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bignose

@ bignose @programming.dev

Posts
3
Comments
24
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • The Fate of Data Model Dependency

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  • The author made this story available to Medium members only.

    Please either update the post with the URL that gets around this login-wall; or, remove the post because the article is not on the public web.

  • To vibe or not to vibe

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  • When I’m using AI for coding, I find myself constantly making little risk assessments about whether to trust the AI, how much to trust it, and how much work I need to put into the verification of the results. And the more experience I get with using AI, the more honed and intuitive these assessments become.

    For a system that has such high cost (to the environment, to the vendor, to the end user in the form of subscription), that's a damningly low level of reliability.

    If my traditional code editor's code completion feature is even 0.001% unreliable – say it emits a name that just isn't in my code base – that feature is broken and needs to be fixed. If I have to start doubting whether the feature works every time I use it, that's not an acceptable tool to rely on.

    Why would we accept far worse reliability in a tool that consumes gargantuan amounts of power, water, political effort, and comes with a high subscription fee?

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    Can Google be trusted without a break up?

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  • No.

  • Schedule I drug

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  • So, it was gambling, then.

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    AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It's the end of the career ladder as we know it

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  • Revenue going up, hiring going down, layoffs every quarter and a big push for everyone to use AI. But at the same time basically no real success story from all this increased AI usage. Probably just me, but I just don’t get it.

    No, you've got it: Revenue increases, short term, when personnel costs are cut, through layoffs and hiring freezes.

    The story told (“workers must return to the office to sit on teleconference all day” prompting more of them to quit, or “your job can be done by robots”, or whatever) only needs to make enough sense that the stock holders are satisfied the executives have a sane explanation for sudden loss of workers. Otherwise it might look like the executives are panicking!

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  • Stop trying to trap people inside “the app”. If “the app” is designed to keep people inside and not visit other sites, that's a reader-hostile pattern and a publisher-hostile pattern.

    The founding model of using Reddit is “the front page of the internet”. That requires that the rest of the internet is still there, not that the rest of the internet gets sucked into Reddit.

  • Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

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  • 10×s developers who could produce 0 code without it

    Let me see; ten times nothin', add nothin', carry the nothin'…

  • Everyone knows what an email address is, right? (Quiz)

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  • The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use

    Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.

  • What Git clients do you use?

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  • Magit is what allowed me to finally commit to switching to Git full time.

    It's such an excellent front-end for Git that I've known numerous workmates learn Emacs just to use Magit.

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  • Now we are beginning to see agents: systems that aspire to greater autonomy and can work in “teams” or use tools to accomplish complex tasks.

    Given that an “agent” can be assigned work and carry it out autonomously: no, we are not yet seeing any agents. Every one of these bots requires close attention by a human to weed out the huge quantity of mistakes it generates. That's not an “agent” by any useful definition:

    Both Anthropic and OpenAI, for example, prescribe active human supervision to minimise errors and risks.

    Right. So, it's a bot which even the vendor recommends you don't leave it to work autonomously. Not an agent.

    In other news: “self driving” that requires continuous human monitoring and intervention, by multiple humans per vehicle, is not self driving.

    Just because the hype marketing of tech corporations bleats a term into the media, does not mean they've got anything that actually does what they say it does.

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    bignose @programming.dev

    SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean?

    www.kqed.org /news/12049420/sf-based-internet-archive-is-now-a-federal-depository-library-what-does-that-mean
  • Technology @lemmy.world
    bignose @programming.dev

    Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals

    www.theregister.com /2025/07/22/whofi_wifi_identifier
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  • No kidding there’s a bubble. When it pops - the tech’s not going anywhere. […] No need for a wall of text, over and over and over.

    He's making the point that the entire tech economy is dominated by this bubble, and gargantuan amounts of money is tied up in this with no hope of getting any useful or profitable business.

    Yet the mainstream press continues to coddle the egos of Musk and Altman and Zuckerberg and Nadella and Bezos and Pichai, as though their business use of this technology is worth the trillions of investment value they have attracted. It's a fantasy. While that continues, the message is not getting through and the bubble continues to inflate.

    For as long as the bubble goes on inflating, yes there is urgent need to keep repeating that message until the mainstream tech and financial press starts accepting it as reality (because that's what investors read), so that people stop hooking our economies into that bubble.

