I mean, I was going to make this joke, but this kind of ruins it. Though, maybe if the joke is seen first…

That old autocomplete is great. It’s specifically the AI autocomplete that’s less useful.

Wow, well it’s absolutely terrible at A. B is worth a shot, but it’s 50/50 to bullshit you in my experience.

Eh, I’ve enjoyed writing a SQL query and having AI translate it to Linq. I’ve had at least one work directly, very clear on what it’s doing, just with Linq’s odd syntax. The other query was more complicated and wasn’t something that translated well to Linq. I may have had to split that into two Linq queries.

Then again, I wouldn’t count translating psuedocode (or SQL) as really vibe coding. To me “vibe coding” means you’re not really looking at the code it produces.

Yeah, I just wrote a blog post comment about how I enjoy using Copilot. But that’s when I explicitly ask it a question or give it a task. The auto complete is wrong more often than it’s right.

Probably doesn’t help that if it was tedious, boilerplate code I would have already explicitly asked it.

Pretty good and well balanced article.

As a professional software dev, AI is absolutely useful. But forcing people to use it is weird. And I never want to have to deal with a PM using AI to generate a PR and then having to review it. That’s absolutely not how you use AI, and more often or not that will be more work than just doing the whole thing yourself.

It’s critical to understand everything the AI is doing as it does it. Because, as the article said, if you don’t, you’re going to get subtle bugs that will be even more difficult to find later. And some of those bugs can be devastating. Add a number of those together and you have an unmaintainable mess.

don’t remember the syntax of the language they’re using due to their overreliance on Cursor.

I think this is pretty fine. Knowing what the situation calls for, knowing exactly how to accomplish it, and having the AI fill in the syntax for your psuedocode typically works pretty great. Something like “In the header add jQuery from the most common CDN. (Verify that CDN or this is a great vector for AI-induced malware/compromise.) Use an ajax call to this api [insert api url] and populate the div with id ‘mydata’.” That’s a pretty simple thing that it’ll likely handle pretty well and is easy to review.

The ways they’re forcing people to use it is kind of insane. But they’re doing that because they’re using AI as a justification for firing people. It doesn’t really work like that. Used properly will it speed up development? For most developers (anyone who used Stack Overflow), yeah. But that doesn’t mean a developer who’s juggling and maintaining 3 products can now suddenly handle 5. It doesn’t speed up context switching, really. And it’s not like it’s replacing the overhead of story boards, standups, change review boards, debugging, handling tickets, or other overhead. You might just spend 7 weeks developing a project instead of 8. And it can remove a bit of tedium (or add if you’re stupid about how you force AI).

It’s a useful tool. It shouldn’t be replacing a large number of developers. Of course they’ll fire the devs anyway, because like any other R&D the dividends are usually paid in the future. So in most cases, firing developers takes some time before you pay the toll, whether it’s opportunity cost, creating an unmaintainable mess, or losing the ability to maintain the things you already have. I expect that’s why the internet’s been falling apart lately. Fire a bunch of people and things they used to handle start to fall apart (or the people who have always handled those things get stretched too thin).

Which is just as risky as instantly updating unless you’re really closely keeping an eye on which updates are security related.

Thank you!

That’s not what the phrase “dark pattern” means.

It’s a switch. It’s clearly marked. It literally says “sponsored”.

Nope. Rust is a low level language.

No, but it clearly wasn’t the solution. They likely could have used some of those people they fired for that.

As long as javascript is running they can track your mouse movement, which is similar to people’s gait when they walk.

Gonna need a source or a reference for that second part. Yes, I’m very aware that your mouse movement can be tracked, so we can skip that part.

pushing people towards specific ideas using social media

I’ve been incredibly concerned about this for more than a decade. Watching r/the_donald in action was incredible and validated all of that fear.

And it’s still happening. On all social media, including here.

Certain narratives are pushed hard, and it’s effective. Some of it is fully genuine. Some of it is/was seeded artificially and picked up some genuine steam, and is still being reinforced. The stuff that’s fully artificial seems to be dropped fairly quickly most of the time these days.

After the artificial narrative picks up and gets genuine sentiment mixed with it, it becomes hard to tell the difference. If you can mix it in with existing emotions, like anger that we’re in this situation, and add in some seeds of truth it works even better.

Propaganda works. On all of us. And just by being here, we’re being exposed. But I’m afraid to leave, too. The more real people leave the easier it is to manipulate the remainder.

It’s just all so easy and effective and actually happening. And the alarm bells about it aren’t loud enough.

Seems like clickbait. Wikipedia does not need actual visitors that badly.

Yeah, I am on .World which for some reason still federates with .ml. I’ve moved over to Piefed on Desktop, just not on mobile yet.

Just read these 14 books from 1930 if you want to have an opinion. No, I can’t summarize anything from them. They can only be understood in their entirety.

All hail Putin, Xi.

If you want to find out if they’re an actual tankie, just look for anything related to Russia or China. They out themselves pretty quick, usually.