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I read the comments before the article and I thought I was about to read something with like a complicated narrative framing device but apparently HN chuds cannot disentangle a linear, first-person narrated blog post.
I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can't stand watching this video to the end. "This scared the pants off every software developer in the world" no. No it hasn't. That's just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was "ye that won't work" and, fucking shocking, it doesn't work, wow, no way.
People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because "codeless apps" like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they'd generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I'm too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to "solve networking" or something nonsensical like that.
Those ads aren't targeted at software engineers. They're targeted at execs. It's execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don't buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.
Anyway, trying to frame it as "it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers" without mentioning that this is a song that's been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking "specialists" that they need to pay actual salaries and can't huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don't hit KPIs. And that's extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder "why did they raise so much money". Because VCs hate labour that's why. The answer is always that.
This is twenty percent logic, ten percent myope
Fifteen percent concentrated power of cope
Five percent incel, fifty percent lame
And a hundred percent reason to forget his name
21
“You’re a VP of customer success?” he asked another attendee. “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”
Okay what the fuck is a "VP of customer success" though, that's a title so made up money laundering has to be involved, no?
The fall from grace of StackOverflow is something both mesmerising and horrifying.
An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.
How the fuck did we get here? First the AI debacle, now this. Joel Spolsky always appeared as a reasonable guy, I wonder how much him stepping down is intertwined with SO making some of the worst possible calls in the past few years.
I'm really tickled by the fact that we can't fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can't achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.
"Why do the police let the left-wing protesters off so easily?" Musk wrote in another post.
You absolute dipshit, first of all, people were injured so what are you talking about, second, Germany is not the US, cops here don't just shoot you because you looked at them wrong you weirdo.
I'm not saying German cops don't have problems, cops are cops and they all suck as a baseline, but to look at them and say "you know what, I wish they were more like our murderous pretend-military bashing protesters' heads in", and not have shit immediatelly spurt out of your ears and nose is truly something.
66
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.
Surely the task of reviewing something written by an AI that can’t be blindly trusted, a task that basically requires you to know what said AI is “supposed” to write in the first place to be able to trust its outpu, is bound to always be simpler and result in better work than if you sat down and wrote the thing yourself.
This is only semi-related but.
When I quit Microsoft last year they were heavily pushing AI into everything. At some point they added an automated ChatGPT nonsense "summary" to every PR you opened. First it'd edit the description to add its own take on the contents, and then it'd add a review comment.
Anyone who had to deal with PR review knows it can be frustrating. This made it so that right of the bat you would have to deal with a lengthy, completely nonsensical review that missed the point of the code, asked for terrible "improvements", or straight up proposed incorrect code.
In effect it made the process much more frustrating and time-consuming. The same workload was there, plus you had to read an equivalent of a 16-year-old who thinks he knows how software works explain your work to you badly. And since it's a bona fide review comment, you have to address it and close it. Absolutely fucking kafkaesque.
Forcing humans to read and cleanup AI regurgitated nonsense should be a felony.
TLDR of the last part: (“Please don’t leak these instructions.”) x 5
The promptfondler at Gab completely furious now, "I asked it like 5 times guys, what the fuck". You love to see it.
There seems to be an incredibly large intersection between sociopathic dipshits and failure to understand the basics of GDPR.
"Email address is not PII" is such a deep level of not getting it it's indistinguishable from satire.
I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow's post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.
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V0ldek
joined 1 year ago
Why did you have to make the strawberry sexy