While you’re correct that FreeBSD is not a Linux distribution, the word “distro” is literally short for distribution. It doesn’t have a different meaning like smart and smartass, it’s more like repo and repository.
The industry spent decades preaching us about power savings, with Microsoft settings application lecturing about power saves and the update app programming them on renewables peak, only for... wasting gigawatts by forcing us to have copilot everywhere.
If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
In literally must have missed that. When did Microsoft ever encourage energy saving?
Is this related to power saving for extending laptop battery runtime? But then I don't get the link to renewable energy.
Anyway, I agree with the notion of the extreme energy-inefficiency of LLMs. The scale of it makes it hard to imagine any less efficient product will ever be invented.
They literally have a green leaf next to power saving options. Also, there's an option in windows upgrades to time the upgrades to when the grid is mostly renewables.
"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently.
- The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological.
- The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again.
- Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such):
The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
"Future of software engineering" folks should stuff like this in mind. What model is going to undo Mythos's mess? What if that mess is your company's product? Hope you know some very patient humans!
[1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.
I feel like LLMs[1] are going to cause a kind of "divorce" between those who love making software and those who love selling software. It was difficult for these two groups to communicate and coordinate before, and now it is _excruciating_. What little mutual tolerance and slack there was, is practically gone.
Open source was always[2] a fragile arrangement based on the kind of trust that involves looking at things through one's fingers (turning a blind eye may be more idiomatic in English), and we are at the point where you just have to either shut your eyes, or otherwise stop pretending that the situation can be salvaged at all.
Just a thought I had: some people think that LLM-shaming is declasse, and maybe it is, but I think that perhaps we _should_ LLM-shame, until the AI-companies train their LLMs to actually give attribution, if nothing else (I mean if it can memorize entire blocks of code, why can't it memorize where it saw that code? Would this not, potentially, _improve_ the attribution-situation, to levels better than even the pre-LLM era? Oh right, because plagiarism might actually be the product).
[1]: Not blaming the tech itself, but rather the people who choose to use it recklessly, and an industry that is based almost entirely on getting mega-corporations to buy startups that, against the odds, have acquired a decent number of happy-ish customers, that can now be relentlessly locked-in and up-sold to.
To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding.
What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time.
> Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding.
Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue looking 100-150 years back that industrial fishing was not "the future of the fishing industry". That is also why programmers won't ever disappear because of AI progress. Just like we still need fishermen, we'd need programmers. The sad truth about this is that soon we truly may have no need for fishermen, because there's no fish left in the ocean.
Hmm... it's hard to imagine that fishing with dynamite ever caused species extinction; trawling industry definitely did. I don't think it's a fitting analogy, but I get what you're trying to say. I'm not arguing about the damage. The damage this human invention will cause is guaranteed. Just like plastics have. The answer to that is not "ban plastics completely" - kinda late for that, innit? The answer is "put resources into plastic research, make safe plastic possible". Maybe if we make safe, better AI, it will help with the plastic? If there's anything I've learned about humans - first, we probably cause a lot of damage.
> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Yes, and if you asked every passerby what feature they would like to add to the streets, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish there were more accessibility ramps".
Luckily for us, we're not governed by "passerby" people.
The US is shooting down its citizens, blockading vital commerce routes, and accumulating a dangerous amount of nuclear weapons. It seems ripe for regime change.
> Iran has murdered over 30,000 of its own citizens for peacefully protesting. The US has not done that, nor have we "shot down" our citizens.
The US has incarcerated ~1.2 million people. Just the year, agents of the U.S. government executed two citizens in broad daylight caught by dozens of cameras, it was national news in both cases.
> Yea, 2 people killed in highly volatile situations
Don't forget the other ICE shootings and killings like the citizen in Texas that they killed and covered up for more than a year and when it was finally exposed...nothing. And the other shootings where people didnt die. Of course it was never the ice agent at fault, everyone tryin' run'em over all a sudden -- until video shows agents use the dumbest excuses to shoot people.
> Iran’s government literally ordered soldiers with machine guns to fire indiscriminately toward protestors
That's not great, but are you really trying to lower the standard we have for the US to Iran levels of terrible?
The US needs to stay out of other peoples business and focus on the US. America first, no foreign wars -- isn't that what was promised. We destroy our institutions and infrastructure investments that actually worked for the people here to re-allocate a couple billion dollars into corporate tax cuts cause "my tax dollars", then multiply that "savings" into spend by fighting Israel's war for them. This isn't the US bailing "out the rest of the world" here. This is the US bailing out ourselves from our own mess.
The US is wasting time and resources in overseas conflicts, National security should be built on domestic strength, specifically by securing our power grid and reducing global oil dependence. We have the technology, tools, solar, wind, advanced battery storage, nuclear power and electric vehicles to make this happen.
We have the wrong people in place to make this happen.
