AI coders are carrying half-open laptops
5 months ago by HertzDentalBar to c/technology
Can't you just disable sleep on close? Fuckin noobs
Updated with correct link
When your boss ranks you based on the number of tokens you burn, there's no choice.
Ohoho, I know exactly how to burn a silly amount of tokens if I want to, which is why that metric is absolutely garbage - arguably worse than ranking developer performance by SLOC committed.
If your metric is usage, it is incredibly easy to game, just send agents on wild goose chases all day long and never accept the results.
Still too much effort.
Automate a script to send AI agents on goose chases for you.
You can send it into deeper rabbitholes than that without even coming close to your prod stack
He's a product head at an AI company, as per the article. He is a boss.
or you can literally just do what is it? something+tab? and it just goes to town without the need for you to confirm anything.
I mean it's gonna turn out slop that won't scale and be full of exploits anyways regardless if you auto confirm or not. then just rig it up to ping your phone when it's done...oh who am I kidding these dudes wouldn't know how to do that.
then just rig it up to ping your phone when it’s done…oh who am I kidding these dudes wouldn’t know how to do that.
Fucking. Exactly. I just made a long comment about how this article feels like they're talking to non-tech-savvy people who are pretending to be tech-savvy because they talk to a fucking AI.
Like this dumbfuck kid who "has to keep shipping software" as if that means he's not shipping it riddled with bugs and security issues since his AI makes the spaghetti code and he just says "I'm sure this is ready for production."
I used to use a push notification app and a small python script for that.
I would “&& notify_me ‘message’ “ and get a notification on my watch when whatever script I was running completed
I judge this wave of people in tech pretty harshly.
Just a bunch of boring script kiddies
I couldn't even find any evidence in the article or photos that anyone interviewed was running a local LLM, which would at least justify worrying about temps if your keyboard acts as your air intake (which apparently is relatively common now).
Just a bunch of narcissists wanting an excuse to have people ask them about what they're doing, ogle what they're doing, and so they can pretend they're...
I mean this is why I don't mind using AI, it gives me the time to focus on the people around me.
Also I see it as a sign of a lack of support and isolation in the workplace. Like "I need help, I don't have anyone to turn to cause everyone is fired so this is my only support" and the anxiety that brings.
Yeah I just swap to the next project. And if all of those are hydrated I go to my hobby projects, and yeah those I don't use agents for so I just stay there for a while after that lmao
Dude needs to start using cloud agents if he’s gonna be this shitty.
I mean... I'm almost glad they haven't figured out the power settings. Imagine if they were all running around with the lids closed and the laptops stuffed into a backpack? It would be a fire waiting to happen.
Idk depends on the airplane at this point.
Surely the CPU would force an instant shutdown if it detected dangerously high temperatures?
I was thinking more about the batteries. It's probably not as big of a deal with such small batteries, but lithium ion batts can enter an "uncontrollable, self-heating state" called thermal runaway. https://ul.org/...
This has been true for 20 years.
Of all the things to compare pre and post AI
This is one that has not changed.
I just translate AI to Anti-Intelligence. 😎
"Actually Indians"
Original is better than clankers but I gladly use both.
I've definitely had windows straight up ignore the power settings before. Granted that was years ago, it's probably only gotten worse
It's fucking surreal watching these people rise to high positions in tech companies trying to sell the idea that they can replace physicians with their "product". Have fun with that mate.
They will. It’s cheaper. People will die. Congress will take money from the lobbyists and say there’s nothing they can do.
This is nothing new
corporate blocks most of the settings anyway
Utterly pointless thread. Drivel. Change your power settings so that you can close the screen and have the machine "do nothing".
Is this the level of content that is deemed worthy these days? Literally a non-story.
If the heat vents are above the keyboard the heat will go directly on the screen. I had a laptop screen stop working due to this.
Seems like an incredibly stupid design that is easily remedied.
