stocksinsmocks

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

Most enterprise software I use has serious defects. Professional CAD software for infrastructure is awful. Many are just incremental improvements piled upon software from the 1990s. Bugs last for decades because nobody can understand how the program works so they just work on one more little VBA plugin at a time. Meanwhile, the capabilities of these programs have fallen completely behind game studios with no budget and no business plan. Where are the results of this human excellence and code quality process? There are 10s of thousands of new CVEs every year from code hand crafted by artisans on their very own MacBooks. How? Perhaps there is the tiny possibility that maybe code quality is mostly an aesthetic judgment that nobody can really define, and just maybe this effort is mostly spent on vague concepts like maintainability or preferential decisions instead of the basics: does it meet the specification? Is the performance getting better or worse?

This is the game changer for me: I don’t have to evaluate tens or hundreds of market options that fit my problem. I tell the machine to solve it, and if it works, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t I throw it away. All in a few minutes and for a few cents. Code is going the way of the disposable diaper, and, if you ever washed a cloth diaper you will know, that’s a good thing.

I’m pretty sure propaganda is a thing.

Hit me up, normie

The value of an NFT is the speculation that a bigger fool than you is in the market (and if you’re average, there is).

The value of AI coding is that it can eliminate some of the labor of programming, which is the overwhelming majority of cost.

These value propositions are nothing alike.

Early stages of Barbarossa were very successful and much of the Soviet Air Force, which had been forward positioned for invasion, was destroyed. Given the Red Army’s attitude toward consent, I would keep the praise carefully measured. TV has taught us there are good guys and bad guys when the reality is closer to just bad guys and bad guys

All real things, so can I put you down on team: David Icke?

My beliefs on aliens: There are almost certainly slime-mold level lifeforms outside of the earth. They are too far away to interact with ever. Plot device physics, like warp drives, are impossible. If smart aliens show up, they’re probably refugees from a dead world who will just eat us.

Regarding disclosure: the nexus of political hacks, permanent bureaucrats, organized crime, financial robber barons, and unhinged zealots that make and execute policy are so constitutionally untrustworthy that whatever they say about aliens, I will believe the opposite. I am 38, and I don’t think any important topic ‘the government’ has asked me to believe in during my lifetime has turned out to be true.

I really thought this was going to be the Dewey Decimal system. Exclude sources from this century. It’s the only way to be sure.

I’m pretty sure the USSR, Cuba, and the like never succeeded doing this sort of thing, but maybe if we hit ourselves in the head with the same hammer (and sickle) just one more time it will work?

Actually it is necessary. That’s why your bridge engineer has to satisfy a licensing board that he or she knows what they’re doing before they seal a set of plans. Clients can’t distinguish good from bad engineering. They shouldn’t have to figure out if you know what you’re doing.

Is that not also true of human written software that costs more per hour than the monthly cost of a coding agent? Developers are expected to ship enterprise software with defects that would land you in court if you made equivalent mistakes designing a water treatment plant or bridge.

I get the “AI sucks” argument from a programmers point of view. It’s weird looking and doesn’t care about “code smells” or about rearranging the code base’s deck chairs just the way you like. From an owner’s or client’s perspective, human programmers suck. You want big standard CRUD app? Like a baby’s first Django app? That’s going to take at least 6 months for some reason. They don’t understand your problem domain and don’t care enough to learn it. They work 15 minutes on the hour, spend 45 on social media or games, and bill you $200/hr. They “pair program” for “quality” to double their billed rate for the same product. They bill you for interns learning how to do their job on your dime. On top of that there is still a very good chance the whole project will just be a failure. Or I can pay Anthropic $20/month and text an AI requirements on my phone when I’ve got 5 minutes of down time. If it doesn’t work I just make a new one and try again. Even if progress on AI stopped today, the world is now so much better for consumers of programs. Maybe not for developers unless you’re writing the AI and getting paid in the millions. Good for them. I’m glad to see the $200/hr Stack Overflow copy and pasters go do something else.

Not defending him, but we were already doing this with electron apps, frameworks, libraries, and scripting languages. The only meaningful cost in most software development is labor and that’s what makes sense to optimize. I’d rather have good software, but I’ll take badly made software for free over great software that costs more than the value of the problem solved.

These discussions are always about tactics and never operations.

I don’t think this is uncommon. At one point Lemmy was a project with thousands of stars and literally no working code until finally someone other than the owner adopted it and merged in a usable product.

The attorneys said so. This is why progress happens in startups and gets bought by the big boys. They’re constitutionally incapable of innovation.

There seems to be a surprising theme that programmers wages are some kind of sunk cost and that their work was free of defects before.

I can get bad code written for the cost of electricity now

I’m a garage coder and the kind of engineer that has a license. I had the capacity with my kids to make a usable application for my work about once every 6 months. Now it’s once a weekend or so. You don’t have to believe it.

How about licensure and liability instead? That’s the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the rest of the engineering world. Sure it’s a guild system with a new name, but if the bridge collapses, somebody is going to be in a courtroom.

Has union labor resulted in measurable improvement in production outcomes in any industry they’re found in? I don’t think going from “managers are unaccountable for failure” to “nobody is accountable for failure” is a good thing.

I think introducing more competition at higher levels may be better than eliminating it below. This should be happening because I’m pretty sure most PMs could be replaced by an LLM.

These are your father’s parentheses. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Family law judges, in my small experience, are so uninterested in the basic facts of a case that I would actually trust an LLM to do a better job. Not quite what you mean, but maybe there is a silver lining.

We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits. So “the algorithms says you’re guilty” has already been happening in less dramatic ways.

I would have thought poisoning someone, even with a sedative, would already be a serious crime. This makes me wonder if this is addressing a weakness in the force of law or if it’s political pandering to look tough on a class of crime without changing anything.

It’s not pork because I like it?

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who saw the profound irony in this. I don’t think anybody of their own free will would pay someone to inject processed agricultural waste into the ground. And honestly, I’m not that upset that bureaucratic inertia has obstructed a process where working people get tax farmed for 50% of their earnings to give people like this his next “multibillion-dollar exit“. Especially when the benefits require so much confidence in extremely simple models of an extremely complex system that they are essentially articles of faith.

Now the cynic in me reads this article is an appeal to his creditors. Maybe they thought that because he made money in software, he must just smarter than everyone else and would clearly be a virtuoso in any market, kind of like a Buckaroo Bonzai. However, now their millions have vanished with nothing to show for it, and he needs to convince his creditors that it’s not he who is wrong, but the world who is wrong.

We can’t all be Mennonites. I wasn’t much older than that when my family got dial up Internet, and somehow I made it.

There are parental controls that don’t seem to do much good at all. I set a filter so that my 6-year-old son would only see content that was rated for kids. The next thing I know I see he’s playing a prison riot simulator and having a shootout with the police. There were some appropriate games, but the screening just isn’t serious. When it’s game time, we pretty much stick to Mario and offline Minecraft.

If there were a lawsuit it’s possible that the original communications could be obtained by court order. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened eventually.

The FBI and friends can also use their means of unlawful surveillance and leak the contents to politically aligned publishers.

My guess is that they discussed a lot of horse trading too candidly.

Or maybe the type of labor desired will be more comple, interesting, and valuable as it was when we gave up hunting and gathering for farms and as we mechanized farming and left for factories and factories and offices.

That thing was too big to be called a library. Too big, too thick, too heavy, and too rough, it was more like a large hunk of code.

Maybe that date is a rule of thumb for when AI generated content became so widespread that it is likely to have contaminated future data. Given that people have spoofed authentic Reddit users with Markov chains, it probably doesn’t go back nearly far enough.