[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

195 IQ and suddenly get someone who just sits in their room for a decade and then speaks gibberish into a youtube livestream and everyone dies, or whatever.

I can't even decipher what this is about. Like if you're 195IQ you can invent Avada Kedavra in a decade?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

Artificial wombs may remove this bottleneck.

Okay but this is an amazing out-of-context sentence. I will croudfund a $1000 award for anyone who is able to put that sentence into a paper and get published in Nature without anyone noticing.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

I don't think Harry was much of a genius, unless you mean Harriezer from MoR in which case lol, lmao

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience

How the fuck would you know that, mate? You don't even have a degree in your field, which, let me remind you, is (allegedly) computer science. Has Yud ever been near an actual genetics professor?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

I feel coding people like they’re software

Jesus christ can you imagine segfaulting someone's kidney

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

It's reacting to the presentation, not you specifically. I think many of the other comments hit on how he goes waaay too far in his criticism, but I wouldn't have written what I wrote if it wasn't a wider sentiment I encountered a few times already.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

The attitude to theoretical computer science re quantum is really weird. Some people act as if "I can't run it now therefore it's garbage" which is just such a nonsense approach to any kind of theoretical work.

Turing wrote his seminal paper in 1936, over 10 years before we invented transistors. Most of CS theory was developed way before computers were proliferated. A lot of research into ML was done way before we had enough data and computational power to actually run e.g. neural networks.

Theoretical CS doesn't need to be recent, it doesn't need to run, and it's not shackled to the current engineering state of the art, and all of that is good and by design. Let the theoreticians write their fucking theorems. No one writing a theoretical paper makes any kinds of promises that the described algorithm will EVER be run on anything. Quantum complexity theory, for example was developed in the nineties, there was NO quantum computer then, no one was even envisioning a quantum computation happening in physical reality. Shor's algorithm was devised BEFORE THAT, before we even had the necessary tools to describe its complexity.

I find the line of argumentation "this is worthless because we don't know a quantum computer is engineeringly feasible"

  1. Insulting,
  2. Stupid,
  3. Lacking whimsy,
  4. Unscientific at its core.
[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The reason is that any government mandated ID is clearly the Mark of the Beast and will be used to bring upon a thousand years of darkness.

You think that's fringe nonsense and you'd be right on the nonsense part, but that's literally what Ronny Reagan said while he was president

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

1970s probably?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

In case of the revolutionary LLM technology we have quality in = garbage out also!

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

Were you invited to the lavish opening party with the flamingos and the dancers at the huge mansion with two pools and all that?

If yes then you're definitely the mark.

The real test is whether you're included in the 5 person Signal group they coordinate the date and time to dump

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago

I'm sure a bunch of people buy knowing it'll collapse, but thing they're so smart and savvy they'll sell it just in time to get rich

21
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems

I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

21

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

66
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

165

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

view more: next ›

V0ldek

joined 1 year ago