Is that a "hard problem" though? Really?

Yes. To me, it is. Sometimes queries I give it are 100-200 lines long. Sure, I can solve it eventually but getting an "instant" answer that is usually correct? Absolutely priceless.

It's pretty common for me to spend a day being stuck on a gnarly problem in the past. Most developers have. Now I'd say that's extremely rare. Either an LLM will solve it outright quickly or I get enough clues from an LLM to solve it efficiently.

You might be robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn SQL for real by short-cutting to a solution that might not even be correct one.

I've tried using LLMs for SQL and it fails at exactly that: complexity. Sure it'll get the basic queries right, but throw in anything that's not standard every day SQL into it and it'll give you solutions that are not great really confidently.

If you don't know SQL enough to figure out these issues in the first place, you don't know if the solutions the LLM provides are actually good or not. That's a real bad place to be in.

Usually the term, "hard problem", is reserved for problems that require novel solutions

Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One of the first examples in that book is how when you are disassembling a motorcycle any one bolt is trivial until one is stuck. Then it becomes your entire world for a while as you try to solve this problem and the solution can range from trivial to amazingly complex.

You are using the term “hard problem” to mean something like solving P = NP. But in reality as soon as you step outside of your area of expertise most problems will be hard for you. I will give you some examples of things you might find to be hard problems (without knowing your background):

- what is the correct way to frame a door into a structural exterior wall of a house with 10 foot ceilings that minimized heat transfer and is code compliant.

- what is the correct torque spec and sequence for a Briggs and Stratton single cylinder 500 cc motor.

- how to correctly identify a vintage Stanley hand plane (there were nearly two dozen generations of them, some with a dozen different types), and how to compare them and assess their value.

- how to repair a cracked piece of structural plastic. This one was really interesting for me because I came up with about 5 approaches and tried two of them before asking an LLM and it quickly explained to me why none of the solutions I came up with would work with that specific type of plastic (HDPE is not something you can glue with most types of resins or epoxies and it turns out plastic welding is the main and best solution). What it came up with was more cost efficient, easier, and quicker than anything I thought up.

- explaining why mixing felt, rust, and CA glue caused an exothermal reaction.

- find obscure local programs designed to financially help first time home buyers and analyze their eligibility criteria.

In all cases I was able to verify the solutions. In all cases I was not an expert on the subject and in all cases for me these problems presented serious difficulty so you might colloquially refer to them as hard problems.

It is not. It’s relative to the subject.

In this case, the original author stated that AI only good for rewriting emails. I showed a much harder problem that AI is able to help me with. So clearly, my problem can be reasonably described as “hard” relative to rewriting emails.

If you have 200 line SQL queries you have a whole other kind of problem.

not unless you are working on todo apps.

TODO: refactor the schema design.

What happens when these "AI" companies start charging you what it really costs to run the "AI"? You'd very likely balk at it and have to learn SQL yourself. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess?

Problem with this is people will accept tech debt and slow query's so long as the LLM can make sense of it (allegedly!).

So the craft is lost. Making that optimised query or simplifying the solution space.

No one will ask "should it be relational even?" if the LLM can spit out sql then move on to next problem.

So why not ask the LLM if it should be relational and provide the pros and cons?

Anyway, I'm sure people have asked if we should be programming in C rather than Assembly to preserve the craft.

Surely you understand the difference between not knowing how to do anything by yourself and only knowing how to use high-level languages?

That is like using the LLM like a book. Sure do that! But human still needs to understand and make the decisions.

I work with some very complex queries (that I didn't write), and yeah, AI is an absolute lifesaver, especially in troubleshooting situations. What used to take me hours now takes me minutes.

Personally, as a DM of casual games with friends, 90% of the fun for me is the act of communal storytelling. That fun is that both me and my players come to the table with their own ideas for their character and the world, and we all flesh out the story at the table.

If I found out a player had come to the table with an LLM generated character, I would feel a pretty big betrayal of trust. It doesn't matter to me how "good" or "polished" their ideas are, what matters is that they are their own.

Similarly, I would be betraying my players by using an LLM to generate content for our shared game. I'm not just an officiant of rules, I'm participating in shared storytelling.

I'm sure there are people who play DnD for reasons other than storytelling, and I'm totally fine with that. But for storytelling in particular, I think LLM content is a terrible idea.

It sounds like in the example the character idea was their own, and they then used an LLM to add come context.

Really cool project. A quick note, I had to dig in your FAQ to find your definition for LOQ:

> "What does 'LOQ' mean in your results? > > Limit of Quantification (LOQ) is the lowest concentration we can reliably measure. Results below LOQ are marked "<LOQ" - this doesn't mean zero, just below our measurement threshold."

