> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.
The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.
More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.
> but I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change.
> I want to do good engineering, not produce slop, but for [...]
IFF this is true, you can already stop. This will never be good engineering. Guess and check, which is what your describing, you're letting the statistical probability machine make a prediction, and then instead of verifying it, you're assuming the tests will check your work for you. That's ... something, but it's not good engineering.
> That has to be worth something.
if it was so easy, why hasn't someone else done it already? Perhaps the cost value, in the code base you don't understand isn't actually worth that specific something?
> I could see a few ways forward:
> Send it, but be clear that it came from AI, I don't know if it works, and ask the reviewers to pay special attention to it because of that...
so, off load all the hard work on to the maintainers? Where's that 2 days of eng time your claiming in that case?
> Or Send it as normal, because it passes tests/linters, and review should be the same regardless of author or provenance.
guess, and check; is not good engineering.
> Interestingly, the pro-AI folks almost universally doubled down and said that I should use AI more to gain more confidence – ask how can I test it, how can we verify it, etc – to move my confidence instead of changing how review works.
the pro-ai groups are pro AI? I wouldn't call that interesting. What did the Anti-AI groups suggest?
> the AI "fixed" so many things to "improve" the code that I completely lost all confidence in the change because there were clearly things that were needed and things that weren't, and disentangling them was going to be way more work than starting from scratch.
Yeah, that's the problem with AI isn't it? It's not selling anything of significant value... it's selling false confidence in something of minimal value... but only with a lot of additional work from someone who understands the project. Work that you already pointed out, can only be off loaded to the maintainers who understand the code base...
General follow up question... if AI is writing all the PRs, what happens when eventually no one understands the code base?
about:config where you need a search engine to find all the key strings does not count as easy in this context. And it's unreasonable to pretend it is.
It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!
I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...
Could they have asked me if I wanted to enable 100 different browser features? Yes they could have, but why would they b/c that's incredibly annoying. If you don't like it you don't have to use it. The AI option doesn't send anything to the server unless you explicitly tell it to, so that is 100% compatible with a privacy focused browser.
The blog post is also complaining about the options to create a screenshot, copy a link to a text fragment, copy a link without trackers, debug accessibility issues, auto-fill a form, and even to print the page.
Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
> It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!
IMO right clicking and selecting translate/summarize/OCR/etc. is that choice. It doesn't translate pages by default, and the translation models are not downloaded until you choose to do so.
I feel what you're asking is for the option to see the option to also be disabled by default. But, it's a useful feature for many people and hiding it in this way would harm discoverability.
I'm sure part of this is hindsight bias, but software was less intentionally user hostile in the before times.
Firefox used to release features that improved privacy. Today they add features that reduce privacy. Enabled by default, with no easy way to disable or remove the spyware link.
The tone should shift, in step with how much disrespect companies decide to inflict on their users.
This would be more relevant if the ui features being 'discussed' were privacy violating, but they're not. Anger about privacy violations (mostly by other software and companies) doesn't justify vitriol about right click context menus in an open source browser.
Objecting to your reply is exactly why I made my original comment. It's the same thing as the cliche; "we can talk about who's turn it is to do the dishes; but first we need to talk about why you're so upset about it?", or the other "you might not shoot the messenger, but you also won't invite him to dinner".
You might not feel the vitriol is warranted for this specific example, but you tell anyone that they are wrong to feel the way they do, at your own peril.
Is it that big of a deal? IMO, no and I say that as someone who was pissed off by it too. But then again the straw the breaks the camel's back never does seem heavy.
But in context:
> every post is turned up to 11.
Everyone is being disrespected all the time, from every direction. Here, it feels like Firefox is doing it too. Every one is already at 11, Firefox added an AI button nobody wanted, with no (real) way to disable it. And we now have an 11.05 post. As everyone paying attention would expect.
They want more users, so logically it cannot be intentional. More generally, we cannot know others' intentions, so the speculation is always redundant.
I'd say it was a collaboration. I had to hand-hold Claude quite a bit in the early stages, especially with architecture, and find the right services to get the outcome I wanted. But if you care most about where the code came from - it was probably 85-90% LLM, and that's fantastic given that the result is as performant as anything you'll be able to find out of the box.
Is spam on topic? and are AI codegen bots part of the community?
To me, the value of Show HN was rarely the thing, it was the work and attention that someone put into it. AI bot's don't do work. (What they do is worth it's own word, but it's not the same as work).
> I don't want to exclude these projects, because (1) some of them are good,
Most of them are barely passable at best, but I say that as a very biased person. But I'll reiterate my previous point. I'm willing to share my attention with people who've invested significant amounts of their own time. SIGNIFICANT amounts, of their time, not their tokens.
> (2) there's nothing wrong with more people being able to create and share things
This is true, only in isolation. Here, the topic is more, what to do about all this new noise, (not; should people share things they think are cool). If the noise drowns out the signal, you're allowed that noise to ruin something that was useful.
> (3) it's foolish to fight the future
coward!
I do hope you take that as the tongue-in-cheek way I meant it, because I say it as a friend would; but I refuse to resign myself completely to fatalism. Fighting the future is different from letting people doing something different ruin the good thing you currently have. Sure electric cars are the future, but that's no reason to welcome them in a group that loves rebuilding classic hot rods.
> (4) there's no obvious way to exclude them anyhow.
You got me there. But then, I just have to take your word for it, because it's not a problem I've spent a lot of time figuring out. But even then, I'd say it's a cultural problem. If people ahem, in a leadership position, comment ShowHN is reserved for projects that took a lot of time investment, and not just ideas with code... eventually the problem would solve itself, no? The inertia may take some time, but then this whole comment is about time...
I know it's not anymore, but to me, HN still somehow, feels a niche community. Given that, I'd like to encourage you to optimize for the people who want to invest time into getting good at something. A very small number of these projects could become those, but trying to optimize for best fairness to everyone, time spent be damned... I believe will turn the people who lift the quality of HN away.
Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.
The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.
More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.
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