awesome_dude

Certainly, and some discoveries have been attributed to AI (I was reading that mozilla firefox were praising mythos recently)

But that's not accounting for all of the discoveries, not at all.

I've also seen the npm people talking about the surge in AI code overwhelming the ability to properly review what's being distributed, and a large number of vulnerabilities being attributed to that

You have moved from "We know" to "We have an educated guess" which is the right way to couch things.

However I wanted to also point out that relying only on educated guesses can lead us into a position where we are "papering over the cracks" or "addressing the symptoms", not the "underlying cause"

Yes, sometimes that's all that can be done, but, also, sometimes it can be more damaging than the cause itself (thinking in terms of the cause continuing to fester away, whilst we think it's 'solved')

> Pragmatically, correlation is evidence of causation in favour of the best explanation, until somebody finds a better explanation.

Uh, no.

Correlation is only ever one thing - cause for investigation.

Everything based on correlation alone is speculation.

You can speculate all you like, I have zero issue with that, but that's best prefaced with "I guess"

edit: Science captures this perfectly, and people misunderstand this so fundamentally that there is a massive debate where people who think they are "pro science" argue this so badly with theists that they completely hoist themselves with their own petard.

Science uses the term "theory" because all of our understanding is based on "available data" - and science biggest contribution to humanity is that it accepts that the current/leading THEORY can and will be retracted if there is compelling data discovered that demonstrates a falsehood.

So - because I know this is coming - yes science is willing to accept some correlation - BUT it's labelled "theory" or "statistically significant" because science is clear that if other data arises then that idea will need to be revisited.

That's correlation, not causation.

It could equally be argued that the AI slop that's being produced makes for a lot more vulnerabilities being shipped. The bigger target makes for the easier discovery.

> people were already diffing kernel commits and figuring out which ones were security fixes With skill, and usually not consistently and systematically. With AI, anyone can do this to any software.

I would like to see actual evidence of this, not.. vibes

I mean, this reeks of "Anyone is a Principal developer now" when the truth is there is still work to do.

"We made this in C#"

"Our team used Go"

"Rewrite it in Rust"

Funny, we credit technology all the time.

> Anyway, one thing for sure is that Gemini is pretty much unusable

Ha! I find that Gemini is quite useful - if only because I am forced to use it (on my personal projects) because it's the only one that has unlimited interaction for "free"

It has its limitations, yes, but so does Claude (which I am leaning on too heavily at work at the moment)

I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"

It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.

I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?

DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?

I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.

But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.

In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model

> Question 2:

> Does throughput really matter more than latency in everyday application?

IME as a user, hell yes

Getting a video I don't mind if it buffers a moment, but once it starts I need all of that data moving to my player as quickly as possible

OTOH if there's no wait, but the data is restricted (the amount coming to my player is less than the player needs to fully render the images), the video is "unwatchable"

Best capability test there is

Athletes have a far bigger curve than you're aware of

Unions rarely form because everyone is being treated well (humanely) and/or paid appropriately.

The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?

This is what killed search more than anything else - people actively working to get their results higher than they would have been under "normal" conditions.

I saw an article on HN a while back that showed the math for "senior" employees was affected by the amount of profit generated off them.

I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG.

The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases.

So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.

There's always been a reluctance by business to hire juniors, AI is just the latest excuse.

Mate, have you never had to deal with over-confident graduates who think they've got the complete answers, but, in reality, they only have a sliver of the whole picture in their minds?

In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking.

It's changing the way we think, and reason.

Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options.

No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun.

The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with.

Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward.

Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.

Yeah - humans have adapted to be able to use milk(s) from other sources than parents for the high sugar and fats present and required to survive in harsher climates (cold) that we're not native to.

Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.

I've recently been introduced to that plugin, love it for humour

When I was younger I absolutely HATED changing gear on the tractor - it was a matter of dropping the revs which caused a dive, then a clunk finding the gear, then a jolt as the gear took hold and the revs came back up

I never felt in control of that old beast

I often say to Claude "you're doing X when I want Y, how can I get you to follow the Y path without fail" and Claude will respond with "Edit my claude.md to include the following" which I then ask Claude to do.

The anecdote the GP is providing there rings true for me too - although I'm not sure if I am going offer better detail.

I'm a proponent of architectural styles like MVC, SOLID, hexagonal architecture, etc, and in pre-LLM workflows, "human laziness" often led to technical debt: a developer might lazily leak domain logic into a controller or skip writing an interface just to save time.

The code I get the LLM to emit is a lot more compliant with those BUT there is a caveat that the LLMs do have a habit of "forgetting" the specific concerns of the given file/package/etc, and I frequently have to remind it.

The "metric" improvement isn't that the LLM is a better architect than a senior dev; it's that it reduces the cost of doing things the right way. The delta between "quick and dirty" and "cleanly architected" has shrunk to near zero, so the "clean" version becomes the path of least resistance.

I'm seeing less "temporary" kludges because the LLM almost blindly follows my requests

My favourite JVM trivia, although I openly admit I don't know if it's still true, is the fact that the size of a boolean is not defined.

If you ask a typical grad the size of a bool they will inevitably say one bit, but, CPUs and RAM, etc don't work like that, typically they expect WORD sized chunks of memory - meaning that the boolean size of one but becomes a WORD sized chunk, assuming that it hasn't been packed

Apologies for the late reply - but I just saw this and immediately thought

So git /did/ have something better than Mercurial after all, it was a 3rd party, but it still meant that it was massively better than Mercurial.

You're actually further away from the truth than you will ever know.

1. Colours do NOT actually exist - they are purely an interpretation by your brain of signals encountered by sensors. Light exists at different frequencies, yes, but what colour is 2.6 GHz? What about light in the gamma spectrum?

2. While the wavelengths were always there, the concept of "Orange" as a distinct category didn't exist for English speakers until the fruit arrived. Before that, it was just "yellow-red" (geoluread) - as has already been mentioned. If you don't have a word for a transition, your brain often fails to categorise it as a distinct entity, effectively "grouping" it with its neighbours. The fruit literally defined the colour for the language.

Finally, just FTR coquelicot is actually a vivid poppy red - it comes from the French name for the flower.

But also - colours don't exist without a name

eg. Before Orange, there was only shades of yellow or reds

Trunk based development has every developer in the company committing straight to main - no PRs, supposedly no merge conflicts (but reality is that main moves fast and if someone else is working in the same files as someone else, there will be merge conflicts)

A middle ground is small PRs where people are constantly rebasing to the tip of main to keep conflicts to a minimum