Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | newswasboring's commentslogin

I have a general impression they are not interested too much in individual devs and making it suite their workflow. They want to be a B2B company and deliver a custom workflow per company.

Or it can just be a Google like problem where a big company one part doesn't talk to the other.


But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts? Or they think golf courts are enough for success? Okay they might be right here, but still they make it so confusing for no obvious reason.

In my experience devs rarely have anything to say in B2B contracts. At best they can recommend a solution to the decision maker, but in almost all deals i was a part of they didn’t have any influence on the final decision. I wish it were otherwise but alas

> But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts?

How? The largest providers that are trying to win devs are locked in a competition to get the devs to continue using the models for free!

The best way to win B2B contracts is to solve the problems that plague business, not those that plague devs. The devs are fickle, have no stickiness and will jump providers to the next free provider, to self-hosted, etc.

Selling to business using Mistral's approach is, I feel, just a good business plan.

"Giving away some credits for free, then making a loss on subscribers" is an absolutely terrible business plan.


Also EU protectionism itself might be enough.

Like American protectionism? Heck, America even prohibits its own companies to sell to the government if the president doesn't like them enough.

Where is EU protectionist?

I feel we are way less protectionist than most other Economic Regions. Including the USA, which are very protectionist but always claim otherwise


Well different discussion, but look at the Mercosur agreement and all the opposition from farmers in the EU. They are extremely protectionist when it comes to agriculture, at least.

Yes the farmers are a very vocal and powerful minority.

They get more than 50% of their income from subsidies, are quite well off, but always find a reason to complain.

I was thinking more about stuff like "Buy American"-Regulations for public tenders. Stuff like that doesn't exist here


Well I can certainly understand them. Based on price tgey would not be able to compete and have half decent living wages so protectionism AND subsidies is a decent strategy to maintain local production which I feel allow a country / area to not lose a lever in international negociations.

Well, if every big company gets a giant EU fine for, say, preinstalling a web browser in an OS, except for EU companies, that could make it easier for the EU companies.

Every company would get fined for anticompetitive behaviour, regardless of where are based.

Well yes, but because there are approximately zero EU tech companies that can be affected by these fines and regulations there is very little political pushback against them.

In a certain sense it’s a way for EU to clawback at least a small slice of all that money flowing to the US.


Why should there be pushback against antitrust measures?

It's what keeps markets alive



Apparently you aren't aware of the EU's deep regulatory protectionism and subsidies at both EU and country level. A small portion is legitimately about protecting consumers, but ultimately this stuff is all designed by and for EU industry.

Basically all economic regions get highly protectionist when it comes to key areas like agriculture, banking, steel production, energy, automotive manufacturing, etc.

On tariffs, the US is now higher, but tariffs are a tax that passes through overwhelmingly onto the consumer (by like 95%+). Given there's essentially no fully domestic US manufacturing supply chains and the US imports everything, it's a defacto VAT from the perspective of the consumer. The EU has VAT levels that are still much higher than the average US tariff level, which is a essentially a dampener on consumption.


But the VAT applies to all goods regardless where they are produced. So that's not a protectionist measure

As far as I understood the French president is pushing French most valuated companies to use Mistral. There can't be a more to down strategy :)

To me it's obvious because the size of companies they are targeting (ASML being an obvious one). I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.

> being made not purely on tech reasons.

As if that’s not true in the US (not just government contracts but VC in general as well)…


> I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.

It's not like b2b sales is more technical merit based, individual contributor led, elsewhere.

It's always the same, depending on the field individual contributors can have some flexibility on picking tools (so a developer in a mid sized company would be able to pick whatever, an accountant probably would be more constrained, meanwhile a developer at a big bank would not have any choice). But for strategic software choices, that impact the whole company, where standardisation makes sense or is even mandatory to get actual value out of it, you need to sell to high level decision makers, not individual contributors. A CTO or a VP of X can decide to buy and mandate the implementation of something as impactful, workflow changing and potentially time and money saving as a company wide AI platform. A dev can't.


you might be correct. for example, they have an intellij plugin that allows integration without the AI Assistant, but it is only available for Enterprise customers

I'm sorry but are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing? Banning racist and sexist content is not a slippery slope. It's just banning racist and sexist content, slope is only slippery because the salivating mouths of these social platforms grease them.

Also, I don't think people are advocating censorship, they are advocating not promoting assholes. You can have your little blog and be racist on it all you want, but let's not give these people equivalent of nukes for communication.


> are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing?

I'm fine with doing something, but the current "something" seems slippery.

> Banning racist and sexist content is not a slippery slope. It's just banning racist and sexist content, slope is only slippery because the salivating mouths of these social platforms grease them.

But what is "racist", exactly? See why I think it's a slippery slope and why it's ill-defined:

1. We could agree that "Let's go out and kill/enslave all the $race/$gender" is racist, but that's bad if we switch $race to any group, as it's speech that incites violence.

