Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandal
Furthermore,
> As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-thingy" included multiple test harnesses (!), the Hello World Rails app (?!), a stowaway text editor, and then eight different variants of the same logo — one of which with zero bytes.
Do you think any of the... /things/ bundled in this software increased the surface area that attacks could be leveraged against?
ive seen plenty of real code written by real people with multiple test harnesses and multiple mocking libraries.
its still kinda irrelevant to whether the code does anything useful; only a descriptor of the funding model
What I don’t like here is the bragging about the LoC. He’s not bragging about the value it could provide. Yes people also write shitty code but they don’t brag about it - most of the time they are even ashamed.
That's not quite correct.
The root set of errors were made by the accounting software. The branch sets of errors were made by humans taking Horizon IT's word for it that there was no fault in the code, and instead blaming the workers for the differences in the balance sheets.
If there were no errors in the accounting software (i.e. it had been properly designed and tested), then none of that would have happened.
Nobody blames THERAC-25 on the human operator.
(THERAC-25 was a little more towards 'just bad software', but there were still systemic failures there as well).
?!
Was it hiding in one of the lifeboats?
Let’s not be naive. Garry is not a nobody. He absolutely doesn’t care about how many lines of code are produced or deleted. He made that post as advertisement: he’s advertising AI because he’s the ceo of YC which profitability depends on AI.
He’s just shipping ads.
The cautionary/pessimist folks at least don't make money by taking the stance.
At the extreme end you'll get invited to conferences but further down you could have other products you are pushing. Even non-AI related that takes advantage of your "smart person" public persona.
But the true metric isn't either one, it's value created net of costs. And those costs include the cost to create the software, the cost to understand and maintain it, the cost of securing it and deploying it and running it, and consequential costs, such as the cost of exploited security holes and the cost of unexpected legal liabilities, say from accidental copyright or patent infringement or from accidental violation of laws such as the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. The use of AI dramatically decreases some of these costs and dramatically increases other costs (in expectation). But the AI hypesters only shine the spotlight on the decreased costs.
To me, in this context, it's similar to drive economic growth on fossil fuel.
Whether in the end it can result in a net benefit (the value is larger than the cost of interacting with it and the cost to sort out the mess later) is likely impossible to say, but I don't think it can simply be judged by short sighted value.