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Posts
139
Comments
508
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • What the hell are they doing in bugfixing an UI bug, when they are “not qualified” to write a test for it. Anyhow, not competent enough for the codebase you’re working on - check.

    Does the name "Dan Luu" say anything to you? Do you know his blog ?

    In general, for Dan Luu I wouldn't assume he is not competent enough.

    And besides that, what is the point of LLMs / GenAI if you need to be an expert in everything it touches to handle it correctly? If you are an expert, you can already do it yourself.

    Also, if one needs to be an expert in every topic to get good or even acceptable results, this creates more doubt that the "intelligence", "reasoning", and "capabilities" of these things are in reality the intelligence of the user, since he does the real work of discerning fabrication and accidental good output.

    Reminds me on that old story of the smart horse "Hans" which could do math, indicating the result with is hooves. But it turned out he could do it only when his owner was around - the horse had learned when his owner agreed with the result and indicated that unconciously.

  • The mistake is in assuming the AI is perfect and will be correct all the time.

    If you’re relying on it to be correct and not verifying its output, you’re doing it wrong.

    I think unless you are a total beginner, proper verification will frequently take about as long, or longer than writing it yourself.

    Like it's harder to read even good and correct legacy code, than to write new code.

  • And another aspect is: You can, of course, engineer reliable things from unreliable components. Much of hardware works like that. Even my bicycle needs to have two brakes, for redundancy. Cloud computing and things like distributed databases and file systems works like that, at the price of massive complexity.

    I can see that some intelligent people are attracted by the challenge. Like a juggler who tries to keep more balls in the air.

    But for generating code and algorithms, and the price being intelligibility and maintainability - is this a good idea?

  • From the blog:

    Another comment, this time loosely paraphrased because this is from memory, was that Matt Mullenweg said that, if you look at people who undertake high variance activities, like gamblers, they're often superstitious. You'll see somebody wear their lucky socks or have a specific routine they do before they sit down to play the slots. Using caveman mode or deciding which model is good because a coding agent coughed up a good result after trying it is not so different.

    Similar to gambling, that might well apply to agentic coding as a whole.

    Also, gambling is addictive, and addictive things distort reality.

  • Something about this didn’t feel right, so I tried reproducing the issue by hand before and after the commit and found out that the whole thing was a fabrication. The video made it look like Codex had reproduced the bug, but it was an artificial browser environment that was designed to create a fake repro, not the real environment.

    Like I said, because this was non- ironically such a great experience, I immediately thought to myself, “how can I get more of this?”

    So, do I get this right: People try it. It does not work better than a coin toss. But because it outputs human language - the hallmark of intelligence, until now -, people think there is still something onto it, get hooked, and continue to use it for code generation?

  • It is currently 100 F in Tuckahoe, the largest city in Henrico County… and they’re asking people to not use electricity so that these heat-and-pollution-generating slop factories can use it instead.

    In other words, this shit is killing people? I don't think many houses in the US are made so that you can survive 38°C outside without A/C ?

  • If I let the agent just produce some result it needed half an hour (or more) for, it’s very likely so convoluted that I can at best skim over it and then go „yeah yeah ok, it’s probably fine

    <merge>

    “.

    I am seeing the first job ads for senior software developers which can debug the resulting mess. A lot of it will be just unmaintenable. They will get 20 years of technical debt with ten times the speed and ten times the volume.

  • Also in the genocide in Sudan. They killed a whole city, Al Faschir or El Fasher. Over 70,000 people disappeared in one night when the city was invaded. Most of them are probably dead - what remained were blood puddles visible on satellite images.

    There is a detailed, very high quality report in the renowned German newspaper DIE ZEIT that tried to reconstruct what happened:

    https://www.zeit.de/2026/16/kriegsverbrechen-al-faschir-sudan-darfur-rsf/komplettansicht

    It is, after the report of WWII allies reaching German concentration camps, and the testimonies from Hiroshima, among the worst and most depressing things I have ever read.

    Seems like Ukraine needed money, and sold drones to Saudi Arabia. And Saudi gave the weapons to the Arab side of the civil war. Which included the forces which besieged and destroyed Al Fashir.

    If AI was perhaps a neutral technology before, this is certainly not the case any more.

  • You forgot "Forward Deployed AI Engineer"

  • “We’re moving from that find-and-fix mentality to preventing issues before they occur,” [...]

    Funny that the introduction of AI in software development generally means a shift into the other direction. As John Ousterhout called it, "debugging a system into existence".

  • “We’re moving from that find-and-fix mentality to preventing issues before they occur,” [...]

    Funny that the introduction of AI in software development generally means a shift into the other direction. As John Ousterhout called it, "debugging a system into existence".

