EliRivers

"Uh Oh" realization of what these models can do?

The code reviews was just how I first saw it, but the rot goes deeper. The "uh oh" was my realisation of how much these can damage people's professional development. These people will never get better at their job than they are right now.

A lot of what else GenAI does is great, but this is an "Uh oh" indeed.

Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?

Acquire it from other people. That's how I do it; my day job pays me less money than me just swapping stocks around. The companies whose stock I buy and sell have never seen a penny from me; never received from me a single penny of investment in their business. I harvest wealth without having ever invested in any company and my actions create no new wealth; I harvest wealth I did not create.

They're interested in getting more wealth for themselves. The easiest way to do that is not to generate new wealth.

It had such a long lifetime.

The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion.

Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again.

I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."

Well, 80% of sales are physical rather than digital. In what way is that dead?

The evidence indicates that you are incorrect, and while I appreciate your passion, if I must choose between you and reality, reality wins.

So far it's worked out very well. I moved the money into space and green energy.

Is this true? There are a lot of low-productivity and zombie companies trudging through year after year.

I have a fairly broad portfolio of stocks, ranging from blue chips to outright bets inspired by the wallstreetbets crowd.

I have divested entirely of anything that relies on the spending power of the British consumer; retail, house builders, all of it. British people just don't have discretionary money to spend, and it's getting worse rather than better. Thus far, this particular stock market bet has gone well for me (although obviously it's a sign of bad times for the UK consumer). This is not the same as British companies; those with large overseas markets are still going. My Games Workshop shares have been absolute champs, for example.

I cannot speak for other countries, but the UK is one I can see with my own eyes. The people are just ending up with ever less discretionary spending power, where discretionary now appears to be gradually edging towards including "something to live inside" and "food."

Well those ones might be, but the ones I want sure aren't. I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending. The library is pretty helpful (reservation fees are more than I'd like, but a lot less than buying); some years I draw a couple of hundred books. But a lot of them I end up buying. Got one in my hand that was just delivered minutes ago (the new partial biography of Jobs about his years outside Apple).

I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist. I do spent a lot on books. I borrow a lot from the library. Your assertions come across very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error. But I assure you, when I'm in the bookstore I'm definitely not the only person there. Between us we appear to be propping up entire publishing industries. Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital (1); if we weren't here there would be nothing for you to pirate!

[1] According to https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/books-ma... "Print remains dominant, accounting for 78% of consumer market revenue"

That's the Platinum Premier tier. If you're on the regular tier, paying the minimum, the AI will silently fix all that right up for you.

It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.

That said, from the review: "open source maintainership as cosmic horror." Genuine laugh.

Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.

I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.

When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.

Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.

Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."

"I'm sorry... did I say something?"

"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"

"Uh..."

"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click

After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.

It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.

If I used that body of text to make a statistical model and used that model to predict what comes after "Are you sure?" it would very often be an indication that previous statements were erroneous.

Well sure, of course we do. We (or at least, a lot of the readers of this who live in a US and similar economic and social system) have learned that it is virtuous and correct to say we value directness. But that's where it stops; it's just a thing that is right to say. Part of the current social interaction protocol. It's then widely understood that many interactions should not be hyper-direct.

What you have observed - people saying they value directness and then not exhibiting it - is the expected behaviour. This isn't a bug.

There was no such time. Even if everyone means "every software engineer" or any variation thereof, and we substitute any other such tool for GC.

These, surely, are the skills they always needed? Anyone who didn't have these skills was little more than a human chatgpt already, receiving prompts and simply presenting the results to someone for evaluation.

Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades.

HN is a tiny bubble. The majority of the world's software engineers are barely using source control, don't do code reviews, don't have continuous build systems, don't have configuration controlled release versions, don't do almost anything that most of HN's visitors think are the basic table stakes just to conduct software engineering.

They can not. They can make some average code. On Friday one suggested an NSI installer script that would never bundle some needed files in the actual installer. I can only imagine that a lot of people have made the same mistake (used CopyFiles instead of File) and posted that mistake on the internet. The true disaster of that being that then testing out that installer on the developer's PC, where that CopyFiles may well work fine since the needed files happen to be sitting on that PC, would then lead on to think it was some weird bug that only failed on the end user's PC. I bet a lot of people posted it with comments like "this worked fine when I tried it," and here we are a decade later feeding that to an LLM.

These tools can write average code. That's what they've mostly been fed; that's what they're aiming for when they do their number crunching. The more specifically one prompts, I expect, then the more acceptable that average code will be. In some cases, average appears to be shockingly bad (actually, based on a couple of decades' experience in the game, average is generally pretty bad - I surely must have been churning out some average, bad code twenty years ago). If I want better than average, I'm going to have to do it myself.

The only software I ever worked on that delivered on time, under budget, and with users reporting zero bugs over multiple deliveries, was done with heavy waterfall. The key was knowing in advance what we were meant to be making, before we made it. This did demand high-quality customers; most customers are just not good enough.