My time in the military has made me hate acronyms with a fury.

https://acronyms-suck.com

If you focus on the differences that’s all you’ll see.

The opposite applies too, if you try hard enough you’ll find plenty of similarities with an Eskimo. We’re all just people in the end.

I’m curious have you ever been burnt or seen anyone burnt by copyright infringements in code?

Sometimes it’s super obvious because a game company steals code from a previous employer, but I have never seen this play out in entreprise software.

How is that extortion? If you use a library/project with a licence you need to abide by its terms. If you don't want to do that, then either write it yourself or find an alternative. People asking for the source code is not extortion, they're fully within their rights to do so.

I actually found the anecdote I was referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605873 (see comment by user yalok).

""" Just anecdotally, but this aligns with my observations on the trend/growth of successful useful open source projects that go with permissive BSD-like license. ~20 years ago there were way less of those than now. And as a SW developer doing client side/apps as well, using GPL/LGPL is a total pain and basically cost prohibitive, unless I work on my personal small project where I don’t care about having to/risking to open source the rest of the code and getting sued/cloned… Real life example from ~2010 - we ended up including an LGPL library in our mobile app code, and published/upstreamed all the modifications we did to that code (mostly ARM optimizations). Once the app became popular, our competitors came to us demanding the source code of our app - just because iOS didn’t support dynamic libraries (so we had to statically link it), and giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL), because they really wanted to see how we hacked around iOS camera input APIs… """

Arguably the competitors didn't have a case as the object code was provided, so I would stand by calling this extortion. Maybe the legal burdens were too high, so the company complied.

I didn’t even realise that was a possibility with iOS. Thanks!

Curious to hear more about this, do you have any examples?

We might release it as a framework of gems.

We created an Abstract controller that handles all of the typical behavior for a resource, auth, filtering, pagination, tenancy, import/export, serialization etc.

Then we expanded rails generators to cover ALL typical behavior. And the markdown file calls the generators.

It was a bit complicated to model polymorphic behavior but we got it working thanks to Ruby/Rails.

But the basic premise that made this work is: Use only restful actions; don’t turn it into RPC. Recognize that most RPC/graphql functions are state changes that could have been a patch request. So instead of /clients/activate its /clients with a status attribute for “activate” or “archive”. Then most nested routes aren’t needed, use accepts nested attributes for and return child ids in the show action. There’s more to it that this but by strictly following conventions and modeling the data for rest, the api ends up Super simple.

Our standard controller only whitelists strong params. All other behavior is automatic.

What do the markdown files look like?

Defines the resources, attributes and relationships. That’s it.

Client first_name last_name organization:references

Organization name tax_number has_many:Clients

I understand your pain, but this is very country dependent.

For example, most of what you describe can be solved using Xero in Australia.

> But it’s a hell of a lot better than sifting through thousands of transactions manually which accountants do and get wrong all the time.

I still wonder why humans getting things wrong is a problem, but LLMs getting more things more wrong more often than humans never is. At the very least you'll need a human accountant around to verify the LLM. Or I guess you could just practice "vibe accountancy" and hope things work out but that seems like a worse idea than a trained human professional. But I'm probably just a Luddite.

Also, I am admittedly not an accountant, but I don't think they manually sift through every transaction to verify compliance issues in every single case. That probably isn't how that works.

To be clear, I agree with you.

Our target market is accountants. I want to help them not replace them.

In the same way security audit tools aren’t replacing professionals, but that can help on initial scan.

> I still wonder why humans getting things wrong is a problem, but LLMs getting more things more wrong more often than humans never is

Some people hate humanity so much that they cannot wait to replace us all with AI so they never have to interact with another human ever again

That's honestly the only reason I can think that they are so biased toward AI

I find this take so strange, do you find no value in AI?

I don’t even want AI to replace us, but it’s a great tool with many use cases.

I weigh the economic value against the lives I believe is going to ruin and the damage I believe is going to do to society and the future of the human race and I do not find value there. I find ruin

There might be a way for us to adopt AI as a tool without bringing ruin to many people, but I don't believe that is the goal of anyone building AI.

As it stands, I don't believe there is anything ethical about AI in it's current form. So from that perspective, I vehemently deny there is any value in it

At one point in history, people like you were asking why anyone could be anti-slavery. After all, it was impossible to deny the economic value of slaves.

