My guess it's more about being able to say: 'We did everything we could.' If someone does end up getting a bomb on board. If they didn't do this, everyone would be angry and headlines would be asking: 'Why was nothing put in place to prevent this?'
> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases?
The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.
There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.
I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
If you're working in big tech and you truly believe you are spoiled, then why not quit that job and let the migrant improve their living situation, while you live in the luxury you already have?
I don’t work in big tech. Wish I was, would be a pretty big improvement in my salary. Still think I’m very spoiled compared to about 90% of the world, probably more than that.
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.
There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.
Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)
There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
I find it interesting you're all writing 'the AI' as if it's a singular thing. There's a myriad of ways to code with a myriad of AI's and none of them are identical. I use a Qwen 3 32B with Cline in VSCode for work, since I can't use cloud based AI. For personal projects, I use Codex in the cloud. I can let Codex perform some pretty complicated tasks and get something usable. I can ask Qwen something basic and it ends up in a loop, delivering nothing useful.
Then there's the different tasks people might ask from it. Building a fully novel idea vs. CRUD for a family planner might have different outcomes.
It would be useful if we could have more specific discussions here, where we specify the tools and the tasks it either does or does not work for.
Sometimes it's pretty great and pops a video with only a few views into my feed that totally fits my interests. Sometimes my entire feed is Kitchen Nightmares episodes because I happened to watch one or two yesterday.
I feel like it's more because the detractors are very loudly against it and the promoters are very loudly exaggerating the capabilities. Meanwhile, as a bystander who is realistic and is actually using it, you have moments where it's absolutely magnificent and insanely useful and other moments where it kinda sucks, which leads to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that:
> The productivity gains from LLMs are real, but not in the "replace humans" direction.
Meanwhile the people who are explicitly on a side either say that there are no productivity gains or that nobody will have jobs in 6 months.
I still manually approve tool use requests at the start of a run. As it gets deeper in I might allow it to run safer commands without that oversight (e.g. writing to local text files), but potentially destructive execution still requires approval.
As for the local env, I'm treating the Android terminal as a sandbox. Anything gets trashed I just reset and reinstall my toolchain.
I won't pretend I'd use this workflow for anything high-stakes. But for simple things like "I wonder how my Hue lights actually work?", its viable.
My guess it's more about being able to say: 'We did everything we could.' If someone does end up getting a bomb on board. If they didn't do this, everyone would be angry and headlines would be asking: 'Why was nothing put in place to prevent this?'
reply