On the other hand, when people who claim success with AI share their prompts, I see all the same misses and flaws that keep me from fully buying in. For the person though, it seems like they gloss over these errors and claim wild success. Their prompts never actually seem that different from the ones that fail me as well.

It seems like “you’re not doing it correctly” is just a rationalization to protect the pro-AI person’s established opinion.

Nobody does it correctly—ai or not.

It’s about breaking the problem down into epics, tasks, and acceptance criteria that is reviewed. Review the written code and adjust as needed.

Tests… a lot of tests.

My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)

Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.

This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.

It's also often a way to avoid saying things in public, in writing, that normal people would be upset about.

If they truly think they're in the right, they can discuss it in public, like the poster already did.

> The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed.

There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.

Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.

So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.

I've been a typical IT person for a very long time. In the last few years, I got into contact with salespeople, by being basically a sales engineer.

And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.

So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".

Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?

I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...

I think the complaint people are voicing in the HN thread is fairly straightforward, but it's being phrased in many different ways because the concept isn't viewed positively in American culture: Kiki, in her attempt to respond, has used an inappropriate level of linguistic formality.

More specifically, she's used a level of formality below what would be appropriate for most communication between strangers. Someone speaking in an official capacity (almost anywhere) who went much more informal than that would be at serious risk of getting fired. There's a similar effect to what was complained about in this meme tweet: https://xcancel.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594

> Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!"

Forced cheerfulness and fictional intimacy are a bad call as a response to "after having 20 years of contributions overridden without warning, we can no longer work with you". That's true regardless of whether the complaint is meant as a dramatic opener to a negotiation or as a severing of relations.

No, we aren't.

It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.

I don’t think so. Working in tech with many busy people, I say “hop on a call”, but only in “let’s sync live, it’ll be faster” situations.

This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.

I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.

> This stuck out to me as rude.

Very much so, and I'm German ;)

In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.

I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".

What about the reply in the link indicates to you that the person has empathy for marsf’s complaints and is willing to change anything at Mozilla in response to them?

For the reasons I stated above, the response comes off as faking understanding to manage a PR issue rather than genuine empathy and possible negotiation, but I am often wrong about many things.

I mean, its right and also not the only sentence too.

“Thinnest” should be measured by the thickest slice for a given dimension.

I have an iPhone 11 which also has a camera bump and the experience of typing while the phone is on a flat surface is laughably annoying. For a company that prides itself on design aesthetics, it is honestly an embarrassing miss.

Genuinely curious: why do you often find yourself typing on the phone resting on a flat surface? I can’t think of a single time where that’s been the best way to handle my device.

I do this all the time, but I switched to iPhone only this year after a decade as a Nexus/Pixel user. I really wonder if this behavior comes from people who got accustomed to using phones with iOS vs Android, because it's certainly much more frustrating on iPhone.

Basically, whenever I sit down at my desk, I always have my phone sitting there, too. That's how I keep tabs on my personal life during work. But it works much better in Android:

* The Always On display came to Pixels a long time ago, so it was very useful to have your lock screen showing the date, time, and what sort of notifications you have.

* The notification management is just light years better in Android, so you don't have to even unlock your phone all the time to see what's going on.

* The Swiping keyboard was introduced a long time ago in Android, and is far superior in my experience, to the iPhone one, so it's pretty tolerable to type up quick things with the phone lying flat on the surface.

I'm actually kind of surprised that you don't interact with your phone on a desk or table. Do you just leave it in your pocket all day? Do you leave it on your desk, too, but just find it too cumbersome to deal with there and are constantly picking it up?

I do this all the time, often when I'm at a desk or table. I had to get a bulky case for my iPhone just so it didn't unstably contact at only 2 points and rock with each tap.

Why don't you pick up the phone and type on it? That seems a lot more ergonomic.

I find myself using the phone on the desk, placed between my keyboard and monitor. I do this because I find having stuff in pockets less comfortable than not, so I put things on my desk. I sometimes want to communicate with my wife about domestic logistics and prefer typing short replies without lifting the phone every time. My work laptop is not logged into my iCloud account, so cannot reply there. Happens a few times a week.

So people would like Apple to make a radically different decision about camera sensor size or phone thickness so that those who want to hammer out a short message a couple times a week on their desk don’t have their phone wobble slightly or, even worse, need to pick up their phone to use it in hand?

And why use a shitty tiny screen keyboard to type if you're literally sitting at your desk with a proper keyboard in front of you?

As an example, not everyone is able to use iMessage on a work computer.

This has similar vibe to "You are holding it wrong"

Which is an interesting comparison because most of the people were indeed unrealistically deathgripping their iPhone just to see the antenna bars drop.

I’d do it more if it wasn’t an annoying UX! I have message previews on lock screen turned off. If I get a message when my phone is sitting next to my keyboard on my desk, I unlock it to view the message. Might type a quick reply.

Apple doesn't advertise this as the intent, but until the Air I felt that the Phone+Case combo is the complete phone, as it is intended to be used. Add any of Apple's official cases, leather, silicone, whatever, and that's the official "thickness" of the phone. The cameras are recessed, the front display is recessed, the whole phone is wrapped in leather and further customized to your style.

