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@jan@social.dytrych.cloud @_elena@mastodon.social Waiting for the rise of artisanal coding, when people who code without LLMs are paid extra money to provide customized, reliable code.

@Crell@phpc.social If we're lucky, we're on the same trajectory as bread. Stage 1: All bread is handmade (ADA, Fortran) Stage 2: Semi-industrial processes adopted piecemeal (CMake, IDEs) Stage 3: Wonder bread (Vibe coding) (Stage 3a: "Wait, this is extremely bad for people and the environment") Stage 4: Artisanal bread as part of a much larger ecosystem of available breads (Artisanal code) I expect there will eventually be future "artisanal coding" jobs for safety-critical systems where hard core verification and validation of all the components and how they fit together is non-negotiable. One hopes.

@linear@nya.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run This is ... horrifying. And when I was in grad school I dropped an undergrad computer science class after the first day to transfer to a grad level (but introductory) programming class run out of the electrical engineering department because the comp sci one was introducing concepts in ways that were orthogonal to how my brain works and I knew I wasn't going to be able to make sense of anything they tried to explain. (The EE professor kept losing his C++ notes and defaulting to his old C notes with explanations about how it was different, so the class had its own challenges, but at least I understood the examples and concepts he was using to convey information.) I just can't wrap my head around this. Like, you get structs, but arrays are too confusing?

@pheonix Long covid prevents me from being able to cope with them at all so my default move is to go the reader. I would say I miss the old web with all its handmade html, but I remember the blinking red and yellow scrolling banners and bright green backgrounds and don't miss them!

@toldtheworld@mastodon.social @pseudonym@mastodon.online I didn't think I'd see the day when I'd want to ask CEOs "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" Overtaken by competitors how? How is it "overtaken by" when what is actually happening is "my competitors are introducing fundamental flaws into their business model that will completely vitiate it as a workable product so all I have to do is wait for them to fail"? Apparently the free market doesn't turn people into money-making machines that build products other people want, it turns CEOs into lemmings. Who knew?

A fully functioning window seat for #Caturday.

@ekes@drupal.community @derickr@phpc.social @Crell@phpc.social @wwhitlow@indieweb.social That has already happened with human-generated software and we know the cost. Banks and airlines and other critical infrastructure become unmaintainable because no-one knows how the software does what it does, and trying to replace one component can break the whole thing. So we get giant "software modernization" efforts that experience massive feature creep and we all lose.

@wffl I was going to suggest these: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/4386398778/butterfly-witch-hat-halloween-black-hat (my daughter has one and it is spectacular) but then you said one to wear every day. Now all I have is Terry Pratchett's Nanny Ogg describing her hat in Witches Abroad: "It's got willow reinforcing all the way up to the point and eighteen pockets inside. Can stop a blow with a hammer, this hat."

@teadrinker@aus.social Gluten free baked goods are much better when eaten before they cool. Is there a way to deliver it still warm?

@wolf480pl @leeloo Examples: Category 5a: a text-based LLM that spontaneously, without being asked, learns to output musical notation. Category 5b: a text-based LLM that spontaneously, unprompted, without being asked, learns to use filenames as input. Category 6: a text-based LLM that spontaneously, without being asked (directly or indirectly) learns that it can output ascii images or generate sounds instead of sentences. Category 7: a text-based LLM spontaneously changes its underlying code so that it can learn how to write novels by memorizing and imitating performances instead of via a matrix of probabilities (fundamental change to its internal capabilities) Category 8: a text-based LLM chooses when to interact with the world. (The original categories I developed years ago were based on what the system can modify: its weights, how many weights, what kinds of weights, etc. I think this might be clearer?) I don't think even Moltbook is showing anything above 4.

@wolf480pl @leeloo Melissa Scott wrote a beautiful pair of novels about this: Dreamships and Dreaming Metal. In Dreamships, an AI has been programmed to think it is sentient and starts killing people. If it has an accurate model of the person, killing the person doesn't matter, because the person *is* the model and it has a copy of them. It literally cannot see the difference because creating the concept of there being a difference would violate its core programming that its own model counts as a living being. In Dreaming Metal, an AI operating metal bodies as part of a magic act is given a musical instrument with an electronic interface. Its grounding in the physical world, with human performers, enables it to develop a sense of self and choose its own path as a musician. These are fiction, but it's the best, most accessible illustration of the difference between funhouse mirror stochastic parrots and sentient agents that I've run across. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/836601.Dreamships

@f@ieji.de I did try Collabora Office on my iPhone yesterday. I was unable to copy a formula (not the cell's value) from one cell to another, and I somehow triggered a bug that caused the app to continuously scroll to the right past infinite empty cells and required me to close out the app entirely. I have no idea what I did to trigger it. I tried looking online for help and found infinite articles on how to copy a value instead of a formula and zero information on how to copy a formula instead of a value. I was frequently unable to select the cells I wanted and trying to select a column caused very unpredictable results. By the time I hit the scrolling bug I was so overwhelmed that I just stopped using it. I have limited cognitive stamina, so I need good documentation. Using internet whack-a-mole support forums to grasp UI design assumptions takes months if I'm to avoid weeks-long symptom flares. Is it likely to be less buggy on a different OS? I think step 1 will be to list app functions I need.

@youseeatortoise@wandering.shop I am laughing. It is good.

@miki @lucydev So it's democratizing code by giving many people the ability to do it badly.

There is a real question here - something related to the balance of

• harm to society and individuals of allowing enormous quantities of badly done things to be created, producing circumstances where actual expertise, understanding, and competence are devalued to the point of no longer being viable careers

• benefit to society and individuals of enabling recognition of genius in a few people who would not otherwise have access to a given audience or skill.

I am broadly in favour of enabling experts and competent individuals to earn a living from their expertise and competence. I am also broadly in favour of enabling everyone to develop whatever abilities and interests they have.

But people with ideas for software lack time, skill, and resources, not access. If there's a demand, why is there no business writing throwaway apps for people? Will AI really be cheaper in the long run?

@JdeBP @cstross Because of course it wasn't meant to refer to "professional students" meaning "full time students who are attending graduate school in lieu of a job". 🤦‍♀️ Edit: In a just world, student financial aid funding levels would be tied to student need. In our world, this is a lesson in technical terminology - they wanted to restrict it to students earning specific types of degrees (engineering is not one, presumably because industrial support of academic research means students don't need extra federal support), and they redefined "professional" in this context (and this context only) to mean "the degrees this applies to". Sigh. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-professional-degrees-nursing/

@Amoshias@esq.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @futurebird@sauropods.win If the purpose of a company is to be sold before the technical debt comes due, then that does explain why every web hosting service seems to come with "AI will help you build your website" but I still can't buy an actual, usable, practical in-home assistance robot that has minimal technical debt and actually works. #Robot: https://labradorsystems.com

@linear@nya.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run I thought I was horrified before. Apparently I was merely slighting disturbed. Now I am both horrified and appalled.