I grew up on a small village in a small island.
The yogurt lady was an essential part of the community.
Many stay-at-home moms (including my mom) seemed to enjoy her visit.
She and my mom talked a lot, sometimes for hours (I still can't figure out how she completed her job when she spent so much time with one person).
They chatted about recent events, like the daughter of the fisherman gave birth, the great-grandpa of the liquor shop died of cancer, a newly opened restaurant in the nearest town sucked, and sometimes shared even personal struggles or family matters.
It really helped a lot of people combat mental struggles caused by the isolation of being traditional stay-at-home wives in a super rural area.
The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn.
Only a couple of those were already in /highlights.
I'm not sure yet whether this is good enough to be an automatic feed into /highlights but I could imagine adding aggregated /favorites pages to https://news.ycombinator.com/lists.
I love this! Thank you. I spent way too much time on HN this week, so I'd already enjoyed several of these, but this is a great showcase of the content that keeps me coming back here.
> The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn
It's a better service than FB or Instagram that depress because people only show their good sides there... As you said, she was an essential part of the community ;-)
> It's a better service than FB or Instagram that depress because people only show their good sides there...
Sadly it's not only that.
Social networks are "half-duplex" where you most likely to broadcast or consume at a time. it's not a true dialog. it made FOMO a thing. and worse, it's not only used for showing good, But it's being used to make complicated world events into bite-size good/bad dividing humanity instead of embracing and considering the complexity.
This is pretty typical of life in small villages across southeast Asia, especially towns along the coast have fish/cashew nuts lady as opposed to the yogurt lady. She was the local news representative and also the beacon of acceptable levels of capitalism -- would price her products with just enough margin for her to enjoy her simple life.
This is a bit concerning. Did you skip everything besides "yogurt delivery", or you don't agree someone talking to you regularly is counter-loneliness?
I've been spending much less time on reviews lately. I used to check if the code was correct and well-written, and worked on my local machine as expected and performed well. But I can't do it anymore. If they can vibe-code, why can't I vibe-review? Maybe something wrong will happen in production, but it's not my responsibility. I also stopped volunteering for on-call (well, I shouldn't in the first place). If I noticed someone reporting a bug in production during non-working hours, I investigated and implemented the solution, usually faster than coworkers. I thought it was my responsibility to contribute to the product if I could, even though it was beyond my job description. Working with AI-generated code really demoralized me and I can't love the product I'm working on anymore.
I agree, but in general those chat apps have relatively bad user experiences for multibillion BtoC company. I used to have a lot of surprises and frustrations while using Claude Code / Desktop, and still encounter issues, but it's the best in major LLM services.
It's funny cause, you know, fixing all those little nitty gritty things should be practically automatic with their own offerings... have your agent put in a lot of instrumentation... have it chase down bugs or dead-end user-journeys... have it go make the changes to fix it...
I've seen these tools work for this kinda stuff sometimes... you'd think nobody would be better at it than the creators of the tools.
But in the stock market, it is almost impossible for companies like Anthropic or any successful startups not to become villains (profit first no matter what). Anthropic especially needs to burn huge amount of money, so they need a lot of funding. The only way to keep founders' idealism is probably to copy Zuckerberg. Divide stocks with and without voting-power and trade only no-voting stocks.
> Surely they know the risks, and surely people will be just as responsible with AI
I can't imagine even half of students can understand the short and long term risk of using social media and AI intensively.
At least I couldn't when I was a student.
> The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true.
This really resonates with me.
If calculators returned even 99.9% correct answers, it would be impossible to reliably build even small buildings with them.
We are using AI for a lot of small tasks inside big systems, or even for designing the entire architecture, and we still need to validate the answers by ourselves, at least for the foreseeable future.
But outsourcing thinking reduces a lot of brain powers to do that, because it often requires understanding problems' detailed structure and internal thinking path.
In current situation, by vibing and YOLOing most problems, we are losing the very ability we still need and can't replace with AI or other tools.
If you don't have building codes, you can totally yolo build a small house, no calculator needed. It may not be a great house, just like vibeware may not be great, but also, you have something.
I'm not saying this is ideal, but maybe there's another perspective to consider as well, which is lowering barriers to entry and increased ownership.
Many people can't/won't/don't do what it takes to build things, be it a house or an app, if they're starting from zero knowledge. But if you provide a simple guide they can follow, they might end actually building something. They'll learn a little along the way, make it theirs, and end up with ownership of their thing. As an owner, change comes from you, and so you learn a bit more about your thing.
Obviously whatever gets built by a noob isn't likely to be of the same caliber as a professional who spent half their life in school and job training, but that might be ok. DIY is a great teacher and motivator to continue learning.
Contrast to high barriers to entry, where nothing gets built and nothing gets learned, and the user is left dependent on the powers that be to get what he wants, probably overpriced, and with features he never wanted.
If you're a rocket surgeon and suddenly outsource all your thinking to a new and unpredictable machine, while you get fat and lazy watching tv, that's on you. But for a lot of people who were never going to put in years of preparation just to do a thing, vibing their idea may be a catalyst for positive change.
To continue the analogy, there’s something called renting and the range of choices. If there’s no code and you can’t build your own house, you’re left with bad houses built by someone else. It’s more likely to be bad when the owner already knows he will not be living in them as building it right can be expensive and time consuming.
When slop becomes easier, there are a lot more people ready to push it to others than people that tries to produce guenuine work. Especially when theh are hard to distinguish superficially.
There's another category error compounding this issue: People think that because past revolutions in technology eventually led to higher living standards after periods of disruption, this one will too. I think this one is the exception for the reasons enumerated by the parent's blog post.
In point of fact, most technological revolutions have fairly immediately benefited a significant number of people in addition to those in the top 1% -- either by increasing demand for labor, or reducing the price of goods, or both.
The promise of LLMs is that they benefit people in the top 1% (investors and highly paid specialists) by reducing the demand for labor to produce the same stuff that was already being produced. There is an incidental initial increase in (or perhaps just reallocation of) labor to build out infrastructure, but that is possibly quite short-lived, and simultaneously drives a huge increase in the cost of electricity, buildings, and computer-related goods.
But the benefits of new technologies are never spread evenly.
When the technology of travel made remote destinations more accessible, it created tourist traps. Some well placed individuals and companies do well out of this, but typically, most people living near tourist traps suffer from the crowds and increased prices.
When power plants are built, neighbors suffer noise and pollution, but other people can turn their lights on.
We haven't yet begun to be able to calculate all the negative externalities of LLMs.
I would not be surpised if the best negative externality comparisons were to the work of Thomas Midgley, who gifted the world both leaded gasoline and CFC refrigerants.
I see a lot of educational animal videos that copy the content of BBC Earth only to replace David Attenborough voice with AI, and it unreasonably irritates me.
Many stay-at-home moms (including my mom) seemed to enjoy her visit. She and my mom talked a lot, sometimes for hours (I still can't figure out how she completed her job when she spent so much time with one person). They chatted about recent events, like the daughter of the fisherman gave birth, the great-grandpa of the liquor shop died of cancer, a newly opened restaurant in the nearest town sucked, and sometimes shared even personal struggles or family matters. It really helped a lot of people combat mental struggles caused by the isolation of being traditional stay-at-home wives in a super rural area. The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn.
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