  • Can’t blame AI for the fact that I know of at least 2 Ford transit vans whose turbo blew within 6 months 5 years ago, and a ranger with oil leaks

    I made an interesting observation - I see small oil leaks more frequently than when I made my driving license in 1988. In both cases, living in an European suburb. No idea why ... perhaps it is because people have more cars and drive less? Or changes in car design and construction?

  • This is about AI and learning.

    I have an interesting observation: I had the last few years the opportunity to work with older legacy code bases. And I came to the conclusion, that understanding them for me requires systematic learning. Pretty much like learning a language.

    Say you have 70,000 lines of code with about 8000 to 10000 identifiers. Also a number of implicit concepts. Invariants and so on.

    To work with the code, you need some basic understanding. To understand, you need an idea what these identifiers mean. Or their important subset.

    Now, remember that the human brain can only keep six or seven things in short-term memory. To store more, the meaning of all these identifiers, concepts, invariants etc.... .... - needs to go into long-term memory.

    Which means repeating and memorizing around 10,000 things.

    That is similar to learning a foreign language up to a pretty good level.

    So. you need that learning process to work with legacy code.

    If AI use inhibits this - this means trouble.

  • Held heute = Arschkarte morgen

    (sorry I don't know how to translate that. "Sonderkommando" is more or less "suicide squad", I think).

  • A phone with SailfishOS is fine for that. It can get tricky with messengers and banking apps (but I think phones are Not A Good Idea for banking authentication).

  • The alternative would be a mid-range phone with SailfishOS on it. I have one, a Sony Xperia III which I chosed for the small size. I like it. BTW I had nearly every Linux phone by Nokia and Jolla since the N900.

    But if you still want something that is more like a pocket computer and less like a distracting phone, you could look for handheld PCs / ultraportables, and put Linux on one. These can run Threema Web, and Waydroid if you still want apps. (I have a Gemini PDA, and I like it, but be careful - this is NOT a phone - but fine for answering mail).

  • Which is also an important issue with google mail.

    But this also violates the expectation that spoken conservations are private.

  • Reverse Turing test for the reverse centaur.

  • Mine is 17 years old and is still over-specced because I use Linux and bought it with 16GB RAM then. And it is the second PC I ever bought, my first one was an Pentium-class PC (actually AMD K6@300MHz) that I bought in 1998.

  • Programming @programming.dev

    Git experts should try Jujutsu

    pksunkara.com /thoughts/git-experts-should-try-jujutsu/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Literate Programming

    www.literateprogramming.com /index.html
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck

    ordep.dev /posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Revisiting Knuth's 'Premature Optimization' Paper

    probablydance.com /2025/06/19/revisiting-knuths-premature-optimization-paper/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Entangled: Literate Programming in Markdown

    entangled.github.io
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Literature review on the benefits of static types, by Dan Luu

    danluu.com /empirical-pl/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Project Gemini FAQ

    geminiprotocol.net /docs/faq.gmi
  • Programming @programming.dev

    A New Rust Packaging Model for Guix

    guix.gnu.org /en/blog/2025/a-new-rust-packaging-model/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Introduction - redo: a recursive build system

    redo.readthedocs.io /en/latest/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    The Leo Text Editor's Home Page

    leo-editor.github.io /leo-editor/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Lukas Atkinso: Net-Negative Cursor

    lukasatkinson.de /2025/net-negative-cursor/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Cognitive Debt (A term to describe the costs of skipping thinking)

    smithery.com /2025/05/05/cognitive-debt/
  • Programming @programming.dev

    If AI is so good at coding - where are the open source contributions?

    pivot-to-ai.com /2025/05/13/if-ai-is-so-good-at-coding-where-are-the-open-source-contributions/
  • Europe @feddit.org

    Passwords are okay, impulsive Internet isn't

    www.dedoimedo.com /life/passwords-passkeys.html
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Exploiting Undefined Behavior in C/C++ Programs for Optimization: A Study on the Performance Impact (concluding that observed performance gains are minimal)

    web.ist.utl.pt /nuno.lopes/pubs.php
  • Programming @programming.dev

    Orsom Peters: Bitwise Binary Search: Elegant and Fast

    orlp.net /blog/bitwise-binary-search/
  • Europe @feddit.org

    It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

    berthub.eu /articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/
  • Europe @feddit.org

    But how to get to that European cloud? - Bert Hubert' writings

    berthub.eu /articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/
  • Europe @feddit.org

    Europe needs its own social media platforms to safeguard sovereignty

    mediascope.group /europe-needs-its-own-social-media-platforms-to-safeguard-sovereignty/