Beej Jorgensen

IE6 teaches us that a multi-engine web is best, though…

I feel my productivity increasing already!

Could his ouster be the first domino?

Building software at scale has always been an exercise in managing complexity. We carefully architect systems to be maintainable even at huge scales. And no one can do this quickly. I think writing code by hand gave us some think-time to ponder these architectural decisions.

But with AI, the thinking time is gone, but the problem of managing complexity remains. Typically, however, nobody above the devs gives a shit about managing complexity–that just sounds like something that eats into the bottom line. It is, as certain people might say, “loser thinking”.

A lot of software engineers like to work on projects where they can be proud of what they’ve made. A beautiful architecture doesn’t only shine in its own right, but it also makes the company run smoothly, makes the customers happy, and improves the bottom line.

And when you don’t have those things for the product that you’re pouring your heart and soul into 996, is anyone truly surprised that devs are unhappy?

“The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.” --Marsellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Sounds so much cooler than “some software”, though.

What percentage of “user”-generated content on Reddit is slop now? And that’ll be fodder for the review AI?

Which is short-term bad for juniors, but long-term good in terms of salary. When companies get desperate, they’ll pay.

Except I don’t rely on them for those kinds of facts, so… I guess we’re good here. :)

I’m not sure whom I’d trust more than yourself for what your definition of a fact is. It’s clear “this program has bugs” is not a fact by your definition. Are you talking about things like “the number of souls on the Titanic”?

Why not so being obtuse and just tell me what you mean by “fact” and I’ll tell you if I use LLMs for that or not?

Look, if I had a magic button that eliminated LLMs from the planet, I’d have already pressed it. About the best I can do is keep losing Anthropic money with every prompt I give. Hopefully they crash out and we can all run local models once RAM gets cheap enough to buy.

But the fact is that LLMs are actually useful for getting to accurate answers more quickly than slogging through SEO crap, much of which was written by LLMs anyway.

Current models are completely incapable of fact checking, despite any claims they may make.

This is demonstrably false. Ask it to find the bugs in a chunk of code, for example. You can try that right now.

You always have to back up what it says with an authoritative source, but that’s not particularly tough to do once you have a candidate answer. And if it’s code, you compile it.

It’s arguably far easier than trying to sift through the mountains of SEO shit yourself.

Well, it’s hardly the only place I learn things. But if you can verify a fact that an LLM gives you, it’s still a fact.

Another fact: there’s a pile of human shit out there, too. So you get the truth by hook or by crook.

When we said “Rescue the environment”, we meant “Make a much money as possibly at any cost”. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I’m a university instructor and I definitely use AI to help learn material. But I write all the student-facing material by hand. And I use LLMs to check my work for errors, directing it to never offer a rewrite.

I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.

My money’s on “both”.

Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes…

I also think this is a bad idea unless we want less stability in the kernel. I’ve seen Torvalds call people all kinds of names for trying to add things to the kernel that he feels are subpar. He’s legendary for it. So I’d probably trust him more than any human alive to avoid slop.

But I also don’t think he has the power to effectively defend against it. Some badness will get through.

As always, we’ll choose the least-crappy OS to run.

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I like to compare them to meth. Sends velocity through the roof…with just a few minor drawbacks… 😅

5 years ago things were bad, therefore there’s no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?