> Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to them
I disagree. When working on legacy code, one of my biggest issues is usually the question 'why is this the way it is?' Devs hate documentation, Jira often isn't updated with decisions made during programming, so sometimes you just have to guess why 'wait(500)' or 'n = n - 1' are there.
If it was written with AI and the conversation history is available, I can ask my AI: 'why is this code here?', which would often save me a ton of time and headache when touching that code in the future.
in the tech world, maybe. All my 'normie' friends are using ChatGPT though and have no concept of their reputation, nor intention of switching. Most people I know are hardly even aware of alternatives, even of Gemini, though everyone has a Google account.
I personally also use ChatGPT and have zero reason not to, currently. I might switch if they royally mess up, but everything they've messed up has been fixed within a day.
> Do you think 30% of your friends or family members can't answer this question? If not, do you think your friends or family are all better than the general population?
That actually would be quite feasible. Intelligence seems to be heritable and people will usually find friends that communicate on their level. So it wouldn't be odd for someone who is smarter than the general population to have friends and family who are too.
My guess it's more about being able to say: 'We did everything we could.' If someone does end up getting a bomb on board. If they didn't do this, everyone would be angry and headlines would be asking: 'Why was nothing put in place to prevent this?'
> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases?
The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.
There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.
I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
If you're working in big tech and you truly believe you are spoiled, then why not quit that job and let the migrant improve their living situation, while you live in the luxury you already have?
I don’t work in big tech. Wish I was, would be a pretty big improvement in my salary. Still think I’m very spoiled compared to about 90% of the world, probably more than that.
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.
There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.
Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)
There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
I disagree. When working on legacy code, one of my biggest issues is usually the question 'why is this the way it is?' Devs hate documentation, Jira often isn't updated with decisions made during programming, so sometimes you just have to guess why 'wait(500)' or 'n = n - 1' are there.
If it was written with AI and the conversation history is available, I can ask my AI: 'why is this code here?', which would often save me a ton of time and headache when touching that code in the future.