2. What about "$race is genetically inferior in a way (less intelligent, less athletic, more prone to $bad_behavior)"? I honestly think most differences in race/ethnicity is due to environmental factors, but what if there actually are difference in intelligence or anything like that? Should we ban speech that discusses that? Black people win running races and are great at basketball. They're prone to certain diseases, as are Caucasians or Asians. So would you ban discussing that? Or would you ban blindly asserting that $race is $Y without some sort of proof?

3. What about statements like "There are way more male bus drivers because X"? Or "men are better at Y, but women are better at Z"?

What do you think the definition of racism and sexism in this context should be? I think the line is where we incite violence towards a group, but not about discussing differences that may or may not be true.

> Also, I don't think people are advocating censorship, they are advocating not promoting assholes. You can have your little blog and be racist on it all you want, but let's not give these people equivalent of nukes for communication.

I think restricting a platform (or anyone or anything) from promoting someone IS censorship. If it's not censored, why shouldn't I be able to promote it? This honestly feels disingenuous - like "we pretend that the racist isn't censored and can have his little blog, but it's illegal to promote his little blog".


It's easy, let's start with banning 1. Obvious incitement of violence. If they can enforce just that much it would be great.

> I'm sorry but are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing?

That seems more reasonable than the alternative, which is to make modifications to a complex system which you aren't sure what the outcome will be. You're more likely to cause bigger problems.


Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.

That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.

Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.


I think big companies already protect against random commands causing damage. Work laptops are tightly controlled for both networking and software.

Taxes dont get deducted from people's salaries?

they do, the above comment is a generic populist rant

Openspec does this. But instead of "?" it has a separate Open Questions section in the design document. In codex cli, if you first go in plan mode it will ask you open questions before it proceeds with the rest.

The UX is there, for small things it does work for me, but there is still something left for LLMs to truly capture major issues.


Bless our interesting times.

I have a stupid solution for this which is working wonders. It does not help to tell the LLM "don't do this pattern". I literally make it write a regex based test which looks for that pattern and fails the test.

For example I am developing a game using GDscript, LLMs (including codex and claude) keep making scripts with no classnames and then loading them with @preload. Hate this, and its explicitly mentioned in my godot-development skill. What agents can't stand is a failing test. Feels a bit like enforcing rules automatically.

This is a stupid idea but it works wonders on giving taste to my LLM. I wonder if I should open source that test suite for other agentic developers.


I think it's the same instinct as making your own Game Engine. You start off either because you want to learn how they work or because you think your game is special and needs its own engine. Usually, it's a combination of both.

> The prompt is unique but the tokens aren't.

The tokens aren't unique, but the sequence is. Every input this model sees in unique. Even tokens are not as simple as they seem

If you type "ejst os th xspitsl of fermaby?" in ChatGPT it responds with

> It looks like you typed “ejst os th xspitsl of fermaby?”, which seems like a garbled version of:

> "What is the capital of Germany?”

> The capital of Germany is Berlin.

> If you meant to ask something else, feel free to clarify!"

edit: formatting


Even a senior dev being able to unilaterally delete your prod entirely should not be possible.

But I don't think the intention was to compare with junior devs, its just a popular shorthand for "your process sucks".


> But I don't think the intention was to compare with junior devs

Junior was said specifically.

A better analogy would be if one of your staff engineers decided to connect OpenClaw to his workspace and it found a way to delete the production DB.

The author was an AI reporter. You can’t argue that he didn’t know what he was doing when he made these choices. Any comparisons involved junior devs are just dishonest.


I was using a common "phrase" that highlights individual human error vs systemic failures

Since you are stuck on the semantics allow me to rephrase - "if a single developer is able to delete your entire production db, that's an org failure"


Specifying a junior dev on his first day is a plain deliberate rhetorical ploy to frame systemic blame as more legitimate than individual blame. If not, then why not make it a senior developer? Anybody can fuck something up, but we give special consideration to noobs who make noob mistakes, and that's what is being implicitly appealed to, illegitimately. This journalist wasn't a noob, and using ChatGPT to write his article was an error in judgement but not an actual mistake.


The original author clarified and you are still stuck here? Take a step back dude it's not that serious.


"You disagree with me? Whoa dude, you need to relax and touch grass."


Things are more nuanced than agreeing and disagreeing. If you can't see that then...


I disagree with you, deal with it. Specifying a junior developer to make the point of blaming systems instead of individuals, to absolve a journalist of individual blame for fabricating quotes, is flat out bullshit and you're wrong to try weaselling it.

Inb4 Omg I still can't believe you're disagreeing with me, like yikes dude go outside.

Auroiris is right, it's a Motte and Bailey routine. And it's insulting that you're pretending otherwise.


> Junior was said specifically.

Yes, but I think you are taking this phrase more literally than its meant to be read.


I don’t think so. Junior was a key designator in the claim and words have meanings. It would have been easier to leave it out if they didn’t intend for it to contribute meaning.

I think this is turning into a Motte and Bailey argument where the junior dev story is used to push the argument and then it’s backpedaled out when others identify the fallacy.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: