I think these comments here are politically charged. There are a lot of walk of life in the US not limited to politics or who/what someone voted for.
I am sure if Americans are not welcome in Europe it isn't because they are an American, but that individual isn't very nice or polite around others. I haven't been to Europe in a long time, because Asia is so much more awesome.
There are plenty of Russians who aren't politically engaged. I think you can see why they may still not be as welcome in Europe as, say, someone from Peru.
I can tell you that it's now the norm in many European institutions that are even remotely sensitive or deep technology related to spend much more effort on background checks for Chinese and Russian nationals than for those of other countries. That's not very welcome. Look past pure tourism.
Why always jump to the extreme that will have almost zero political chance of winning. Billboards sound like a feasible incremental step in a good direction. Start there, everyone sees tangible improvements and is primed to make a bigger leap. Killing an entire industry as step one, is just simply never going to happen, dream on.
As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
Establishing that you support the extreme action does not mean that you are unwilling to accept incremental action as well.
Let's start by banning billboards, and then let's keep going and ban more forms of mental pollution until the overton window has moved enough that we can entirely ban the ability to pay to control someone's attention.
I don't think GP was suggesting this a political policy worth pursuing, but was just stating a preference. And stating an extreme preference does not imply that one would not be pleased with incremental improvement.
I, too, would love it if all advertising just disappeared.
It isn't a political statement there are other avenues in marketing besides advertising. If a product is genuinely good it should serve on its own. Advertisements lead too much opportunity for exploitation.
How? People would still use their money to buy things. A lot of advertising is adversarial. If demand stays the same but neither you nor your competitors can advertise your products, everyone makes more money.
Of course, there are lots of products where people don't know they would benefit from the product - or don't think of it. For example, life insurance, business loans, university education, movie releases, etc. In those cases, arguably the advertising is creating a positive for society. (Since its resulting in a need being addressed that wouldn't be addressed otherwise.)
If you're a brick-and-mortar business, you list yourself on whatever various directories exist for businesses, create a Yelp page, etc. Yes, you might get a slower start, but as more people visit your store and come away with a good impression, they'll tell their friends.
But regardless, I... just don't care. Your need as a new business to find customers does not supersede my need to not suffer psychological manipulation every time I go outside or peruse the internet.
Directories would be advertising. All your proposing is a world where first comer world by default have a stranglehold on the market. It's a dystopia.
Outside I can agree with and prefer Billboard free areas but you choose it online. You choose to use services that are funded by advertising. They are all optional so why don't you choose not to use them?
> All your proposing is a world where first comer world by default have a stranglehold on the market. It's a dystopia.
How so? Suppose I'm looking to buy a camera in a world without advertising. I'd still want to look up product reviews and find out information about good deals from different manufacturers before buying one. Some people may visit a camera store and see what they have in stock, and talk to the sales assistants. Someone else might ask their friends - who may also be in the photography community. In any case, I don't need advertisements at all. Why would you assume I'd only buy a camera from an old, established company? I don't think I've even seen a single advertisement for a camera for years. It didn't seem to stop me from shopping around and buying one a few months ago.
Likewise if I want a packet of chips at the supermarket, I look down the aisle and decide what to buy based on price, brand familiarity, flavour and packaging. How would a ban on advertising change anything?
How does your camera shop decide what to stock? How do they discover new brands to include? Without advertising smaller shops and by extension you would be unaware of any new brands or accessories available.
A ban on advertising would again stop grocery stores from discovering new products and testing them. Why bother when you can just partner up with P&g and stock only their stuff, your customers won't know there is choice so might as well just stock the brand that can offer you the best deal.
> How does your camera shop decide what to stock? How do they discover new brands to include?
In the case of camera shops, camera brands actively reach out to the stores and have a relationship with them. The camera brands send reps out to train the sales people on the features of new camera models.
Likewise, brands partner with supermarkets to sell their products. Thats not advertising. Nobody is proposing or talking about stopping businesses from forming relationships with one another.
So I want to start a new shop I need to hope the major brands deem me worthy enough to send reps out.
My point with supermarkets wasn't that those relationships would be banned it's that there is no point in providing variety if there is no advertising to encourage alternatives. So the optimal strategy would be for nestle to do a deal with Walmart to only stock their products. The public isn't being made aware of alternatives so the demand for them will be gone
> So I want to start a new shop I need to hope the major brands deem me worthy enough to send reps out.
If you started a new shop, you would want to reach out to the major (and minor) camera brands directly. Do you think shops, today, get inventory by advertising somehow? No. They get inventory by cultivating relationships with suppliers. Advertising has very little to do with it.
