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To avoid this in the future, just added this to my Caddyfile:

    @aibots {
        header User-Agent *GPTBot*
        header User-Agent *ChatGPT*
        header User-Agent *anthropic-ai*
        header User-Agent *ClaudeBot*
        header User-Agent *OAI-SearchBot*
        header User-Agent *Google-Extended*
        header User-Agent *FacebookBot*
        header User-Agent *CCBot*
    }
    abort @aibots

Reusable 100%.

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In-reply-to » Oh boy, I absolutely hate this stupid trend of not writing changelogs anymore! Why the fuck would one seriously consider it to be a viable option to just let some shitty bot spew all merge requests on a goddamn GitHub release?! First of all, these merge request titles suck balls. The order of the changes in this "changelog" is completely random (well, probably merge time, which is as useless as the dick on the Pope). They are not grouped by anything at all. Additions, changes, removals, deprecations, etc. randomly mixed up in one giant list. And then "Add feature X", seventeen kilometers further down "Revert 'Add feature X'". Fuck you! Don't include this shit in the first place!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks!

On the AI changelog part, though, I’d rather recommend to just not have a changelog at all.

I’m afraid that ship has sailed. You can rest assured that someone who uses AI/LLMs for their code (which is almost everybody at this point) will most certainly also use it for changelogs.

I actually considered not mentioning AI output at all, because this just opens a huge can of worms … šŸ˜ž

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these ā€œNew Project Contributorsā€ sections

Yeah, they play on a nerd’s pride.

Now, it’s just the same auto shitshow with MR titles in a rolling date-versioned release scheme. It’s just our team who has to deal with that, though. I think I’m the only one who is not a fan of it.

I’ve found that this whole situation is much worse at work than it is in the Free Software world. At work, it’s literally work and hardly anybody actually cares. We still don’t have all people convinced that writing good commit messages or using good branch names is worth the time. It’s … oh god, no, I’m going to stop here, this is bad for my mental health. šŸ˜…

Suffice it to say, all release notes at work are now AI-generated. Nobody gives a fuck.

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In-reply-to » Oh boy, I absolutely hate this stupid trend of not writing changelogs anymore! Why the fuck would one seriously consider it to be a viable option to just let some shitty bot spew all merge requests on a goddamn GitHub release?! First of all, these merge request titles suck balls. The order of the changes in this "changelog" is completely random (well, probably merge time, which is as useless as the dick on the Pope). They are not grouped by anything at all. Additions, changes, removals, deprecations, etc. randomly mixed up in one giant list. And then "Add feature X", seventeen kilometers further down "Revert 'Add feature X'". Fuck you! Don't include this shit in the first place!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, great timing! :-D I love your article and agree with almost all your points.

On the AI changelog part, though, I’d rather recommend to just not have a changelog at all.

Another important thing for me is the deprecation notice section. What do I need to look out for in the future? Should I start to migrate to another API soon? Even right now? Or does it have time?

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these ā€œNew Project Contributorsā€ sections (yeah, for that, they found the time to make a section) annoying. Don’t get me wrong, sure, credit where credit is due. But come on. Soooooo much space for an inefficiently formatted (and also unsorted) list. At least it was easy enough to skip over it.

And then, there are also these changelogs or rather notice documents in general that are infested with multicolored emojis all over the place. My brain’s spam filter kicks in and shoves everything to /dev/null immediately. It’s especially a thing at work.

In my previous work project, we also used the Keep A Changelog Format. That was great. You wouldn’t believe how often I resorted back to that document. At least twice a week, often several times a day. I was very glad that we put in this effort. Of course, writing the changelog took its time, but it was worth every minute and more. Reading a many months old item, it was immediately clear. I was our best customer in that regard.

Now, it’s just the same auto shitshow with MR titles in a rolling date-versioned release scheme. It’s just our team who has to deal with that, though. I think I’m the only one who is not a fan of it.