  • Needs

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  • Except worse: Confluence tries insanely hard to prevent anyone actually getting at the document source code. So you are expected to use the godawful interactive web editor to make any changes.

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    bignose @programming.dev

    When tech hardware becomes paperweights

    basic.bearblog.dev /when-tech-hardware-becomes-paperweights/

  • What the EU’s new software legislation (Cyber Resilience Act) means for developers

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  • Despite their great value to society, open source projects are frequently understaffed and underresourced. That’s why GitHub has been advocating for a stronger focus on supporting, rather than regulating, open source projects.

    What nice sentiments. Perhaps you, GitHub, could start by insisting that Microsoft cease the un-attributed, non-consensual shovelling of open-source software into their LLM training maw. And turn off the LLM that they're attempting to unilaterally sell based on all that uncompensated labour.

    Or is your platitude of “supporting open source projects” fall short of actually respecting what we want and need?

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  • a marketing term that is used to sprinkle some magic fairy dust that brings the venture capital dollars.

    Like “metaverse” before it. And “blockchain” before that.

    Whatever magic phrase will unlock the purse strings of those who control the money, know nothing about where to invest it, and expect unreasonable monopoly returns.

  • If AI is so good at coding - where are the open source contributions?

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  • Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

    Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

  • If AI is so good at coding - where are the open source contributions?

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  • do companies need code that runs quickly on the systems that they are installed on to perform their function.

    (Thank you, this indirectly answers one question: the specific optimisation you're asking about, it seems, is optimised speed of execution when deployed in production. By stating that as the ideal to be optimised, necessarily other properties are secondary and can be worse than optimal.)

    Some do pursue that ideal, yes. For example: many businesses seek to deploy their internal applications on hosted environments where they pay not for a machine instance, but for seconds of execution time. By doing this they pay only when the application happens to be running (on a third-party's managed environment, who will charge them for the service). If they can optimise the run-time of their application for any particular task, they are paying less in hosting costs under such an agreement.

    can an unqualified programmer use AI code to build an internal corporate system rather than have to pay for a more qualified programmer’s time either as an internal hire or producing.

    This is a question now about paying for the time spent by people to develop and maintain the application, I think? Which is thoroughly different from the time the application spends running a task. Again, I don't see clearly how "optimise the application for execution speed" is related to this question.

  • I got theses 2 books for free, are they still relevant?

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  • As others have said: the content is likely to be only of historical interest, because the fields they describe have progressed in understanding a great deal in the intervening decades. As a result, many, many historical books are of effectively negligible interest today.

    With that said, historical interest can sometimes be a lot: and those two seem to be from institutions which did seminal work (Rand Corporation, for example).

  • Is there a way to submit issues for software on Github without creating a Github account?

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  • This is a good question: submitting a bug report should be feasible without maintaining an account at GitHub (other issue trackers manage it just fine with only existing email communication, for example).

    Unfortunately, GitHub, like so many other centralised platforms that assume they're the centre of the world, expects you to create and maintain a personal identity special to GitHub, in order to submit a bug report at all.

  • Is it okay to leave tests in your code?

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  • Following up after your clarification (thank you):

    it is not okay to do, but the severity of how much of an issue it is depends on the context? Either that or it’s completely avoidable in the first place if I just use “automated testing” or “loggers”.

    It's important here to distinguish the code you're currently working on, in your local development environment only; versus the code you commit to VCS (or otherwise record for progress / deployment / sharing with others / etc.).

    In your local development environment, frequently you are making exploratory changes, and you don't yet know what exactly is the behaviour you need to implement. In this mode, it's normal to pepper the area of interest with console.log("data_record is:", data_record) calls, and other chatty diagnostic messages. They are quick and easy to write, and give immediate result for your exploratory needs.

    In the code you commit (or deploy, or share, or otherwise record as "this is what I think the code should be, for now") you do not want that chatty, exploratory, effectively just noise diagnostics. Remove them as part of cleaning up the code, which you will do before leaving your workstation because you now understand what the diagnostic messages were there to tell you.

    If you find that you haven't yet understood the code, can't yet clean it up, but you need to leave your workstation? Then you've made a mistake of estimation: your exploration took too long and you didn't achieve a result. Clean up anyway, leave the code in a working state, come back to it another day with a fresh mind. Your will have a better understanding because of the exploration you did anyway.