It’s almost like this is a shameless attempt to pump the stockprice before those in the know dump it onto the duped

Well, this is one way to prolong their pump and dump strategy

I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart

Because they’re trying to pump their stock price before their economic walls come tumbling down

What stock?

The private stock that's about to go public

Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer

It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management

And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so

> feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager

Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.

> Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.

A good, tech savvy manager is the stuff of legends, like the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot.

Try working for technical companies.

This is an observable spectrum with which can influence the kind of team you have in your landing spot.

He says he should have used an LLM to write his one-off code

I guess this is a common idea now

Yet since a lot of our coding is for one-offs then we are allowing LLMs to blunt our skills

Their labour didn’t involve coding. When we equate labour to creating a load of prompts then it feels hollow to me.

Was this, then, done to impress others rather than enrich the coders skills and experience?

The futuristic equivalent of pressing the “demo” button on old electronic keyboard and pretending to play

They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.

Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.

Yep, this. I was delighted they implemented this simple yet powerful idea. I don't even remember when I have needed to go to a second page of search results in Kagi and spammy clone sites which copy stack exchange verbatim are banned into oblivion where they belong. Fuck up once doing that shit, and you are forever out of my search results.

And then there is the very handy assistant, that I can jump into using follow-up questions to the quick AI queries one can choose to use or not to use by appending a "?". Again a simple idea, which empowers the user.

Yup, same here. Been using Kagi for years. It's boring, it just works. Hoping they can stay that way.

My ongoing concern with Kagi is they always seem to be focused on sidequests like their Orion browser and their LLM-powered Translate tool. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but I can't help but feel like I just want a damn search engine than works.

I also have no interest in their side projects. It doesn't bother me that they have them, though. As you say, as long as the search engine works and the price is acceptable, I'm happy.

Yeah, that's the thing for me: filtering out the SEO crap that Google happily serves up.

Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.

So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.

It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.

I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.

Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.

That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.

I’m not fawning over it but it’s

- usually better than Google

- has actually useful features (smush BS listicle articles together, weight/block sites)

- if you don’t use any searches that month, they’ll just straight up refund the month subscription automatically

- doesn’t annoy me constantly

I at least appreciate he was up front about advertising his book.

But, yes, after about seven paragraphs I could no longer read on, and I had completely lost any interest in his book.

This should be given as an example how marketing can actively damage your product.

I can't believe how high this is on hackernews. It feels odd.

If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?

How is it different from relying on the internet, when most people don’t know what a routing table is, let alone how to manage one? Or from relying on word processors that the average user could never write themselves?

Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.

I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.

This is how we got cars that require visiting the dealership to get serviced, because they have total control over the ecosystem.

Yes, exactly. As compared to 70 years ago, when cars came with a manual on how to adjust the spark gap, and buyers were expected to do so.

It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.

Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.

I guess by practising the lower level things less and less we become less able to understand and maintain them, whereas any profession that required continued practice kept you sharp enough to learn things like networking.

Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.

> Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).

Now we have Uber and Lyft. You can have a chaffeur on call.

> If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.

It's almost as if proving you are technically competent is the new problem.

You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.

Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.

As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.

Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)