MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come 15 hours ago:
There’s a corp solution called “CyberArk” that’s intended for storing passwords and other secrets and providing an audit trail for every access, as well as access controls, etc. It’s nothing like a solution for personal data storage, but those core concepts would be great.
- Your stored data is under access control.
- Configuration of access to this data (write, read, and access frequency) is controlled by you.
- Access grants to others are time limited (although, maximum time may be 10 years or more.)
- Every data access is configured to be logged by default.
- Access to important data can be configured to require real-time authorization by the owner.
- Full change history is logged by default and thereby all changes can be reversed.
- Only the owner can choose to delete change history.
- Only the owner can choose to delete logs.
The trick is getting Meta, Alphabet, X, banks, retailers, libraries and the rest to agree to use this API for storage of your data. The next (impossible) trick is enforcing their secure deletion of copies of your data in a timely fashion after they have accessed it.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 4 days ago:
Some do, some don’t, but more importantly: most just don’t care.
I had a tester wander into a set of edge cases which weren’t 100% properly handled and their first reaction was “gee, maybe I didn’t see that, it sounds like I’m going to have a lot more work because I did.”
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 4 days ago:
I work in a “tight” industry where we check ALL our code. By contrast, a lot of places I have visited - including some you would think are fairly important like medical office management and gas pump card reader software makers - are not tight, not tight at all. It’s a matter of moving the needle, improving a bad situation. You’ll never achieve “perfect” on any dynamic non-trivial system, but if you can move closer to it for little or no cost?
Of course, when I interviewed with that office management software company, they turned me down - probably because they like their culture the way it is and they were afraid I’d change things with my history of working places for at least 2.5 years, sometimes up to 12, and making sure the code is right before it ships instead of giving their sales reps that “hands on, oooh I see why you don’t like that, I’ll have our people fix that right away - just for you” support culture.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
bullshit tests that pretend to be tests but are essentially “if true == true then pass” is significantly worse than no test at all.
Sure. But, unsupervised developers who: write the code, write their own tests, change companies every 18 months, are even more likely to pull BS like that than AI is.
You can actually get some test validity oversight out of AI review of the requirements and tests, not perfect, but better than self-supervised new hires.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
I’m mixed on unit tests - there are some things the developer will know (white box) about edge cases etc. that others likely wouldn’t, and they should definitely have input on those tests. On the other hand, independence of review is a very important aspect of “harnessing the power of the team.” If you’ve got one guy who gathers the requirements, implements the code, writes the tests, and declares the requirements fulfilled, that better be one outstandingly brilliant guy with all the time on his hands he needs to do the jobs right. If you’re trying to leverage the talents of 20 people to make a better product, having them all be solo-virtuoso actors working independently alongside each other is more likely to create conflict, chaos, duplication, and massive holes of missed opportunities and unforeseen problems in the project.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
but unit tests should 100% be the responsibility of the dev making the change.
True enough
A bad test is worse than no test
Also agree, if your org has trimmed to the point that you’re just making tests to say you have tests, with no review as to their efficacy, they will be getting what they deserve soon enough.
If a company is going to rely heavily on AI for anything I’d expect a significant traditional human employee backstop to the AI until it has a track record. Not “buckle up, we’re gonna try somethin’” track record, more like two or three full business cycles before starting to divest of the human capital that built the business to where it is today. Though, if your business is on the ropes and likely to tank anyway… why not try something new?
Was a story about IBM letting thousands of workers go, replacing them with AI… then hiring even more workers in other areas with the money saved from the AI retooling. Apparently they let a bunch of HR and other admin staff go and beefed up on sales and product development. There are some jobs that you want more predictable algorithms in than potentially biased people, and HR seems like an area that could have a lot of that.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
We have had guys submit tests like that, long before AI was a thing.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
A software tester walks into a bar, he orders a beer.
He orders -1 beers.
He orders 0 beers.
He orders 843909245824 beers.
He orders duck beers.
AI can be trained to do that, but if you are in a not-well-trodden space, you’ll want to be defining your own edge cases in addition to whatever AI comes up with.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
Ideally, there are requirements before anything, and some TDD types argue that the tests should come before the code as well.
