Well that depends on a supply of tankers to transport the oil though. The tanker availability is already constrained. If hundreds are trapped in the strait and transit there is slowed you lose a lot of capacity. So the fungibility drops. It's possible we see demand destruction in areas that maintain their price due to export.
When The Force Awakens, I spent $99 on a toy version of BB8 that you could control from your iPhone. It was a cool toy. Then after a while the app was no longer supported... Sad times.
I also owned every iPhone from the first through iPhone 7 and kept each as I replaced the old one. After a while, none were usable due to changes in cellphone tech. And I realized keeping LiO batteries around was a huge fire hazard...
If it’s the same BB8 I had, there was a repo on GitHub that allowed you to control it from your computer via Bluetooth. Might be worth looking around if you want to bring it back to life
I don't agree. Older tech was simpler, and often more reliable. They didn't depend on being able to connect to a networked time clock for sync, didn't need networking period. Today's systems are inherently fragile.
I grew up in the 70's. About the only thing I would say is less fragile are cars. Today's cars are just better in so many ways but are unmaintainable by the average user.
And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how. But that's changing as self-repair movements have taught millions. For example, the Kitchen Aid mixer. The original, built by Hobart and acquired by KitchenAid was a tank. However it had a sacrificial gear and people said that was a flaw because they didn't understand the purpose of sheer pins or sacrificial gears. Now it's pretty well understood thanks to YouTubers like Mr. Mixer that repairing these is easy peezy.
> And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how.
Part of it is the materials used now, though - many things get thrown out because the plastic bodyshell got old and brittle, and broke. (Plastic is particularly difficult to repair because the break usually presents very little surface area for glueing.)
I think I was unclear. I’m not saying now is better. What I meant is there was a short period, perhaps late 90s to early 2010s, when electronic devices became sophisticated and reliable enough to “just work” in perpetuity, but before everything was internet connected and subscription-based.
Cars are perhaps the best example. Before this that time, you’d expect to do much more maintenance and you’d be impressed to get 100k miles out of it. Now it’s not unusual to get to 200k miles or more, but increasingly you have to deal with firmware upgrades and pay a monthly fee for advanced features.
Aside from this brief period, devices either required more maintenance and replacement (pre-90s) or updates and subscriptions (now).
Can you provide some examples from this time period? I'm having trouble squaring your statement with things like the Red Ring of Death with the X-Box etc.
Cars are actually surprisingly maintainable by an "average" user - if you maintain them the same way the repair shops do - replacing parts.
What old cars had was the ability to fix things without replacing parts - but most of those kinds of repairs (think: adjusting points, etc) are no longer necessary at all.
A modern car tells you what is wrong (usually) and you can have an auto parts store read the codes, search YouTube for a video on it, and order parts and replace it yourself.
You need to go back pretty far to find vehicles that can be repaired by the side of the road in Outer Mongolia with nothing but a hammer and a bag of random pieces of metal (iirc, this was in the extended features of Planet Earth, maybe the Snow Leopard episode - sadly, not about macOS at all ;).
Yes and no - while it's still simple enough to replace parts in some cases, and said parts are usually easy enough to track down, manufacturers are starting to go the Apple route and lock the ECU to a given part, or require what boils down to a very expensive dongle to perform even simple maintenance procedures. Some of this is due to an actual need to recalibrate the vehicle due to minute differences in performance between parts, other cases are clearly laziness or malice.
For example, some modern Hyundai models require a very expensive ECU reprogramming tool to... release the electronic parking brake. So that you can change brake pads, a job that is normally well within the reach of anyone willing to get their hands dirty. I've seen suburban moms be shocked by how simple it is. And yet some vehicles now require a service at the dealership to change brake pads because they are the only ones who can command a parking brake unlock. What was wrong with the old pull handle or floor pedal parking brakes?
You can't tell me that all the features of an ECU reader couldn't be programmed into a modern head unit. The stereo is already on the CAN bus, why doesn't the stereo just pop up an alert that says e.g. "VSS Malfunction", "Oxygen Sensor Malfunction" instead of the cryptic check engine light requiring a special tool? Why don't our vehicles have a "maintenance mode" built into the head unit that can clear codes and recalibrate injector timings?
Even on early 2000s vehicles, there were usually procedures to do things like reprogramming key fobs by doing arcane things like cycling the key in the ignition 5 times while holding the brake pedal down. Old PCs had beep codes or blinkenlichten to tell you what the problem was when they couldn't POST, the only reason modern vehicles can't do the same is that automakers are looking for new revenue streams amid shrinking margins.
And this is aside from the fact that we have optimized for ease of construction rather than ease of repair, I saw a picture from a mechanic friend who works at a dealership recently, to replace a camshaft actuator on a modern Ford Bronco they had to lift the entire cab off the chassis. While I have seen home mechanics lift a cab a foot or two to access a part, it's well outside the ability of the average person to crane one of the heaviest parts of their vehicle several feet in the air.
My dad once told me that just because he had a phone (landline), that he was under no obligation to answer it. I thought it was funny at the time but I wish he was still around for me to tell him he was right.
When iPhones became common, my ex-wife would get upset when I wouldn't reply to a text message. Sometimes I was busy and missed the notification, or couldn't answer (like in a meeting, driving, etc). Or I knew that the message would be better answered in person.
The social expectations part is hard to overcome. Societal contracts, whether implicit or explicit are very hard to ignore.
I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...
The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
I've been a skeptic about LLMs in general since I first heard of them. And I'm a sysadmin type, more comfortable with python scripts than writing "real" software. No formal education in coding at all other than taking Harvard's free online python course a few years ago.
