Which is a bald-faced lie written in response to a PR disaster. The original claims were not ambiguous:
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.
Obviously, "every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" is not contained within a single research project, nor are "Microsoft's largest codebases".
This is obviously false on the face of it. Let’s say I have a patent, song, or a book that that I receive large royalty payments for. It would obviously not be logical for me be in favor of abolishing something that’s beneficial to me.
Declaring that your side has a monopoly on logic is rarely helpful.
In absolute numbers I’m not sure that’s true. But 4GLs aren’t what replaced assembly for anyone. C, C++ and Pascal were the most common assembly replacements.
As for C and C++, there definitely aren’t fewer of them in absolute terms. And even in relative terms they are still incredibly popular.
All of that is beside the point though. The hype around 4GLs wasn’t that they would replace older programming languages. The hype was that they’d replace programming as a profession in general. You wouldn’t need programming specialists because domain experts could handle programming the computer themselves.
In the past year I’ve used AI coding assistants on a life-saving medical device product (no, followup commenter, I did not ship unreviewed vibes in a medical device product), a tool for editing documentation used in healthcare (no, followup commenter, it does not use LLMs to generate documentation), a piece of custom cue calling software for theater and to reverse engineer a TCP protocol to help modernize a piece of water quality measuring equipment.
But hey, every once in a while I like to have a little fun ;)
Yeah none of those are nearly ambitious enough for someone who is spitting out browsers in less than a full workday.
This is at least a 100x speed up. You should be cranking out operating systems in a few days. Why haven’t you built an integrated OS, programming language, browser, and game engine yet?
I would love for these self professed AI assisted hacker gods to dogfood said browsers, before, for example, building them 3 times over in different languages for no reason.
At the moment I’m kind of just excited that this way of orchestrating works at all, and in the process of refining it I’ll probably have it build a couple more “browsers”. But yeah, once I’ve got a setup I’m happy with, I totally plan to go all in on an approach, up the ante from Acid3 to the Web Platform Tests (which do support HTML5 and modern Web APIs), and start using it (if not as a daily driver, at least enough to get a sense of where it’s strong/weak).
I will of course be complaining vehemently on HN whenever someone’s website fails to render properly in my janky obscure browser, as is tradition.
> If Gen-AI were making tech workers even 10× more productive at scale, you’d expect to see it reflected in revenue per employee, margins, or operating leverage across the sector.
If we’re even just talking a 2x multiplier, it should show up in some externally verifiable numbers.
I agree, and we might be seeing this but there is so much noise, so many other factors, and we're in the midst of capital re-asserting control after a temporary loss of leverage which might also be part of a productivity boost (people are scared so they are working harder).
The issue is that I'm not a professional financial analyst and I can't spend all day on comps so I can't tell through the noise yet if we're seeing even 2x related to AI.
But, if we're seeing 10x, I'd be finding it in the financials. Hell, a blind squirrel would, and it's simply not there.
Yes, I think there many issues in a big company that could hide a 2x productivity increase for a little while. But I'd expect it to be very visible in small companies and projects. Looking at things like number of games released on steam, new products launched on new product sites, or issues fixed on popular open source repos, you'd expect a 2x bump to be visible.
Yeah but that's very different from an AWS outage. Everyone's website being down for a day every year or 2 is something that it's very hard to take advantage of as a competitor. That's not true for software that is just terrible all the time.
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them
We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.
Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.
Probably easier than convincing individual senators/reps and the part(ies) as a whole to give up their own personal power with things like Ranked Pairs voting, no?
And probably easier to have Congress pass such legislation to draw a new line in the sand, even if it could be undone later, than doing things that would inescapably require a Constitutional amendment.
The problem with the other reforms I have thought of is that we're so far gone it will take more than one reform. Like campaign finance reform would have been great a decade ago. But now that kind of relies on getting back a non-pwnt and even trustworthy law enforcement apparatus, too. Same with a US GDPR / tech antitrust enforcement - would have been great a decade or two ago, but it won't particularly change much now that half the pop culture is already enamored with fascism.
But I agree that we need to be brainstorming and discussing many approaches to reform. So what specifically are you thinking of as the reforms we need?
