your sister offloaded to her plumber.

her plumber offloaded to chatgpt.

"i just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff."

are we talking about your sister or her plumber?

The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber

Im a software engineer and know how to be a software engineer, yet I find LLMs quite helpful. Why should a plumber be any different.

Because if a plumber moves fast and breaks things, I've got shit all over the place.

That, and also the plumber loses their license. So perhaps the solution is professional licensing for software engineers.

I feel like a licencing process for software engineers would

A) test lots of skills that are common but not universal. I'm thinking javascript trivia here, where I don't write any javascript in my professional capacity as a software engineer; but there are many people who think Software Engineer == Javascript Programmer

B) shine too much of a light on the fact that this industry is full of people who demand high salaries but can't program their way out of a paper bag

I think that's coming regardless. AI just might be the perfect storm to bring the timeline in considerably.

Engineer is a protected title in Canada after all

the question was rhetorical. but, since you responded – do you think that there are limits to who can or should use ai? if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable?

some knowledge is likely "cached" in the plumber. maybe he doesn't ask the same question twice. i'm sympathetic to the plumber, but i think your concerns of erosion of knowledge or skill are worth pushing on further.

> do you think that there are limits to who can or should use ai?

I don't think there should be imposed limits, but there might be an upper bound where expertise becomes atrophied by depending on AI too much.

> if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable?

In the short term sure, and maybe even in the long term for the customer. I think the risk to the plumber is losing some of their expertise by outsourcing to AI. But who knows, maybe the plumber has excellent memory and only accumulates knowledge each time they use AI.

Some of the article is lost in the plumber example. I doubt plumbers are spending much time exploring new ways of solving problems, and might even benefit from having a narrower range of outcomes. Other fields that require both expertise and novel solutions will be at a disadvantage if they become more homogenized by depending on AI. Not only is the range of solutions reduced, but getting there is faster, so people end up in a local maxima. Maybe they get stuck there, maybe not, but that's the risk I see.

You don't imagine any long term risks by outsourcing expertise to AI?

I do, but again, it was a rhetorical question; a paradoxical thought experiment.

Which part of being a plumber? Was the house installed with something non-typical? Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual?

Without further knowledge of what was going on it's hard to say why they used ChatGPT.

> Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual?

Yes

How do you know ChatGPT is referencing the right information if you need to look it up in a manual?

Water damage is generally more expensive than a half hour of a plumber's time

The issue here is that the sister could have used ChatGPT herself, so why bother hiring the plumber. The plumber has provided less value than was expected. But make no mistake: the value the sister was looking for was to have someone else deal with it, and there's a price that the sister was willing to pay for the service of having someone else deal with it.

In the comments of this HN post, there is a dead comment from someone who posted an LLM's summary of another comment. It's dead because it offers very little/no value: that summary could be obtained directly from ChatGPT by anyone who wants a summary.

The sister offloaded plumbing to the plumber under the economic principle of comparative advantage. The plumber undermines the value they provide by outsourcing yet again. What value is provided by the middle man who does nothing but proxy the issue? Is the person who does this really a plumber? Is a plumber merely someone who has plumbing tools like wrenches and pipe tape?

That the plumber also wanted to outsource it is the concern: right now, the plumber is able to make money because of the difference between what is charged to deal with a problem and what it costs for them to deal with it. Knowledge and experience has become a commodity, which we probably can't do anything about, but along with that comes all the drawbacks (and advantages) of things, and humans, being comoditized.

This is assuming that ChatGPT had everything needed to do the work. If the plumber was asking specific questions, based on their previous experience and knowledge about what needed to be done, the sister might not have been able to get the same result from her use of ChatGPT that the plumber received.

Experts look things up all the time, because no one can hold all the knowledge of a field in their head. Being an expert means being able to know what to look up and how to use the information retrieved from looking something up.

In the plumber example, ChatGPT is going to tell them to do things using the terminology that plumbers know, and tell them to do tasks that plumbers know how to do. The sister would have to continually look up more and more things about how to do basic plumbing tasks, rather than just looking up particular novelties.

Yes, this is why I mentioned comparative advantage.

So you are saying that a plumber does not in fact need to know how to be a plumber?

> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

This rhymes. Recently, I took my iPhone 16 Pro in to swap out the screen (there was an ever growing dead spot, and they handled it free of charge). Unfortunately, the screen they replaced it with is much more fragile – hairline fractures within days. I know the replacement screen is of lesser structural quality, but I can't prove it. I've had iPhones since the day they debuted in 2007(?), and this moment connected the dots across years of screen replacements. The original is always much more durable.

But again, sadly I can't prove it.

My iPhone 16 Pro's screen got scratched/cracked within weeks of me getting it when none of my other iPhones (5 of them from the 3GS until the 13 mini) ever had any screen issues.

It's hard to not feel like the durability is decreasing.

perhaps.

i worry about Dioxus. not because "they're going to be destroyed by their VC funding" directly, but indirectly. is this a sustainable endeavor? does the market really want them or care about them? it's hard to consider and commit to them, when it's unclear if they're sustainable or just running on the fumes of a passionate founder three months away from marking the project as unmaintained and walking away.

to that end, while i find beauty in dioxus, i've been more willy to play with expo.

it's a bet for sure. but if you squint or zoom out, you can see that dioxus labs is creating a whole new land of possibilities with blitz, taffy and their rust hot-reload. nothing is more motivating to a founder than adoption so i think developers should look at the big picture and contribute more to help speed things up. a big blocker for me was video in blitz but i solved it myself. ultimately it's up to developers to take a risk and give dioxus some credible case studies. flutter really dropped the ball on web and dioxus has a huge opportunity on the line. hopefully people will give it a real shot to help build some momentum. they are miles ahead in a lot of ways simply due to the vastly available rust crates

That's what happened to Darklang, if I recall correctly. I've been hearing about it for almost 10 years now and they went through multiple language rewrites and ultimately went bankrupt and then open source. Turns out it's hard to make money in languages and tooling.

while i'm sympathetic to your position, the truth is that /that/ is where this site is now.

the method for databases to talk to each other is via?

if we're not talking about replicas, we're talking about coordination at the app level, right?

Linked servers or FDWs

i think this is aligned with the author's choice. a separate schema is effectively a separate database (from a product eng perspective) with shared infra.

at one point, HN was anti-censorship. this discussion shows how ideologically aligned this concept has become.

there are volleys back and forth of "what censorship" followed by links to wikipedia enumerating it. RT and Joe Rogan are thrown in the mix.

when did this experiment fail?

first: looks very cool.

now, historically, i'd look at the language choice and ask myself, "would i want to set up a JVM" to run this kotlin app? oh, it's kotlin and python and the installation happens through pipenv?

two different ideas strike me now:

1. would it be worth throwing this at an LLM and having it write it in a different language,

2. if i was just consuming a bundled binary (e.g. go or rust), would i have such reluctance?

i think distribution is becoming increasingly important, making nonsense details like pipenv and whichever version of the JVM is present much greater friction.

Especially with things like github actions creating your releases meaning you don't have to build on your own hardware. You just set up three workflows that build on a windows, mac, and linux image, store the results in temporary storage, with a release workflow that grabs the binaries from storage and packs them up as a binaries + source release.

isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p

I mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.

As an non-expert myself, that's exactly what I would do.

we'll let it slip, this one time.

I for one am not leery of noleary.