So I set out to build an app with CC just to see what it's like. I currently use Copilot (copilot.money) to track my expenditures, but I've become enamored with sankey diagrams. Copilot doesn't have this charting feature, so I've been manually exporting all my transactions and massaging them in the sankey format. It's a pain in the butt, error prone, and my python skills are just not good enough to create a conversion script. So I had CC do it. After a few minutes of back and forth, it was working fine. I didn't care about spaghetti code at all.
So next I thought, how about having it generate the sankey diagrams (instead of me using sankeymatic's website). 30 minutes later, it had a local website running that was doing what I had been manually doing for months.
Now I was hooked. I started asking it to build a native GUI version (for macOS) and it dutifully cranked out a version using pyobjC etc. After ironing out a few bugs it was usable in less than 30 min. Feature adds consumed all my tokens for the day and the next day I was brimming with changes. Burned through that days tokens as well and after 3 days (I'm on the el cheapo plan), I have an app that basically does what I want in a reasonable attractive, and accurate manner.
I have no desire to look at the code. The size is relatively small, and resource usage is small as well. But it solved this one niche problem that I never had the time or skill to solve.
Is this a good thing? Will I be downvoted to oblivion? I don't know. I'm very very concerned about the long term impact of LLMs on society, technology and science. But it's very interesting to see the other side of what people are claiming.
I really identify with this. As an engineer, I really do enjoy building things. However, a lot of times, what I want is a thing that is built. A lot of time, that means I build it, which sometimes I enjoy and sometimes I don't; so many of my half finished projects are things that I still think would be awesome to have but didn't care to invest the time in building.
LLM-driven develop lets me have the thing built without needing to build the thing, and at the same time I get to exercise some ways-to-build I don't use as often (management, spec writing, spec editing, proactive unblocking, etc.). I have no doubt my work with LLMs has strengthened mental muscles that are also be helpful in technical management contexts/senior+principal-level technical work.
Honestly, I think it's great that you could get the thing you wanted done.
Consider this, though: Your anecdote has nothing to do with software engineering (or an engineering mindset). No measurements were done, no technical aspects were taken into consideration (you readily admit that you lack the knowledge to do that), you're not expecting to maintain it or seemingly to further develop it much.
The above situation has never actually been hard; the thing you made is trivial to someone who knows the basics of a small set of things. LLMs (not Claude Code) have made this doable for someone who knows none of the things and that's very cool.
But all of this really doesn't mean anything for solutions to more complex problems where more knowledge is required, or solutions that don't even really exist yet, or something that people pay for, or things that are expected to be worked on continuously over time, perhaps by multiple people.
When people decry vibecoding as being moronic, the subtext really is (or should be) that they're not really talking to you; they're talking to people who are delivering things that people are expected to pay for, or rely on as part of their workflow, and people who otherwise act like their output/product is good when it's clearly a mess in terms of UX.
I get what you're saying, but imagine a CTO/CIO who's never been very technical. The world is full of them. They vibe up an app, and think it's easy. They don't have the developer experience to know the things they're missing.
While I downplayed my job experience, I'm very in touch with developers and their workflows; the challenges they face. And I'm scared because they won't be making these decisions about LLM usage; their bosses, the guy who vibe coded a dumb app over the weekend will.
Maybe I misunderstood the purpose of your post...? It seemed to me like you were arguing "Hey, what about me? Why shouldn't I vibecode since it enables me to do things that I couldn't before?" and that's what I wrote my comment addressing.
I completely agree that people are going to be forced into using things that basically do not really work for anything non-trivial without massive handholding, and they will be forced to use those things by people who are out of touch and are mostly setting up to eventually get rid of as many people as they possibly can.
I (like many on HN I'm sure) have been continually pestered by management to use AI like it's some cure for polio. They just want to tell their VP that "my team is accelerating its use of AI!" so that the VP can pass that up the food chain. Same with when we started to migrate (unnecessarily imho) to the cloud. Just another checkbox and an attaboy from senior management.
There's really not much of a place for AI in my work. We're not cutting edge, we're just a large, safe business protected by a regulatory moat. We don't want to be on the cutting edge, since the bleeding is bad for profits and reputation. But the incentives our IT execs operate under is all about resume/credential building and moving on to bigger things. Our C level officers are not even slightly technical, so they defer to the CIO. Nothing new at all in this company, it's a story told a thousand times.
So I was just very curious how it would be to approach vibe coding as if I was my VP. You don't know what you don't know, right? And the ease at creating a simple app that would be beyond 99% of the people in my company gives way too much confidence. And with misplaced confidence comes poor decision-making.
I can see where someone who currently is an Excel jockey would benefit from some of this stuff. As long as they can compare and test the outputs. But the danger from false confidence has to be an institutional risk that's being ignored.
> And the ease at creating a simple app that would be beyond 99% of the people in my company gives way too much confidence. And with misplaced confidence comes poor decision-making.
I 100% agree. I heard via a CTO I've worked with before that a stakeholder in the company had come to him with a mock frontend that looked beautiful, it even had bits of interactivity where it could be used as if it was real. He asked them who made it, because it was very nice; they said "I made it!" (Claude made it). Now the plan for the next product is to shove it into a server format so that it can be used with a vibecoded frontend where the stakeholder is now responsible.
Honestly, I think the above situation is as good as it can get with these stakeholder hallucinations; ultimately the web frontend is likely to buckle under the pressure of having almost zero technical backing behind its creation, it'll perform badly with even the most basic of things and a real one will likely be created instead. The key is that the person having the LLM psychosis is the one that is responsible, so when things fail it's their fault.
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