5C5C5C

@5C5C5C@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  As a senior dev I hate vibe coding. I can write code an order of magnitude faster than I can review it, because reviewing code forces you to piece together a mental model for something made by someone else, whereas when I write the code myself I get to start with the mental model already in my head.

  Writing code is never the bottleneck for me. If I understand the problem well enough to write a prompt for an LLM, then I understand the problem well enough to write the code for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn’t have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

  The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.

  The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don’t know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won’t actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.

  I’d be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don’t reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they’re still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.

  But that doesn’t leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I’m not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there’s a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions… billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.

  Then there’s things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm so vegan I could eat a burger and still be a vegan⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No no, that would hurt the feelings of the man-children that get triggered by vegans existing. They’re too sensitive, they can’t take it, it would be an act of cruelty towards animals that have no personal agency, which we all know is something vegans can’t condone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Was Set to Host an Israeli Military Conference. When We Asked About It, the Event Disappeared.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you’d expect for an organization of its size. It’s entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.