My gaming laptop emits a ton of heat in the chassis around the keyboard. Keeping it closed while it's running would likely be a very bad idea.
If they happen to be running any sort of models that are local to the machine that could be quite haphazard.
"coders"
'AI coders' specifically.
spits on the ground
Anyone with half a working brain in computer tech would know that, if you really need something to be kept on, but checked regularly, it becomes a fucking server that you connect to using different equipment. But that's too high tech for vibe-whatevers.
"I think people think I'm whatever the equivalent of an iPad kid is for a middle-aged woman," one AI user said.
Ackshually, we think you're an absolute fucking idiot.
It is. I don't know if you do any development or simply write code as a hobby but you get a sort of dopamine hit when something you're working on actually works. like a bug or something that's been dogging you for days and suddenly you figure it out. it feels good. I can't remember the quote but Linus Torvald said something similar. it's a good feeling.
Now imagine you get that constantly, consistently, again and again because you strictly use an AI agent. that's what these tech bros are getting. The problem is unlike actual devs they're getting that hit because it essentially "works on my machine" as really that's all the AI turns out. Something that surface level functions. So they're addicted to it. "oh man that was so fast and easy, lets build something else!" over and over again.
The problem then becomes they'll run out of ideas or things to build and will naturally have to start trying to maintain what the AI built utilizing the same AI. Annnnnd if you've had any experience with these agents you know "that's where the fun starts" those dopamine hits are going to vanish very quickly. Now these people are "chasing the dragon" so to speak. AI doesn't know it was the one that built the thing. I've seen it first hand with my clients vibe coders when I've asked them to go back into something that was built and have the AI start fixing bugs that I've found in my review. the vibe coder panics, it doesn't understand what the agent is telling them, the agent believes the vibe coder built this thing. suddenly it's not fun anymore. suddenly it's not churning out semi-working results. suddenly things are breaking.
This is the one aspect NONE of these companies or tech bros or vibe coders like to talk about it. Haven't you wondered why you rarely read stories of them sending their AI agents back into the thing its built to scale it or fix something? it never turns out well.
So it is an addiction. And they're all collectively chasing the dragon. But eventually they stop getting their hits and will crash out.
If these yahoos come back to hire people like me who were dismissed like so much garbage, they are going to find we processed our loss and moved on after a year of self reflection and accepatance.
They will either pay us through the nose to convince us to help, or piss off.
Oh shit, that's a great idea! I'm surprised claude didn't suggest it first. /S
How do so many tech people not know about the power settings that can let the laptop run 100% even with the lid closed and on battery power?
Like, how stupid are they? Has AI really atrophied their tech skills that much?
A guy here shared a story about this AI guy his company hired, that was pretty clueless when it comes to basic tasks about his job. When he had to do the same thing a week later, he was still as clueless. Anyway, that made me think that AI people might have trouble learning things, because they just let a data center hallucinate an answer. I have the same thing when i use a navigation system, i don't really learn the way i go, i just follow an indicator.
I'm not in IT, just a lowly office grunt who is forced to use Windows on their laptop. I know most people here have forgotten that 99% of the working world has to use Windows, so let me remind you how much it sucks.
It doesn't matter how you change the laptop power settings, Windows will look at your settings and then just do whatever the fuck it wants when the lid closes.
Sometimes it goes to sleep
Sometimes it stays powered on and quietly overheats in your laptop bag.
Sometimes it completely freezes up and forces you to hold down the power button.
Sometimes it just logs you out and does nothing else.
Sometimes it will go to sleep, but the moment you open it back up it decides what you REALLY wanted was to restart.
Changing the settings has no effect on what Windows decides to do.
I know people on this site like to sit on their gilded Linux throne and sneer at all the lowly peons forced to use "Microslop" instead of their clearly superior, self-hosted, FOSS, Linux distro; but it is a real problem with Windows laptops.
I am in IT, and personally speaking, with my own machines, I have never had these power settings not be obeyed.