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In-reply-to » @movq Related reading (if you're interested): Let's Talk about LLMs by James Bennett

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That DORA quote is 🤯 — and it perfectly explains why AI coding tools terrify me in certain contexts. Dropping Copilot into a codebase full of technical debt isn’t gonna fix the debt, it’s just gonna write more of it faster 🤣 Fred Brooks would be nodding his head right now šŸ™

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In-reply-to » @movq Related reading (if you're interested): Let's Talk about LLMs by James Bennett

(#xbh2sbq) @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That DORA quote is 🤯 — and it perfectly explains why AI coding tools terrify me in certain contexts. Dropping Copilot into a codebase full of technical debt isn’t gonna fix the debt, it’s just gonna write more of it faster 🤣 Fred Brooks would be nodding his head right now šŸ™

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In-reply-to » Okay. I have lost the ā€œbattleā€ against ā€œAIā€ at work and I will no longer try to ā€œfightā€ any of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Related reading (if you’re interested): Let’s Talk about LLMs by James Bennett

First, it quotes the DORA report on the ā€œState of AI-assisted Software Developmentā€:

The research reveals a critical truth: AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.

At the end, it quotes the late Fred Books:

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

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In-reply-to » Okay. I have lost the ā€œbattleā€ against ā€œAIā€ at work and I will no longer try to ā€œfightā€ any of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, I’m sorry to hear about that. Permanent emergency mode sucks, I’ve been there, and it always felt like drowning.

Fortunately, at my current job, we’ve been given time to keep our technical debt from overtaking the project. Unfortunately, we’ve been forced to use AI (mostly in the form of GitHub Copilot). Of course, now that the tokens cost more than a developer’s salary, they’ve been rethinking that position somewhat. 😁

In my experience, you are 100% correct - even in the best case, AI is a force multiplier. If the code is clean, it can speed you up. But if the code is a mess, it’ll just multiply the mess.

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Okay. I have lost the ā€œbattleā€ against ā€œAIā€ at work and I will no longer try to ā€œfightā€ any of it.

It is simply what people want. They want to use it. And that’s the end of it.

And why do they want it? Because it makes their job easier. And why is that? In very large parts, it’s because we have accumulated a metric fuckton of technical debt due to decades long mismanagement. We were (and are) operating in ā€œemergency modeā€ all the time. There simply was no time to clean things up or to rethink designs. We always have to go with the cheapest and quickest solution. We are never ahead of things: Earlier this year, I started an initiative and wanted to tackle some issue that I could see coming. I was shut down because this wasn’t ā€œurgentā€. Very soon after, this exact thing became that exact problem – but now, there was no time anymore to do it properly because NOW it’s urgent, so, once again, we had to go with a quick and dirty solution.

It’s always like that and I had brought it up again and again. And now we have a huge spaghetti mess that hardly anyone understands anymore.

Nobody – except AI. It can still make some sense of this and, obviously, this is useful to people.

So, any argument I make against AI is completely pointless to begin with. I’m such a fool for not having seen this earlier.

The last argument I made today was: ā€œLook, we already have so much technical debt and spaghetti systems, we really, really must clean this up. If we throw AI on top of this now, it’ll only get so much worse.ā€ And once more, I was shut down. My intentions were ā€œadmirableā€, but ā€œthere’s no time for thatā€.

Okay. Good luck with that. They’ll keep doing it this way. At some point, it’ll either explode entirely and some poor soul has to clean it up, or it’ll explode and they’ll have no other choice but to throw everything away and start from scratch – assuming they can still afford that.

In other words, none of this about AI, really, nor caused by it. Our department’s massive spike in AI usage is just a symptom of the underlying management issues. And since those aren’t being addressed, nothing will change and this whole mess will only get worse.

(I blame all this on management, because, well, that’s who’s to blame. I do not have a solution for it, though – and assigning blame without constructive criticism always sucks big time. I don’t like doing this. If you had put me into that particular management position, I wouldn’t have been able to solve any of this. The thing is, though, I’m not an expert on management and it isn’t my job – I’m just the ā€œprincessā€ who solves your technical issues.)

