I think, if you can wait long enough, there is a chance employers will be champing at the bit to hire people who actually know what the fuck they are talking about and whose ability to think hasn't been short-circuited by a tool that pretends to think for them.
That's what I am counting on. Could just be (definitely is) copium.
Very out of my depth here but thank you for this post and the links. This was delightful to read. 💖
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it's only gotten worse
I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as "Google needs a competitor"), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad's DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to "complete") has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.
Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren't on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.
this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine
My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."
wow, *and* algorithms? i didn't think anyone had gotten that far
something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i ~~respect~~ used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:
they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-user's brain.
anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences
"oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series."
additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?
Baldur Bjarnason has a piece from July 2023 called The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con^[https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/] that you might appreciate, if you haven't read it yet. :)
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it's one thing if it's gaming-related^[i guess. not really, fuck discord.], but when i'm at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say "ask for help in our discord server", i feel like i'm in a fever dream and i'm going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
i bought some bullshit from amazon and left a ~~somewhat~~ pretty mean review because debugging it was super frustrating
the seller reached out and offered a refund, so i told them basically "no, it's ok, just address the concerns in my review. let me update my review to be less mean-spirited
i was pretty frustrated setting it up but it mostly works fine"
then they sent a message that had the "llm vibe", and the rest of the conversation went
Seller: You're right — we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses, but every message is reviewed to ensure accuracy and relevance to your concerns. We sincerely apologize if our previous replies dissatisfied you; this was our oversight.
Me: I am not simply dissatisfied. I will no longer communicate with your company and will update my review to note that you sent me synthetic text without my consent. Please do not reply to this message.
Seller: All our replies are genuine human-to-human communication with you, without using any synthetic text. It's possible our communication style gave you a different impression. We aim to better communicate with you and absolutely did not intend any offense. With every customer, we maintain a conscientious and responsible attitude in our communications.
Me: "we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses"
"without using any synthetic text"
pick one
are all promptfondlers this fucking dumb?
half as good as expert human
60% of what a senior can do
is there like a character sheet somewhere so i can know where i fall on this developer spectrum
- We’re likelier to be in a simulation run by whoever creates many simulations.
would love to ask these dorks "what is the event space of this probability distribution" and "have you heard of a category error"
I didn't know this had a name. Thank you!