I’ll use Ghostty as an example because that’s the only software I use that I know is written in Zig. It’s also a moderately complex project not a toy project.
My main Zig project will need over 1,000 edits to get it up there :O I've already had Claude spec out the changes required. I'll just have it or Codex or whatever fork itself into one agent per file and bang on it (for the stuff I can't regex myself) ;)
But the IO thing is frankly a good idea. I/O dependency injection, when I've used it in the past, has made testing quite a bit simpler (such as routing any I/O stream into a string to assert on) and the code much easier to reason about. The extra argument is a bit annoying, but that's the price of purity and it's worth it.
Palantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
It appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity).
a lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
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A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:
So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.
Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose.
Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression
> > Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.
Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too.
Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met.
I haven't had to work for 25 years. But I've spent the vast majority of that time employed. Times when I've not had purposeful employment as an anchor in my life have been rough for me. (First 2-3 months feels great... then it stops feeling so great).
Thanks for sharing. Absolutely right; people need to feel useful and valued—not to mention, jobs can help us get out of the house and connect with people.
Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?
> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?
No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.
I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.
LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.
I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.
I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.
Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.
I've done plenty of those self-actualizing things. I've learned to fly airplanes. I've done hobby projects. I've gotten into astronomy. I've learned to make things in many kinds of ways (carpentry, sheetmetal, machining, welding, 3d printing, lithography) and have overkilled so many projects. I've gone to my kids' games. I've 100%-ed a lot of RPGs. I've travelled. I've read too many books.
But I want to be -useful-, too. I enjoy helping and working with kids in my current job more than I enjoy filling my time in empty ways (well, up to a point: summer sure feels nice, too :).
Money gave me the freedom to define the relationship with work in the way that works best for me; and it turned out that's more valuable to me than the ability to escape work entirely.
You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.
The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.
There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.
It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system.
Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.
You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.
It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.
I think you misread the situation. The move is towards open models, small efficient models, what makes you believe there will be a moat around AI for automation?
I think the point here is that a lot of automation still requires "real-world" components (read: hardware). E.g. robots, factories with said robots and so on. So you being able to run LLMs on your PC is still not going to put big factories owned by big companies out of business.
> so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution
As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.
Correct. If we don’t do anything, it effectively is about as immutable as a law of nature. But if enough people respond, the system will change in some way.
Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.
Yet the elite won't share that benefit until someone makes them. History makes me think that won't happen until hunger motivates the masses from their apathy.
it's only for "the enrichment of the elite" if one looks at life with a perspective of entitlement, resentment and disregard for the nature of...nature (existence,randomness, realty itself).
just because humans can't "outdo" technology doesn't mean we should "blame" "the elite". that's literally how the great catastrophes of socialism, communism, Marxism, etc started
Humans aren't "forced" to do anything, (depending on how you look at it). You could just lay down, "live" in your own excrement until you starve to death. That seems reasonable! Liberate the proletariat! Why doesn't everyone else work for me?!
It's far less effective than the hydrocarbons that heat my house. My point being that I think people on HN like to underestimate how important work is when talking about replacing humans.
It's not "just business", it's my ability to survive.
But when you dig down deep on theories like that it just doesn’t make sense from a chemistry or physics standpoint. Everyone saw that Star Trek episode about silicon based life and ran with it as being possible. It’s just a show.
If you have the money for it, you should really consider hiring a contract artist to supplement your gaps.
A concept artist and a 3D modeling artist altogether will cost like $3000 for 1 fully complete character that fits your vision. For 2D probably a lot cheaper.
For me, $3000 is worth the months/yrs of saved time.
Of course if you are having fun learning the art side and don't care about the destination as much then ignore this and have fun with it! If you practice every day for a year you'll probably start getting close to what you invision.
EDIT:
I'll also add that it's possible most of the aesthetic you're looking for can be achieved via shaders (for both 3D and 2D games). A lot of art looks very different in-game because of shaders doing all kinds of manipulations.
They could start with stick figures and placeholder graphics to communicate the idea, then level up; a great example of this iterative approach is Factorio, which redid some of its graphics and graphics pipelines over the years, starting off with basically MS Paint style graphics, then moving to a detailed 3D model transformed to 2D sprites pipeline.
Then there's the Kingdom of Loathing games that never moved on from shitty Paint drawings, lol.
