178 karma · joined June 12, 2024
Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.
It is the current spear-edge of the investor pressure to ship products faster, and monetize users more aggressively, all at the cost of quality, reliability, ethics, security.
If you, as a software engineer, once held an ideal about programming as an art or craft, AI coding flies in the face of all that.
It turns out that maximising for short-term profit leaves many other objectives behind in its wake.
Also, note that thunderbolt not yet supported[2].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241219125418/https://social.tr... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 [2] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...
You should consult the code owner or primary set of authors before proposing a large rewrite. But if you do this, you should understand very well the pros/cons of throwing away all of this old code, documentation, and unit tests that have an implicit dependency on the existing structure.
I worry that if you are just vibe coding and letting the AI rewrite everything at will, you could not be further from understanding the details involved.
Why?
I feel we should build an extension to HTTPS to allow Cloudflare / other reverse proxy services to proxy web requests without circumventing the SSL guarantees between the user and the host. It should be trivially possible.
That said, the cynical side of me worries that it works this way by design.
[1] according to this particular metric: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare [2] "the IPA makes it illegal for companies to disclose the existence of such government demands." https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/apple-pulls-encrypted-i...
IANAL
Does Visa Insights save lives?
I have strong views about privacy as a fundamental human right, but I don't know how to answer that question. I certainly don't want to make the world worse, but this feels like a lesser of two evils type of deal: either make it even harder to catch bad actors, such as child abusers, or make it plausible that your government take away your freedom forever.
I don't understand the notion that it is faster to generate repetitive code with keyboard macros. I use Vim-mode exclusively, and while I'm not a Vim master, I don't think there's any set of macros that will do what Copilot can do.
It's not that Copilot is smart. It's that 60% of what I do doesn't require much intelligence to anticipate. It is the 40% that matters, the remainder can be trivially guessed, and this is exactly what Copilot does.
Maybe this will help: you need to imagine with an AI intellisense that with each keystroke, you are collapsing the possibility space down to a smaller, finite number of outcomes. You write exactly what code you need for the dumb AI to predict the rest of it.
There are a LOT of reasons why AI intellisense is not all there yet; it can be distracting; it can try to generate too much at once; none of the tools have LSP integrated, so it will provide bullshit suggestions of library methods that don't exist. This is all true, and yet it is still highly valuable in some domains, for some people.
That said, if you write x86 assembly for a living, you are probably out of luck.
(I write Kotlin, Java for Android apps and services, C++ that is tightly integrated with the SoC. Python and Bash for command-line tools that invoke REST APIs. Copilot is useful for these domains.)
So while it is unlikely anyone is _forcing_ you to use AI-enabled efficiency boosters, there may be a strong managerial pressure felt to do so, and it may even be offered as an action item in yearly reviews, and therefore strongly linked to compensation / incentives.
That is all to say, I understand if people in this group are frustrated with the AI hype train at the moment, even if they can appreciate that these tools do indeed improve efficiency in some places and in some people.
How would you do Android differently?
A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.
The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.
edit: typo
That said, if you have team members who somehow can't or won't copy the surrounding code style, then automatic linting sounds necessary.
There is a reason applications go to so much effort to proxy requests to resources such as images. It's not free to do this.