IMO this definition should be on every results page, since most of the pages have more LOQs than anything else.

Viewport size and deciding where to paginate makes a naive approach to this surprisingly difficult. That being said, if you can control the css / html, you can often solve these problems with a short media query and some hints at where to break pages (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-after).

It seems like before you think about monetization, you should think about how you can generate the amount of traffic you had in February repeatably. February had 6k visitors, but March had 350, and August had only 240. It's going to be pretty hard to generate any revenue from a website that links to free books with only 8 visitors per day.

I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.

My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.

Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:

primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.

What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.

"nostr is a simple distributed protocol to build internet applications for social networking, communication and media.

It requires lightweight relay servers, as opposed to large federated servers like in mastodon or email, or fully p2p like scuttlebutt.

It can be used to some extent via a browser using web clients, but it's best used alongside extensions for authentication and key management"

That is what I'm looking for. I'm not sure it's a good description, but I wish something like this was front and center

>It can be used to some extent via a browser using web clients, but it's best used alongside extensions for authentication and key management

Just wonder can the key just sit in the IndexDB? And it is decrypted on the client side (when user enters password to decrypt the key) to sign a message to send to peers or relay, they can verify your identity by checking against the corresponding public key.

>It requires lightweight relay servers, as opposed to large federated servers like in mastodon or email, or fully p2p like scuttlebutt.

Are there any good light weight relay servers you can recommend? I went to the site and the git repo, and https://njump.me

Are there any I assume open source ones?

Going back to the site, I see what you mean. Very fair criticism. The site appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.

> appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.

That's such a good way to summarize it!

The question isnt a category error and deserves a direct answer.

If I follow what you're saying the answer could have been: "it's a framework/set of protocols for building a Twitter that can show all the stuff on other compatible Google+/Facebooks"

If you have a preference for this style of definition, then we could say that

Nostr is a protocol that's well suited for creating decentralized applications that need publicly verifiable identity, censorship resistance and event based communication.

For example, https://zapstore.dev/app is an Android AppStore that uses nostr to provide a decentralized way to verify the developers and remove "fake" apps.

A few ways:

1. An American company benefited from their labor

2. American consumers benefited from the goods / services they contributed to providing

3. American citizens benefited from the services provided by the taxes they pay

4. Other American businesses benefited from their patronage

You are missing alternative costs of the fact that more people compete for the same resources, Americans get much lower ROI for their education, it hollows domestic expertise. Companies become dependent on foreign workers. Local jobs pay less, people have less money to pay for products and services.

Short term - shareholders win, long term - everyone loses except the country of origin, where they can bring the knowledge back and develop their economy.

It's like outsourcing, just the foreign workers are onshore.

Seems like you forgot the American worker in the equation?

People who are purely consumers (usually living of real estate gains or entitlements) are of course a huge part of the population, and benefit from everything brining consumer prices down - including cheap labour.

And many people are both consumers and workers, so they are benefitted from lower prices at the same time as they're disadvantaged by lower salaries. If they've already got real estate and the biggest expenses in life paid, they are more interested in lower consumer prices.

Then you have the people who have a much bigger interest in higher salaries than in cheaper consumer goods. Primarily young workers who need to get a foothold in life. For them it is of utmost importance that salaries increase, even though consumer goods get more expensive, because without a foothold in life they have nothing to live for.

This is such an important distinction that gets lost so often...

That doesn't seem to be specific to H1B visa issuance does it? This seems to me to be more of a general argument in favor of immigration in general to spur economic activity, which as far as I'm aware is "correct", provided you have to also show your math with things like a potential rise in housing costs/rent, strains on services, perhaps some folks don't actually pay taxes, etc. Some of those items might be short term or temporary, some may not. I don't know.

But if we were to take your argument at face value and I generally do because that's what the economists say and makes sense to me, why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration? China, for example, or perhaps Japan or Korea? What about New Zealand or Switzerland?

All the countries you mention offer temporary work visas for skilled workers, of varying similarity to an H1B.

Sure, I agree, I guess what I’m trying to understand is why don’t they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?

Think back to what the person I replied to said about the economic benefits of immigration in general (again which I believe are true based on what I understand).

For that matter we can just say the United States offers temporary work visas for skilled workers through the H1B program. Case closed! In the case of maybe New Zealand or Switzerland they represent less than 1% of the global population, most of the talent lives outside of those two countries. Are they importing enough high skilled foreign workers? I’m not sure. Switzerland for examples seems very expensive to immigrate to and get citizenship. But I’m not an expert there, just what I’ve skimmed through online.

Or is there more to it?

