Interesting! Thank you!

Also worth noting that some of the workflows that were available in languages like CL or Smalltalk back in the 80s are superior to what most languages offer today.

In what ways? I don’t have any experience with those so I’m curious.

I get what this is saying but on the other hand…

Programmers now:

💪 Can spin up a minimum viable product in a day

💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second

💪 Remote code execution and memory related vulnerabilities are rarer than ever now

💪 Can send data across the world with sub 1 second latency

💪 The same PCIe interface is now 32x faster (16x PICe 1 was 8GB/s, while PCIe 6 is 256GB/s)

💪 The same wireless bands now have more throughput due to better radio protocols and signal processing

💪 Writes applications that scale across the over 100 cores of modern top of the line processors

💪 JIT and garbage collection techniques have improved to the point where they have a nearly imperceptible performance impact in the majority of use cases

💪 Most bugs are caught by static analysis and testing frameworks before release

💪 Codebases are worked on by thousands of people at the same time

💪 Functional programming, which is arguably far less bug prone, is rapidly gaining traction as a paradigm

💪 Far more emphasis on immutability to the point where many languages have it as the default

💪 Virtual machines can be seamlessly transferred from one computer to another while they’re running

💪 Modern applications can be used by people anywhere in the world regardless of language, even things that were very difficult to do in the past like mirroring the entire interface to allow an application that was written for left to right languages to support right to left

💪 Accessibility features allow people who are blind, paralyzed, or have other disabilities to use computers just as well as anyone else

Just wanted to provide come counter examples because I’m not a huge fan of the “programmers are worse than they were back in the 80s” rethoric. While programmers today are more reliant on automated tools, I really disagree that programmers are less capable in general than they were in the past.

Off topic, but is it safe to share what I’m assuming is a stack trace/debug info QR code? Does it have any potentially sensitive data?

So it segfaults after one whole second instead of immediately?

Wearing a tech company backpack in public, especially in the rougher parts of town, is like wearing a sign that says “scrawny nerd probably with expensive electronics, come rob me.”

I personally like programming too much to ever vibe code as they say. Solving problems and organising things is why I like programming in the first place.

There’s a saying in Mandarin that translates to something like: Being in different professions is like being on opposite sides of a mountain. It basically means you can never fully understand a given profession unless you’re actually doing it.

LLMs can’t even stay on topic when specifically being asked to solve one problem.

This happens to me all the damn time:

I paste a class that references some other classes which I have already tested to be working, my problem is in a specific method that doesn’t directly call on any of the other classes. I tell the LLM specifically which method is not working, I also tell it that I have tested all the other methods and they work as intended (complete with comments documenting what they’re supposed to do). I then ask the LLM to only focus on the method I have specified, and it still goes on about “have you implemented all the other classes this class references? Here’s my shitty implementation of those classes instead.”

So then I paste all the classes that the one I’m asking about depends on, reiterate that all of them have been tested and are working, tell the LLM which method has the problem again, and it still decides that my problem must be in the other classes and starts “fixing” them which 9 out of 10 times is just rearranging the code that I already wrote and fucking up the organisation that I had designed.

It’s somewhat useful for searching for well-known example code using natural language, i.e. “How do I open a network socket using Rust,” or if your problem is really simple. Maybe it’s just the specific LLM I use, but in my experience it can’t actually problem solve better than humans.

Assembly, LLVM IR, etc

  File "<python-input-0>", line 2, in a
    a()
    ~^^
  [Previous line repeated 988 more times]
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

Microsoft really creating the problem and then forcing you to use their solution.

For real

The name is an insult to the people who write software for vibrators.

“Your responses will be used to train the AI. By participating in the interview you give us an exclusive, worldwide, non-revokable license to your voice, likeness, and anything you say or write during the interview.”

BREAJING NEWS: Alzheimer’s is just an SQL injection in the brain being exploited!

Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?

It is in everyone’s interest to gradually adjust to the notion that technology can now perform tasks once thought to require years of specialized education and experience.

The years of specialized education and experience is not for writing code in and of itself. Anyone with an internet connection can learn to do that in not that long. What takes years to perfect is writing reliable, optimized, secure code, communicating and working efficiently with others, writing code that can be maintained by others long after you leave, knowing the theories behind why code written in a certain way works better than code written in some other way, and knowing the qualitative and quantitative measures to even be able to assess whether one piece of code is “better” than the other. Source: Self-learned programming, started building stuff on my own, and then went through an actual computer science program. You miss so much nuance and underlying theory when you self-learn, which directly translates bad code that’s a nightmare to maintain.

Finally, the most important thing you can do with the person that has years of specialized education and experience is you can actually have a conversation with them about their code, ask them to explain in detail how it works and the process they used to write it. Then you can ask them followup questions and request further clarification. Trying to get AI to explain itself is a complete shitshow, and while humans do have a propensity to make shit up to cover their own/their coworkers’ asses, AI does that even when it make no sense not to tell the truth because it doesn’t really know what “the truth” is and why other people would want it.

Will AI eventually catch up? Almost certainly, but we’re nowhere close to that right now. Currently it’s less like an actual professional developer and more like someone who knows just enough to copy paste snippets from Stack Overflow and hack them together into a program that manages to compile.

I think the biggest takeaway with AI programming is not that it can suddenly do just as well as someone with years of specialized education and experience, but that we’re going to get a lot more shitty software that look professional on the surface, but is a dumpster fire inside.

Why aren’t “alternate syntaxes” a thing? You can pretty easily just write code to convert between C-like and Python-like syntax. Why aren’t there IDE extensions that let you write in python syntax and automatically commit the standard syntax.

fixes bug

bug fix uncovers code that was relying on the faulty behaviour to work properly

FUUUUUUUU