BatchJob

Yes its pretty clear that "unauthorized access to a computer system", is only a law depending on who you are. Same with copyright laws.

As I see it, if you rob a bank the judge throws the book at you if you rob all the banks, the judge pats you on the back and says "nice job!" and sends you on your way.

While this is all very "interesting", can someone please explain to me the difference between any of these AI companies and a malware bot farm?

Please make it clear. Its becoming unclear...

While these tools were useful for their time, I agree with most of the sentiment that some genies are best left in the bottle.

Also, I would beware of getting MS lawyers on your tail.

iOS has essentially been nagware for a long time now. I switched to android because everything iOS does is to continually put focus on iOS. So many nagging prompts, so much broken/misleading configuration. iOS is now the hellstew du jour. Android is with the exception of Gemini, a peaceful computing platform.

Also developing for iOS which I did for a long time will turn you off iOS when you see how slow the apps are and how unreliable the OS really is.

Personally, I think iOS is a rolling disaster and its influence on MacOS made macs no longer worth it. If Ternus wants to do something. Scrap iOS.

but what if dude already did it (destroyed the world but it hasnt happened yet) before he quit?

The rule of all games played in capitalism is there's a sucker born every minute. you can work a few years or your whole life before you realize you've been had.

and most do....

If you are buying expensive hardware to run LLMs "on your own machine" you will soon find your ladder is on the wrong wall.

The scenario laid out is pretty dated. Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore. Admittedly I have seen this happen in the old days but it wasnt usually very impactful. It was in places where people had too much time on their hands and not much supervision.

Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.

If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.

You can see the slop through the headline. No need to click. Posts like this are turning the internet into a trash pile. Nobody needs this slop, abandonware.

Heres the template:

"I" <--- prompted some LLM

"built" <--- to generate code for a

"fastest" <-- insert specious claim here

"PHP server" <-- thing

"And I prompted the LLM to build a website" <---- link

Im sorry folks but this just doesnt cut it anymore. I dont think it ever did.

while the design aspects have been significantly accelerated and modularized, reducing costs and time to market, i am starting to get a "the cool kids all have their own chips" vibe now like maybe this has gotten too easy.

Next Uber will have its own chips if they dont already.

The math hasn't changed much, betting on software not changing is a pretty bad bet unless your stinking rich or a fool.

Hi, Im not an H1B but as someone who contracted for decades, it was pretty easy to get hired as a contractor after companies laid off. The entire reason I stayed a contractor was because after being an employee and living under constant threat of layoffs, I decided I couldn't live like that anymore. It was my way of taking control.

Contract labor is not booked as headcount so its not just the cost its also how its budgeted and looks to shareholders.

Obviously our industry hasnt cared a whit about what its employees think since at least 2005 when they thought they were going to send all of it elsewhere.

2 wrongs will never make a right

My earnest, non-sarcastic advice to anyone considering learning to code is to find something else that interests you.

While there is possibly some time left before the software industry implodes, hobbyist software will also get steamrolled so I would in the strongest terms possible guide someone to find something that makes them happy and to pursue it.

The software industry as it exists today is a sad bag of regret and disappointment being papered over by opportunists of the worst kind.

Save yourself the trouble.

Unfortunately, there is no quality available at this time.

razzmatazz? Do you mean marketing lies and self aggrandizement for merely doing shoddy work?

I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.

I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.

The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.

As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)

When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.

I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.

I have been a professional SWE for 30 years, I was also paid to write software when I was in middle school in the early 80s. I quit to do other things before high school.

I am not pro AI nor anti AI. since machine learning is not an interest of mine and is not programming I simply have no interest in it.

im also not interested in being a consumer of machine learning products as it relates to my profession.

If I need solutions coded with automation code generators are much faster and reliable. i write them all the time.

The only benefit I derive as a consumer of machine learning at this time is to avoid using the degraded and near useless google search engine for minor lookups of trivia I dont commit to memory. And I do value this very much given the pathetic state of internet search.

As an engineer I can do everything I need and want to do and dont need help building systems. People who do frequently need help enjoy machine learning consumerism more than I do.

As far as what I want in regards to machine learning in the workplace is to be allowed to do my job and not be bothered to use a bunch of junk I dont need.

and the noise around LLMs is annoying and I am anti building data centers and destroying general purpose computing over some corporate lust for power just because an LLM can string a few sentences together.

I am also vehemently against the massive theft of copyrighted content to train LLMs and view LLM output as a form of obfuscated theft.