And the only time when I have seen these settings “not be obeyed” in other systems is because either,
- Someone or some other non-Microsoft software had dicked with power settings through the registry/GPO, or
- I’ve been able to trace things down to hardware malfunctions or hardware discrepancies.
“Claude, how do I change power settings on a laptop?”
Thank me later, AI users. ;)
Oh, right. AI users…
ahem
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some laptops use the keyboard as an airvent tho
I guarantee this article was written in conjunction with the comms team at OpenAI. Just more propaganda to try to convince people that AI is popular and generate FOMO.
AI has important uses, but for capitalists its only use is to make them more money at your expense.
I don't know, it has the opposite effect, IMO.
It just makes them seem obnoxious, since the example they chose was a parent who was distracted with the computer open in the changing room while they were supposed to be helping their children with their skates, and literally mentions how the other parents have to navigate around the thing.
You'd be more inclined to think that they're a computer addict who can't put the the thing down for even a moment.
On top of that, the video is basically a recipe to drop the laptop and have it shatter into fine powder, if you're holding it by the corner like that.
That is 100% the vibe I got from this article as well. They're trying to get this in the zeitgeist.
Wow, that was quick to have vibe "coders" not understanding how a operating system works.
To be fair, often times coders are horrible system admins. Heck Torvalds famously runs Fedora because he found installing Debian too confusing.
Fedora allows him to mess with kernels easier than other distros
Is that why I make a pretty decent sysadmin? Because I'm a terrible coder? 😅
Skill issue
The 39-year-old head of product at Raven.AI is a [Claude Code and OpenAI Codex power user. He also has two daughters, ages 12 and 10, who love to ice skate. So, when he takes them to their weekly skating practices, he sits outside the rink and codes with AI.
It's easy to lose track of time with these tools, he told Business Insider. Soon enough, the girls' practice has ended, and the parents flood into the changing room. He joins them — with his laptop ajar, so that the AI agent can keep running.
Sure pal, your work is more important than your kids!
USA makes the world more difficult by pushing people to work more hours and more hours and even more hours, that is turning to a normal thing, which affects the rest of the world bad. Yesterday was AI pushed all over the world, today is war going worldwide. God belss USA and it's capitalist heads!
What really worries me about this article is this very dystopian idea that you're supposed to be "working" 24/7, no breaks ever.
Even when you're out with your kids, why are you present in the moment instead of working? Open your laptop, go work.
Wasn't all the marketing abour the "AI Future" talking about getting things done faster?
When did that turn into "Work 24/7 so you don't waste your hourly token limit"? WTF?
Also,
The 15-year-old from Bentonville, Arkansas, is a 10th grader who's building a startup with his 24-year-old cousin. He uses Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode (paid for with seed money from his parents).
Lul. Lmao. ROFL even.
Yesterday on my way home there was a lemonade stand, 6 boys making great value lemonade for $2 a glass. Two of the kids were turning poorly made signs it was so wholesome if I had $2 on me I'd of stopped just to support them.
Sometimes kids should just start a business instead of a startup. Less disappointment and brainrot
I can't remember the specifics of it, but I vaugely remember someone pointing out that back in the 70s people assumed that rising productivity meant they'd have to work less. That if the work of a week in 1970 would be the work of three days in 2020, that they'd simply only work those three days. Even if I'm misremembering what was said, I feel like it's clear to see that rising productivity doesn't mean we're going to work any less. Capitalism will just keep squeezing until nothing is left.
Yeah futurists said the same shit about email and smartphones, etc. These were “time saving” productivity tools that would help us all enjoy a better work-life balance. Instead you end up with workers essentially on call 24x7x365.
on top of that, there is no way they are working on anything so important that can’t take an hour away or whatever. these dopes could also configure yolo mode if they just need to sit there and click “accept” to changes…
So many comments about the power settings thing, but this isn't about working effectively and efficiently.
You can take AI out of this article and it would be just as sad, but it wouldn't get the clicks.
