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bignose

@ bignose @programming.dev

Posts
3
Comments
37
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Back-end programmer for gig economy company describes how the sausage is made.

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  • The Fate of Data Model Dependency

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  • The author made this story available to Medium members only.

    Please either update the post with the URL that gets around this login-wall; or, remove the post because the article is not on the public web.

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    Can Google be trusted without a break up?

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  • No.

  • Schedule I drug

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  • So, it was gambling, then.

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    AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It's the end of the career ladder as we know it

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  • Revenue going up, hiring going down, layoffs every quarter and a big push for everyone to use AI. But at the same time basically no real success story from all this increased AI usage. Probably just me, but I just don’t get it.

    No, you've got it: Revenue increases, short term, when personnel costs are cut, through layoffs and hiring freezes.

    The story told (“workers must return to the office to sit on teleconference all day” prompting more of them to quit, or “your job can be done by robots”, or whatever) only needs to make enough sense that the stock holders are satisfied the executives have a sane explanation for sudden loss of workers. Otherwise it might look like the executives are panicking!

  • Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

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  • 10×s developers who could produce 0 code without it

    Let me see; ten times nothin', add nothin', carry the nothin'…

  • Everyone knows what an email address is, right? (Quiz)

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  • The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use

    Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.

  • What Git clients do you use?

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  • Magit is what allowed me to finally commit to switching to Git full time.

    It's such an excellent front-end for Git that I've known numerous workmates learn Emacs just to use Magit.

  • Needs

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  • Except worse: Confluence tries insanely hard to prevent anyone actually getting at the document source code. So you are expected to use the godawful interactive web editor to make any changes.

  • What the EU’s new software legislation (Cyber Resilience Act) means for developers

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  • Despite their great value to society, open source projects are frequently understaffed and underresourced. That’s why GitHub has been advocating for a stronger focus on supporting, rather than regulating, open source projects.

    What nice sentiments. Perhaps you, GitHub, could start by insisting that Microsoft cease the un-attributed, non-consensual shovelling of open-source software into their LLM training maw. And turn off the LLM that they're attempting to unilaterally sell based on all that uncompensated labour.

    Or is your platitude of “supporting open source projects” fall short of actually respecting what we want and need?

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

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  • Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

    Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

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

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  • do companies need code that runs quickly on the systems that they are installed on to perform their function.

    (Thank you, this indirectly answers one question: the specific optimisation you're asking about, it seems, is optimised speed of execution when deployed in production. By stating that as the ideal to be optimised, necessarily other properties are secondary and can be worse than optimal.)

    Some do pursue that ideal, yes. For example: many businesses seek to deploy their internal applications on hosted environments where they pay not for a machine instance, but for seconds of execution time. By doing this they pay only when the application happens to be running (on a third-party's managed environment, who will charge them for the service). If they can optimise the run-time of their application for any particular task, they are paying less in hosting costs under such an agreement.

    can an unqualified programmer use AI code to build an internal corporate system rather than have to pay for a more qualified programmer’s time either as an internal hire or producing.

    This is a question now about paying for the time spent by people to develop and maintain the application, I think? Which is thoroughly different from the time the application spends running a task. Again, I don't see clearly how "optimise the application for execution speed" is related to this question.

  • I got theses 2 books for free, are they still relevant?

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  • As others have said: the content is likely to be only of historical interest, because the fields they describe have progressed in understanding a great deal in the intervening decades. As a result, many, many historical books are of effectively negligible interest today.

    With that said, historical interest can sometimes be a lot: and those two seem to be from institutions which did seminal work (Rand Corporation, for example).

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

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  • Maybe closed source organizations are more willing to accept slop code that is bad but can barely work versus open source which won’t?

    Because most software is internal to the organisation (therefore closed by definition) and never gets compared or used outside that organisation: Yes, I think that when that software barely works, it is taken as good enough and there's no incentive to put more effort to improve it.

    My past year (and more) of programming business-internal applications have been characterised by upper management imperatives to “use Generative AI, and we expect that to make you nerd faster” without any effort spent to figure out whether there is any net improvement in the result.

    Certainly there's no effort spent to determine whether it's a net drain on our time and on the quality of the result. Which everyone on our teams can see is the case. But we are pressured to continue using it anyway.

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

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  • Does business internal software need to be optimized?

    Need to be optimised for what? (To optimise is always making trade-offs, reducing some property of the software in pursuit of some optimised ideal; what ideal are you referring to?)

    And I'm not clear on how that question is related to the use of LLMs to generate code. Is there a connection you're drawing between those?

  • What's your favorite IDE right now?

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  • The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.

    A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.

    Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.