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Excellently built, no nonsense site. Refreshing to see a site that just loads instantly without spinners. The exercises are also well thought out.

There's an excellent little book in German called "KI und der Neue Faschismus" [1] (AI and the New Fascism) where the author (Rainer Mühlhoff) tries to warn about the dangers of decisions based on opaque statistical models (like LLMs) instead of a clear, human auditable decision process.

[1]: https://rainermuehlhoff.de/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam...

I am watching websites and Microsoft apps get slower and buggier before my eyes. We are defending into vibe-psychosis and chaos.

Do https://htdp.org and follow all the exercises carefully (yes, it will feel like baby work at first) - you will retrain your brain for functional stuff. :-)

What a beautifully designed website. Everything is thoughtfully set-up and well placed. A great example of a well curated digital garden. It feels well kept and very human crafted.

I also really like the distinction between a function and procedure. The function is a pure mathematical function. The procedure is a series of instructions.

I was a few years into amateur self-teaching at that time. It helped me think through problems recursively, which was a lot of fun, but my biggest takeaway was learning to think of problems by representing the data with types, then stubbing out functions that dealt with the different types that I needed to solve the problem. Although it's done with an untyped language, it makes you think through the type signatures of all the functions you write. I discovered that whenever something didn't work, the problem was almost always that I misunderstood the data or the type. I also learned how to deal with problems with recursive algorithms through trees and nested data structures like s-expressions. That opened up a whole world of parsing and evaluating.

I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.

Haskell thriving in the wild!

That's so sad. Presumably they won't also be asking, "why is this breaking so often?"

Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?

> "To combat this we need to write a security context file to guide the AI, be cautious with AI permission requests, create a daily security intelligence feed, and provide builders with a secure-by-default harness and templates."

Edit: To combat this we need to actually write and understand our code.

Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI.

> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...

A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.

In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.

How's the AI generated code running for ya?

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were:

- PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes

- An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.

- The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

I've really enjoyed using CloudFlare and I've been impressed, but I'm afraid it will descend into a broken mess as they enthusiastically use more and more vibe-coding.

> I am under the impression that I can’t “take my time” to think about a problem anymore. It almost feels wasteful now. I have to “just do it”.

This exactly, has been the problem in cultures that have produced broken, lower quality things in general. Don't think deeply about the problem and don't think about the long term consequences. Just grab whatever solution gives some immediate solution the fastest. "Jugaar."

Many people are slipping into this culture now with the new pressure for immediate production pushed by the AI crowd. It's "jugaar." It's trading short term gain for long term breakage, chaos, and pain. It's also social and economic pressure to not do things properly.

Those who want to take the time time to really understand things, or to build things correctly are mocked or punished for being slow and simple minded. "Just do it this way, look everyone is doing it and making more money faster!" This is also part of that culture that drags everyone into jugaar.

What are the big benefits of the runtime (BEAM) that are drawing people?

I'm so glad I switched to NeoVim. I've got the good LSP and auto-complete stuff, a nicer grepping experience, semantic moving and selecting with treesitter textobjects, and absolutely ZERO LLM AI stuff. (I still use LLMs outside my editor for some searching and questions, but may try to cut that down too.)

Call me a Luddite, but we are up against something extra insidious with this new AI wave, and the cracks of the psychosis are starting to show.

This is not just another abstraction. It is something fundamentally different because it is a jump away from deterministic, transparent processes to a probabilistic black box. It's not like a jump from orality to books to digital media, or hand written arithmetic to calculators to programs. These abstractions were solid and dependable and could be relied upon to tackle harder problems. This abstraction is beyond leaky.

The assumption that "that person understands the issue better than you" is bold when the best AI summaries will often give back completely false summaries on any given issue.

I was talking to a teacher and she was explaining how everyone is reaching for AI to have everything explained to them. "I'm too dumb to understand things," is the basic assumption people are now growing up with, reaching for AI summaries all the time without trying to understand anything themselves.

Instead of trying to understand things, people are reaching for better tools to have the thinking done for them. We are losing something huge.

All those examples are fundamentally different because those are hard-coded, deterministic programs/algorithms/libraries.

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.

Exactly. In direct contrast to this would be how Xerox and Bell funded laboratories just to pursue knowledge, without demands of profit. They ended up creating incredibly profitable things when driven my knowledge, and not profit.

I also read a book about math where the author argued that while the Greeks were driven to pursue truth for truth's sake, they ended up being far more productive and innovative. The Romans who were more driven to work for solutions to immediate practical needs, ended up being not so productive and innovative. He used this as a defense for efforts in pure math that seems to have no immediate application but ends up being massively, surprisingly powerful and productive for practical applications down the road. I think the same could be said for software development focussed on truth and correctness, rather than immediate productivity.

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.

I don't know how many times I've seen some Google AI summary or ChatGPT with references that, when I checked, did not say what what the AI summary said. If a high school student falsified references in a paper like this, they would get a bad or failing grade. This is bad, not acceptable, the teacher would say.

But we have been sold to use these constantly falsified AI summaries as the go-to source of "truth" by all levels of society. We're trading truth for an illusion of short-term gains. This will not have good consequences.

It's almost like people don't actually want LLMs all over their core tools...

I lived in Calgary for 4 years before we had smart phones w/ maps. The grid system was amazing, it was like being able to give easily processed human GPS coordinates. "Let's meet at 7th Ave and 9th Street." Done!

Drivers for laptops. Do all the sound cards work flawlessly? Is the power usage/battery life similar? Sadly this is a big part of what holds it back.

> By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself.

I love these quotes. I got a much deeper, more elegant understanding of the grammar of a human language as I wrote a phrase generator and parser for it. Writing and refactoring it gave me an understanding of how the grammar works. (And LLMs still confidently fail at really basic tasks I ask them for in this language.)

Except your team is full of occasionally insane "people" who hallucinate, lie, and cover things up.

We are trading the long term benefits for truth and correctness for the short term benefits of immediate productivity and money. This is like how some cultures have valued cheating and quick fixes because it's "not worth it" to do things correctly. The damage of this will continue to compound and bubble up.