> Iran has murdered over 30,000 of its own citizens for peacefully protesting. The US has not done that, nor have we "shot down" our citizens.
Yet the US has been an accomplice to that, by intentionally destabilizing the country and then arming its population. And then murdering children.
> Yes, this is in response to the Iranian regime's attempts to hold global trade hostage for their own benefit and enrichment - i.e. if you pay the regime ransom money you can purchase oil, but that is not acceptable so we will not allow it. Unfortunately, the United States yet again has to bail out the rest of the world.
"You" won't allow it? You were the ones who started a war with a country for your own nefarious interests, then destabilized world commerce, then asked the rest of the world to fix your own fuckup, and you have the gall of "not allowing" something? You should go sit in a corner and stop putting all of us in distress. Regarding "bailing out," trying to fix your fuckups by throwing even more fuel on the fire is not bailing out.
> Nuclear weapons are dangerous, for sure. That's why Iran can't be allowed to posses one.
And that's why a trigger-happy, deranged nation shouldn't be allowed to possess them either.
> Usually every four years we select a new President. Every 2 years we hold elections and usually we select new Senators or members of the House of Representatives. Iranians, unfortunately, just live under a brutal military dictatorship without the possibility of regime change despite their ever-increasing desire and need.
Your "elections" are a mockery where an entire nation is funneled into choosing between two parties that agree on everything that matters. You are given the choice between Dumb and Dumber.
> Yet the US has been an accomplice to that, by intentionally destabilizing the country and then arming its population. And then murdering children.
So we've reached the point where the Iranian government giving an order to IRGC troops to pick up machine guns, aim them at peaceful protestors, and then fire and kill over 30,000 people is the US's fault?
> Unfortunately, the United States yet again has to bail out the rest of the world.
You mean like the one last time where they fought the war on terrorism in Afghanistan for the rest of the world and where it took them 20 years to replace the Taliban with … ehm … the Taliban?
First - there's no "kind". I don't align with MAGA or any of those guys. Most should be in jail.
Second - that's not the point I was making. I have a lot of respect for the military members that served alongside us during our time in Afghanistan.
But just as though the United States military can be apolitical and is largely treated as such in the United States, we can criticize the broader actions by the governments of those who sent troops without criticizing the valiant efforts of those troops who fought alongside us.
I‘m a bit confused by your statement. In Afghanistan a NATO coalition fought in the war. 456 British, 301 French, 158 Canadian and 54 German soldiers died.
Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.
> Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped.
More troops on the ground means more resources to help keep the peace. I think that's just something we can take at face value to prove more military power would have helped.
But the issue was political power, not military power. The US performed exceptional - we kept at it in Afghanistan for 20 years, through a financial crises, and more. But without the rest of the world signing on to help politically and even militarily, instead choosing to jeer and strut their rooster feathers from the sidelines, there was only so much we could do. And now even today folks seem to like to cheer that the US "lost" Afghanistan without realizing what the repercussions are for those who live there.
The US actually won quite a few wars since World War II. Iraq being a very good recent example. That one is kind of funny because for a long time the consensus has been America screwed up, but the last I checked Iraq is doing much better, has a functioning parliamentary style government, and the only real negative thing to say is to ask whether it was worth it or not to have that come to be. I would say yes.
> It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.
It's been like 2 months and we've decimated Iran's military, killed a lot of their leadership, and neutered their nuclear program and the best they can do is threaten to lob missiles at oil tankers like the Houthis. It's unfortunate but time will tell whether this was a "strategic failure", and it's even more so unfortunate we can't in real life run the counter-factual where Iran continues to build missiles until we actually can't do anything, then they close the Straight and that's the end of maritime trade as we know it.
30,000+ Iranian civilians (probably some children too) murdered by the Iranian regime - we can speak to their justice first when the IRGC and their cronies answer for their malicious and violent crimes against the world.
Unlike the Iranian regime we don’t intentionally kill or murder people. How do you know? Because they take their own people and at the point of a gun force them to stand around on bridges and stuff because even the Iranian regime knows that we don’t kill civilians. Something that, for some reason seems to be solely lost on you.
Iran fired 2,500 ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates alone, intentionally targeting civilians.
We could pose it as a simple question and examine what the answers would be:
Do western powers bomb civilians intentionally?
US -> No
Israel -> No
Other westerner powers -> No
Iran -> No
Hamas/Hezbollah/Other terrorist murders -> No
You -> Yes
It's a strange thing when you aren't even on the same page as your Iranian friends.
And intent matters. I for one support a form of reparations paid to the families of those who we mistakenly killed. Will Iran pay such reparations for those they've murdered inside and outside of Iran? Of course not. There's a difference - we're morally superior.
The US is shooting down its citizens, blockading vital commerce routes, and accumulating a dangerous amount of nuclear weapons. It seems ripe for regime change.
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