That's not even mentioning a not insignificant part of the point of code reviews is to propagate understanding of the evolution of the code base among other team members. The reviewer benefits from the act of reviewing as well.
Also used to run a nuclear weapons program back in the day[1]. Though, to be honest, I think it'd be politically impossible to revive today. There's barely political will to build new nuclear power.
I do not think that nuclear power is viewed same as nuclear war heads. One is perceived as potentional ecological catasprophe and the second one as a weapon of retaliation.
I honestly don't think most people understand either. Younger generations are a bit more open minded, but for a lot of people who lived through the news reports of Cs137-fallout from Chernobyl raining down on them, nuclear anything is represents an invisible and scary boogyman.
I like this explanation why people in old soviet block tent much more to support nuclear energy. When Chernobyl accident happened, communists we're mainly silent about that but countries which we're affected and had a free press were (rightfully) panicking so general population became scared about the use of nuclear as a energy source.
The same reason why they exist now. Why spend millions of tokens on designing, implementing and debugging something, followed by years of discovering edge cases in the real world, if I can just use a library that already did all of that
Sure, leftpad and python-openai aren't hugely valuable in the age of LLMs, but redis and ffmpeg are still as useful as ever. Probably even more useful now that LLMs can actually know and use all their obscure features
They know the syntax but seem to miss the architectural context. I've found that models will happily generate valid Redis commands that introduce race conditions or break state consistency the moment you have concurrency. It saves typing but you still need to design the locking strategy yourself.
> When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.
I can't think of even a single example of OSS being monetized through direct user engagement. The bulk of it just isn't monetized at all, and what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that. A few projects like Krita sell binaries on the steam store.
There is this kind of webdev-adjacent niche where the model of using documentation (or even intentionally sub-par documentation) as a marketing funnel for consulting and/or "Pro" versions is a thing. These projects are somewhat vocal about vibe coding killing their business models. If these projects really create any meaningful value is another question.
> what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that
All of those examples are the "direct user engagement" in question. No one tips a tip jar that they don't see. Enterprise users don't sponsor projects or buy licenses when they don't know they are using projects they should sponsor or buy a better license.
If an LLM is automating your `npm install` you probably don't see the funding requests. Are you running `npm fund` in your spare time?
If an LLM is automating your need to lookup library documentation you probably don't see that the library's own documentation has a Ko-Fi link or GitHub Sponsors request. Would you check library websites and GitHub repos on your own for such things without the need to read their documentation?
This is fairly uncharitable. The goal is not to trick people into reading, it is to motivate them as to why they should read. It is more about highlighting the most interesting part of your article to tell people why they should spend the time. You still have to deliver on your promises.
I feel like Gwern’s example is quite illustrative of this point. Just framing the content differently makes you more motivated to jump into it, even if you’re reading about the same content as before.
I don't know. It's almost universally assumed to be true that "making someone want to read on" is inherently good but IMO it's not. Why is it good to be "more motivated to jump into it"? If a plain description and some context does not motivate you, it would be better to spend your time elsewhere.
Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1]. I fairly often often put the conclusion in the title, and must have been on the HN front page over 20 times by now.
This is obviously not the only way to construct an article (nor the only one I employ), but it is surprisingly reliable, and will attract and retain the readers who are actually interested in what you have to say, while letting those that aren't interested find something else.
> Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1].
I think this is an important distinction. I would argue that it's better to make the point clear to find readers that care, than to try to make all readers care.
you get a replication crisis on the bleeding edge between replication being possible and impossible. There’s never going to be a replication crisis in linear algebra, there’s never going to be a replication crisis in theology, there definitely was a replication crisis in psych and a replication crisis in nutrition science is distinctly plausible and would be extremely good news for the field as it moves through the edge.
Leslie Lamport came up with a structured method to find errors in proof. Testing it on a batch, he found most of them had errors. Peter Guttman's paper on formal verification likewise showed many "proven" or "verified" works had errors that were spottes quickly upon informal review or testing. We've also see important theories in math and physics change over time with new information.
With the above, I think we've empirically proven that we can't trust mathmeticians more than any other humans We should still rigorously verify their work with diverse, logical, and empirical methods. Also, build ground up on solid ideas that are highly vetted. (Which linear algebra actually does.)
The other approach people are taking are foundational, machine-checked, proof assistants. These use a vetted logic whose assistant produces a series of steps that can be checked by a tiny, highly-verified checker. They'll also oftne use a reliable formalism to check other formalisms. The people doing this have been making everything from proof checkers to compilers to assembly languages to code extraction in those tools so they are highly trustworthy.
But, we still need people to look at the specs of all that to see if there are spec errors. There's fewer people who can vet the specs than can check the original English and code combos. So, are they more trustworthy? (Who knows except when tested empirically on many programs or proofs, like CompCert was.)
A friend of mine was given an assignment in a masters-level CS class, which was to prove a lemma in some seminal paper (It was one of those "Proof follows a similar form to Lemma X" points).
This had been assigned many times previously. When my friend disproved the lemma, he asked the professor what he had done wrong. Turns out the lemma was in fact false, despite dozens of grad students having turned in "proofs" of the lemma already. The paper itself still stood, as a weaker form of the lemma was sufficient for its findings, but still very interesting.
The woke movement in many ways has taken core Christian principles, cut out the supernatural elements, and formed a new quasi religious movement. It has its dogmas and priests, it focuses on the poor & disadvantaged, etc. That's not a criticism of woke, I see it more as a response of the failures of Christianity in practice to live or embrace those values.
There's a reason Nietzsche labeled it slave morality. It undermines people's confidence to act and judge other appropriately, revalues weakness to be a virtue and strength as evil, and demands that people stop trying to change the world for the better and focus instead on their own supposed guilt. It's morality developed for people who are structurally unable to act (because they are commoner serfs with no power) to make them feel justified and satisfied with inaction.
FWIW it seems Russia's trolling activities took a pretty significant hit after Prigozhin fell out of a window in 2023, as the "Internet Research Agency" was one of his ventures.
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