This article is either helping push, or documenting the push, that if YOU are a higher tier of worker bee that wants to prove your superior worth to your bound legal entity, AND you want to virtue signal having your head on straight to all the lazy selfish people around you actually being present in the moment, then YOU need ShinyTechBroProduct!
Ohhh all the cool parents are into ShinyTechBroProduct! All the other lame asses who PaId AtTeNtiOn To tHeiR KiDs aren't going to be the next Elon Jobs now are they!
After the advent of laptops, I tried taking them "out in the world" to work from parks, or airports, or whatever. Yeah, I could get some stuff done like that. No, it wasn't a great idea. It wasn't even a slightly good idea. The only "on the road" place that works for me is inside a sailboat in a marina - quieter than home or office, better environment for work. The only "good thing" that came out of road coding? Getting hit on by a curious woman while we were both stuck in SFO waiting for the LAX shuttle that was backed up.
Road coding out in the world? A great way to spend 4x as long to produce code of 1/4th the quality as what you could do in a less chaotic office-like environment.
This shit reads like an Onion article. Good god.
Figures they don't know how to keep their laptops awake while the lid is closed lmao
This is the first setting I changed on every laptop I ever owned. So often I had stuff running in the background and didn't want it to sleep. Plus, windows had that stupid fucking sleep bug, so usually I'd use hibernate anyways.
I disabled sleep-on-close for my server laptop (I use NixOS btw), although I do prefer to keep it on for my personal laptop.
Can’t you just disable sleep on close? Fuckin noobs
They'd have to know how to use a computer to know that...
And if they knew how to use a computer, they wouldn't be using AI to do their job.
A big thing no one is talking about, is how each worker's goal here isn't to build a fully functioning thing, it's to make something "good enough" that it gets off your desk and is no longer your problem. It doesn't matter if the "creator" knows how it works or even if it works. Just enough to get a rubber stamp from your manager, then they move on to a new one.
Since most "AI coders" will just keep typing "try again" till it works, eventually they'll get something that "works", we won't fully realize the damage for a while
But pretty soon shit is going to start breaking all over and no one will know how to fix it besides typing into an AI "try again". No corp or government will pay humans to start over with something maintainable...
And this is the most boring way possible we get to War Hammer 40k
Just a reminder that real devs are using AI, and even vibe coding because the alternative is unemployment. I agree with the sentiment, though.
You're giving them too much credit. They're afraid their chatbot will suffocate if they close those lid all the way.
You think people who ship apps with 127.0.0.1:[port number] as a URL can figure out how to set up a personal VPN?
Close the lid, buddy. You gave your only good ideas to a stranger and they made you obsolete.
Nah, it's okay. They probably don't have ideas worth stealing.
Actual link to article: https://www.businessinsider.com/...
Redirect links are tracking links and should be banned imo.
Yea I feel like a fool for not catching it, I've updated the post. I thought I'd opened the proper page and just copy and pasted.
Thank you, I was about to edit my comment to add it.
Yeah, I think I learned to do this with my first laptop within the first hour of using it.
Jesus, These people have no critical thinking skills.
Imagine leaving skate practice and your father cannot stop his AI gooning to pay attention to you
Can't you just run the agent remotely? 🤔
They would have to know something about technology
I remember being a young intern and a senior dev taught me about screen. It was cool and I immediately forgot how to use it.
Every time I use screen I forget how it works. Doesn't matter if it was an hour ago I forgot either how to detach, or how to reattach.
I've been using byobu, which is a wrapper. No idea how actual screen or tmux work, but in byobu it's just F2 for a new screen, F3 for previous, F4 for next, ^A, D to disconnect. And ^A, & to kill a screen. Those are the only commands I've ever needed.
I should probably learn how to actually split a terminal, but I've never been in a situation that I couldn't just move the terminal emulator window.