Why is AI unethical in its current form and what would make it ethical for you?

At this point I don't think even Sam Altman believes AI to be ethical, as much as he would like to believe such thing.

I think we misunderstand each other.

Accounting is quite broad and there are many examples of where LLMs can help.

For example, what is tax deductible is subjective to local laws. This is essentially a classification problem that LLMs are particularly good at.

I don’t do well with 100% working from home.

My preference is 3 days in the office, I find anything less than that and I struggle mentally. My home starts to feel like a prison and I lose connection with people.

I really value human connection and I just don’t get the same thing online.

> I really value human connection and I just don’t get the same thing online.

Check out meetups! Bars! Reading groups at your library! Gym classes!

Funnily, I do a lot of those things. I have a bunch of hobbies that are very social.

But for me it’s not really that. It’s about walking in a place and knowing everyone, having small talk and feeling comfortable chatting.

Work takes up a lot of time, so I prefer to have that along side it. Rather than only in my spare time. I

I relate to that and I think the real reason some people struggle to believe that is because not everyone has a great work environment at work. I have one, I actually look forward to coming to the office sometimes.

This is key, I’ve had great work environments where we’ve had lots of fun solving problems together.

Why not use a co-working space? I found it was the best of all worlds when your "coworkers" have no relationship with your "boss".

I was pondering this, because my team is very small, so I don't get to interact with all that many people at the office (the people I interact with will 90% of the time be elsewhere anyway).

But apart from that it seems like the worst of both worlds? You still have to commute there, you can't reasonably expect to have peace and quiet since it's mostly open space (or if it's a closed office, how's that better than staying home?), and you don't even get to see your colleagues.

In my case, what I hate with the office is the commute and the random noise people make (phone calls, chats, whatever). I rather like my colleagues, so it's not like I want to avoid those people specifically.

Not the previous commenter, but co-working spaces are few and far between in most of the world, plus they can be expensive if the employee is the one paying.

As for the coworkers not knowing your boss thing, I agree, although in a more positive framing – it can be helpful to have a work social group that isn't in your reporting chain. You can get this at many medium sized and up companies.

Or better yet, a therapist. Work is literally THE worst place to make human connections because it is a business first and foremost (yes, go ahead and post how it’s not true – it won’t change a thing).

> Work is literally THE worst place to make human connections

I don't necessarily disagree, but I make a slightly different argument, in that, humans will make human connections, whether they like it or not, and the most typical human experience is to make stronger and stronger connections with people you see regularly. Furthermore, depending on the company, there's the desire to be a part of something bigger, there's social conditioning setting in to prove yourself among your peers, there's the desire to not appear like you're lazy.

Where I think you'll agree is that your company will 100% exploit these human aspects of you to get a better margin on the value of your labor vs the compensation they pay you.

Let me clarify my point: in the absence of life outside of work, work is the worst place to make connections. If you treat work as “just” a complementary source of connections, then it is fine. But if it’s your only source, then you need to get of this situation asap.

At my last work place everyone talked about how great therapy was. Curious I decided to try it myself.

Turns out therapy was great, it made me realise that my work place was toxic and since leaving I haven’t needed a therapist again!

I really like co-working spaces, but not enough to pay for them when I have an office I can go to.

I feel this pain.

We have an intern that is finishing a four year computer science degree that has no clue what git is, never used a log and all he presents is AI garbage.

I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who has no interest in the craft.

I’ve seen push back on this idea multiple times on HN.

Humans review their own work, just like LLMs can.

I’ve come to love this style of writing. While not quite the same, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street felt similar.

Just raw thoughts, no rules.

Capitalization would not change the content at all, but would make it easier to read. People reading English have expectations are capitalization. Breaking those expectations makes the text more difficult to read and feel less effortless.

It’s a stylistic choice, it doesn’t have to cater to peoples expectations.

Sure, it doesn’t have to. But it will affect ease of reading for most readers who are accustomed to more “standard” written English.

They still respect writing rules, in fact - except for the capitalizations.

If they wrote, say, phonetically instead, the text would become utterly unreadable, even though the raw thoughts in one's head aren't expressed in written English.