Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
But the process is still inaccessible to them, provided we consider achieving reliability and security goals of said process. And no, this is not "no true Scotsman;" "vibe coded" software is demonstrably inferior in numerous ways, and outright dangerous in some contexts. No number of carefully scripted demos or PR campaigns is going to change this reality.
The joke about vibe coding replacing junior devs is apt, because it has the same failure mode -- it can build something that works, but completely incompetently and with unmaintainable design choices.
Consequently, this was the reason businesses had junior devs partnered with senior devs! It's not surprising that when you pair junior devs (human) with junior devs (gen ai coding) you still get junior dev issues.
Personally, I think AI coding tools being able to translate incomplete junior dev thinking into senior dev work is an impossible task. There's just not enough initial intent signal in the novel task use case (read non-'CRUD LOB app').
I do think eventually we'll have complementary expert tools that perform a senior dev-alike function (arch and security review), but that's a harder problem that likely isn't going to be economically viable as a product until/unless AI coding tools achieve substantial penetration.
> make a valuable process accessible to themselves
I am directly calling into question the "value" of that process. It's also becoming increasingly clear that these tools just whitewash away the copyrights of the materials they were trained on and still mostly reproduce when asked. This would then actually be the destruction of value.
> invoking a a no-true-Scotsman
I did not. This is in response to an article. It demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of professional software engineering and instead imagines that writing a good spec is all there is to actually do. It displays a definite lack of understanding of the fundamentals of engineering or of profitable business.
> is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
You seek appeasement instead of understanding and you call into question my skills? I see now what you think this forum is for.
Calling you out for being overly critical is not 'seeking appeasement'. I am calling your skills into question -- why shouldn't I? Your soft skills seem to consist of attacking people when you don't like what they have to say.
> People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services.
In a local mom and pop store, the mom and pop owned the store and were invested in the community, Their money was spent back in the same place it came from. They had a personal stake in their reputation and knew the customers, and the customers knew them. This is how a community operates. You are thinking about it as a dry 'products and services' offering, when it is much more than that. You don't live to buy products and services, you live to do other things, and a community fosters that part of your life. The 'spending money to get things you need or want' part is to facilitate the rest of your life, not the other way around.
> They also had much less generous return policies.
Why is this an issue? People who consistently rely on generous return policies are either buying shoddy goods or abusing it at the cost of everyone else. Figure out what you want before you buy it and then it won't be a problem.
Walmart employs a bunch of people in their stores and their profit margins (the money that leaves the community) are slim. That money is more than likely offset by their ability to offer lower prices than mom and pop places. Mom and pop places go out of business because they can't compete with economies of scale.
If Walmart was really extracting so much money from the communities they operate in, those communities would wither and the Walmart would eventually collapse as well. Walmarts rarely close.
> Why is this an issue?
Because customers prefer better service over worse service.
You're flipping the script on this criticism. Walmart offers better service (returns) and your saying it doesn't matter. Usually people argue that The mom and pop places offer better service but can't compete on price.
Battery degradation is non-linear, and when it reaches a certain point of degradation it can be become unstable. This has lead to 80% being the traditionally considered point for EOL of a Li-Ion pack. However, this is a rule of thumb and the data is evolving with the technology.
"When the battery degrades to a certain point, for instance, if a battery can only retain 80% of its initial capacity,9, 10, 11 the battery should be retired to ensure the safety and reliability of the battery-powered systems."
> But when you just look at it from an inference perspective, looking at these data centres like token factories makes sense.
So if you ignore the majority of the costs, then it makes sense.
Opus 4.5 was released on November 25, 2025. That is less than 2 months ago. When they stop training new models, then we can forget about training costs.
I'm not taking a side here - I don't know enough - but it's an interesting line of reasoning.
So I'll ask, how is that any different than fabs? From what I understand R&D is absurd and upgrading to a new node is even more absurd. The resulting chips sell for chump change on a per unit basis (analogous to tokens). But somehow it all works out.
Well, sort of. The bleeding edge companies kept dropping out until you could count them on one hand at this point.
At first glance it seems like the analogy might fit?