> there is no point in providing variety if there is no advertising to encourage alternatives
Of course there is. I've never seen any advertising for 95% of the brands I buy at the supermarket. But I still appreciate that their products are on the shelves, and I still buy them. If I visually imagine all the groceries I regularly buy, most of the products are from brands I've only discovered by chance at the supermarket. (Eg, milk, eggs, canned food, etc).
Cancer treatment is bad for health too, but it's worth it to cut out and kill cancer before it kills the host. Not everything that is "bad for the economy" is bad for the humans who have to live under it.
I've had cancer, I have the scars and the lifelong effects from the surgery and chemo. Don't try that emotional shit on me. I'll make whatever comparison I damn well want.
In fact you're right that it's an inappropriate comparison, because the cancer didn't do what it did on purpose.
Such and interesting thought provoking situation. So much money circulates and thrives off the idea of advertising. The concept of YouTube would cease to exist. Some products would never even get off the ground without some level of advertising.
What constitutes advertising vs marketing?
Does product placement count as advertising or marketing?
Does opening up a pop shop count as advertising or marketing?
So much to this, ultimately we do need to regulate advertisements. But I am not sure we can survive without them.
They say AI, but AI isn't eliminating programming. I've wrote a few applications with AI assistance. It probably would've been faster if I wrote it myself. The problem is that it doesn't have context and wildly assumes what your intentions are and cheats outcomes.
It will replace juniors for that one liner, it won't replace a senior developer who knows how to write code.
I really wish that was the case. You can give it only so much context before it starts to go down a path where the context doesn't even make sense to it, and yet if you explained it to a colleague they would instantly understand.
Context has layers and really 1st or 2nd layers ever get reached by AI but it can't dive further because it is too focused on the final output rather than the continuation of the output.
For example you write code and then tell it what the final expect output is, it some how always divorces itself from rudimentary implementations and poops out something that cut a lot holes out or shortcuts all of your work. Removes modularity in favor of that immediate outcome. AI is just not good enough to understand the complex relationship of maintainable code and deliverable code. So it poops out what is easily made to meet the deliverable.
What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.
Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.
However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.
I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.
Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.
For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.
It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.
If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?
I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.
"If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?"
The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.
The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.
My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.
Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.
I (like a very large plurality, maybe even a majority, of devs) do not work for a consulting firm. There is no client.
I've done consulting work in the past, though. Any leader who does not take into account (at least to some degree) relative educational value of assignments when staffing projects is invariably a bad leader.
All work is training for a junior. In this context, the idea that you can't ethically train a junior "on a client's dime" is exactly equivalent to saying that you can't ever ethically staff juniors on a consulting project -- that's a ridiculous notion. The work is going to get done, but a junior obviously isn't going to be as fast as I am at any task.
What matters here is the communication overhead not how long between responses. If I’m indefinitely spending more time handholding a jr dev than they save me eventually I just fire em, same with code gen.
A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.
That was my point, though I may not have been clear.
Most people do get better over time, but for those who don’t (or LLM’s) it’s just a question of if their current skills are a net benefit.
I do expect future AI to improve. My expectation is it’s going to be a long slow slog just like with self driving cars etc, but novel approaches regularly turn extremely difficult problems into seemingly trivial exercises.
I’m hoping that LLMs may be helpful, here. Sort of like a “documentation concierge” service. Like going to the reference desk in a local library, and asking The Librarian to help you find some information.
I believe so. I am also hoping it can just pull in repositories and tell me more about the code and history relating to it. There is a lot of potential to this. TLDRs are needed for code, LLMs will be an excellent replacement.
I actually like re-writing documentation, but if I can not reorganize the documentation too I am discouraged from re-writing. I believe a lot of contextual information is lost when people use confluence as a dumping ground and don't plan the structure of the documents.
I've emotionally moved to git for documentation, but I can not get people to follow or transition to better documentation methods once someone is emotionally tied to tribal knowledge and communication.
I have a colleague who prioritizes maintaining control over teaching others. He tries to force a particular perspective, emphasizing the importance of his role while fostering dependency rather than sharing knowledge. This seems driven by a fear of losing his job.
My primary focus is backend development, where I assist developers and solve infrastructure challenges. However, I’m so effective in this role that I often end up boxed into it. I’ve been making an effort to expand into frontend development to broaden my expertise, but this colleague operates in that space and isn't the only one who has made it difficult for others to gain traction.
I am sure if Americans are not welcome in Europe it isn't because they are an American, but that individual isn't very nice or polite around others. I haven't been to Europe in a long time, because Asia is so much more awesome.
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