Ideally, the customer is well represented during requirements development - ideally, not by the code developer.
Ideally, the code developer is not the same person that develops the unit tests.
Ideally, someone other than the test developer reviews the tests to assure that the tests do in-fact provide requirements coverage.
Ideally, the modules that come together to make the system function have similarly tight requirements and unit-tests and reviews, and the whole thing runs CI/CD to notify developers of any regressions/bugs within minutes of code check in.
In reality, some portion of that process (often, most of it) is short-cut for one or many reasons. Replacing the missing bits with AI is better than not having them at all.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
There have been a few “milestone moments” like map-reduce Hadoop, etc. Still, there’s a whole lot of eye candy wrapped around the same old basic concepts.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
With an understanding of good practice, a proper development environment and a close eye on the junior devs, there’s no inherent issue to using it.
My feelings about C/C++ are the same. I’m still switching to Rust, because that’s what the company wants.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
Repackaging old technology in slick new interfaces is what we have been calling progress in computer software for 40+ years.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
(asking GPT-5 to do your dynamic SQL calls is inviting disaster, for example. Requires hours of reworking just to get close.)
Maybe it’s the dynamic SQL calls themselves that are inviting disaster?
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 5 days ago:
In the beginning there were manufacturer’s manuals, spec sheets, etc.
Then there were magazines, like Byte, InfoWorld, Compute! that showed you a bit more than just the specs
Then there were books, including the X for Dummies series that purported to
Then there was Google / Stack Overflow and friends
Somewhere along there, where depends a lot on your age, there were school / University courses
Now we have “AI mode”
Each step along that road has offered a significant speedup, connecting ideas to theory to practice.
I agree, all the “magic bullet” AI hype is far overblown. However, with AI something I new I can do is, interactively, develop a specification and a program. Throw out the code several times while the spec gets refined, re-implemented, tried in different languages with different libraries. It’s still only good for “small” projects, but less than a year ago “small” meant less than 1000 lines of code. These days I’m seeing 300 lines of specification turn into 1500-3000 lines of code and have it running successfully within half a day.
I don’t know if we’re going to face a Kurzweilian singularity where these things start improving themselves at exponential rates, or if we’ll hit another 30 year plateau like neural nets did back in the 1990s… As things are, Claude helps me make small projects several times faster than I could ever do with Google and Stack Overflow. And you can build significant systems out of cooperating small projects.
- Comment on Thoughts about responsibility 6 days ago:
Agreed, unions level the playing field between large businesses and individual workers. If you’re a single employee in a small business (say, less than 10 employees) you have a reasonable chance to negotiate with your employer. As a single employee in a business with hundreds, it’s basically impossible - you have almost no leverage and the employer has too many incentives to not acknowledge your needs.
Unfortunately, union organizations are themselves “big business” and ripe for corruption.
Transparency is the real answer. We should all know and share what our working conditions, benefits, salaries, etc. are. Companies should be up front about what they are offering and how their employees are treated. If you’re applying for work at a place that does 10% layoffs every 3 years, you should be able to easily see that from a reliable source, not just random scattered news stories and ex-employee anecdotes. If your prospective employer has been giving upper management 15% annual raises in total compensation for the past 20 years, while rank and file have been getting 1.5-2%, that should be readily available information.
- Comment on Thoughts about responsibility 6 days ago:
so hypocritical that I was raised to act responsibly
Children are also raised to believe that life is fair.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 1 week ago:
Everything about private jet travel is shock value inefficient if you compare it to “normal people” CO2 emissions.