I think I'm not understanding what comparison you're trying to make. I thought you were expressing some doubt about whether H1B, or temporary skilled worker visas generally, were beneficial for the host country. You asked, "why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration" and I pointed out that they do have similar programs. Now you ask "why don't they have even higher rates of skilled worker immigration?"

Japan's SSW program has close to 300k workers. The U.S. H1B program has about 700k workers, so by population, Japan's program appears to be a bit larger. New Zealand's AEWV program has 80k workers with a population of 5 million so proportionally that's much larger.

> What about New Zealand or Switzerland?

This is already the case. About 30% of Switzerlands population are immigrants (one of the highest percentages in the developed world) and it has a freedom of movement treaty with the EU.

I’m sure you have better data but here is what Wikipedia says:

  In 2023, resident foreigners made up 26.3% of Switzerland's population.[18] Most of these (83%) were from European countries. Italy provided the largest single group of foreigners, accounting for 14.7% of total foreign population, followed closely by Germany (14.0%), Portugal (11.7%), France (6.6%), Kosovo (5.1%), Spain (3.9%), Turkey (3.1%), North Macedonia (3.1%), Serbia (2.8%), Austria (2.0%), United Kingdom (1.9%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.3%) and Croatia (1.3%). Immigrants from Sri Lanka (1.3%), most of them former Tamil refugees, were the largest group of Asian origin (7.9%).

That’s a bit different than what you seem to be implying - according to Wikipedia the immigrant population of Switzerland is just Europeans, mostly Western Europeans at that.

With respect to Switzerland, what are the immigration rules and polices if you are Indian, or Chinese, or Brazilian, or Indonesian, or Nigerian? I’m just picking on those countries due to a mix of population levels and relevance to immigration in America. It’s rather surprising to me that Switzerland seems to have little meaningful numbers of immigrants from these higher population countries. Why is that? Is there maybe a specific policy we could point to? Do people from Italy really like the Alps and the Chinese don’t?

And going back I think to what is implied by the person I responded to, if what they’re saying is true about the economic value of immigration, and I think it is, why doesn’t Switzerland have, for example, unrestricted immigration from all over the world? Why are half of its immigrants from Italy alone? (Again just going off the Wikipedia article and I am happy to look at any other figures)

Are they immigrants or just Italians living and working in Switzerland because of the EU?

That doesn't seem to play out in practice for average Americans.

The companies profits primarily go to the capitalists not to average people.

That seems to apply to, for lack of a better term, consumerist goods and services like TVs and clothing. Which isn't nothing. However, it doesn't seem to apply to things like housing.

America's social safety net is already very weak and only getting weaker.

Same as the first point. The benefits of business success primarily goes to capitalists not workers.

Please don't just copy paste LLM output into comments.

> Another way to look at this is you’re outsourcing your understanding to something that ultimately doesn’t think.

You read this quote wrong. Senior devs outsource _work_ to junior engineers, not _understanding_. The way they became senior in the first place is by not outsourcing work so they could develop their understanding.

How about a CEO delegating the work to an Engineer ? CEO does not understand all the technical detail but only knows what the outcome will look like.

You are moving goalposts significantly here -- a small CSS hack is a far cry from your docker infrastructure.

I am going to put it out here: Docker and other modern infra is easier to understand than CSS (at least pre flex).

My take from this comment is that maybe you do not understand it as well as you think you do. Claiming that "other modern infrastructure" is easier to understand than CSS is wild to me. Infrastructure includes networking and several protocol, authentication and security in many ways, physical or virtual resources and their respective capabilities, etc etc etc. In what world is all of that more easy than understanding CSS?

I have been coding 10+ years, surely it is fine for me to vibecode then?

Only if you don’t mind what comes out :)

I mean I love it.

The irony is that a valid reason for in-house developers to not want to use an external product is concern about the long term support availabilty for that external project. You could make a case that this product shutting down is proof the in-house developers were right not to trust it.

I don't think that's totally fair in this case, since it seems they open sourced their software. But also, in general, I think NIH syndrom gets a bad rap. Sometimes a "worse" solution you control really is more reasonable compared to a technically superior solution made by an external company.

Ive been doing this for 20 years and I have had to do several major migrations due to vendors doing all sorts of stupid things. Millions of dollars and so so many hours completely unproductive because a commercial off the shelf product was 'cheaper' to buy initially.

Feeling it :) Currently in day two of an outage with almost no vendor response for my entire platform because it was "the cheaper option" :)

Every quarter during budgeting I have politely pointed out this inferior service costs us a lot of money and sucks at support as well, and every time its considered not a priority.

Today its a priority :)

This exactly happened for the same product a few years - a real time push company called Pusher folder (or killed its major product) and everyone using it had to migrate.