Why is it bizarre? It is inevitable. After all, AI has not ruined creative professions, it merely disrupted and transformed them. And yes, I fully understand my whole comment here being snarky, but please bear with me.
> Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge impact on a lot of lives—otherwise it is not progress. By definition it will impact many, by displacing those who were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster. The trouble is when people hold back progress just to prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the cost of progress.
Now it's the software engineers turn to not hold back progress.
> [...] At the same time, a part of me feels art has no place being motivated by money anyway. Perhaps this change will restore the balance. Artists will need to get real jobs again like the rest of us and fund their art as a side project.
Replace "Artists" with "Coders" and imagine a plumber writing that comment.
> [...] Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement job than before. And all those artists who devoted their lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal adjustment.
Again, replace "Artists" with coders and fill in the replacement.
So, please get in line and adapt. And stop clinging to your "great intellectually challenging job" because you are holding back progress. It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a machine anyway.
The premise of those comments, just like the premise in this thread, is ridiculous and fantastical.
The only way generative AI has changed the creative arts is that it's made it easier to produce low quality slop.
I would not call that a true transformation. I'd call that saving costs at the expense of quality.
The same is true of software. The difference is, unlike art, quality in software has very clear safety and security implications.
This gen AI hype is just the crypto hype all over again but with a sci-fi twist in the narrative. It's a worse form of work just like crypto was a worse form of money.
I do not disagree, in fact I'm feeling more and more Butlerian with every passing day. However, it is undeniable that a transformation is taking place -- just not necessarily to the better.
Gen AI is the opposite of crypto. The use is immediate, obvious and needs no explanation or philosophizing.
You are basically showing your hand that you have zero intellectual curiosity or you are delusional in your own ability if you have never learned anything from gen AI.
I play with generative AI quite often. Mostly for shits and giggles. It's fun to try to make it hallucinate in the dumbest way possible. Or to make up context.
E.g. try to make any image generating model take an existing photo of a humanoid and change it so the character does a backflip.
It's also interesting to generate images in a long loop, because it usually reveals interesting patterns in the training data.
Outside these distractions I've never had generative AI be useful. And I'm currently working in AI research.
Is it though? I agree the technology evolving is inevitable, but, the race/rush to throw as much money at scaling and marketing as possible before these things are profitable and before society is ready is not inevitable at all. It feels extremely forced. And the way it's being shoved into every product to juice usage numbers seems to agree with me that it's all premature and rushed and most people don't really want it. The bubble is essentially from investing way more money in datacenters and GPU's than they can even possibly pay for or build, and there's no evidence there's even a market for using that capacity!
It's funny you bring up artists, because I used to work in game development and I've worked with a lot of artists, and they almost universally HATE this stuff. They're not like "oh thank you Mr. Altman", they're more like "if we catch you using AI we'll shun you." And it's not just producers, a lot of gamers are calling out games that are made using AI, so the customers are mad too.
You keep talking about "progress", but "progress" towards what exactly? So far these things aren't making anything new or advancing civilization, they're remixing stuff we already did well before, but sloppily. I'm not saying they don't have a place -- they definitely do, they can be useful. My argument is against the bizarre hype machine and what sometimes seems like sock puppets on social media. If the marketting was just "hey, we have this neat AI, come use it" I think there'd be a lot less backlash then people saying "Get in line and adapt"
> And stop clinging to your "great intellectually challenging job" because you are holding back progress.
Man, I really wish I had the power you think I have. Also, I use these tools daily, I'm deeply familiar with them, I'm not holding back anyone's progress, not even my own. That doesn't mean I think they're beyond criticism or that the companies behind them are acting responsibly, or that every product is great. I plan to be part of the future, but I'm not just going to pretend like I think every part of it is brilliant.
> It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a machine anyway.
This will be really funny when it comes for your job.
I believe you misunderstood the point of my comment, or rather I didn't make it clear enough. The quotes I quickly picked out feel like they represent a majority opinion on HN, namely that this is progress and disruption. I don't share that opinion.
My own gut feeling is that this sentiment comes out of a position of superiority and a definite lack of empathy. It is software engineers building the technology that is leading to job loss, sloppification of everything as well as second order effects like storage and RAM prices soaring because of the hype.
As such, I find it ironic to complain about being replaced. After all, your profession is the one responsible for all of this, so now please take a look in the mirror and take responsibility for the actions of the industry you choose to work in.
Personally, I think the current trajectory of AI is an overall net negative to society. I sincerely hope it all comes crashing down in another AI winter, but we'll see.
I feel different: the last line is very important in this context, since it communicates the underlying thoughts and values of the poster.
Asking for "amazing" open source projects in this case is not asking out of genuine curiosity or want for debate, it is a rhetorical question asked out of frustration at the general trajectory of AI and who profits off of it -- namely the boot-wearers.
No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as
> do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you
If you think telling someone that after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.