Someone else mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, and I believe this is the crux of the issue: this is all predicated in the actual end users finding enough benefit in LLM services to keep the gravy train going. It's irrelevant how scalable and profitable the shovel makes are, to keep this business afloat long term, the shovelers - ie the end users - have to make money using the shovesl. Those expectations are currently ridiculously inflated. Far beyond anything in the past.
Invariably, there's going to be a collapse in the hype, the bubble will burst, and an investment deleveraging will remove a lot of money from the space in a short period of time. The bigger the bubble, the more painful and less survivable this event will be.
Yes. R&D is guaranteed to fall as a percentage of costs eventually. The only question is when, and there is also a question of who is still solvent when that time comes. It is competition and an innovation race that keeps it so high, and it won't stay so high forever. Either rising revenues or falling competition will bring R&D costs down as a percentage of revenue at some point.
Yes, but eventually may be longer than the market can hold out. So far R&D expenses have skyrocketed and it does not look like that will be changing anytime soon.
> An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
Coca Cola does still use coca leaves for its flavor:
"In a telephone interview from Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, Randy Donaldson, a company spokesman, said, ''Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.''"
...
"Bales of coca destined for Stepan and, ultimately, for Coca-Cola are shipped to the Maywood plant through ports in New York and New Jersey, Mr. O'Brien said. Each shipment carries its own import permit, also issued by the D.E.A."
1. Goodhart's law suggests that you will end up with quality control mechanisms which work at ensuring that the measure is being measured, but not that it is measuring anything useful
2. Criticism of a method does not require that there is a viable alternative. Perhaps the better idea is just to not incentivize people to do tasks they are not qualified for
The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.
Progressive prosecutors don’t care. Judges let repeat offenders out with a wrist slap. Demoralizes police - what’s the point of all the effort if they are back out on the street tomorrow?
No, that's your experience. The narrative is that everything went to shit because the left is trying to create a society where the values you hold are despised and where the good people are blamed for everything while lazy people and criminals get to do whatever they want because of a misplaced sense of justice.
What is actually happening is more mundane.
It's political systems breaking because closed primaries and Gerrymandering mean that a significant population in a lot of places effectively get no political voice because the elections are held in the primaries, and the people can't vote in the opposing party's primary. Ossification results, or the candidate who appeals to the party's more ardent voters get elected, and we essentially lose the center as a political position.
We also have a homeless situation that isn't being addressed, because no one wants to do anything effective. So what happens is that the only thing that can be done is to arrest them, and house them in jail temporarily. This is expensive and doesn't actually fix anything.
So you have a bunch of frustrated citizens who feel like they have no control over their local policy and are sick of the petty crime, along with police who are handling it by not enforcing quality of life crimes in the hope people will blame the elected officials they don't like.
Your frustration is real, but the causes you are attributing for them are wrong.
Arresting criminals and throwing them in jail, like we did until about 10 years ago, would be a fantastic start! Really not a quantum leap in policy change
You need to read what people write and engage with the substance of it. Replying with a variation of the same talking point over and over is not a discussion.
My response is simple and straight forwards, I don’t tie myself into logical knots to turn what is simple and correct into a complicated inverse of reality
Except you didn't respond to anything I wrote. A 'simple and straightforward' response that does not address the content of the post you are responding to is not how this board operates.
From the guidelines:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
It’s just hard to engage when the comment doesn’t respond to the philosophical bedrock point: Stealing! Is! Wrong!
This is a bedrock foundational principle of Western civilization. I don’t take any quarter to any other opinion. This is the Ten Commandments. I don’t give an inch to anyone who tries to justify stealing whatsoever. While my HN persona is a bit grating my personal relationships are full of leftists, or I wouldn’t be able to be a community member in my deep blue city. I am tired of people defending theft and thieves. NO STEALING EVER PERIOD
We were talking about enforcement, not morality. I addressed enforcement completely in the comment you never bothered to read.
You are conflating different things, you are not reading or properly engaging, and you are letting emotions take over instead of thinking. Maybe you should work on these issues instead of blaming leftists.
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