Hey, claud. Don't let the computer go to sleep when I close the lid
Closes laptop lid
Hahaha
It's not running a local model anyway, why would you need to run anything local. If you're that careless, just deploy EC2 with headless claude and whatnot, and let it drop your production database do it's thing.
Fuckin noobs
Lol I mean... yeah, they're vibe coding.
I like how they think they're somehow special for walking around with their laptops open. Business idiots have been doing this forever. It isn't some new "AI coder" thing. Jane from fucking accounting does this on the way to her meetings too you morons.
Normally I want mine to sleep on close.
That 15yo in a startup has got to be a sociopath. You know how serial killers usually start by torturing random animals? It's the techbro version of that
It's also an ad for Business insider. This link is paywalled.
When you lock your lid: Do nothing When on battery, turn off laptop after: Never
They think "do nothing" means the AI will do nothing.
One of the things that concern me about the AI revolution, is that users don't have the critical thinking skills to discern bad information, bad code, bad prompts, etc., etc.
That's what I'd do as well if I used AI. But that relies on knowing anything about using a computer beyond accessing a web browser
Can't you just disable sleep on close?
Most modern laptops have their air intake in the keyboard, which would cause them to overheat on a matter of minutes.
Edit: I may have been confidently incorrect here. I know I’ve seen this done before, but I guess it’s not common like I thought
Most? With the amount of people running laptop docked I would say that is not the case for most business laptops for sure.
You can set different behavior between docked and undocked. At least to a degree
I really don't think it's a thing, or maybe just for some high end gaming laptops? Which, yeah, most things on expensive gaming laptops don't actually make sense. They just throw shit on there to justify prices
Decent ones dropped this practice a while ago. Some pull in the sides, some crappy ones use the bottom. My coworker actually got much better performance out of his dell by closing the lid and flipping it over. With it positioned normally it would overheat and throttle the cpu.
That's why they stopped calling them "laptops" for a while, and instead "notebooks".
But I actually just went and checked Dell, HP, and Lenovo and they do call them laptops again.
Do you have an example?
I tried to find something, but the only mention was five years old saying Alienware might try it.
It sounds stupid but with people using laptops on beds I could see the idea behind it.
If they increased the size of those little rubber feet to keep the screen and keyboard separate, then that would completely solve the issue.
I want to see if no one's thought of that yet since it seemed so obvious, but I just can't find any real example of keyboard cold air intakes. Are you talking about actual vents? Going between the keys may just be an urban legend from what I'm seeing.
Even if there was an intake in the keyboard it wouldn't dramatically affect anything. My P1 does partially intake through the keyboard and closing the lid has no appreciable performance impact. I only leave the lid open so the display doesn't get baked by the i9 using 70+ watts.
Shoutout amphetamine, awesome little app.
No need to install a separate app:
sudo pmset disablesleep 1
If you close the lid on a MacBook, it ignores caffeinate and goes to sleep anyway. The only cases in which it doesn't go to sleep with a closed lid are when you connect an external display or disable sleep entirely:
sudo pmset disablesleep 1
Everfall 2 is the "sequel" to Everfall, a vibe coded disaster of a game. The sequel only exists because the "dev" couldn't figure out how to get Claude to fix the fact that save games just didn't work. One week after publishing the original, he abandoned it saying the sequel would be given to everyone who bought the first at a "huge discount". After push back, he reduced it to free if you DM him on discord. The sequel is almost exactly the same as the first game except saving works more often. Like, literally 100% carbon copy. The screenshots on each steam page is proof of that.
I make web apps for work, they connect to vendor APIs and generate reports. It's pretty awesome, but idk i think im a unicorn. Tried to major in CS but just couldn't be perfect with my syntax and actually failed a couple courses because I couldn't get full programs to build even though I aced the conceptual on paper-quizzes. So I feel pretty good about knowing and understanding the apps claude is building for me even though i just can't get all the semicolons in the right place myswlf.
Hey chatGPT, can I close my laptop lid and not have it go to sleep?
