They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/.
Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in.
The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/.
We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs.
In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on.
But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).
No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.
I disagree, top voted comments are threads comparing the collapse of US to USSR, like wtf, really?
I wish HN would just stop with any political motivated threads, it brings out the worst in people here and there is 0 debate. The site is obviously mostly urban progressives and they will not allow any replies so you get the same hive mind nonsense as reddit/twitter etc..
did they mention that you can cheat this when e.g. singing, by changing pitch dynamically to fit the chords you are working with?
In theory, a synthesizer or sound card could do the same.
Of course, this could have other undesirable side effects.
I am glad this essay was on the right side of the fence, otherwise I would have written it myself in response..
Our company is currently one of countless, where we just had a "get with the program" meeting with our PMs, where they showcased stuff they had added to our enterprise system in hours and days, and told us that they expected us to start delivering with the same tools techniques and speed..
Meanwhile, my team had spent that same working day before that meeting, trying to figure out why our production databases were suddenly getting hammered; it turned out some system was suddenly calling an expensive query endpoint 10k (10.000) times each hour, during business hours.
Guess 3 times whose vibe-coding adventures were responsible for those 10k calls :-/.
Other than that, I noticed during the meeting, that their vibe-coded demo added module to our enterprise system only dealt with happy-path of the data updates,
but would leave debris in our database for all the edge cases. Happy times. But heck yeah, let's just ram it straight into production. I wonder who will take care of adding support/clean up for the edge cases.
Move fast and break things. If it works well for a startup with 3 users and 1 developer, why not do the same for our critical infrastructure company? Openclaw, fire my engineering team and bring me more alcohol.
Everybody and their mom loves to believe they're the hot young stuff on the block.
Even with a company like, say, Meta, they have more freedom to make mistakes than 100% of enterprise companies. Nobody cares too much if Facebook goes down or is slow or something.
But if you're selling to another business, they're gonna have your ass for breakfast for even the tiniest mistakes. As they should, they're paying you a lot of money!
file sizes in explorer is my pet peeve, it should be a builtin.
When I am coding and making small projects, I want to see the bytes.
I hate that everything is shown as "1 or 2 k".
and it is a hazzle to get access to and install of the mods that show bytes column.
It should just be an extra column available by default 'Byte Size'.
Or automatic column width. Or even setting the same column widths for all folders (try it, it's tough without 3rd party tools). Or the UI hangs with network folders. Or the search that never finds anything. I could go on...
As an approximation, you could use AutoHotKey to have the key press sent every 200ms when an Explorer window has focus. ;)
Personally, I wouldn’t want to have it automatically, because sometimes you have really long file names, or other columns that can get arbitrarily wide. There would also have to be a configurable maximum column width.
Nah no workaround. I'll take the hit until I can switch to something better on my work PC. Several decisions Microsoft has taken make it more likely that I'll invest the time. May as well try to un-Microsoft my org (at least to the degree I'm involved) while I'm at it.
Note as a Linux user, the only version of Fusion you can really use is the (bad) browser one, which requires a $900/year subscription. I like Fusion, but this is a powerful motivator to make due with FreeCAD or Dune3D.
Usually, I can easily tell bad AI slop, because it is just that - sloppy - the bullet points, the 'delving' and all that.
But how can you tell this article was also AI-tainted?
On a second skim, I can sort of sense some of it - the bulletpoint-enthusiasm, the idiosyncratic segues (?) that link sections/paragraphs of the text.
But it didn't trigger for me immediately, or cause me concern..?
I'm worrying that soon, I will have to hunt for non-AI essays by them just being worse written/more 'crude' and not as eloquently written as an AI would do :-/
Basically, seeking out "authentic human slop".
It's very clear to me on its face that it's AI, but not "obvious as the sky is blue" others seem to be implying. I would dislike the writing style even if it weren't AI.
For the record, an AI detector that appears to have put work into reliability and that I trust very much from my own testing, Pangram (https://www.pangram.com), says this is 100% AI generated. I've used it plenty before when experimenting with AI-collab writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and it's frustratingly accurate in identifying what is and isn't my contribution. I have since largely given up trying to do AI-collab writing, because no matter how nice the writing looks in the moment, it always reeks when read closely, or on later days.
Your detector did not work well on an AI-collab writing fiction project I did a while ago, tagged it as 100% human even with high confidence for the most part. But to be fair, most detectors weren't significantly better, although this one gave a justification that made sense https://aidetector.com/
Passages like this one suggest that maybe it was an AI rewrite, rather than from scratch:
> I experienced this pattern without understanding it. My Tuesday evening interval sessions, scheduled after long workdays, consistently felt worse than my Saturday morning sessions. I blamed sleep, stress, hydration. Those all matter, but the research suggests the cognitive load itself was a primary culprit.
You really couldn't tell? The overly dramatic transitions all over the place is such an obvious tell:
> Here's the part that surprised me:
Might as well have said "here's the kicker" and used emojis instead of bullets. Maybe you can share your reading sites as you seem rather undrrexposed to not recognize this immediately lol.
Edit: I mean come on man, how can you not tell?! I'm still cringing from this one:
> The incremental cost of actually thinking hard? Almost nothing.
It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this;
I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too.
But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.
I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression.
(1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me().
(2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call.
(3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?",
where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)
() I suspect what they are though..
Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where
the people in charge of teams can understand them,
plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view
contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").
We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains,
which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.
The thing I find the most hilarious about all these companies jamming llms in all over the place is that they don't ever put it where it makes the most sense to me - to manage the settings.
They could do away with all these mazes of settings and configurations and just have a little chat thing. You pop open and then tell the AI hey I want to change the background and then it just does it. You could have a huge and complex array of settings that would be a headache to navigate in a typical form format, but a breeze with an llm that has an API into them.
As an aside, another one that I just find hilarious is the LLM implementation into Google sheets. I'll ask it. "Hey how do I do this?" and then it goes "I don't know" and I'm like WTF why is this here
It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).
When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.
The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring.
Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.
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