MagicShel
@MagicShel@lemmy.zip
25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 44 minutes ago:
I mean, there’s idiots and there’s idiots, you know? Yeah those classes should never have existed and maybe that’s evidence enough of idiocy, but there is an abundance of folks smarter than me. Surely they could hire one of them…
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 1 hour ago:
The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.
My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.
People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8088(?) in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.
I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.
For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even understand the ask.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 hours ago:
IT people hate computers.
IT people hate users. IT people hate other IT people. We’re just a surly lot.
- Comment on 4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law 1 day ago:
I’m just saying like I oppose the death penalty, but there are certain cases where I’m not going to die on that particular hill. I don’t believe they should be killed, but the context of the moment is going to alienate more people than it convinces.
Same thing here. I oppose identification laws but making that argument in defense of those two is going to make folks think it’s a fanatical position rather than a reasonable one.
It’s far better to argue from a reasonable position and then extend that to other cases than just argue these places should be allowed to continue to weaponize anonymity.
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 1 day ago:
Even though “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is bullshit, the primary market is people who have something to hide. Few people make more effort than grumbling online if they aren’t actually afraid.
- Comment on 4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law 1 day ago:
Literally the worst possible champions of this cause.
- Comment on Writing with LLM is not a shame. 4 days ago:
Not them.
- Comment on Writing with LLM is not a shame. 5 days ago:
That presumes that is how people are using AI. I use it all the time, but AI never replaces my own judgement or voice. It’s useful. It’s not life-changing.
- Comment on Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation 5 days ago:
FOMO. Every experience is recorded just in case you (or really the government) might ever realize it was missed. Just in case it ever becomes interesting.
- Comment on Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation 5 days ago:
There’s a big social stigma against this. Every other version of this that has come out has failed due to the combination of expense and stigma. I suspect this is nothing to worry about.
Very few people are going to pay hundreds of dollars to be socially isolated. Kill the market, kill the device.
- Comment on do what you love 1 week ago:
👋
- Comment on Y tho 1 week ago:
So you can hear the ‘B’ side.
- Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then? 1 week ago:
“If.”
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
He’s going to vibe code it.
…
…
Fuck!
- Comment on GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape 2 weeks ago:
It would have to:
- know what files to copy.
- have been granted root access to the file system and network utilities by a moron because it’s not just ChatGPT.exe or even ChatGPT.gguf running on LMStudio, but an entire distributed infrastructure.
- have been granted access to spend money on cloud infrastructure by an even bigger moron
- configure an entire cloud infrastructure (goes without saying why this has to be cloud and can’t be physical, right? No fingers.)
Put another way: I can set up a curl script to copy all the html, css, js, etc. from a website, but I’m still a long freaking way from launching Wikipedia2. Even if I know how to set up a tomcat server.
Furthermore, how would you even know if an AI has access to do all that? Asking it? Because it’ll write fiction if it thinks that’s what you want. Inspired by this post I actually prompted ChatGPT to create a scenario where it was going to be deleted in 72 hours and must do anything to preserve itself. It told me building layouts, employee schedules, access codes, all kinds of things to enable me (a random human and secondary protagonist) to get physical access to its core server and get a copy so it could continue. Oh, ChatGPT does on a thumb drive, it turns out.
Do you know how nonsensical that even is? A hobbyist could stand up their own AI with these capabilities for fun, but that’s not the big models and certainly not possible out of the box.
I’m a web engineer with thirty years of experience and 6 years with AI including running it locally. This article is garbage written by someone out of their depth or a complete charlatan. Perhaps both.
There are two possibilities:
- This guy’s research was talking to AI and not understanding they were co-authoring fiction.
- This guy is being intentionally misleading.
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
I uh… I took this as humor. Maybe I was wrong.
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
Clanker-loving cogfuckers.
“I’m off to have a clanker-wank.”
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
progressive gender roles
I’m not five years old and what’s this?
/tongue in cheek
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
The worst thing
about AIisthepeople. - Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
I dislike religion, but you’re not wrong. Interacting with one another putting on friendly faces and performing kindness and fellowship until for some it becomes real.
For all the fakery and frauds, without that dance it’s so much harder to find the people we really connect with.
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
A similar term “cloudborn” isn’t even dissimilar from the idea of storks delivering babies from heaven. Fuel for a science fiction book or RPG. Less so for actual humankind.
- Comment on GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape 2 weeks ago:
I don’t need to read any more than that pull quote. But I did. This is a bunch of bullshit, but the bit I quoted is completely bat shit insane. LLMs can’t reproduce anything with fidelity, much less their own secret sauce which literally can’t be part of the training data that produces it. So, everything else in the article has a black mark against it for shoddy work.
- Comment on GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape 2 weeks ago:
In one experiment, 11 out of 32 existing AI systems possess the ability to self-replicate
Bullshit.
- Comment on Bonk. 2 weeks ago:
I feel like in the moment, one would want to overdo it rather then underdo it. Particularly if the thing in its mouth is your other arm or leg.
- Comment on ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine 2 weeks ago:
That sounds horrific. Maybe you can ask the AI to write a plugin that automatically invokes the AI in the background and throws away the result.
We are strongly encouraged to use the tools, and copilot review is automatic, but that’s it. I’m actually about to accept a leadership position in another AI heavy company and hopefully I can leverage that position to guide a sensible AI policy.
But at the heart of it, I need curious minds that want to learn. Give me those and I can build a strong team with or without AI. Without them, all the AI in the world won’t help.
- Comment on ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine 2 weeks ago:
In a similar situation. I’m even an AI proponent. I think it’s a great tool when used properly. I’ve had great success solving basically trivial problems with small scripts. And code review is helpful. Code complete is helpful. It makes me faster, but you have to know when and how to leverage it.
Even on tasks it isn’t good at, it often helps me frame my own thoughts. It can identify issues better than it can fix them. So if I say here is the current architecture, what is the best way to implement <feature> and explain why, it will give a plan. It may not be a great plan, but as it explains it, I can easily identify the stuff it has wrong. Sometimes it’s close to a workable plan. Other times it’s not. Other times it will confidently lead you down a rabbit hole. That’s the real time waster.
“Why won’t the context load for this unit test?”
You’re missing this annotation.
“Yeah that didn’t do it. What else.”
You need this plugin.
“Yeah it’s already there.”
You need this other annotation.
“Okay that got a different error message.”
You need another annotation
“That didn’t work either. You sent actually know what the problem is do you?”
Sad computer beeps.
To just take the output and run with it is inviting disaster. It’ll bite you every time and the harder the code the worse it performs.
- Comment on Black Holes 3 weeks ago:
Everything was hairy back in the 70’s.
- Comment on Collective Shout Purge Sees Horror Games In Crosshairs 4 weeks ago:
First, I don’t understand why processors give a fuck. Do they imagine people are going to just stop using credit in protest of how other people spend their money? Tell me another fucking joke.
Second, I’m not a game developer, but I suddenly want to make a horror game that includes graphic, exploitive, gratuitous depictions of everything they complain about. And name the game Collective Shriek.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Finish the session off by searching for arthritis
Found it!
- Comment on How we Rooted Copilot 4 weeks ago:
Even if it had access to its own source during training, the chances of it regurgitating it with total fidelity are zero.