I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people make when evaluating them. It seems like people conflate "25% of the money is on a yes outcome for xyz event" with "xyz event yes outcome is 25% likely."
It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .
I wonder if they actually see their current users as profit centers. The tech is still being built out, to some extent they just need users to find out how it gets used and to get experience in the space. The real appeal of this entire space is its future potential, so they just may not care that much about providing a good consumer-grade experience at this stage.
Besides the fact you're completely shifting the goal post here on analogies, changing email address is a pretty normal feature of any service pretending to be serious. Also, you seem to have the belief it is impossible for such a large company with such investment to work on multiple things simultaneously.
In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could argue there's not much of a difference between the two, because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still, they're not the same.
Why make the analogy at all if not for the implied slaughter. It is a visceral reminder of our own brutal history. Of what humans do given the right set of circumstances.
There is, at least, a way to avoid people without jobs starving. Whether or not we'll do it is anyone's guess. I think I'll live to see UBI but I am perphaps an optimist.
You'd have to time something like UBI with us actually being able to replace the workforce -- The current LLM parlor tricks are simply not what they're sold to be, and if we rely on them too early we (humanity) is very much screwed.
One would argue in a capitalist society like ours, fucking with someone's job at industrial scale isn't awfully dissimilar from threatening their life, it's just less direct. Plenty more people currently are feeling the effects of worsening job markets than have been involved in a hostage situation, but the negative end results are still the same.
One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer not to.
If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made, but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for one for all the money in the world.
UBI will not save you from economic irrelevance. The only difference between you and someone starving in a 3rd world slum is economic opportunity and the means to exchange what you have for what someone else needs. UBI is inflation in a wig and dark glasses.
population projections they already predict that prosperity reduces population
and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear
it's a coordination problem
in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets
...
there's already a pretty serious anti-inequality (or at least anti-billionaire) storm brewing, the question is can it motivate the necessary structural changes or just fuels yet another dumb populist movement
I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit" that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of welfare support that have been historically resilient due to institutional support and being strongly identified with specific constituencies. When the benefit is abstracted away from a constituency it's easier to chop over time.
I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
In practice there are a few strong local unions (NY teachers, ILA (eastern longshoremen)), but in general it doesn't help those who are no employed. (Also when was the last general strike that achieved something ... other than getting general strikes outlawed?)
... also, one pretty practical problem with UBI is that cost of living varies wildly. And if it depends on location then people would register in a high-CoL place and live in a low-CoL place. (Which is what remote work already should be doing, but many companies are resistant to change.)
In theory it makes sense to have easy to administer targeted interventions, because then there's a lot of data (and "touch points" - ie. interaction with the people who actually get some benefit), so it's possible to do proper cost-benefit analyses.
Of course this doesn't work because allocation is over-overpoliticized, people want all kinds of means-testing and other hoops for people to jump through. (Like the classic prove you still have a disability and people with Type I diabetes few years have to get a fucking paper.)
So when it comes to any kind of safety net it should be as automatic as possible, but at least as targeted as negative income tax. UBI might fit depending on one's definition.
... maybe? it depends on how it's implemented. (and that depends on the legislative purpose.) the usual equality vs equity thing comes to mind. (negative income tax has probably the most desirable properties for this as far as I know.)
Somebody should try a smart populist movement instead. My least favorite thing about my favored (or rather least disfavored) party is that we seem to believe “we must win without appealing to the populace too directly, that would simply be uncouth.”
This article mentions cost to ship, but ignores that the largest cost of any software project isn't consumed by how long it takes to get to market, but by maintenance and addition of new features. How is agentic coding doing there? I've only seen huge, unmaintainable messes so far.
While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping.
I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from. I'm not trying to belittle you, I sincerely want to know: Are you aware that everyone writing software has the goal of releasing software so perfect it never needs an upgrade? Are you aware that we've all learned that that's impossible?
this was basically true until consoles started getting an online element. the up-front testing was more serious compared to the complexity of the games. there were still bugs, but there was no way to upgrade short of a recall.