That's not how paraphrasing works. They probably intentionally held back from guaranteeing an interview, for various reasons. One that seems obvious to me is that with the bar set at "Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch", it's plausible that someone could meet it by feeding the problem into an LLM. If a bunch of people do that, they won't want to waste time interviewing them all.
You may want to consider the distribution and quantity of replies before stating that you WILL do something that might just waste more people’s time or not be practical.
The classy thing to do would be responding to every qualifying submission, even if it’s just to thank everyone and let some people know the field was very competitive if an interview won’t be happening.
So I like these public challenges, but as someone who set some public questions, ask any company who ran any public contest for their opinion. The pool is filled with scammers who either bought the solutions through sites like Chegg or sometimes even just stackoverflow.
i think by your logic, they only thing that they do that is condescending is to say that an interview is not guaranteed.
people are mentioning that they do this for a reason, which explains away that behavior, so yeah, it kinda does change the fact of whether they are being condescending.
> They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI.
But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
>That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though.
It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year.
I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
How is this my fault as customer? This a predatory practice in tech.
I work in automotive, the hoops you have to jump through in order to push a SW update are enormous. One of the first rules is: if the owner of the vehicle does not consent to an OTA update, you're out of luck.
The industry is obviously unable to self-regulate, so it is time for an external regulator, e.g. the EU, to jump in and mandate that SW updates cannot be applied without explicit consent and an explicit explanation of what is being changed. Of course, security updates must be maintained separately from feature updates like this.
As a consumer, I always want the latter, rarely do I want the former. My device, my choice.
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win.
Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing constant maintenance, the manufacturers had to shift to different revenue streams, like killing repairability and locking everything behind manufacturer approval.
This is a professional shop voicing the complaints, not a random guy trying to do a fix on the side of the road.
Imagine someone told you they work for Apple and the reason everything is soldered, glued, stacked in a way it will never survive disassembly, and every bit of software and hardware in the device needs the manufacturer's blessing to be replaced or just keep running is because it was cheaper and safer this way.
> it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
It was a solved problem for everything mechanical where locking it down or preventing people from learning wasn't really an option. How did it become tricky again just now when we deal with far more flexible software and possibility to lockdown?
I likely did not communicate clearly enough: it is tricky because of organizational reasons, not technical. There are many trade-offs that have to be made and it involves different business units with their own targets and incentives.
To take a few examples from the article with likely causes (note I don't work for BMW, so this is pure speculation based on my own experience):
> BMW has over-engineered the diagnostic procedure to such a level that even their own technicians often do not know the correct replacement process.
The ECU, diagnostic procedures and service methods are being developed by a different org-units. One is engineering, which works towards their own development use cases. They might develop the on-board diagnostic interfaces. The service unit develops their own tester and have to develop their own procedures.
Engineering is usually late with providing real hardware & software samples, let alone a fully integrated car. The service unit might only get a working test car very late in the process and discover that the procedure is super complicated. By that point the car development is already too far along for major changes. Remember that most components have been specified and awarded to suppliers years ago by this point.
> And it gets worse: the original iBMUCP module, which integrates the pyrofuse, contactors, BMS and internal copper-bonded circuitry, is fully welded shut. There are no screws, no service openings, and it is not designed to be opened, even though the pyrofuse and contactors are technically replaceable components.
Engineering is not concerned with these issues, it's usually the service unit which needs to bring in maintenance requirements. A judgement call is being made whether an assembly that you source as a single part needs to be split up further. For example, if you split it up further, you now have more parts to manage. You need to provide logistics and must allocate space in your spare parts warehouses for these new parts.
That usually makes sense for expensive components. Here's another fact: the manufacturer allocates a warranty & goodwill budget for each car line, because the manufacturer has to pay dealers for these repairs if it falls into the warranty period or is judged to fall under good will. It's usually not in the interest of the manufacturer to have expensive repairs because of that.
It might also be that the repair is being deemed to dangerous, because it is a high-voltage component. Opening it up and tinkering with it might increase the risk of an electrical fire in the battery. It might be that this risk was judged to be higher than the repair cost.
> Additionally, the procedure requires flashing the entire vehicle both before and after the replacement, which adds several hours to the process and increases risk of bricked components which can increase the recovery cost by factor 10x.
No service unit wants these long flashing times, because it blocks a repair bay in the workshop. But it's usually because the EE integration has been developed in this way. It might need coding, calibration or just bringing up everything to the latest release.
Vehicle SW is super regulated, you need to fulfill a staggering amount of regulations. Look up UNECE-R156 SUMS as an example. It might be that the new parts comes with a newer SW version, which has only been verified and approved in combination with newer SW in the other components. This would require flashing ancillary ECUs as well even if they have not been changed to ensure release compliance.
> Even after we managed to open the unit and access everything inside, we discovered that the Infineon TC375 MCU is fully locked.
Look up UNECE-R155. Things like these are mandated, if not directly in the regulation then indirectly by making the manufacturer liable for any modification that somebody did to their car. It is practically required to lock it down.
