Composer 2.5 worked just as well for me as opus 4.6, and was faster and actually worked better for quick bugfixes and reporting back to support. And is much cheaper.
I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.
I don't know if it's just me, but the thoughtfulness of of the average HN comment has seemed to decrease in the last few years. Feels more populist/Reddity the last couple years.
You haven't been paying close attention. This has been going on for about 15 years. I'd say we had 5 good years here before the quality began dropping precipitously. If you got here after about 2012, you're probably part of the problem.
I'm pretty sure it has. If you look at threads from a decade ago, they're completely different - much less dramatic, much higher quality, way less populist and full of manipulative language.
If I vibe code an app, and make $1m, and people willingly paid me for it, who am I exploiting? How did I "extract" $1m from a market. Who did I take that away from?
I didn't even exploit my workers and make a margin on their labor. Please can someone who believes billionaires are evil explain this to me.
What if - evolutionarily we just haven't evolved for birth control?
What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?
No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.
And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...
We’re certainly not dying out. At minimum, eventually civilisation would crack badly enough that we can no longer make contraceptives, nor other entertainment to distract from sex.
Which I’m fairly sure is part of the picture. Evolution didn’t build us to want sex; it built us to crave stimulation, which is more generally useful, then made reproduction into fallback entertainment.
Depends on what you mean by "we". Humanity? Yeah, impossible to die out by fertility crisis merely due to lifestyle. The fewer babies are born, the more unoccupied space there is, making it more and more attractive to have kids. But if you mean "Americans" or "ethnic population", it's very much possible to die out. It happened to native Americans, it can happen to your group. If birth control collapses in your country, you can still be supplied by another one from across the globe who secretly or openly cheers for your collapse. Same goes for shipping you drugs, see history. As for space becoming available from your low fertility, alas that doesn't work when you're being invaded and your land settled in by a more fertile country.
I also used it for advice on a massive personal decision, but I specifically asked it to debate with me and persuade me of the other side. I specifically prompted it for things I am not thinking about, or ways I could be wrong.
It was extremely good at the other side too. You just have to ask. I can imagine most people don't try this, but LLMs literally just do what you ask them to. And they're extremely good and weighing both sides if that's what you specifically want.
So who's fault is it if you only ask for one side, or if the LLM is too sycophantic? I'm not sure it's the LLMs fault actually.
This has also been my experience - asking it to take the devil's advocate of the other side of the coin and assume the persona of 'X relevant highly rational type with deep knowledge in the field' both have a lot of utility. You can do this in more than one dimension, too.
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.
How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.
(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier:
> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.
You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
Yeah, I remember people saying that about making 1m model 3s per year, landing rockets, getting 10k+ satellite privately into orbit, and getting millions of subscribers using internet via those satellites.
Maybe just maybe the guy does actually get things done, and if you didn't hate him you'd see that?
(yes, there are some things he hasn't gotten done. That doesn't take away from what he has gotten done)
Please understand that his companies succeeding in some things doesn’t make the things that are exaggerated, overpromised, or just plain naked hype with no backing somehow practical. It’s an interesting effect of our age that for some figures to some people if any criticism is considered unwarranted then all criticism must be disregarded.
It reminds me of growing up in the evangelical church and all the pastors who’d still keep their followers even after they show up in new cars or fly first class, taking the tithes from old ladies on their pension.
That's really understating things. He has promised so many things at various times that the "hits" are at best 10% of what he says. You can't just cherry pick his successes and say "well maybe this will work too" with a track record like that.
This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all.
To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time.
But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.
I actually think the public markets have a lot less faith in openai than softbank does. They need these crazy investors. Public markets would not value openai at $1.4trn. So they can't go public. It would reveal how bad things are.
I'm not saying HN should be super supportive of everything, but the level of hate and complete loss of reality for a lot of people is quite sad to see, for a community of supposedly intelligent people.
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