ChatGPT: screw off loser.
"I think people think I'm whatever the equivalent of an iPad kid is for a middle-aged woman," one AI user said."
They don't think it bro they fuckin know it.
Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't paying attention and thought I'd copied the direct link. I've fixed it.
In the before times we had to VPN into machines and run large data processing jobs that took hours. It was pretty normal for everyone to leave their laptop half-open on their desks during lunch.
No, it was not a good idea. Yes, we fucked with each other and changed people's backgrounds or chat usernames or email signatures.
Anyways, if you're on Mac you can run caffeinate -i claude and your computer won't go to sleep until you close your Claude Code instance. You can also attach it to a PID. Then you can close your computer's lid and it'll still run.
You could have locked the computer without logging out
"For those who don't want to input a command in a terminal"
Sounds like they are being performative: they want every one to know and to ask them about it.
Can’t you just disable sleep on close?
i could, but closing the lid turned off radios (wifi + bt) at some low level in a way that i haven't figured out
What OS are you using?
lmde on a seven year old laptop five years ago, i was already accustomed to wifi on linux being dogshit. energy management was even worse and for some time hibernation was not a thing
Ah, yeah, was there any particular reason you were using LMDE? Because I'm not sure what parts of systemd it uses (especially back then), but I always just edited /etc/systemd/logind.conf to have HandleLidSwitch=ignore and have had zero issues. Pretty sure there is a gnome GUI for changing this same setting, gnome-tweaks.
I would assume the bad WiFi support was due to it being Debian and Debian being notoriously behind in terms of updates for the sake of stability.
to get wifi working properly in the first place i had to find a missing binary that wasn't packaged in any normal way and was only hosted on some dudes github so my expectations were low already. it got a lot better over the years tbh
You can literally just tell the AI to disable sleep settings ,this is beyond stupid, they aren't even running the actual LLMs on the laptops so it doesn't even matter
I'm not sure if I see a reason not to disable sleep on lid close. If you have to carry it around lid open so that it doesn't sleep, you clearly have a case for wanting to keep the laptop running with lid closed.
If it's a "look at me, I'm doing things", it's a whole different story.
I walk with my screen open at the office sometimes. I prefer my computer does go to sleep when I close the lid, but if I’m just grabbing a quiet room for a meeting, I don’t want to wait for the network to come back up when I open it again. Been using computers since the 80’s, but still a noob somehow.
This article is so confusing because it seems like everyone they're talking to is just using online models and the use of local models is mentioned but it's not clear how many of the people being interviewed are using local models since it's all about laptops. Even the one lady who you can see her screen is a CLI, it's not clear that she's not just using the CLI version of Claude.
I have a mid-range desktop and doing local LLM can be pretty darn slow on it especially with an AMD card and ROCm as opposed to Nvidia and CUDA. I have a relatively nice laptop, but it's specs are well below my desktop and I just can't imagine actually running a local LLM on a laptop.
If they're not using a local model, then they wouldn't need to worry about overheating with the lid closed. Easy to make it so it doesn't hibernate when the lid is closed via CLI (at least in Linux anyway). Because if they're offloading all the work to a remote model, their PC can essentially be relatively idle and draw less power/produce less heat.
Article also seems strangely focused on Macs? All it's mentions of how to make it so you can close the lid are Mac-focused. Did I miss something about the new Apple Silicon being really efficient for local LLMs? Maybe that's what I'm missing here.
It just seems almost weirdly narcissistic, like they want people to ask them about it so they can talk about it. Certainly it seems that way with the kid with a startup business that he runs during classes with tokens paid for by his parents.
Anyway, the whole thing seems odd to me. Either the article is about people who aren't actually super savvy coders or techies, or they would... just switch it so they can close their fucking laptop... or something about making a show of what they're doing is part of it. I dunno, weird. Anyway.
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I just feel bad for these poor kids. You can't leave your goddamn Claude at home while you take your kids to the rink?
save