As a SWE I would prefer offshore labor remain offshore. I have no problem with it.

This is kind of obvious but, definitely something that should be on people's minds as things keep getting weirder.

It was bad enough when mobile phones were not forced to be dealt with as "general purpose computers", and instead were allowed to remain proprietary hardware/software combinations controlled by the tech oligarchy.

But now that RAM is not financially viable to deliver to consumers due to the obscene appetite of the LLM crowd, and fabs are developing custom silicon for the dumbest things of all "training LLMs", we are seeing at least the beginning of what it mean for "personal computers" to become emaciated to the point where chip companies can no longer justify making them for such measly profit and how difficult they will be to sell at such high prices if they incorporate high cost components.

We arent fully there yet but we are heading in that direction. The laptop Im typing this on cost 1600 dollars 8 months ago and now retails for 4 thousand dollars. In 6 more months it will either not be available or retail for 8 thousand.

Given that LLMs are convincing less experienced coders that code is a waste of time to write, the generational/knowledge gap that will create over time in the industry, software engineering could in essence become a niche reserved only for elites (if it will even be allowed) and end user software/hardware knowledge will be discouraged and considered threatening to the establishment.

Although there is a large knowledge base on the Internet (right now) the Internet is now under relentless and growing assault from AI bot farms referred to as agents, which are simultaneously making it less and less practical to maintain web sites and internet infrastructure due to increased costs, which could create a "lights out" situation for online documentation as the internet is choked off and dies in favor of MCP clients and servers which hide functionality behind obscure interfaces and website content ceases to be economically sustainable.

This will usher in a human "dark age", where the cost of information will be zero but the truth of anything if it existed previously will become unavailable to all but the very wealthy especially if it contradicts LLM sources. Otherwise, non AI sources of information will be stomped out and authoritarianism will rule over all government and peoples, unleashing perpetual war, famine and genocide.

But other than that it will be fine.

they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic told them to.

there is no frontier. there is only greed and lying.

If you or I did this we would be put in jail. We have to disabuse govt of the notion that these agents are not under complete control of their owners.

Open AI employees should go to jail.

I have a better question? Why would you trust OpenAI or any AI company, at all? Or you crazy?

This article makes more sense if you remove the self congratulatory verbiage from it, and the cost rationale which I believe is zero.

Most orgs used REACT native becuase they simply didnt have the interest or talent to build mobile apps using native tech. Many many companies outsource the entire thing for the same reason.

So NOW that its been many years, and LLMs are there to help them they arent simply AFRAID to build a native mobile app anymore.

Thats the entire article. The rest is utter nonsense and bullshit.

im not a fan of react native per se , but this reasoning does not add up.

they are going to "delete an app" because they got some LLM to slop out 2 apps?

The architect who wrote that is batshit and will be unemployed after this blows up in his face.

The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible.

If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities.

It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.

But what happens when the exec level managers are done with all these AI training sessions and rollouts and realize nothing has improved?

What about the loss of productivity of developers who are forced to entertain tons of noise about AI and take training and attend sessions which do not increase their productivity and instead takes time away from real work?

Are employers running a software shop or a church?

I rather enjoy Finder as a power user and software engineer who stopped using windows 20 years ago. Although I do have to use it for work occasionally. Windows explorer is nothing to crow about. Its definitely worst of breed. It misrepresents the file system more than any tool I have used and its a buggy disgusting piece of software that has 3 generations of windows trash still left in it that MS refuses to clean up.

Say what you want about Finder, but only a Windows devotee would dare put Explorer in a pile of anything to emulate. It is the worst of all possibilities and in that sense fits the host OS to a "T"

The asteroid is the author and his horrible attitude towards software development. People giving in like this is an indication that they really didnt have much to offer in the first place and viewed "dev experience" as he puts it as just some way to be clever.

Also when someone says something like "I literally worked on a browser performance team", using the parlance of a middle school cheerleader to describe that work, I dont have a feeling that these experts bowing out is really going to have much impact.

In general, I have always felt UI, and UI adjacent developers to be the least serious of us and this article backs that up.

Pair programming is one person coding, and one person watching.

In our current environment using AI, individual development also "doesnt scale", so this "doesnt scale", 2X.

I think these proponents of AI have a very large burden on them to not just make this palatable for developers, but to actually make it "scale" as you say.

The human code review process for AI generated code will simply die due to lack of interest. Its up to the organization to find a suitable replacement or continue to pretend that half asleep disinterested developers are going to fix all this trash.

Have fun with that!