Guessing, but i suppose he might be referring to the implied-as-given duty ethics tone of the parent post, that easily comes across as an obligation to be blindly guided externally by norms.
Obviously a personal anecdote and YMMV, but I have several nieces and nephews, and I've gotten to watch them grow over the last ~15 years. During this time, I've tried to spend as much time with them as I can.
But I'm a new dad as of this year, and it's totally different. It really doesn't compare.
There's only so much time you can spend with someone else's kid, even if they're family. Even seeing a niece or nephew every week doesn't compare with waking up with a newborn at 3 AM and seeing them stick their tongue out for the first time, or seeing the squinty face they make when they try a strawberry for the first time at 5 PM on a random Tuesday.
It also doesn't compare with the sheer joy of having a little one who joyfully loves the heck out of you because you've bonded with each other and they feel loved and secure with you -- you've cared for them, loved them unconditionally, been understanding, responsive, and emotionally stable with them, and patiently/consistently enforced healthy boundaries on their behavior.
In a sense, one could say there's no greater joy.
But there's also perhaps no greater pain when parenting gets really complex and hard. One of my kids is autistic and raising him has been incredibly difficult and painful (he's a teen now).
The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage.
While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making open-weight models. The open-weight model developers then train on those logs to 'distill' a model.
Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry:
"The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car companies are applying that data to design new vehicles that will directly replace Ford!"
I wasn't arguing against the practice, I was clarifying that the weights of these models are not being stolen, and explaining what these companies do to create their models.
This is how I worked with LLMs originally, and I much preferred it. This gave me a much better understanding of the code that I was adding. But, there's no way to keep up with my team like this anymore. It's just too slow when everyone else is working directly in Claude Code.
If the entire team is vibe coding and there is no human audit then there is no way but to vibe code, for sure.
I would also just vibe it if there is no responsibility, but if I do it that way I don't even care what happens with the project.
I get so detached from it that I stop caring and if it has huge critical bugs..I just don't care anymore because it's not my responsibility or my code at all at that point. I'm just there to nudge things along.
Just hook it up to Jira and let the managers add the features then pass it off to QA.
Real engineering is fully automated at that point.
> I just don't care anymore because it's not my responsibility or my code at all at that point
Yep, 100%.
Business has made it clear they don’t care, so there’s no point in burning one’s energy. Throw the whole thing on auto, check out, and go do something else during the day.
I agree, that work in these places is likely short lived, if for no other reason than working in them is awful and demoralising. My point is, that these places exist, and have such a hard-on for “oh my god, AI!!!1!1!” that putting in extra effort there, is a waste of your own energy.
I'm just thinking: The result is net-net the same. Either they terminate your contract as a salaried employee or they do it as a consultant. The fee is higher as a consultant and you never have to say you were fired. You're making a really good argument for getting into consulting.
You can just answer the same rote questions to different companies for max salary, then when the going gets tough you can essentially 'fire' the company and say they've moved past your core consulting paradigm. Maybe suggest a new consultant and move one. Rinse; repeat.
Parent comment said they end up "...pass[ing] it off to QA."
Edit: suppose that very well could have been tongue-in-cheek.
Side note: as someone who has been interested in programming for a while, but didn't end up in a software dev track in life, it's been pretty wild watching the ride you all have been going on lately. I used to be pretty bummed I didn't get to do that kind of work for a living, but lately I've been feeling more and more like I dodged a bullet.
Not that I don't have my own AI-related junk I have to deal with where I did end up, of course. I think most have.
I have a version of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser (using Pyodide and WebAssembly) and it's smaller than a lot of modern React homepages (12.35MB):
Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."
Yeah, bit shameful, I also got curious about the walkman-look-alike, but then I saw the reflection on the CD which seemed out of place, I think it's supposed to reflect the roof of the cover, but instead seems to reflect behind "the camera", kind of gave it away :/
The Walkman D-E220 is kind of close though, so not completely far away, but their CD players weren't so toy-y and rounded it seems.
There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.
There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.
Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.
The school Macs had the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball for scrolling. It was my first time seeing a Mac, but I always thought there had to be a setting somewhere that would let you move the cursor around with it. Spent many computer lab hours looking for it.
My eye went to the labeled floppy disk, since no floppy regularly used for more than a week ever had that pristine of a label on it, and there’s no practical reason you’d use floppy disks over flash drives or burned CDs today. (And why would you write 1998 on it?) Alas, none of us will be able to tell before too long.
It seems plausible, at least, that the floppy has such a pristine label because the kids didn’t end up using it. Even if I was a kid and into retro games I don’t think I’d care to play my parents’ saves. (Not to say I have any strong belief that this is a non-AI image).
Well, not exactly. He did say that the hiring process at Geoworks was incredibly rigorous, and that he passed that.
I know this author’s name but not his whole life story, but it reads like he got hired at Amazon before they acquired Geoworks and brought all of his former colleagues over.
The original iPhone is tiny. Are you misremembering?
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