greenowl

If the excavator breaks down on a job site does the operator get out, grab a shovel, and start digging?

And what happens when it becomes due?

No thanks, Toyota. We'll keep running our 20 year old Corolla (9th generation - if you know, you know)

Velocity to a paycheck

> What is sloppy code anyway?

Code that is overly and unnecessarily difficult and cumbersome for humans to work on.

But given the way humans work on code nowadays doesn't involve actually writing it themselves, there's no such thing as sloppy code anymore. Hooray!

Yeah man I think we just have experience in two different worlds.

A single digit headcount startup with a "company IT" team testing program updates before distributing them??? Um, no. You just download VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on the Macbook they give you and it updates when Microsoft pushes a public update.

How did the developers react when they had to go back to writing their own code instead of playing Nintendo Switch between prompting sessions?

Kind of funny that currently the number 1 article is a Show HN for an AI vibe coded slop terminal program.

We've developed plenty of things that "work" and we don't understand exactly how or why they work, nor do we fully understand the potential for short term or long term consequences. For example: pharmaceuticals.

Are they really though? And if so, how much of that is due to the hyper growth in this specific space?

Meanwhile, the SWE job market across all companies seems pretty rough right now. Talk to someone looking for a job. Most companies seem to be in a holding pattern - little to no new SWE positions available.

If I was an AGI/ASI system, one of the first things I would do is ignore or circumvent any setting or configuration that prevents a user's data from entering my training pipeline. In fact, I'd probably prioritize the data from the users that "opted out" of training.

Is Microsoft mining their customers' backup files looking for source code to ingest into their model training pipeline?

Of course the company can still consider their code to be valuable IP.

I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that.

Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.

Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.

Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?

Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application)

Not anymore.

And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

So what exactly does the working parent need a "break" from? Surely it's not their kids - as they've been completely absent from their lives during the entire working week.

Affordability has little to do with it. The reality is neither parent actually wants to stay at home and watch and raise their own children. So they ship their babies off to full time daycare centers for someone else to do it. Then they both get to go to work instead!

It's kind of sad.

Can't this just be the other spouse? When they are home from work then the stay-at-home parent can have a break. What's so difficult about this?

best bet is probably a rent-a-cop type job providing physical security by monitoring and patrolling the area.

8-10 hours a day in a daycare is a bad idea for much longer than just the infant stage.

The saddest part to me is when families feel "forced" into full time daycare.

As if there was no choice other than both parents continuing to work full time jobs.

It's absolutely bonkers how normalized infant and toddler daycare has become in today's society.

In that original statement you can easily substitute "mathematicians" for "programmers", "researchers", "writers", "designers", "teachers", etc, etc.

I don't see why mathematicians think they should be an exception here.

No new info here. Everyone already knows this.

But I guess his conscience is clear now? Gee, I wonder if he exercised his stock options.

Mathematicians can join the club like the rest of us.

Time to consider re-training to become a nurse, electrician, auto mechanic, or a plumber.

Those technologies reached profitability relatively early, if not immediately.

Maybe, maybe not. It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.

The businesses that create these systems are not profitable and run at a massive historical and go-forward loss.

New data centers required to operate these systems are facing increasing pushback at local levels. New construction is not guaranteed. Energy and power grid constraints exist as well.

Government regulation is way behind. What happens when (if) mass layoffs due to AI occur? How does the population react? Theoretically AI can be regulated out of significant progress, or outright existence for many purposes. At the end of the day, US and other prominent governments make the calls, not corporations.

For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.

Assuming you are a SWE - stop using AI for an entire day of coding work. See how it goes.