneOS is privacy and not sending data to Google, so using the PlayStore is not an option)
I'm pretty sure if I try calling my bank or searching the website to confirm the developer's public key fingerprint, there's not going to be any answer. You have to ask Google's servers to give you the APK and trust what it gives you, either via the front-end called Aurora or the front-end called Play Store
I think in general trust is established for Play Store apps by downloading the app with the Play Store on a phone with Google Certified Android. Then the app can get the signing key for storage in the database. Then this can be used to verify APKs downloaded outside the play store.
Maybe not in practice, but in theory, it works. I don't think there's a better way of handling this without relying on some centralised authority (Google) to validate the authorship of an app, which is hardly desirable.
Large development team... that is exactly the problem. The more effort and code put into it the worse it gets. Peak web was one webmaster per site, doing it by hand.
Well, who knows, but in brave it looks alright, and ff for me has extremely narrow text with disproportionately huge images. I see a few upvotes so I assume at least some other users have the same.
It's hard to say since the gp didn't specify what they thought was broken.
The overall layout is fairly odd & weird - but it's the same in Chrome & Firefox. There is one technical bug with the main body font-size - it uses some invalid syntax (should be invalid in both Chrome & Firefox) & Chrome seems to be accepting it (against spec). The rule:
Whats wrong with the font size exactly? Im not a desktop to check it but its look fine? A bit unusual but I wouldn’t say a clamp with a bunch of math is invalid.
for me it's just a slight reduction in the font size due to firefox ignoring the above - which doesn't seem enough of a difference to warrant folk calling it outright "broken"
It's entirely possible I'm misreading the spec on clamp() but as far as I understood it, clamp() performs math on a bunch of comma separated fixed values, calc() handles arithmetic operators - this seems to be combining those without a calc invocation, but maybe I misread & overlooked clamp arithmetic operators. Firefox just says it's invalid, no detail on why.
Sure. However I have a strange feeling when I read all AI praises and how productive everyone is while seeing more and more broken things everywhere. Sometimes from the same very productive people. Otherwise we might have said that maybe broken stuff goes from AI-deniers.
If everyone is doing the job of hundreds, extremely productive and everything is so easily fixed, why everything feels so slow and broken, even so basic things? That's kind of the point. I'd expect nearly perfect websites everywhere, especially from "productivity" people who mastered the flow.
> If everyone is doing the job of hundreds, extremely productive and everything is so easily fixed, why everything feels so slow and broken, even so basic things?
This doesn't make sense. There were slow and broken things before AI. This was true even when the things were made by hundreds or thousands of engineers.
If an organization doesn't care about making their app or site fast or correct, then unless they have a truly ludicrous amount of free manpower (more than is available now with AI, because review and architecture are still bottlenecks), it probably won't happen.
AI doesn't change this. AI doesn't change the priorities of an organization, it just changes how quickly and cheaply they can build. And every org has a point in their priority queue where things are no longer worth it to spend resources on.
If Venmo didn't care about making their login page work well with Firefox (which, in my experience, they don't) before AI, why would you expect it to be better with AI?
Yes, something like this is a good skill for me to add to the critic phase. This is my first post with the blog redesign, and I will admit I am 100% using hacker news as QA.
A guid isn’t a user id, if it is in this case, it’s an abuse of how guid is used, at least colloquially. I haven’t read enough to understand if it is user / machine id, I.e. only globally unique in the sense it’s a globally unique entity identifier.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
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