Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
> I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?

I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.

Comment · 8 months ago
No, you outsource it because it's not your core competency. I think humans should be able to do anything and not narrowly specialise as narrow specialisation leads to tunnel vision. Sometimes you need to outsource to someone because of legal reasons (and rightly so, mostly because the complexities involved do require someone who is a professional in that area). Can some things be simplified? Of course they can, and there are many barriers that prevent such simplification. But it's absolutely insane to say - nah, we don't need to think at all, and something else can do all the work.
Comment · 8 months ago
> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

How very adult of you.

Comment · 8 months ago
The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-using side of this) is strict liability for companies making software products (just like in the physical world). Then it doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and sort out any externalities caused. This will probably mean no vibe-coded side hustles but I personally am OK with that.
Comment · 8 months ago
This really resonated with me, thank you for writing it <3

> Companies value velocity and new launches and shipping first at all costs because of course they do; it’s table stakes. Speed of delivery is basically the number one corporate value of every organization whether they admit to it or not.

Yeah this one is again one of the causes of where we are today (alongside profit extraction, or perhaps because of it). It used to be the case that you would find companies that would offer quality at a slightly higher price, and people would be more than willing to pay for it. Now the feeling is that this is all marketing driven and there is no 'higher quality' because everyone gave up and went after speed of delivery. And well, as the old saying goes, that's valuable when you're catching fleas.

Comment · 8 months ago
There's nothing to recover from, what are you even talking about? I'm not a token user (and I can't make predictions about the future and whether it will force me to use token but still). That the industry is collectively having a delusion about what constitutes good software (in all senses of the word - functionality and consequences for society) is clear to see, something I too fear we might never recover from, but I stand quite clearly on the side of people not of corporations hoping to extract more more more.
Comment · 8 months ago
Really? I will most likely be using IntelliJ 2027.x with whatever the latest plugins are for the programming languages I write by hand.
Comment · 8 months ago
> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it!

Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.

Comment · 10 months ago
What hype? I have and will continue to be anti-BigAI from the very beginning. Until the mechanism is no longer that of a probabilistic model, the data gathering that of massive copyright infringment and the runtime that of a "let us burn more fossil fuels to power as many transistors as we can" I will continue to avoid it without any regrets about missed "productivity" or whatever.
Comment · 10 months ago
That's not a technical problem though is it? I don't see legal scenarios where unverified machine translation is acceptable - you need to get a certified translator to sign off on any translations and I also don't see how changing that would be a good thing.
Comment · 11 months ago
Would be nice if every article about LLM/AI had that as a tag so you could skip past them...
Comment · 11 months ago
Just like the digits of PI...
Comment · 1 year ago
Again, citing the UK here, if you go to your doctor and get a prescription, all you need to pick it up is your name + address (said verbally over the counter) - no ID needed. I do not have statistics for the false pickup rates but I very much doubt it is anything to worry about.

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