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In-reply-to » @prologic Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

On the subject of debugging these so-called AI(s) / Black Boxes… the model is a black box sure, but that’s not really the problem. Everything around it — the inputs, the outputs, the decisions it makes — all of that can and should be fully logged, traced and replayed. The ā€œprogramā€ isn’t the model, it’s the full context you feed it. That’s what you debug. It’s not so different from any other system really; if you’re running something in production with no logs, no structured outputs and no tests, you’d have the same problem. The model doesn’t change that discipline, it just makes it more important.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@prologic@twtxt.net

it’s ā€œprobabilisticā€ not ā€œdeterministicā€

Yep, I know. And when I tell that to people and tell them ā€œif we use AI here, we lose the ability to debug this stuffā€, then all I get is: ā€œBut it’s good enough. We don’t need to debug this. Non-deterministic computing has its use cases.ā€

But that is just not how I’d like to model/implement our business processes. šŸ¤” I want something reliable, not ā€œit mostly worksā€.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m kind of flag you bring thi sup, because you simply can’t. You wouldn’t even be able to in an atypical neural network either (which is what ehse things are anyway). The problem here really isn’t the so-called ā€œAIā€ (I wish we’d stop calling it AI), but the flawed usage(s) thereof. I believe I even stated earlier in this thread that sometimes it may not do what you expect, it’s ā€œprobabilisticā€ not ā€œdeterministicā€ – those pushing for greater use need to understand this, those not happy with the ā€œpushā€, should educate the ignorant here (especailly managers pushing for weak, insecure and bad uses).

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

Maybe my wording isn’t good. šŸ¤” Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.

There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like ā€œI need access to a particular systemā€. This triggers the bot to ā€œrunā€ the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like ā€œcheck if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requestsā€, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no ā€œscript interpreterā€ but just the AI.

Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the ā€œconclusionā€ to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?

If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?

(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s hard to get my point across here. I tried to address that a few paragraphs down.

Yes, I can tinker with AI techniques on a general level. That’s cool but not really my area of interest.

What I certainly can’t do is learn how specific AI products work. I can’t possibly find out why Claude Code produced that particular line of code. Claude is just a magic box that does something and I have to trust it.

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In-reply-to » @prologic don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. šŸ˜œšŸ˜…

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely šŸ˜…

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because ā€œthey have AIā€?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered ā€œnoā€, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said ā€œYesā€, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that ā€œAIā€ will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

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In-reply-to » @bender Well no. Some of us don't. Let me point you at some research on the subject šŸ˜… Some people don't have an inner monologue

@prologic@twtxt.net so, ā€œpeople with no inner monologue—a condition researchers sometimes refer to as anendophasiaā€, says the AI. Then ā€œit is not a disorder: lacking an inner voice is simply a different, perfectly healthy way of being humanā€. Ah, so a condition, but a healthy one. Got it.

Again, I am not talking about a true monologue. If you have never thought ā€œOK, let’s do this!ā€ before engaging on an activity, then alright. Weird, in contrast to the rest of us, hard to believe, yes, but I believe you. Much of the troubleshooting, and creativity that comes with thought involves, well, thoughts. Maybe you are closer to AI than the rest of us, indeed! šŸ¤ŖšŸ˜‚

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the ā€œAIā€ we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ā€˜what comes nextā€. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called ā€œAIā€ we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the ā€œtediousā€ work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@prologic@twtxt.net let me ask you this. Would you want your children not to learn anything, because ā€œthey have AIā€? Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework? What sense will it make? What kind of future would that bring for them? We need to analyse the repercussions from all angles, even if AI were to provide absolutely flawless answers every single time. Even if AI were to become omniscient. What will it be of the human race then? What would we do? Serve the AI? Maintain the AI? Would we have found the true meaning of life then? To care for AI. Is that it?

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Is it the fact that ā€œbig techā€ companies have basically stolen all of human knowledge to their benefit to build these AI(s) that’s the problem? Or is it that these AI(s) can write code better than you can (some of the time)? Or is it that because of all of the above, there’s no joy left in writing code anymore? šŸ¤”

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

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In-reply-to » I’ve started collecting reasons against AI usage here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Your very first point is obviously crucial. ā€œWriting codeā€ is just the means to an end for many people and they don’t really care about it or like it, so they love AI. I had this in another draft (it refers to the other list I posted):

https://movq.de/v/614f14c3ef/ramble.txt

And this right here is so important:

simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

Finding an elegant, simple solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything else. And here’s the thing: I don’t get why nerds/techies don’t get ā€œnerd-snipedā€ by this. A lot of people love building big stuff and then brag about being clever/competent because they were able to build that big thing – but once you realize that this approach is the lazy one, shouldn’t you make finding the elegant solution your goal? Doesn’t that give you more bragging rights?

