Cognitive Surrender. I can feel it happening every time I use this employer-mandated Cursor crap. I’m fighting it as hard as I can. Every AI slop pull request I have to review makes me die a little more inside.
(Edit: I’m glad this was so well received, but people are hating on my “assembler isn’t as difficult as people think” post below. Oh well.)
First, I love this analogy. At the end of the day someone is still analyzing and decomposing problems, and whether you use AI primarily to search and summarize, to recommend, or to write some goofy starter unit tests, it should still be the human writing the code.
… and now I can’t unsee this rule of three crap. Ever since I heard about an author getting busted for using AI, and all the talk about how AI generates in “rule of three”, I keep looking at my own writing and saying “wait, I do this too. People are going to think my posts are by an AI.” Every part of this post was written by a human software developer on a cell phone while I should be getting ready for work instead.
Also I feel like pointing out: assembler is the human-accessible version, where you break code into files and procedures, give things useful names, you have a symbol table that gives you the addresses where your names ended up. You can insert things and edit things and all the addresses shift around to accommodate your changes automatically. You add comments, even block comments. You “inline” methods with assembler macros.
I would say assembler is more accessible than people think, and complex programs don’t require as much of the “hold everything in your brain at once” horsepower as people think.
99%? We can get these numbers lower :-)
There’s a lot of “And then for some reason we did this, and it was more complexity” in this paper. I think that’s missing the point of languages, as a conversion layer between machine code and weird, squishy human brains. We think better, hold abstractions in our minds better, when the language maps more closely with how we’re structuring the problem in our minds.
Not sure if you were even looking for paper reviews.
Buying the company usually means buying all of their user information as well. Other companies can change their policies too. I think you should judge them by their actions, and give them a chance to answer your questions before you condemn them.
(Did you try asking them about your concerns?)
I’m with you, stuck at a billion dollar software company with an AI fetish. It’s a great search tool, can write some decent unit tests. But God help you if you let it write production code, for any of the “you won’t find this on stackexchange” stuff we all work on.
This, 100%. Use whatever language you’re fast and fluent with. If you don’t have any of those yet, C is a good choice. Get books and tutorials from the 90s or 2000s and OpenGL is a great place to start.
The most limited resource that you have to manage would be your own energy and passion. Don’t go out and seek that dopamine hit of validation from others until you’ve built something. “I want to build something” is OK, but “I’ve started building something, it runs somewhat, here’s a repo, I’m stuck, HAAAALP!” is way more compelling.
How old is that game? Are there other people in your demographic who also play the game, and then searched for the same thing?
Yes, I host my own with mspencer.net. Feel free to look at whois info. Your registrar should offer something similar.
There’s this problem we have with self hosting standard public services. Everything that could be used by a business seems like it’s either a full time job-sized hobby to maintain it or you have to pay a bunch of money to a service provider for them to handle it for you. Nobody takes the time to create an easy recipe for people to follow.
Luckily, though email was a difficult setup, it’s run worry free since. My emails are delivered because I did the security stuff: opendkim, dnssec, tls, all that. And I get zero spam (apart from exactly two cases where they abused a legitimate sender - whose abuse department responded and handled it) so it’s been lovely. I don’t seem to have time to maintain this so I’m lucky it’s been running well hands-free.
It’s a project but I would recommend it. Don’t let the big tech companies own all email, too. We have to protect that ability by exercising it.
Ohhh I get you then. Instead of checking against an author’s key, and building a distributed web of trust between trusted authors, you build a system that requires everyone collaborate on one shared chain of signatures.
Friend, PGP signed messages were around in the 90s. Key signing parties. Web of trust.
This is one of those “technically true but functionally useless” arguments, and I hate arguing the other side here… Valve always has the option to stop using Visa and, I don’t know, have customers write out and physically mail checks or money orders.
Obviously the number of customers who would do this is microscopic. It’s not a real thing anytime would ever do. But because the option exists, they aren’t technically making the content impossible to sell.
Suppose a person owns an apartment building. What’s the process they should follow to behave as a good person should?
Devs make mistakes. We want to put up guardrails so mistakes don’t hurt us so much.
Please don’t deliberately line the guardrails with barbed wire.
The N=16 keeps getting buried. Deliberate?
N=16 developers
Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.
The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.
I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.
(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)
I feel like there should be a third box with Wall Street raider types, for scrapers that use Selenium browser automation.
I don’t think it’s entirely unblockable - adsense seems to know to only serve unmonetized PSA ads - but I think it’s very difficult to discriminate between “this is a real browser controlled by an end user” and “this is a real browser being controlled by automated test software”.
Marco! Polo!
CW (continuous wave / Morse code) over RF in the 1900s.
Walkie talkies and car phones in the 1940s.
AMPS cell phones in the 1980s.
Mostly though they’re right. When you used telecommunications systems you were largely communicating with a location or a known station, not a personal identity. Fascinating to think about.
Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)
Wikipedia has citations. Check out the links at the bottom as well as inline citations.