My initial comment stated the goal very strongly. I don't see that an initial stopgap version of it would require a Constitutional amendment. The President's power to federalize the Guard comes from legislation passed by Congress ("Insurrection Act", etc), which Congress could straightforwardly undo. Congress could also reaffirm Posse Comitatus, tighten up any loopholes in the President's ability to divert funding from the state-controlled National Guards. Congress could also include a bit indicating that state courts are the appropriate jurisdiction for claims over control of the guard. The Supreme Council might try to go against that last bit under the guise of "Constitutionality", but the goal would be to give the chain of command stronger grounds to refuse illegal orders.
I'm eager to discuss other avenues of reform, though. What do you see as a minimum viable path to reform?
The President's power to control the national guard comes from the constitution not acts of congress.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”
But ignoring all that, if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war. The military gets deployed, and death and destruction follow.
The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President, and removes a President who violates their will.
Congress has the power to control the President right now. If they aren’t willing to do exercise that authority, there’s nothing we can do.
Let’s say you got Congress to grant states the ability to make war on the federal government in order to provide an extra-congressional check on Presidential power (which I don’t think you can do, but just pretend you can). That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress. Otherwise an extra-congressional check isn’t needed. But in the case Congress will just remove that power from the states.
This only works even a little bit as a Constitutional amendment—even if you could pass legislation to do it.
The President's power to command the Guard, when called into "actual service of the United States", by Congress. Being called up by a state governor would be in service of that state and would not qualify, right? Hence the constant threat of invoking the "Insurrection" Act.
> if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war
When state police arrest a fedgov employee for breaking state law, is that a "civil war" ? I would call that enforcing the rule of law under a system of shared sovereignty.
> The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President
If wishes were horses... Congress failing to exercise their powers for the past several decades is a big part of how we got into this situation. And sure, at any point technically they could retake them. Except it seems that the Republican congresscritters are content with the plausible deniability, while they would be more hesitant to stick their own necks out and positively affirm what's going on.
But the context of reform I am talking about is if the Democrats regain control of the Presidency and Congress. What can be done to make it so that after 4 years of relative sanity regarding separation of powers, people won't just get frustrated and start craving the simplistic answers of fascism again?
A big part of this is the many broken and unjust things about our society, but trying to fix a sizeable number of those in 4 or even 2 years is a tall task. Hence why I'm trying to focus on a kernel of the least possible required to stop the hemorrhaging, so that it might have a chance of getting done before the buntings change again.
> That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress
Look at the current state of things - Congress doesn't appear to be fully captured, just immobilized.
> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
Andrew Jackson did it 1 year into has fist term. Trump is already in his 2nd.
> it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
It’s horrible to be clear. But ending assistance to other countries is in no way morally worse than genocide, slavery, and war.
>detention camps
The last year of the Biden administration, there were about 40k people in ICE detention facilities. The number has gone up under Trump, but it has less than doubled.
Any preventable deaths of people in ICE custody are unacceptable, but the number of deaths are a little higher proportionally than under Biden.
This is all horrible and condemnable. But detaining undocumented immigrants temporarily is something every administration does (even if this administration is ramping it up) and is in no way comparable to rounding up 100k innocent US citizens for a 4 year term.
Trump is an awful, greedy, morally corrupt human being, and a terrible President. But we’ve seen and survived much worse.
Language is not a huge deal - if the French and the Spanish and the Dutch can use Facebook, they could use Eurobook if that existed, as well. The problem of course would be, if they made a committee to build Eurobook, they'd spend 5 years in meetings to ensure every country and every language is absolutely equally represented and then would build something that no speaker of any language would use.
As for GDP, EU overall GDP is only slightly less than US GDP, so it could very well sustain the industry of comparable size. Per capita GDP is indeed lower, but I'm not sure how that precludes creation of something like Eurobook.
EU GDP is about 2/3 US GDP. That’s a very significant difference. Per capita income is probably less important than average and median disposable income, which is much higher in the US and has an obvious impact on B2C companies.
FB was incubated in a single unified market before it really spread to the EU. It’s harder for companies to take off and reach tech giant reach with the much smaller individual markets in the EU.
It’s much harder to build a product that appeals to everyone from the Irish to the Bulgarians, and to advertise to them than it is to do the same for everyone in the US. And it’s not just the tech companies, the individual content creators on the platform have the same comparative problems.
That’s 200 Windows’ worth of code every month.
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