(Am I being clear? Do you understand what I mean? šŸ˜…)

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In-reply-to » I’ve started collecting reasons against AI usage here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:

Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. ā€œBut you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!ā€, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. ā€œBut I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossibleā€, ā€œI’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated itā€ are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says ā€œdo it like thatā€ or ā€œthis solves your problemā€, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the ā€œinstruction setā€ is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerfulā„¢ Featuresā„¢?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

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In-reply-to » By the way, did you know that I have a five month notice period? Starting next year, it’ll be six months. Germany is the opposite of ā€œhire and fireā€, but it applies to both parties.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If you really like to, you can try to negotiate with your employer that you can leave earlier. At least some mates were successful in that. I mean, it’s also in the company’s interest to not have to pay someone who has already mentally resigned long ago.

And on the bright side, you don’t even have to hand over anything. Your boss doesn’t have to look for a successor, so they can just let you go even sooner. This AI shit will simply continue whatever you did, no problem!!

It’s so crazy. I should probably also look for something else. :-(

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I’m still having some fundamental design issues with my TUI widget system, so I’m still not comfortable making this code public.

But after a day of work (and discussing AI ad nauseam at work), I just don’t have any energy left. šŸ˜‘

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495 turns and about ~4hrs alter I won! šŸ™Œ Small map, 2-players, myself and an AI player. šŸ˜… – It took forever to beach the island the AI player was on and get enough Galley’s and Swordsmen just to push back and eventually slowly destroy all enemy units and capture all cities! 🤣

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As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.

This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…

Architecture slop:

  1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like

  2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating

  3. generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building

Moralizing slop:

History slop:

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In-reply-to » Another AI rant:

@bender@twtxt.net Or maybe I’m just shitty at communication and maybe that’s why nobody at work understands my ā€œargumentsā€ against AI/LLMs. 🤪🤣

(I’m too tired to rephrase the OP. Maybe some other day. Actually, rest assured that I will complain about this again. šŸ˜…)

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Another AI rant:

One of the ā€œkey featuresā€ of LLMs is that you can use ā€œnatural languageā€, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, ā€œI automated this process using AI!ā€, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because ā€œit worksā€.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

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In-reply-to » @lyse Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the ā€œoldā€ knowledge to fall back on.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible

Does this refer to the training course or to the tools themselves? šŸ¤”

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In-reply-to » @lyse Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the ā€œoldā€ knowledge to fall back on.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I couldn’t agree more! I also have the feeling that it causes more people to just accept ā€œit’s a software problem, there’s nothing that can be done about itā€. Which is very frightning to me.

Up until now, I was successful in refusing to actively use that crap. I had to do one mandatory AI training, but even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible. Probably also nailed together by the same rubbish they want us to now use everyday as much as possible.

Code reviews are the part that I have to deal with most. And I believe that the code quality is degrading.

Let’s hope the bubble bursts sooner than later. It will definitely burst at some point. That’s for sure.

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In-reply-to » Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the ā€œoldā€ knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

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In-reply-to » Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I ā€œaskedā€ the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It ā€œsaidā€ that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
ā•žā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•”
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
ā•žā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•”
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

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In-reply-to » Via https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3220#issuecomment-4198066671 I came across this nice selection on why not to use AI: https://github.com/Vxrpenter/AIMania/blob/main/WHY.md#why

Everything changes, right? I know we sound like curmudgeons, and perhaps AI is the next step. We are living its early infancy, the struggles and dislikes, the errors and flaws, and generations after us will simply benefit from it, and see it as natural as my children see the Internet today (it isn’t natural to me, I was born way before it).

Or maybe AI isn’t the next step. Either way, whether we like it or not, there is truly absolutely nothing (or close to) we can do. Well, complain we can, of course. :-P

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Via https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3220#issuecomment-4198066671 I came across this nice selection on why not to use AI: https://github.com/Vxrpenter/AIMania/blob/main/WHY.md#why

This then lead me to the slopware list: https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

Holy shit, there’s even more than I thought. :-O In addition to Vim, the following affects me more or less daily (but hopefully not my ancient versions): curl, VLC, ImageMagick, rsync, Python, systemd and even the Linux Kernel itself. Oh fuck me dead. :ā€˜-(

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