Discussion
Code is run more than read
choeger: Clearly, there is a thing missing here: Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. So in that case biz just becomes a filter for users that actually are willing (and able) to fund your software. That's a good thing.Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...
jollyllama: And cars are driven more than worked on, but putting the oil filter inaccessibly in the middle of the engine block is still an unforgiveable sin.
its_ethan: What if there's an efficiency in engine design by placing the filter in the middle that leads to a +2mpg improvement for the driver? Or that it fails, on average, 22k miles later into it's life? Not all hard-to-repair-yourself designs are malicious...
alexpotato: I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful codeFor example:- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstractionI mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
datsci_est_2015: Google “hospital server room”. Guess everywhere should just do the same thing with their server rooms, yeah? Works for hospitals, and look how much money the healthcare system makes! Why even pay an IT engineer, just plug in another wire bro.
andsoitis: The real issue is that oil filters and gears are really just legacy design. EVs don’t need them.So, similar with software design, as in other fields, often a problem goes away when you ask a different question.
jjk166: > Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user.If that's what the regulators are optimizing for.
codemog: Stupid regulations are why we have an idiotic cookie banner on many websites.
batisteo: Most cars sold in the US are not aerodynamic so it seems a couple of mpg isn't the focus anyway
0x457: I think oil filter located somewhere sinful usually in cars that are aerodynamically sound.
direwolf20: biz > user is capitalism. Removal of that isn't capitalism. Non-removal of that is capitalism.
evanjrowley: Does the ">" mean "greater than" or is it meant to symbolize an arrow in a ordered sequence?
psychoslave: It went on the good track, but failed to generalize that ≹ is what apply among all these terms.
carefree-bob: The US is filled with bubble cars like everywhere else. There isn't really much difference between cars across the world. Well, China is unique with like 100 automakers all searching for customers, but for most of the world, it's Toyota, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Stellantis, GM, Renault/Nissan, Ford as the top global producers and they sell everywhere. Sure there are some special models in local markets, but those are mostly rebadged versions you can get elsewhere.Fun Fact: Along with the "Bees are disappearing" scare, which was just measurement error, there has been an "insects are disappearing" scare, due to the fact people's windshields are not covered with bugs like they used to be. However that is because cars have gotten more aerodynamic so fewer insects are hitting the windshield.
coeneedell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations?...Um I’m pretty sure that’s not the only evidence for insect population declines.
ww520: If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.
its_ethan: Glad to know in this hypothetical car scenario the owner decided to not get an oil change leading to the total loss of the vehicle. That seems very realistic and definitely something that car designs should be optimized around.Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.
bena: To be fair, you are constructing an entirely hypothetical car scenario where oil filter placement leads to a 5-10% increase in fuel efficiency.We're already in the land of the fucking ridiculous. Let's have fun with it.
its_ethan: I'm using this hypothetical to illustrate the point that: tradeoffs exist, and that you (we) may not have full insight into the full complexity of the trade space that the engineers were working with.Putting some random number of hypothetical mpg improvement was clearly a mistake, but I assumed people here would be able to get the point I was trying to make, instead of getting riled up about the relationship (or lack thereof) of oil filters and fuel efficiency.
carefree-bob: This is like saying you can get a 10% improvement in battery life by changing where you position the RAM on your motherboard.There is just no universe in which placing an oil filter in one location or another is going to make such a difference. You'd have to mount it completely outside the engine, say sitting as a cylinder on top of the hood, and even there you are not going to get a 2mpg improvement.
its_ethan: Sorry we're talking about a hypothetical car engine, and as an analogy to software development. I'm not an expert in designing car engines like you, but acting like this example being not fully realistic is some kind of "gotcha" for the point I'm making is really frustrating.The point that I am making (obviously, I think) is that tradeoffs exist, even if you don't think the right decision was made, your full view into the trade space is likely incomplete, or prioritizes something different than the engineers.Based on the replies, saying there's a hypothetical 2mpg improvement to be had was a mistake, everyone is latching on to that like there's some actual engine we're investigating.
tikhonj: As a counterpoint, some firms have great code quality. I spent a summer at Jane Street (so I only have a limited view), but all the code and systems I saw there were great. I've also heard good things about some of the other top places like HRT and XTX, although I gather it is not universal.These places manage to get a lot done (and make a lot of money) with relatively few people, so it isn't like they're moving slower. If anything, the good code quality is one of the key factors that lets them move faster.I guess my point is that while it's clearly possible to operate with low quality code, it is not inevitable, and having good code quality does not mean you have to move slowly.
