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It’s not even rumors. The MERS/SARS gain of function research started in UNC, US, then paused due to safety concerns, then moved to Wuhan.

The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.

Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.

In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.

In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.

You know the rest of the story.

Yet there are countless extremely banal posters, made of sakuras, flags, red sun rays and purely random hieroglyphics that mean nothing, made by humans for the entire history of poster-making.

Most illustrators available to most businesses for hire would do worse job for more money and much more time than an LLM would do.

Probably an unpopular opinion, but advertisement does need a creative bar too high. No one cares about it. It’s enough to have a black text on a white background saying what is happening, when and where. The rest is optional, and most of the time gets in the way of understanding the poster info.

Y’all terribly overestimate quality of human art (as well as how informed humans are and how accurate their answers are) while riding the LLM hate train.

One of my favorite childhoods stories was told from a perspective of an arctic fox. It wasn’t a cartoonish “Lion King” type of story but pretty serious and mature stuff.

Some Captain Obvious stuff.

Literally nothing real looks like CG. Shadows and lighting don't look like that. Optical effects don't look like that. People don't move like they do in games and CG animations. Physics IRL doesn't work like it does in games. Real world doesn't look like filtered JPEGs stretched over wireframes with LODs.

Having the gullible herd like this is the whole point of modern democracy.

Maybe I can share an anecdote from my childhood?

I was born in the 80s, in USSR, and learned reading at 3 y.o. thanks to my mom who would read stories to me constantly while I was sitting next to her, trying to figure those mysterious symbols out.

When I got to elementary school, one of the topics kids would discuss first is how old they were when they started reading, and it turns out that 3 y.o. readers were not rare at all, quite opposite - most of my classmates started reading around the ages of 3 & 5. And if someone admitted they didn't start reading by the age of 6, they would get concerned looks from us all, like "Are you even ok mate?". A couple of kids who went to school not being able to read on their own, write and count at least up to 100 struggled to study and were lagging behind.

And that wasn't the case of our parents trying to raise prodigies, that's just where the bar was at the time. Also lack of any kind of digital entertainment and 3 state TV channels.

The idea of AI capable of something like that seems to be on the verge of magical thinking.

But what would the consequences for the industry be? How many competitors to every major product appear overnight once such AI is released? Why would Netflix and others, being aware of such a thing, release any of their technology to public after approx. right now?

I suspect that in such environment any kind of knowledge sharing would stop, simply to keep technological advantage. I cannot imagine a world where everyone is equally capable. If anyone can do anything, does anything have any value at all?

I just don't see much use for AI coding agents beyond PoC and prototypes, that are to be ditched soon.

In my 15 years long developer career I've always found ways to automate all kinds of chores in big projects - simple shell scripts generate boilerplate code for services/modules/controllers/etc, modern infrastructure & tools automate or completely hide a lot of mundane work while giving back valuable data to act upon (think testing and deployment), the code itself is almost always highly modular and lets me to rearrange complex logic in no time with minimum risk. All that while having complete understanding of what's going on, and full control over every aspect of the software I'm responsible for.

And I have a feeling that writing proper prompts to achieve all that (even given the model has enough context) would simply be more work than just properly programming it the old way.

Besides that, the models feeding on OSS and Indian code from GitHub is not only injust, it's also very limited in how creative it can be - the next innovation would leave LLM-generated solutions behind if kept in vault, so LLMs cannot learn form it. And I have a feeling that's where we're heading - death of OSS (esp. in the wake of the recent supply-chain attacks) and a new round of closed-source technological competition.

I have a feeling that a prompt accurate enough to cover all the important stuff (functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc) would be close in its volume and complexity to the actual software code and configuration (given the proper tools, frameworks and infrastructure in place)...

How do you deal with weird machine-readable values which you'd like to make some sense of yourself, like a Unix timestamp or a base64-encoded value? Some Bash nerds do "echo ABASE64ENCODEDVALUE== | base64 --decode" to read the encoded stuff, others hit F12 on whatever web page they happen to be at the moment and type something like "new Date(1582889280 * 1000)" (don't forget to x1000 if it's seconds!) in console to see dates (Bash nerds have their "date -d @1582889280" for that), the rest google "base64 decode online" and use some random web tool.

So, this is another random web tool for those tasks and few others. At the moment it helps with URLs (parses & transcodes query values), JSONs (formats & converts them to YAML), Base64 transcoding (including files!), has few crypto functions and, of course, a timestamp converter. There are plans to add a CSV<->JSON converter, a JSON transformer/mapper, a JWT parser/validator, probably a HMAC tool and more.

And the main feature, so rarely found in developer tools, is it's UI. Unlike all the similar tools out in the web, which look like they have been designed by professional programmers, this one is made by a professional programmer who used to date a professional UX designer, so it has both smooth operations & neat looks. There are hotkeys (not many at the moment, but I'm aiming at having full keyboard control over the thing eventually), a sharing feature and data reuse across tools.

We, backend developers, deserve to have nice things too. Give it a shot, I hope one day it finds it's place among your favourite tools.

/!\ Please mind it works only in desktop browsers now. I see not much use for this thing on mobile, but maybe one day a mobile version will follow.

A JSON parser in Bash, impressive. I've just finished an HTTP server in Bash and had to rely on jq for parsing JSON requests, but maybe would love a pure POSIX solution instead. Do you happen to have any benchmarks?

So, I wanted to learn more about Bash scripting and make something in it for fun & profit, and here it is — a nearly fully featured HTTP server, accompanied with a small framework for web apps, both written in Bash Script. At the moment it responds to all kinds of requests, fully supports binary files & file upload, form data, JSON requests & responses, has MySQL utilities, does routing, renders simple HTML templates and more.