4,268 karma · joined July 7, 2017
I don't think that there's a better alternative at the moment, and I get the need to pump out features to keep the revenue stream going, but I miss the slimmer versions
Attribute-based access control is already a thing. User X logs in the US East between the hours of 6am and 6pm. If User X logs in from Russia at 3am, deny access. This seems like an evolution of that pattern
Importantly, this behavior is deterministic. If the compiler takes your code and spits out something you did not expect, it will always spit out that same result, given the same input. Once you figure out what went wrong, you've solved that problem.
Generative AI is intentionally not deterministic, and that means you're going to solve the same issues -- hallucinations, primarily -- over and over again.
How large is your team? Because I don't think that would scale beyond maybe five engineers
I'm a huge proponent of automated testing, because that catches things like "this whole system I depend on is gone" even if the guy who depends on it isn't in the room
I'm also a huge proponent of shared ownership of ... everything, really. It's natural for people to kind of own different pieces of a codebase, especially if it's a component they created, but that leads to silos and low bus counts. There shouldn't be one guy who owns one system that depends on one other component
That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.
When the page loads, the article takes up about 25% of the screen, on the bottom right. It's basically in the exact place I wouldn't look for the content I loaded the page for.
Metadata about the article takes up just as much space at the article itself, a full quarter of the screen, even though it's only a few lines long. Once you start scrolling, there's just a massive empty gulf off to the left.
The menu is ... I didn't realize it was a menu at first.
It's actually much more readable on mobile, which might be a first for me
Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about.
AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...
I am convinced that their talk of UBI is just handwaving; they're trying to convince us that there will be a solution to the destruction of the economy as we know it, so that we'll just let them do whatever they want.
It isn't the backlash against AI that will get ugly, it will be the backlash against the ten people who suddenly own the entire world's money supply
Like, enums. I get a lot out of the box when I use an enum in Java or Kotlin. Converting to/from a String is trivial. Type safety ... exists.
I can do that in Go, but I have to hack it in, for every single enum type I want to represent. Enums are not a thing in the language, which means its easier to keep the language in your brain all at once, but at the expense of making it harder to keep the software I'm writing in my head. Is this "enum" the same as that "enum"? I have to go read the code to figure it out.
But Go is excellent at a lot of things. Compile times, static binaries, resources compiled right into that binary, execution speed ... there is a lot to love.
A smartphone is not an optional component of modern life. You need a smartphone to apply for many minimum wage jobs now
There are also peptides that seem to have similar effects as regular exercise; a weekly injection might give you the same benefits as a daily mile run. These haven't been well studied, however, and we don't understand their safety profiles.
But the influencer set has taken these possibilities and run with them, because they're more interested in clicks and views that science and facts.
Oracle has dumped billions of dollars into AI, and planned to be the source of choice to build out AI data centers. They've taken on more debt in the past two years than many nation states.
These layoffs are entirely about cutting costs in order to manage this debt. It has nothing to do with human developers being made obsolete, or even increased developer productivity due to AI.
This is actually about investments in AI not paying dividends, and drastic cuts in personnel to keep the company solvent.
I also wonder how much of the jump in early 2025 comes from cultural acceptance by devs, rather than an improvement in the tools themselves.
The right wing in America isn't trying to improve the population, they're grifting and hoping that 1. they won't face the same consequences as their supporters, because they're rich enough to be shielded, and 2. that they're going to die before society collapses from the havoc they unleash.
This is also true of, say climate change.
1. People who are ignorant 2. People who are using anti-vax propaganda for some kind of gain
In the US, category two have gone all-in on using category one to gain political power. The "health official" in this post is clearly in category two, and might be in category one as well, but he is absolutely deserving of invectives.
Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.
I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.