nonameiguess: This is getting to be possibly the most irritating thing I've seen on Hacker News since registering here. Every thread about a limitation of LLMs being immediately rebuked with "humans do that too."It's a continuous object lesson in missing the point. A similar thing happened a few hours ago when an article was posted about a researcher who posted a fake paper about a fake disease to a pre-print server that LLMs picked up via RAG, telling people with vague symptoms that they had this non-existent disease. Lo and behold, commenters go in immediately saying "I'd be fooled too because I trust pre-print medical research." Except the article itself was intentionally ridiculous, opening by telling you it was fake, using obviously fake names, fictional characters from popular television. The only reason it fooled humans on Hacker News is because they don't bother reading the articles and respond only to headlines.It's just like your code examples. Humans fail because we're lazy. Just like all animals, we have a strong instinct to preserve energy and expend effort only when provoked by fear, desire, or external coercion. The easiest possible code to write that seems to work on a single happy path using stupid workarounds is deemed good enough and allowed through. If your true purpose on a web discussion board is to bloviate and prove how smart you are rather than learn anything, why bother actually reading anything? The faster you comment, the better chance you have of getting noticed and upvoted anyway.Humans are not actually stupid. We can write great code. We can read an obviously fake paper and understand that it's fake. We know how hierarchy of evidence and trust works if we bother to try. We're just incredibly lazy. LLMs are not lazy. Unlike animals, they have no idea how much energy they're using and don't care. Their human slaves will move heaven and earth and reallocate entire sectors of their national economies and land use policies to feed them as much as they will ever need. LLMs, however, do have far more concrete cognitive limitations brought about by the way they are trained without any grounding in hierarchy of evidence or the factual accuracy of the text the ingest. We've erected quite a bit of ingenious scaffolding with various forms of augmented context, input pre-processing, post-training model fine tuning, and whatever the heck else these brilliant human engineers are doing to create the latest generation of state of the art agents, but the models underneath still have this limitation.Do we need more? Can the scaffolding alone compensate sufficiently to produce true genius at the level of a human who is actually motivated and trying? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not, but it's really irritating that we can't even discuss the topic because it immediately drops into the tarpit of "well, you too." It's the discourse of toddlers. Can't we do better than this?
carefree-bob: No, the point is that the GP statement missed the point. Say we hear about a company laying off 10% of workers, and someone says "What if they needed to lay off those workers in order to meet their HIPAA obligations and protect user privacy?" Now clearly that would be an argument that is either bad faith, or just spectacularly uninformed. We do not then go on to discuss the relative importance of HIPAA compliance versus employment. The reason companies lay off workers is because of a decline in market demand or efforts at cost cutting. That is the reason. It's not to help the environment. It's not to protect customer data. It's not because this is the year of the Pig. Anyone who makes those arguments should get responded to in a way to clearly points out it is a specious argument.The reason why automakers place serviceable parts in bad locations is due to either incompetence (If you are, say, Bentley) or malicious design (almost everyone else) -- e.g. they do not prioritize serviceability. Car makers really hate that ordinary people can repair their own vehicles. There were proposals in the 1960s to try to lock shut the hood so that car owners wouldn't be able to open it and service the cars on their own. Hyundai just announced that they will not allow car owners to retract their own parking brakes when they want to replace brake pads. You need a login with a website and prove that you are a professional mechanic before you can retract your own parking brakes. This is done, ostensibly, for "cyber security" reasons. But the real reason is that Hyundai does not want people to be able to service their own cars, they want you to take the car to a dealer. They also are not fans of independent mechanics, they would prefer if everyone that touched the car had a business relationship with Hyundai and was under contract with them. The fact that you can work on your car is an endless source of pain for manufacturers, and when they repeatedly make it hard to work on your car, or try to lock down parts so that you can't pull an old seat heater from the junkyard and use it to replace your own failed seat heater -- that is all part of the war on independent repair.So what should be discussed is the environment of hostility to serviceability, everything from insisting that transmission oil is "lifetime" to forcing you to pay money to the manufacturer if you want to read the data from your sensors, or making it extremely hard to do simple things like changing a headlight or replacing a battery. All of that is part of the same issue, which is hostility to end user repair. It has nothing to do with improving gas mileage, or ending world hunger, or celebrating the Year of the Pig. These are all equally specious arguments.
its_ethan: ok, glad you seem to have everything figure out so definitively
