There is no justice in this. Mass layoffs with selective re-hiring was the plan all along. If AI wasn’t the excuse, “the economy” would be and it would look the same.

Disrupt the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, indiscriminately. Then bet on being able to get enough of them to come back on weaker terms, weaker contracts, and with reset seniority.

Fresh account engagement bait will be deleted in 2 hours

Apologies. I thought it was clear from context. Here are some examples of his bad judgement:

“one of the "Godfathers of AI … who previously served as Meta’s chief AI scientist”

Past bad judgement is not an indicator of current good judgement.

It is pure slop.

Random assortment of keyword-related sentences, tied together with superficially correct language.

No human would write that thank you notes are “contentious” and “require the applicant to do free work”, while linking to an X post of some dude saying “pro tip: write thank you notes”

Ooh an advertisement article about AI being useful! Let’s play Qualifier Bingo!

he thinks💥 he’s stumbled across what could💥 be a new trading life hack: getting AI to trade for him.

Many of his friends in the markets have already jumped on the trend and are automating💥💥 their trades.

An olympic level jump across different meanings of the word “automation”. That is worth two points!

Currently, he’s speaking with💥 an AI platform about using their tech to💥 create a semi-automated trading system, which he hopes💥 could💥 help💥 him make some💥 money on the side💥

Hell yeah, 11 points! This gives the article a factuality rating of… “Fucking Scam”

Shitting on people “thinking too much” is the most destructive attitude you can have in software development. That is how we build real skills. It doesn’t matter if your opinion is that the thing being used to exercise on is weird or useless.

I (63m) sent her (19f) a card just asking for friendship

I feel there are strong judgements to be made already.

*Alexandra

Yep! In just 86500000 milliseconds. 🫡

…on questions generated from known course material, of which heaps of similar questions, approved answers, and discussions are in the LLM’s data set.

So the expensive search engine pointed at the answers database managed to find answers.

This is marketing.

Popmath youtubers: “123+456=123456 😱” actual explanation depends on an obscure redefinition of numbers, + and =.

I don’t care whether it goes away. Neither have tapeworms, and while some people claim it helps with weight loss, most people are not up for it.

The first usecase: One-off scripts. That is “do my homework for me” help. You can spend a minute reading the manual instead. Next time you do it, you can do it faster than through the LLM.

The second usecase touches on something you might be bad at: abstractions and maintainability. We already had autocomplete. Autocompleting a block of code is a sign that you are not writing anything new and a signal to think about whether there is semantic duplication in the code that should be explored. Avoiding the annoyance of writing the block is you solving the wrong problem.

I have yet to see a developer endorse LLM output in an area they are able to do useful work in.

Either it is someone who thought the LLM helped them write unit tests, and it’s never tests that capture the intent of the code, because they don’t know that is important. They see tests as “this stuff I have to add for process reasons”.

Or it is an LLM helping them write a fade-in tooltip with 200+ lines of React Javascript, because they don’t know this is a one-line CSS rule.

Or have the LLM add code documentation that does nothing but repeat the function signature, because they don’t understand they need to empathize with the person using of maintaining the functions. Write something that helps jump a non-obvious gap, or write nothing.

Or have the LLM do code review because they think it’s about obsessing over syntax, not about discussing how the change applies to the intent.

Or have the LLM write their pull requests because they think it’s a boring process thing that summarizes the change, and not a discussion of the purpose, intent, cost, value and approach of the change.

Moral: If you think LLM is good at X, it’s because you really really suck at X, and you need to get better at it instead of pumping out shit work faster while learning less.

Frameworks can be fine. Using them before understanding what you make is not. At that point you often see it is faster and better to just make the parts you needed yourself.

Model as in you have a clear opinion on what your system does, why, how, and what it doesn’t do. A model evolves during development, which is where it becomes hard: You always need to make room for things you didn’t predict, so you need to adapt and refine the system model so that the change makes sense.

Adding features until a full system explanation consists largely of “but”, “and also” or “except”, things like “and you should ask Bea about how that part works” or the worst of all “this part can be anything”, is the opposite of working from a model.

We’ve had a growing invisible divide in software for two decades now:

A: People who jam in frameworks, copy examples online, and adopt “processes” and principles that bigger companies claim work for them, that only result in pulverizing responsibility, speed and understanding. They don’t expect to understand their tools. They fudge them until they stop giving off visible problems and wrap that up in “grown up words” by making ineffectual unit tests, make a PR, tagging it “bugfix: ticket #877”, sending it to review, debating some syntax, and spend the next two years debugging the system because of all the small things that go wrong because the thing they make don’t behave according to a clear mental model.

B: People who don’t think knowing a single programming language counts as competence, and prefer making things according to a model (instead of copying someone else’s framework and contorting their own work to fit inside it)

Group A are the reason shit sucks today, and they believe LLMs can code, because they themselves can barely code and just copy impressive looking convoluted shit from others anyway.

People get so extremist when I set fire to their property.

I feel threatened. It is unsafe that they are allowed to be angry at me.

On the “satire” part:

If it is “ironocally” taking real payments to “ironically” provide the advertised service to “ironically” do harm, the fine sure call it satire if you really want to but don’t make it out to be a defense.

They are doing harm illegally and should be “ironically” sued to bits. Jail them satirically if it helps.

Good tip! Usually do that, but this was full disk encryption, which I have to enter in the terminal and not on anything the password manager integrates with. I could still have gone through typing it on screen and copy/pasting it, though.

The recommended way, which I am sure to follow next time, is to wait a few days to remove the old password. (Full disk encryption can have any number of passwords added.)

I got stuck an utterly embarrassing amount of hours on this the other day because I recently changed my password but managed to set it with a typo.

I know it is correct, I wrote it down in my password manager, what the heck is going on, have I bern hacked? Do I have extremely specific disk corruption?

At the end I was wondering if the password algorithm was hitting some dodgy hardware (ram, rdseed32…) and just sat numbly and entered the password over and over again to see if it behaved differently. …and on one of those attempts I managed to do the same typo and the mystery was solved.