I'm not saying that this model is profitable in the current environment, but it did exist in a real world environment at one point, making the point that certain processes are compatible with useful products, but maybe not leading edge competitive products that need to make a profit currently.
Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is.
I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.
finally the right question! I would upvote you 1,000 times if I could!
this is why they need a senior/seasoned developer behind them. for things that can simply be learned directly (e.g. from man/docs) it rocks, without guidance. for other things it needs guidance
there are many millions of people writing code… that’s way too many to get any good quality. you might get lucky and get involved with codebase which does not make you dizzy (or outright sick) but most of us are not that lucky
certainly not more of it now, we have decades and decades of human-written code if I am understanding the question correctly.
all's I am saying is that "anti-AI" HN crowd literally glorifies human-written code every second of every day here, "AI slop this, AI code unmaintainable that..." I have been a contractor for many years now and usually brought on to fix shit and human-written code is in vast majority of cases much worse compared to AI generated code. the sample size of the latter is smaller but my general argument remains. I think people that write these "AI slop" comments should pick their favorite language/framework/... and then go to github and browse through codebases, written by humans (ignore commits before xxxxxx) and then see if they like what they see :)
From my own experience (having maintained legacy human codebases and now and then toying around with LLM coding) there's a quite fundamental difference between the types of slop, though.
Bad human code often has antipatterns, missing sanity checks, terrible data structures, bad naming, convoluted flows, etc. but you can usually deduce the intent behind the code. It's pretty obvious where it's bad and why. And if you can get to the mental model that guided the development, you can figure out how to rewrite it.
LLM code has all of those problems, but on top of that, there's no underlying mental model to deduce, much less a consistent one. This, in my experience, makes the slop go from horrible but possible to fix and refactor, to beyond repair and in need of not just a complete rewrite, but an entire new architecture from scratch.
The title is kind of baiting junk takes and misses the nuance here. Life stressors can induce depression or symptoms of it. Medication has shown to improve these symptoms. It does make treating actual chronic pathological mental illness more difficult, because of the exact attitudes expressed here.
Hint: mental illness and life being stressful is often comorbid and causal.
There is a growing movement that says life is too easy nowadays and we're handicapping our ability to develop coping strategies.
Life is incredibly easy nowadays. We have more luxury and access to everything than we've ever bad. Crime is at all time lows. We're safer and have an incredible access to just about anything. This leads to self segregation and an atrophy of basic coping skills.
But the media convinces us of the opposite. People are told from birth that their lives are hard, the system is broken, etc. This conditions people to not bother. This atrophies skills or they never develop.
I recently read an article that something like 25% of Ivy league students have a "disability". They don't, but they think being depressed is a disability which enables them. The author made a good case that they were taking advantage of the system, which cheats themselves out of developing their skills. https://reason.com/2025/12/04/why-are-38-percent-of-stanford...
My friends sex addicts group has also touched on a similar thing lately: emotional comfort is not emotional maturity. People today segregate themselves from people to protect their emotions, then they wonder why they can't handle people who disagree with them. It's easy to avoid things.
The main thing I'm saying here is that today's modern life allows us to avoid things we don't like. This leads to a lack of development in many areas. Then we claim everyone is struggling. Then the media reinforces this.
Over time it can become difficult to gauge people's conditions and legitimacy of those conditions. therapist friend of mine and I talk about this a lot. "What's an actual condition and what do people think they have?" is a big issue in modern therapy. People Self-diagnose way too much nowadays. The media convinces everyone that they're broken.
My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities. I forced myself to work customer service jobs and voila, after a year or two I became a social person. My stutter went away and I became comfortable in groups.
Our perspective is fucked and it creates a cycle of apathy/complacency. Then everyone is "depressed" because they can't handle their latte having soy instead of cows's milk. This is hyperbole but it isn't untrue.
> My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities.
I don't understand why you think that the fact that exposure cured you means you didn't have social anxiety?
Exposure is something a therapist would suggest for social anxiety.
The issue seems to be that you think saying that someone has social anxiety means they are permanently broken (and maybe will give up trying to do anything about it?) but I'm not really sure where you got that idea from.
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