Now the Air has a bump that is so big no case can hide it without also being unreasonably thicc, breaking the trend. I wonder what a case mfg could stuff into the awkward space on the peninsula where the camera is missing so the case provides a uniform surface when laying flat, even if that means a bigger bump on the top when cased. The phone would have a natural angle towards the user, that's kinda nice. Maybe a little bluetooth speaker setup so owners of the Air can more efficiently irritate their fellow passengers.

I think the “crushing nihilism” pro-AI argument is what makes me most depressed. We are going to have so much fun when we do not communicate with other humans because it is a task that we can easily “filter out.”

The OP author shows that the cost to scrape an Anubis site is essentially zero since it is a fairly simple PoW algorithm that the scraper can easily solve. It adds basically no compute time or cost for a crawler run out of a data center. How does that force rethinking?

The cookie will be invalidated if shared between IPs, and it's my understanding that most Anubis deployments are paired with per-IP rate limits, which should reduce the amount of overall volume by limiting how many independent requests can be made at any given time.

That being said, I agree with you that there are ways around this for a dedicated adversary, and that it's unlikely to be a long-term solution as-is. My hope is that the act of having to circumvent Anubis at scale will prompt some introspection (do you really need to be rescraping every website constantly?), but that's hopeful thinking.

>do you really need to be rescraping every website constantly Yes, because if you believe you out-resource your competition, by doing this you deny them training material.

The problem with crawlers if that they're functionally indistinguishable from your average malware botnet in behavior. If you saw a bunch of traffic from residential IPs using the same token that's a big tell.

You should try to do some load testing of a real Erlang system and compare how it handles this scenario against other languages/frameworks. What you are describing is one of the exact things the Erlang system is strong against due to the scheduler.

I don’t know Go, but that sounds like someone has simply written part of Erlang in Go.

Well written typespecs + dialyzer catches most things you’d want to catch with a type system: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/typespecs.html

There is also pattern matching and guard clauses so you can write something like:

def add(a, b) when is_integer(a) and is_integer(b), do: a + b

def add(_, _), do: :error

It’s up to personal preference and the exact context if you want a fall through case like this. Could also have it raise an error if that is preferred. Not including the fallback case will cause an error if the conditions aren’t met for values passed to the function.

Writing typespecs (+ guards) feels really outdated and a drag, especially in a language that wants you to write a lot of functions.

It reminds of the not-missed phpspec, in a worst way because at least with PHP the IDE was mostly writing it itself and you didn't need to add the function name to them (easily missed when copy/pasting).

I wouldn't lump guards and typespecs together. Guards are a runtime feature of erlang/elixir's excellent pattern matching.

Typespec is an opt-in type hint for develop and build time.

True but by using guards + pattern matching structs you can approximate type hinting, but it feels cumbersome and more of a workaround than a real solution.

I'm of the opinion that Erlang/Elixir are terrible for repeat tasks like a standard CRUD server over a SQL database. Because yes, it IS cumbersome! Behaviors and type hints only get so far, and it is exhaustingly slow to sit with epgsql in the REPL to figure out what a query actually returns.

I find them much better suited for specific tasks where there is little overlap or repetition.

> Let's unpack that a bit.

I’m not accusing you of anything, just giving the feedback that this line makes your post sound like it is AI slop. This is an extremely typical phrase when you prompt any current AI with some variation of “explain this post”. Honestly, the verbosity of the rest of your post also reinforces this signal. The typo here also indicates cutting and pasting things together “Given what he has to say about . But more importantly,”

If it is not AI slop, then hopefully you can use this feedback for future writing.

All written by hand, and you can check the style against thousands of posts I've made on HN over almost two decades.

(I explained the issue briefly in the first paragraph, but the article is 15k words. Hard to convincingly rebut that without the details.)

But thanks for the superficial style feedback and ignoring the substance.

Please don't do this here, it's easy enough for you to see their comment history. Believe it or not, people still care about writing comments on HN in an informative and engaging manner.

The correctness of 8%, 16%, and 90% are all equally unknown since we only have one timeline, no?

That's why you have to let these people make predictions about many things. Than you can weigh the 8, 16, and 90 pct and see who is talking out of their ass.

That's just the frequentist approach. But we're talking about bayesian statistics here.

I admit I dont know Bayesian, but isn't the only way to check if the future teller is lucky or not to have them predict many things? If he predicts 10 to happen with a 10% chance, and one of them happens, he's good. If he predicts 10 to happen with a 90% chance and 9 happen, same. How is this different with Bayesian?

It is the only way if you're a frequentist. But there is a whole other subfield of statistics that deals with assigning probabilities to single events.

If one is calibrated to report proper percentages and assigns 8% to 25 distinct events, you should expect 2 of the events to occur; 4 in case of 16% and 22.5 in case of 90%. Assuming independence (as is sadly too often done) standard math of binomial distributions can be applied and used to distinguish the prediction's accuracy probabilistically despite no actual branching or experimental repetition taking place.

You can make predictions of many different things though. Building a quantifiable track record. If one person is consistently confidently wrong then that says something about their ability and methodology