Yes very much so, if they could make their product do the things they claim they would be focused on doing that, not telling people to stop being naysayers.
You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.
When LLMs first showed up publicly it was a huge leap forward, and people assumed it would continue improving at the rate they had seen but it hasn't.
Exactly. The customer doesn't know what's possible, but increasingly neither do we unless we're staying current at frontier speed.
AI can type faster and answer Stack Overflow questions. But understanding what's newly possible, what competitors just shipped, what research just dropped... that requires continuous monitoring across arXiv, HN, Reddit, Discord, Twitter.
The gap isn't coding ability anymore. It's information asymmetry. Teams with better intelligence infrastructure will outpace teams with better coding skills.
That's the shift people are missing.
Hey, welcome to HN. I see that you have a few LLM generated comments going here, please don’t do it as it is mostly a place for humans to interact. Thank you.
>The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem.
How do you know that? For tech products most of the users are also technically literate and can easily use Claude Code or whatever tool we are using. They easily tell CC specifically what they need. Unless you create social media apps or bank apps, the customers are pretty tech savvy.
One example is programmers who would code physics simulations that run in massive data. You need a decent amount of software engineering skills to maintain software like that but the programmer maybe has a BS in Physics but doesn’t really know the nuances of the actual algorithm being implemented.
With AI, probably you don’t need 95% of the programmers who do that job anyway. Physicists who know the algorithm much better can use AI to implement a majority of the system and maybe you can have a software engineer orchestrate the program in the cloud or supercomputer or something but probably not even that.
Okay, the idea I was trying to get across before I rambled was that many times the customer knows what they want very well and much better than the software engineer.
Yes, I made the same point. Customers are not as dumb as our PMs and Execs think they are. They know their needs more than us, unless its about social media and banks.
I agree. People forget that people know how to use computers and have a good intuition on what they are capable of. Its the programming task that many people cant do. Its unlocking users to solve their own problems again
Yes this is exactly what I feel. I disconnect enough that if it’s really taking its time I will pull up Reddit and now that single prompt cost me half an hour.
I disagree while, there is an Linux icon that would fit in here. This is not it. It might be a starting point, I don't think the design works. despite how simple the windows and apple logos they represent thousands of hours of work by the best graphic artists.
I'm not one of the best graphic artists but I'll give it a shot. First the default version feels vaguely ominous. To me it feels like someone robbing a bank or the logo on stormtroopers murdering civilians, this is obviously horrible. I think this is due to the sharp angles and the eyes without an attached mouth.
The other options improve the scary problem but add complexity that moves it away from the simple universal recognizable logo we are trying to make. On that note the default version is still too complex. Maybe you could move to more of a silhouette, though I think that would fail in recognizably.
Perhaps part of the problem is a penguin is just not so omnipresent in our lives as windows and apples are. Redhat does achieve this with a very simple instantly recognizable logo, I think that could work. Ubuntu also does well with it's logo thought it has gone full abstract, it's distinct and works well.
If you want to see more google image search for "logos"
Marking the road at its engineered speed is ineffective. People overwhelmingly do not use speed limits to decide how fast they drive. They look at how wide and straight the road is and how many things they see. The problem is we built a lot of streets that are engineered to be 50mph roads in residential neighborhoods. People then ignore the 25mph sign and drive 50mph and hit little children playing outside their home. Rebuilding and rerouting the road is impractical, so how do we fix the problem? Empirical evidence shows that by adding "distracting things" people drive slower, and this results in few fatalities.
You are thinking of them as "distractions" but counter intuitively it might better to think of them "focus holders". Imagine your job is to sit in an empty room with a single button and at random times, a light turns on and you need to push the button within half a second. If this happens every several seconds or so, this is pretty easy, but if it only happens after an hour or so your mind will be wandering and your reaction time will be shit. Now imagine instead you are given a platforming video game like Mario or Hollow Knight, and every time a certain character appears on screen need to push the Y button. This sounds like something that is easy to do for hours, even if the specific character appears infrequently, it would even be enjoyable. Adding those elements like trees, turns and bumps are the same idea, it ensures the drivers focus is always on the road where it needs to be.
Also some people just don't care and race down wide straight roads as fast as they can. The only way to slow these people down is to make it impossible to go extremely fast. I can think of this play ground near my house which is across the street from a school. In orders to stop people speeding down this straight street, the placed large rocks in the middle of the road, so you have to dive this zig zag pattern. I sure this can be somewhat frustrating for drivers but it's now impossible to navigate this road at more than ~20 mph which is what we want.
As for moving interactions I think the idea of not having pedestrian crossings at intersections is infeasible. Though it might work if you were building a new city from scratch. When you are walking in a city you are going to cross multiple blocks. Walking ten+ blocks to get somewhere is so normal it’s not something you even think about. Crossing in the middle of the block would at least double and could triple or quadruple the length of the of a walk and city dwellers would simply not do it and cross at intersections. They already universally ignore traffic lights, and aren't going to walk out of their way dozens of times a day.
I could imagine a city that was designed around walking and all the shops and homes were on car free streets, with streets behind the houses, like alleyways or underground. That I could see working, but the problems with implementation are obvious.
> An algorithm can screw up too of course, but it's a lot harder to show intent, which can affect the damages awarded I think.
I personally think an algorithm would be easier to show intent, or a least willful negligence, it would also magnify the harm. A employee might only make mistakes on occasion, but an algorithm will make it every single time. The benefit of an algorithm is it does not need to be reminded do or not to do something, and it's actions are easier to interrogate than a humans.
reply