A friend won a $14M lottery payout, he didn’t go for planes but he liked boats, so it’s to be expected that he buys a couple of boats. The boats themselves weren’t so impressive, what was impressive was going out for a day-trip fishing with him… and burning 800 gallons of fuel. Sure, we went a little farther than my Uncle’s boat could go in a day just because the lotto win boat is faster, but a day fishing pretty similar fish with my uncle? 10-20 gallons of gas if we’re trolling (which we weren’t in lotto win boat), 3-5 gallons if we just run around and anchor and chum like we normally do.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
Also, be careful what you believe when you ask AI a question - what’s wrong with this answer? "A Boeing 747 burns roughly 18,000 to 24,000 gallons of fuel for the Miami to Frankfurt flight, which is about 36,000 to 50,000 liters. "
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
Yes they do. A big part of it is their size / capacity. Per passenger or per kg cargo they’re pretty efficient, but that doesn’t change the fact that they burn ~280,000 liters on a typical (Washington D.C. to Frankfurt) Atlantic crossing round trip.
Yes, overstated - it’s a two way Atlantic crossing. And if you consider Newfoundland to Ireland to be “an Atlantic crossing” that certainly uses less, and it’s rounded up a bit - though with unfavorable wind conditions it can exceed 300,000 liters.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
As of July 2025, approximately 424 Boeing 747 aircraft are in active airline service
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.
Don’t forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
maybe the resulting future is that the tools can only work with really popular libraries that have lots of people talking about them on stack overflow in the year 2024 or whatever, and new smaller potentially interesting libraries will have a harder time seeing adoption
Yeah, that’s the future I’ve been living since about 2005. The alternative to letting the world be your support desk via stack overflow and similar is to develop killer examples and API documentation for your own libraries so the AI (and everyone else) can learn from that. Qt was a great example of this starting in the early 2000s.
The dark future is where you have competitors “poisoning the well” spreading false information about your tech in the normally reliable channels, then having AI amplify that for them. This, too, is already happening to some extent - more in the political sphere than the technical space, but it’s everywhere to some extent.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
Another way of looking at this: A “Daily AI Habit” on your table is about the same as driving a Tesla 10 miles…
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
I was “there” with Claude as you describe about 3 months ago. Since then, Claude has stepped up to being able to create fully functional microservices. It helps if you completely specify what you want, it helps if you don’t specify funky libraries or other tech that has poor support on the internet, it helps if your total ask amounts to 1000 lines of code or less - but I have gotten up around 3000 lines before Sonnet 4 choked a few times.
Before this, my AI queries were mostly limited to specific API function call syntax, and they would only be right about 2/3 of the time, which beats randomly trying things myself until I eventually guess the right variation… Yes, it’s better to consult the documentation - when it’s available - it’s not always available.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper,
The baby turtles thank you.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 2 weeks ago:
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
- Comment on What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025? 2 weeks ago:
This notion that healthy adults need mental herding is very pervasive
Need is a strong word, but it is very true that the environment you put people in will influence their behavior. Grocery stores filled with attractively packaged highly processed foods will drive more highly processed food consumption than if you had to show proof of age ID and sign a disclosure before being allowed into the back room to buy those same foods in plain brown wrapper containers blazoned with all the health warnings that apply to them.
Handheld screen tech delivers dopamine release as powerful as most recreational drugs / experiences. People are definitely “herded” by how that tech is delivered, default settings that most of them never take the time to learn how to change, other settings that annoyingly constantly reset themselves to undesired PAY ATTENTION TO ME configurations, etc.
So, yeah, mindfulness of how your devices are shaping your behavior is a “higher level of awareness” that we as a society should be collectively trying to attain.
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 3 weeks ago:
If you’re talking about India / China working for US firms, it’s supply and demand again.
It’s clearly not. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a software guy left standing inside the US.
India / China can do a lot of things. For my company, they’re very strong in terms of producing products for their domestic market. They’re not super helpful per-capita on the US market oriented tasks, but they’re cheap - so we try to use them where we can.
There’s not a lot of good US software employees standing around unemployed… A lot of what I have interviewed as “available” are not even as good as what we get from India, but we have a house full of good developers already.
That’s just a bad business.
While I might reflexively agree, you have to ask yourself: from what perspective? Their customers may not be the happiest with the quality of the product, but for some reason they keep buying it and the business keeps expanding and making more and more profit as the years go by… in my book that’s a better business than the upstanding shop I worked for for 12 years that eventually went bust because we put too much effort into making good stuff through hiring good people to make it, and not enough effort into selling the stuff so we could continue to operate.