Just a few points off the top of my head, the comment got too long anyway.
Thanks for your comment. It looks to me that most of the people who work in engineering area express some form of understanding or give the benefit of the doubt to the situation while people from outside the field borderline call for malice in the side of BMW.
I think both are right. Engineering a modern car is really complex as you pointed out but the customer also has the right to say, "well that is what you are paid for". In the end the customer can just go to the next car brand.
I own a relatively recent BMW but it is only a mild hybrid diesel (4 year old M340D) and before I even received the car, they changed the whole engine and did not release the car until that was executed. That was done by the dealer, and i never knew what was the reason.
On the flip side of modern car engineering I once had a check engine light called the dealer and with authorization prompts on my side they were able to tell me some gas exhaust sensor was malfunctioning and I would be able to go there at my leisure, as it was not urgent. That was nice. When i bought the car I had 5 years of maintenance included and this is one of the nicest things about owning a car in modern times. They even call me when it is about time to do the maintenance asking for when I am available. I never owned top brand cars before but this is for me worth the premium so far as it is one less thing to organize.
Apart from the normal maintenance and the above I never had any issue with the car, and it is a very big difference between a 2001 Passat TDI(my youth car) or a Ford Torneo Connect(the car i am aiming to exchange for due to family reasons).
But that’s a very long way to say that yes, BMW is to blame for making something that’s hard to repair and doesn’t do anything about it because it makes them money. Other companies got it far better so your explanation is superficial.
When a system “malfunctions” only to the benefit of one side it’s not “an issue” as much as design.
Why don’t you run the same careful reasoning against any hostile action from any big tech company and see how it sounds? All the actions of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon are just the result of unfortunate misalignment between teams.
If a flipped coin always lands how the person flipping wants it to land, it’s loaded, not misalignment between hand and coin.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made in corporations with more money and higher stakes than BMW. Once you get off the ground and see more of the bigger picture, you can’t unsee the hostile decisions that are compartmentalized from the people who just see the tiny bit in front of them and it’s easier to sell them that they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s not a problem.
> I just haven't found Emacs to be particularly productive over SSH. IMO it works best on a local machine, there's just too much in the GUI which isn't as workable over terminal. Font rendering, images, clickable text links all take a hit. None are really deal breakers, but Emacs TUI just kind of feels like an afterthought. X11 over SSH doesn't feel responsive to me.
But that's what tramp is for, it works nicely and is surprisingly well integrated into the rest of Emacs. The only obvious downside is initial performance, but that can be worked around by tweaking SSH settings to keep connections open.
Another hack I use is to initiate a connection from remote to my local Emacs instance. The use case is ssh'ing into a remote shell, typing "remote-emacs <file-xyz>" and having that open the file on my local machine.
I did that by creating a script that gets my local IP from $SSH_CONNECTION, uses that to ssh into my local machine and executes "emacsclient -n /ssh:$HOSTNAME:$FILEPATH" which then in turn opens the remote file using tramp. Pretty useful.
How does it handle things like project heirarchy? Does folder browsing work? Can I use an org-roam database? I've used TRAMP to open single files over SSH, but it seems less functional than mounting with FUSE. But I haven't looked into it extensively.
I am definitely going to build out that bash script for the second use case, that sounds excellent. Thanks, I had no idea you could do that
Yes, it works basically everywhere you'd interact with a local file or directory.
For example, you open a remote dired buffer with C-x C-f /ssh:host:/dir/. Afterwards, opening a file or navigating to a directory will open it remotely as well. You can also use project functions or magit seamlessly. I have plenty of bookmarks remotely etc.
Fundamentally, you just prepend "/ssh:[user@]host:" to any path or file operation and things will magically Just Work (tm).
If the system values proportional representation higher than qualification, than I will either abandon my own strive towards excellence or I will actively support changing that system.
I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity
The system should value qualification higher than other factors. But the system is made up of people with inherent biases that has led to imbalanced representation of the majority over actual qualifications.
You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum.
In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test.
Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.
College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.
How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
Let's rewind 4 years to this HN article titled "The AI Art Apocalypse": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133 and read some of the comments.
> Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge impact on a lot of lives—otherwise it is not progress. By definition it will impact many, by displacing those who were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster. The trouble is when people hold back progress just to prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the cost of progress.
Now it's the software engineers turn to not hold back progress.
Or this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541693
> [...] At the same time, a part of me feels art has no place being motivated by money anyway. Perhaps this change will restore the balance. Artists will need to get real jobs again like the rest of us and fund their art as a side project.
Replace "Artists" with "Coders" and imagine a plumber writing that comment.
Maybe this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856326
> [...] Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement job than before. And all those artists who devoted their lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal adjustment.
Again, replace "Artists" with coders and fill in the replacement.
So, please get in line and adapt. And stop clinging to your "great intellectually challenging job" because you are holding back progress. It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a machine anyway.
reply