falkensmaize

We might cure cancer in 10 years. We could have Martian colonists in the next decade. Everyone might be commuting to work with a jet pack. Literally anything could happen, especially given a long enough time horizon.

Citing the absolute worst practices from terrible developers as a way to exonerate or legitimize LLM code production issues is something we need to stop doing in my opinion. I would not excuse or expect a day one junior on my team that wrote pointless tests or worse yet removed tests to get the CI to pass.

If LLMs do this it should be seen as an issue and should not be overlooked with “people do it too…”. Professional developers do not do this. If we’re going to use Ai for creating production code we need to be honest about its deficiencies.

What is happening?

What diminishes your value is that suddenly everybody can (in theory anyway) do this work. There’s a push at my company to start letting designers do their own llm-assisted merge requests to front end projects. So now CEOs are greedily rubbing their hands together thinking maybe everybody but the plumber can be a “developer” now. I think it remains to be seen whether that’s true, but in the meantime it’s going to make getting and keeping a well-paying developer gig difficult.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Today I tried to get it to upgrade Nx, yarn and some resolutions in a typescript monorepo with about 20 apps at work (Opus 4.5 through Kiro) and it just…couldn’t do it. It hit some snags with some of the configuration changes required by the upgrade and resorted to trying to make unwanted changes to get it to build correctly. I would have thought that’s something it could hit out of the park. I finally gave up and just looked at the docs and some stack overflow and fixed it myself. I had to correct it a few times about correct config params too. It kept imagining config options that weren’t valid.

This was my first thought too. We already have terraform for repeatable, source controlled service provisioning and we have the relatively straightforward aws cli for ad hoc management. I don’t know that I really need another layer, and it feels quite risky.

‘How does a model “trigger” self-harm?’

By telling paranoid schizophrenics that their mother is secretly plotting against them and telling suicidal teenagers that they shouldn’t discuss their plans with their parents. That behavior from a human being would likely result in jail time.

Not to be cheeky, but isn’t this just

display: flex; align-items:center;

now?

I buy vinyl for one reason - it forces me to actively listen to the music. My teen daughter does the same.

I have many happy memories of getting a new record as kid, laying in the floor and listening from start to finish while poring over liner notes and album art. There was a level of connection with the music that I just don’t get from listening to Spotify while I’m washing the dishes or something.

I know it’s sentimental, but I get so much joy out of watching my daughter do the same thing now. She has a blast going to our local record store, finding records from her favorite bands old and new and then coming home and just listening. No devices, no distractions, just her and the music she loves. In a sometimes horrible and depressing world, it’s a sweet escape.

"I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again."

You should be - in all likelihood you'd have to work 3 burger-flipping jobs to make enough money to pay rent and buy food. Inflation and housing issues have hit a lot harder than most people who make 6-figure incomes realize. It's really tough out there right now. I am very, very grateful for the income I have and don't take it for granted.

Man, come on - what planet are you from, seriously? I got into this business because I enjoy programming, but I also wanted to for once in my life make a decent living and be able to save something. I have kids I'd like to send to college. I'd like to be able to retire someday. I have aging parents that need expensive care. This is one of the few professions that you can upskill into without years of expensive degrees.

People need to make money to survive, now more than ever. It seems incredibly selfish to wish for that to disappear just so you can "purify" the profession.

"will continue to do so"

What evidence do you have for this statement besides "past models improved"?

It seems pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I know I’ve experienced some serious skill atrophy that I’m now having to actively resist. There’s a lot lost by no longer having to interact with the raw materials of your craft.

Thinking is a skill that is reinforced by reading, designing and writing code. When you outsource your thinking to an LLM your ability to think doesn’t magically improve…it degrades.

The only way to truly fix these cycles is to finally let the bubble actually pop. Make laws against government bailouts. Let companies and investors who acted recklessly go broke. Send criminals to jail. That’s the only way to restore sanity to the system - if it’s actually their own money they are gambling with they’ll start doing due diligence and stop gambling.

I've had this same thought for some time. There should have been an explosion in startups, new product from established companies, new apps by the dozen every day. If LLMs can now reliably turn an idea into an application, where are they?

Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.

This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.

EarFun Air Pro 4

Yes actually. That was one of my biggest annoyances with non-Apple earbuds in the past, but these actually do seamlessly connect to all my Apple devices and switch quickly and reliably to the active device.

This is not an ad, just personal experience, but I went through two pairs of AirPod Pro 2s in the last couple of years and both developed problems outside of warranty. I bought a pair of Earfuns from Amazon and they’re honestly pretty great. 95% of the sound quality and functionality of AirPod pros for about 25% of the price.

Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.

"But it will get better, a lot better."

I see statements like this a lot when talking about AI in general. People seem to think it is a foregone conclusion that no limit to LLM model improvement and capability exists. What causes you to believe this and what evidence do you have to back it up?

Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher

This is really impressive - nice work. I too use Ruby at work, and would love to build something like this.

The numbers are FAKE. How else can you describe a 30% downward revision in jobs numbers this year?

I unironically love the band Winger. They’re probably most famous now for becoming instantly uncool once Mike Judge drew Stewart in a Winger tshirt on Beavis and Butthead in the 90s.

The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.

Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.

As someone who writes a lot of RoR and typescript at work, I find I’m generally happier and more satisfied after completing a ticket in typescript.

It seems counterintuitive because Ruby is generally more expressive and readable than JavaScript. In theory, Ruby should be the “happy” language. I think it really just comes down to confidence that what I’ve written will work properly at runtime. There’s always a nagging paranoia with Ruby that I’ve missed adding a safe nav operator or forgotten an .is_a? somewhere, and those mistakes have led to embarrassing production issues in the past.

Typescript is far from perfect, but I experience a lot less bugs when writing code in it.

Please no. There are many alternative cross-platform password managers one can use instead. Please don’t make my software and devices suckier and harder to use to appease some EU bureaucrat.

What makes you think Bitwarden can’t indiscriminately axe your account?

You’re incredibly far off base. I’m not a libertarian in the least. I’m all for well run government that uses its money to help its citizens. Unfortunately we don’t have that kind of government. But if you want give even more of your paycheck to help fuel the war machine and fund bloated useless department of redundancy departments be my guest.