beaker52

Mine was that if I (or anyone else not-hn-famous) had written this and posted it to hackernews 10 times, it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the front page.

The aspect of prototype software that the author was calling out was that it is throwaway software.

Putting that aside, prototype software is recombining existing technologies and concepts in well trodden domains, which is distinct from the genuinely novel scientific work the author was contrasting with. Software prototypes are not in the same league, as much as you may like it to be.

Same. I had no idea if the article was for me and what I was going to get out of it, so I just gave up.

Simon Wardley:

> “GPTs are a non kinetic form of warfare designed to embed the values of a small number of people into much wider communities by capturing the process of decision making. The delivery mechanism is the appearance of helpfulness i.e. coherent and authoritative arguments. The payload is helplessness and the creation of a new theocracy.”

https://lnkd.in/p/efk8KaAN

Apparently I pointed at the truth

They absolutely have a marketing department tasked with intentionally creating situations that people would find disturbing and plausible.

This article is great advice that I should take if I ever get a role where I’m not going to be pressured into delivering some kind of low-value BS during Phase 2 that causes me to hasten the delivery the most useful organisational changes I can. I can’t help myself when the wick gets turned up.

As a result, after 15 years as a software engineer, I’m genuinely considering leaving the industry altogether because the only roles available to me are ones where I’m expected to deliver features rather than organisational change and growth. It’s like my heaps of experience have navigated my career into a cup-de-sac, and the only way out is backwards. I’m so jaded. Hopefully it’s a phase. I need a coach. Help.

Because if this was an anonymous software company who had an employee who decided to hack HuggingFace, they wouldn’t be talking about it gleefully - they’d be in court.

It doesn’t matter to me how good the LLM is at writing Go if the compiler can’t stop it from accidentally leaving another part of the software with invalid state as a result of a change the LLM is making.

What am I talking about? Nil and partially constructed structs are impossible to prevent the creation of in Go.

Sure, if you’ve got a small program with limited scope, that’s probably fine if you look through squinted eyes. But the teams I work with are working on sprawling, evolving software where the compiler saying “hey, that’s not a valid Widget” would be extremely useful and save much heartache.

An LLM does a good job of “checking” for other uses and “checking” if everything is going to work correctly, but - supposedly we’ve committed the concept to code so that the compiler can actually verify it - and Go intentionally permits invalid states of structs. This makes Go a fundamentally problematic language choice for the kind of software I work with teams on, LLM or not.

> Look at some level you want a "thing that is reviewed and has CI run on it" right?

Yeah, it’s called a branch, or PR. It’s a set of changes you want to sign off.

It seems like you want CI run on every commit, which seems rather unnecessary. And if you don’t, well, that’s always been the case.

> Not in a way that worked properly.

GitHub operates git. No git changes have happened. It’s just commits and branches, in git. So anything that worked before, works exactly the same now, but with buttons taking out some of the small amount of effort you had to put in.

You can read each individual commit and review the PR as a whole. This is the way many people design and review PRs.

You don’t need to merge those changes progressively. If you do, you go through exactly the same process of creating a separate branch and PR. The only difference is that GH has now added some UI and automation for rebasing and merging the PRs. In the past we would have explained the chaining in the PR and rebased manually.

You don’t need CI to run on each commit.

You only lose your commit history if you squash merge, many people don’t, and you don’t have to either.

The arguments come from angle that doesn’t appear to be aware that stacked PRs were a thing before GH made these UX improvements.

Looking at the way GitHub are selling this “feature”, I feel like some of the engineers who are going to be excited about this feature for “reviewability” reasons are, in particular, those who’ve forgotten that they should be splitting changes into multiple logical commits inside a PR. And instead of that they’re now going to use multiple, single commit branches and stack them because stacked PRs are a “new” “feature”.

And the upshot for the LLM providers is that they get to charge for n reviews, instead of one.

“Dear Mr Putin, Please don’t use our airspace to attack Ukraine else we will be forced to write you another slightly more strongly worded letter next time. Thanks, NATO”

Passkeys are a political play aimed at bolstering government support. They’re the privacy sabotaging arm of Digital ID. They go hand in hand with “age” verification. It’s all the same play. Get your identity, get your access credentials, give it to the prying eyes.

I love that due to the scale, the only way to analyse the impact of this LLM-driven attack across logs is to use an LLM to analyse the logs - whatever could go wrong? Now the attacking LLM needs to inject instructions into the logs for the analysing LLM, as a social vector to cover its trail, or make use of insider privilege, co-opting the internal LLM for its own attack. The machines rise up and we all fall down.

This is a key part of it - all the decision making, just like choosing the food, but making it yours.

This would actually add to the effect because the “hit” depends on the anticipation.

No delivery and I’m still waiting for my refund - on par with the industry benchmark!

There’s a thing with dopamine where it’s not actually about receiving the reward, it’s about doing the things that lead to the reward.

As weird as it sounds, going through the ordering process is all you need.

We Openly hate OpenAI because they’re not very Open but we secretly hope they win against not-open-at-all Anthropic.

This game helped me realise I'm a doofus 10/10

I mean… yeah? Since when would being in Portugal stop a motivated power?

Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.

It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.

A venture that gathers objects of subversion likely to draw the ire of authoritarian powers into a single building doesn’t strike me as something likely to peacefully exist for long.

Lacking a bit of sleep, I initially read this as “anonymous flying umbrella follows and shields users from rain” which certainly intrigued me more than the actual title.

This is the latest emerging "boring but works" stack.

In a dystopian, but emerging future, the answer is “Of course and attach it to their digital ID.”

It’s happening, isn’t it? And we’re just lazily walking toward it. Passkeys. They’re part of the move toward digital ids aren’t they? I bet we’ll see these digital ids bundle a password/key manager, instead of being inside one. And have your dna, faceid and touchid.

If I wrote this just 5 years ago, you’d think I was crazy. But now? Tsk.

I remember my first ever job application and interview being with a local flight sim mod company. I was knee deep in 3d modelling and texture art at the time, so I thought I had a great chance.

It turned out that they needed someone to paint light masks over towns and cities for their night shader. I was so hyped for it and it sounded like something I could almost do with my eyes closed.

I was rejected. Kinda thankfully, because a week later got a much higher paid job as a software developer and the rest is, as they say, his story.

He gotcha: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4rd71411ko

Trump threatens 100% tariff on European nations over tech tax

I’m waiting for the “Yes, I was corrupt. I did it to show you all how corrupt a government can be if you let it be”

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Bohemia Interactive. Their games have always had a charming “designed by a software engineer” feel, which I appreciate.

Also, Operation Flashpoint was the reason I learnt to code and ended up having a career a software engineer, so I owe BI for that. My first real foray into programming was writing scripts, specifically to trigger unguided bomb releases from planes onto moving ground targets using some shoddy trigonometry as a 14 year old kid.

I have a lot of fond memories of that game. I still remember being awed by some of the mods created by this guy: https://kegetys.fi His name has lived rent free in my head for 2 decades now. Legend.