“No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector

  • 37 Posts
  • 281 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: December 9th, 2023
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoProgramming@programming.dev•Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs
    2·
    13 days ago

    suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

    The US is continuing to worsen in performance on meaures of small business entrepreneurship in essentially all industries in the US, software and software adjacent industries are no different especially if you don’t get distracted by the AI bubble inflating that value of a bunch of illusions claiming to be businesses.

    It is easy to see how the inability of the average person to try a new idea, or risk taking on a project that may not pay off immediately translates directly to a lack of available developers for open source software projects.

    The impact of Universal Healthcare would be huge for open source development in the US, the amount of programmers that would be pushed over the line from “just making ends meet while having a work life balance” to “ok maybe I could devote some time to open source development”.

    Don’t get me wrong though, I think we need to normalize straight up paying developers for Open Source Development. Just because it is open source doesn’t mean it doesn’t take labor, that is not the argument I am making.

    https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2018/oct/affordable-care-act-impact-small-business

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoProgramming@programming.dev•Rust will save the Linux kernel project from flood of AI-discovered security problems and already improves the kernel, but it is not a silver bullet, says Greg Kroah-Hartman
    73·
    15 days ago

    The only thing that will save Linux from AI is when programmers get their heads out of their asses, stop subscribing to scifi slop that AI is about take over and start asserting to everyone else how necessary human input is in their craft by forming unions.

    The problem with programmers is they are quick to think their understanding of computers makes them understand everything and it created a massive blindspot of hubris big enough to allow the ruling class to destroy the potential quality of life that used to come from working as a programmer right in front of programmers eyes. I would be tempted to call it sad if programmers didn’t tend to be so condescending about believing their knowledge is a universal shortcut to understanding everything else.

    Programming is an industry dominated by pushovers who aren’t willing to fight for anything that cannot be understood in the terms of automation, scaling or endless growth of technology. There is a willing blindness here and the rest of the world is getting really tired of it.

    Fight, stop immersing yourself in stories about how AI will become sentient blah blah blah, outside of your bubble very few people actually believe this nonsense and it just blinds you to your own dehumanization that is happening right in front of your eyes for entirely human reasons that have NOTHING to do with technology working or not working and EVERYTHING to do with a failure of humans to organize and preserve the professionalism of their craft because they were convinced of delusions by the people ruling over them.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How bad is the software engineering job today?
    2·
    1 month ago

    I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.

    The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.

    Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.

    To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.

    To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?

    It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.

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