MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
to the point where non-programmers can solve their problems
I had a period of about 10 years where I bounced from company to company fixing non-programmers’ code so that it could actually be used in commercial products that brought in revenue.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
legit concern I hear is its environmental impact.
Commuting my fat ass to a climate controlled office, out to lunch, back home, parking spaces, highway lane miles, fuel, periodic vehicle replacements… that all has environmental impacts too, if I can do my job in half the time, that’s a big win for the environment.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
I have been doing this stuff for over 40 years, the tools get faster and the ecosystems get more complex.
What would be really nice is a return to simplicity, using the fast tools to make simple stuff fast-squared, but nobody seems to want that.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
If you ask something longer than 20 lines, there’s a very high probability that it won’t work on the 15th round of corrections.
Try Claude by Anthropic. I noticed Copilot and Google getting hung up much faster than Claude.
Also, I find that if you encourage a good architecture, like a formalized system of variables with Atomic / Mutexed access and getter/setter functions, that seems to give a project more legs than letting the AI work out fiddly access protection schemes one by one.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
I got one up around 500 lines before it started falling apart when trying to add new features. That was a mix of Rust and HTML, total source file size was around 14kB, with what I might call a “normal amount” of comments in the code.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
Once my business is in a more profitable place I’ll bring someone on to fix up the code
AKA: technical debt. I actually approve of this approach when you’re testing the market and don’t have any paying customers. Where it gets ugly is when customers start placing trust in your product, trust that might be costly if your code fails, and management doesn’t budget the resources to actually fix up the code. I was very glad to leave the place that was doing this…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
The problem is when people assume you can actually build an entire software/service architecture of any complexity just through vibe coding.
Welcome to CEO handling 101. It’s an art, a very soft skill, and not for the faint of heart. I worked for a mid sized (50 employee) company once where I’d “speak truth to power” in our weekly meeting, get shot down rather enthusiastically by the CEO during the meeting, then after I and the rest of R&D left his office, he’d go out to production and have them start implementing all the concepts of my pitch - as his own ideas, naturally.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
That’s a great tip: having it review the security of code that an earlier context generated.
I plan on having it write unit tests, or at least try to…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
You need to be able to read it to understand that it’s going a little off the rails.
At least 2/3 of the time I spend with AI coding is getting it to compile without errors - that’s more than a little off the rails, but it’s also much more helpful when you finally do get to a working example that you can look at, instead of beating your own head against the Stack Exchange archives hoping for inspiration, let it try for you.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
AI coding is actually a very powerful tool, almost like a light saber. Do you notice how many amputations and artificial limbs there are in that galaxy far far away?
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 4 hours ago:
Because: for $20 per month to the AI company, you can output poor code much much faster.
- Comment on Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US 1 day ago:
For a more extreme example, look to the Principality of Monaco. Being so much smaller, it can be much more extreme.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 5 days ago:
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn’t. When they rug-pulled the “otherOS” feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no “Smart” TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content…)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they’re happy where they are.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 5 days ago:
I may have seen it, but it “felt wrong” from the start - never considered it anything of interest.
- Comment on Password manager by Amazon 6 days ago:
If you keep the book secure, it’s probably safer than any computer based record system - right up until someone untrustworthy gets their eyes on the book.
With a physical book, you can store it in a safe deposit box when you don’t need access, make partial copies, copies take (everyone, bad guys and good) significantly longer to make even with a photocopy process… most importantly, people intuitively understand the vulnerabilities of a physical book.
Now, the physical book won’t stop keyloggers…
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 1 week ago:
Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
I imagine the draft for WWII was a little different…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Pet of the month from the 1980s… lost track of her in the 90s, pretty sure she looks different now.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Any time I have tried using my middle name as the name printed on my credit card, the banks 100% consistently refuse to do it.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Your trolls were lightweight. Trolls in my schools would have doubled, or tripled down on Willy - knowing that it bothered him.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Both of my grandfathers went I.O. initials only, including when they were drafted for WWII. One would use his first name about half the time, but only reveal what the middle initial stood for maybe twice in my lifetime. The other: I.O. all the way, to his grave nobody I know ever heard what those initials stood for.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Our IT intake asks “is there another name you prefer to be known by” - and I have gone by my middle name since I was 12, so I told them, and they cheerfully complied… on half the things in their system, the other half use my first name - things like the name under my picture during Teams calls. But, my e-mail address uses the middle name, so that’s nice.
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Background checks are big into “A.K.A.” listings.
Joe, Joey, Joseph, Jar-Man…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Not always… I knew a girl once…
- Comment on We should be able to legally have a different name just for work for better work/life separation 1 week ago:
Can you use any of them on a credit card?
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 1 week ago:
I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn’t work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the “big” airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn’t interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 1 week ago:
Yeah, I was an EE in college so I took the Smith’s chart class, did the exercises, then promptly started using newer tools when such things were called for… mostly I worked in software after school so all those exercises were… academic.
- Comment on Feds in Catalonia, Spain think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer 1 week ago:
Rare is a matter of popular practice, not difficulty.
It’s rare to walk around with an actual tinfoil hat, but not difficult or expensive to do.
- Comment on Feds in Catalonia, Spain think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer 1 week ago:
they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.
Nothing is ever absolute, but Silicon Valley has been going in a consistently bad direction for 20+ years now.
- Comment on Feds in Catalonia, Spain think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer 1 week ago:
If she floats, she’s a witch and we’ll burn her at the stake.