YC companies have pretty much always been overhyped trivial bullshit. I'm not surprised it's even worse nowadays, but it's never been more than a dog and pony show for bullshit.

> To the point where I recommend people who are dabbling in GPU work grab a Mac (Apple Silicon often required) since it's such a better learning and experimentation environment.

I don't know, buying a ridiculously overpriced computer with the least relevant OS on it just to debug graphics code written in an API not usable anywhere else doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

For anyone who seriously does want to get into this stuff, just go with Windows (or Linux if you're tired of what Microsoft is turning Windows into, you can still write Win32 applications and just use VK for your rendering, or even DX12 but have it be translated, but then you have to debug VK code while using DX12), learn DX12 or Vulkan, use RenderDoc to help you out. It's not nearly as difficult as people make it seem.

If you've got time you can learn OpenGL (4.6) with DSA to get a bit of perspective why people might feel the lower-level APIs are tedious, but if you just want to get into graphics programming just learn DX12/VK and move on. It's a lower-level endeavor and that'll help you out in the long run anyway since you've got more control, better validation, and the drivers have less of a say in how things happen (trust me, you don't want the driver vendors to decide how things happen, especially Intel).

P.S.: I like Metal as an API; I think it's the closest any modern API got to OpenGL while still being acceptable in other ways (I think it has pretty meh API validation, though). The problem is really that they never exported the API so it's useless on the actual relevant platforms for games and real interactive graphics experiences.

> I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs.

Perl 5 is to me a classic scripting language (as opposed to an actual programming language), for both good and bad. I've always viewed Perl scripts with exactly that perspective and I find them fine/good. In contrast, I find Python to be a mediocre scripting language, an okay-ish programming language from a syntax perspective and a bottom-5 programming language in pretty much every other regard.

That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.

Some people are more productive. Others less so.

There is a tension between the two groups.

Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.

> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.

This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.

If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.

With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.

In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical

While I understand that people might downvote the parent post because it seems in bad taste and touches on a culturally sensitive thing, haven't we all wondered this? Why is it that the poor give relatively more generously than the rich?

It's such an interesting phenomenon that so many ultra rich people are essentially just hoarding wealth beyond what they should reasonably be able to even have use of in multiple generations. Worse, some of them simply cannot seem to get enough and will literally commit crimes and/or do indisputably morally wrong things to get even more.

I would personally never ask anyone this, and I wouldn't expect anyone who could answer it to actually answer it, but I think what komali2 asked is one of the most interesting questions out there.

I think it might be because I'm autistic but can you help me understand why it's in bad taste to ask it? I see YouTube videos of people talking about how they became really wealthy or showing off their houses or cars, and this person was talking about his bank account directly and has mentioned the 3 comma thing before, so I'm a bit confused why it's not ok to ask more about it.

You did mention something I didn't think of which is lifetimes, I guess if someone wanted to guarantee an ultra wealthy lifestyle for all generations of their kids and grandkids forever, that would be a reason to hoard wealth into the hundreds of millions.

I had this issue a few years ago with certain applications and came to find out that it had to do specifically with them using GTK. I googled for it and found the fix, and after all the same apps started practically instantly. Could this be what you're running into?

(I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me about this particular issue.)

Maybe? I've tried removing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome as it seems to cause slow startup for other people but that doesn't seem to fix it.

> There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible.

I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it was pretty immediately obvious that it was too slow at doing pretty much everything, and even the slightest interaction with the LLM caused very long round-trips that would add additional time, over and over and over again). It's possible people simply don't do the kind of things I do. On the extreme end of that, had I spent my days making CRUD apps I probably would've thought it was magic and a "game changer"... But I don't.

I actually don't have a problem believing that there are people who basically only need to write 25% of their code now; if all you're doing for work is gluing together libraries and writing boilerplate then of course an LLM is going to help with that, you're probably the 1000th person that day to ask for the same thing.

The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.

P.S.:

I have found that very short completions, 1-3 lines, is a lot more productive for me personally than any kind of "generate this feature", or even function-sized generation. The reason is likely that LLMs just suck at the things I do, but they can figure out that a pattern exists in the pretty immediate context and just spit out that pattern with some context clues nearby. That remains my best experience with any and all LLM-assisted coding. I don't use it often because we don't allow LLMs for work, but I have a keybind for querying for a completion when I do side projects.

my current job /role combinations has me working in a variety of projects which feature tasks to be done in: Python/SQLAlchemy (which I maintain), Go, k8s, Ansible, Bash, Groovy, Java, Typescript, javascript, etc. If I'm doing an architecture-intensive thing in SQLAlchemy, obviously I'm not going to say "Claude here go do this feature for me". I will have it do things like write change notes (where I'll write out the changelog in the convoluted and overly technical way I can do in 10 seconds, and it produces something presentable and readable from it), set up test cases, and sometimes I will give it very specific instructions for a large refactoring that has a predictable pattern (basically, instead of me figuring out a complex search and replace or doing it manually). For stuff I do in Ansible and especially Groovy (a horrible language which heavily resists being lintable), these are very simple declarative playbooks or Jenkins pipeline jobs, I use Claude heavily to write out directives and such because it will do so without syntax errors and without me having to google every individual pattern or directive; it's much easier to check what it writes and debug from there. But I'm also not putting Claude in charge in these places, it's doing the boring stuff for me and doing it a lot faster and without my having to spend cognitive overhead (which is at a premium when you're in your late 50s like me).

> The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.

see there you go, I have things like this I have to figure out many times per week. so many of them are one-off things I really dont need to learn deeply at the moment (like TypeScript). It's also very helpful to bounce off ideas, like when I need to achieve something in the Go/k8s realm, it can sanity check how I'm approaching a problem and often suggest other ways that I would not have considered (which it knows because it's been trained on millions of tech blogs).

> A whole new class of problems just became solvable.

This is almost by definition not really true. LLMs spit out whatever they were trained on, mashed up. The solutions they have access to are exactly the ones that already exist, and for the most part those solutions will have existed in droves to have any semblance of utility to the LLM.

If you're referring to "mass code output" as "a new class of problem", we've had code generators of differing input complexity for a very long time; it's hardly new.

So what do you really mean when you say that a new class of problems became solvable?

In Swedish the G wouldn't be silent so it wouldn't really be all that much like "wonderful"; "vanderfugel" is the closest thing I could come up with for how I'd pronounce it with some leniency.