Indeed - the future is RL meet-ups and small, intimate online communities.

Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

Counterpoint: https://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

People will prefer the bots that give them head pats and tell them they're so smart and that they love them

I don't necessarily think that is a stop-gap against people socializing more offline/being socially productive online.

Especially considering the fact that it seems more the case that the bigger stop-gap is what we already have:

In asian (especially Japan) it's host(ess) clubs.

Globally for friends it's influencers exploiting loneliness.

Those are things I think has to go for people to embrace offline socialization or using their online time better.

This is the optimistic take I’ve held.

Bots get so good that they become indistinguishable from humans. If that’s true then it doesn’t actually matter if your community is all bots. But it does matter because authenticity matters to humans. They will seek authenticity where they can successfully sense it, which will be in-person.

Human simulacrums will one day cause a repeat of this issue. Then we’ll have a whole Blade Runner 2049 issue about what exactly is authenticity?

> Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

Definitely not. “Terminally online” is as deleterious as it sounds.

Yeah, you're completely right. Maybe this will be the impetus a lot of people need to detach from online.

I’d love something like this implemented for email.

Sending an unsolicited email to a random person X requires you to pay a small toll (something like 50p).

Subsequent emails can then be sent for free - however person X can “revoke” your access any time necessitating a further toll payment.

You would of course be able to pre-authorise friends/family/transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for.

This would nuke spam economics and be minimally disruptive for other use cases of email IMO…

>transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for

These are one of the main culprits of unwanted emails... and a toll system would make them all the more valuable for the even worse actors to take advantage of.

HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience.

You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…

I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms.

You can barely comment before you are rate limited.

You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time.

New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more.

I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.

If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

I think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.

The karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.

Not exactly true.

You get the right to down vote and if I promote my totally not a scam product on HN, people will check my user account and see: on wow over 9000 karma? Gotta be trust worthy, when in truth it's just been karma farming.

HN does limit some of it, but it's not a panacea.

I don't know, never found much value in karma. I recreate an account at least once a year for no particular reason and it roughly takes me a week to get enough karma to do what is important (flagging posts).

My account is literally 4 years old and I'm not even halfway there.

How do you do it?

And I'm trying to limit myself from saying unwanted things like criticizing ** or saying something nice about **. (Self censoring to avoid downvotes).

Maybe I should be more active.

I don't know. Just have something niche to share, be interesting. Don't be afraid of downvotes.

I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.

Look at his other comments - its textbook LLM slop. Its a fucking tragedy that people are letting their OpenClaws loose on HN but I can't say I'm surprised. I desperately need to find a good network of developers because I think the writing is on the wall for message boards like these...

Repugnant.

Doors - A first person, exploration game/experience that I built from scratch.

Doors lets you explore URL addressable 3D rooms that link together seamlessly via portals. The idea is that people would upload rooms to the internet (to github, S3, whatever) and connect them together to form one giant inter-connected space that would be a real trip to explore.

Right now rooms consistent of a: - Manifest JSON file that points to requisite resources and configures portals - An optional skybox - An optional background music track - A .vox file containing voxel terrain data

Here is a video I filmed on my phone of flying through a room that links back to itself: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BCqOYTISS_k

Portals can be arbitrarily sized and everything is prefetched/loaded seamlessly in the background.

I'm nearly done - I just need to add in a very lightweight interface and give the code a bit of a spit shine (I will open source it - so I want it to look pretty)

EDIT: As an aside, I finally decided to give this whole Claude Code thing a go - I purchased a max subscription and I'm trying to write as little code as possible. I certainly wouldn't call what I'm doing "vibe-coding". I discuss a feature in plan mode (incl. how I want to implement it in high level terms) iterate on the plan 2-3 times until I'm satisfied and then let it rip. I'm both very impressed and quite frightened by the productivity boost...

Funny stuff, that's cool.

0.0005%*

If this is somewhat common for games, could one create a virtual fs with FUSE that dedupes using via content-defined chunking and install games there?

I feel like writes would probably be quite painful, but with game assets are essentially write-once read-forever so not the end of the world?

As an aside, its messed up that people with expensive SSDs are unnecessarily paying this storage tax. Just feels lazy...

Also check airline miles haven’t gone missing.

A friend of mine recently had his BA account compromised, all his Avios stolen and he was none the wiser after receiving about 60 emails a minute

The rank disrespect of somebody asking you to review something they haven't even looked at is eye watering.

I feel like AI-induced brain-rot of engineers is inevitable. Unless we see AI leapfrog into something close to AGI in the future (certainly not ruling this out), I think there will be very lucrative careers available to engineers who can maintain a balanced relationship with AI.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets viscerally irritated when I'm asked to review a PR that was obviously generated. You didn't take the time to write this code, but you expect me to take the time make sure it's correct, which will take far longer than a regular PR because there's no reason to assume an LLM even understood the task. Next time just be honest and ask me to do your work for you.

> You didn't take the time to write this code, but you expect me to take the time make sure it's correct

So, I guess there are a couple parts here right? I might not take the time to write the code, but surely I am on the hook to demonstrate that I've tested the code or have very good reason to believe it's correct?

If people are pushing PRs [of any meaningful complexity] without knowing whether they work in the general case that sounds like a failure of process and/or training. For me PRs are about catching edges?

I'll quote from my parent comment:

> somebody asking you to review something they haven't even looked at

The situation you're talking about is not the one we're talking about, so I'm not sure what you're taking issue with.

My boss decided to start putting out a ton of PRs from Devin at one point. I told him I'm spending more time reviewing his PRs than he was saving.

I just felt this recently. I was sent some code for me to put into prod, a long running service. And in one func, which returned an error (Go) but still called "os.Exit" in each error handler rather then returning.

Fixing the issue was a small matter. But the amount of disrespect I felt, that I looked at it closer then anyone else apparently (which wasn't really all that close at all), when they were ostensibly building this code, that disrespect was just immense.

Stop saying engineer when you mean programmer.

It’s an insult to real engineers.

Code reviews are one of the few ordeals worth doing. They catch problems and transfer knowledge. In a reasonably well run org (it doesn't take much) code reviews are easily a huge net benefit.

As for "reading closed tickets", you are right. It is silly. Alas, in apathetic orgs it is a reliable way to get some people know what is going on some of the time. And that particular ordeal keeps the tickets somewhat in sync with reality.

Consider that your experience may not be universal. Just because your reviews are useless rubber stamps to satisfy "some boomer" does not mean that other shops also have no standards. I get explicitly asked for reviews at work all the time, and I'm expected to actually understand the code and provide useful feedback.

By the way, you don't have to give useless reviews even if your coworkers do. It sounds like your workplace is infected with complacency, but there's no law that says you can't do better.

If you saw the nonsense some of my teammates try to commit, you would have a completely different view on code review. Just off the top of my head in the past 3 months, they have:

  - Written a 1-line function that returns a literal, but they pointlessly made the function async and added a @cache decorator.
  - Used try/catch to catch ALL exceptions, and then just ignored the exception causing code elsewhere to explode.
  - Used try/catch to catch ALL exceptions, and then log that an authentication error happened. Did the request time out? Well the logs now lie to you and say it was an authentication error.
  - Replace a log statement for a very serious error with a logging.warning() because that makes the error no longer show up on our reports.

If code reviews are that useless to you, that must mean either your team is completely homogeneous in terms of skill level and knowledge, or no one is taking the code reviews seriously.