1,064 karma · joined March 11, 2008
You can literally read the staff directory without having to guess: https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/
Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in their fields, and most are vastly more qualified in their fields than pretty much anyone else publishing online (both now and 20 years ago).
It seems that _certain kinds of individuals_ have had rose-colored glasses on about pretty much everything online, but for Ars especially for some reason.
They detest change in a publication that covers the reality of actual life and technology, rather that commit suicide and stay covering stuff the same way they did in 1997—which 8 people total want to read (and not pay for, by the way).
Ars has been operating at an exceptionally high level for their entire history and have outlasted many other flashes-in-the-pan which are now relegated to the dust bin of history.
Specifically the dynamic analysis skills could get a really big boost with this MCP server, I also wonder if this MCP server could be rephrased into a pure skill and not come with all the context baggage.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
Your bank is the entity you're ultimately upset with, don't malign a company that generated a _very good solution_ to a _huge problem_ and THEN worked with their industry peers to cajole these huge banks to let you have access to your data how you want to use it. Before Yodlee and Plaid came around there was a snowballs chance in hell I could ever hope to get at my banking transactions in an API and now I can, and in many cases I never have to give supply my banking credentials to anyone but my bank.
Heck one of the defining qualities of humans is that not only are we unpredictable and fundamentally unknowable to other intelligences (even other humans!) is that we also participate in sophisticated subterfuge and lying to manipulate other intelligences (even other humans!) and often very convincingly.
In fact, I would propose that our society is fundamentally defined and shaped by our ability and willingness to hide, deceive, and use mind tricks to get what our little monkey brains want over the next couple hours or days.
I don't need to imagine anything. I live on Earth in America and to my mind you've very accurately described the current state of human society.
For the vast majority of humans this is how it works currently.
The amount of government, military, and police and the capital, energy, and time to support all of that in every single country on earth is pretty much the only thing holding up the facade of "order" that some people seem to take for granted.
Humans are EXTREMELY unpredictable. Humans only become slightly more predictable and producers of slightly more quality outputs with insane levels of bureaucracy and layers upon layers upon layers of humans to smooth it out.
To boot, the production of this mediocre code is very very very slow compared to LLMs. LLMs also have no feelings, egos, and are literally tunable and directible to produce better outcomes without hurting people in the process (again, something that is very difficult to avoid without the inclusion of, yep, more humans more layers, more protocol etc.)
Even with all of this mass of human grist, in my opinion, the output of purely human intellects is, on average, very bad. Very bad in terms of quality of output and very bad in terms of outcomes for the humans involved in this machine.
My lived experience the software industry at almost all levels over the last 25 years leads me to believe that the vast majority of humans and teams of humans produce atrocious code that only wastes time, money, and people's patience.
Often because it is humans producing the code, other humans are not willing to fully engage, criticize and improve that code, deferring to just passing it on to the next person, team, generation, whatever.
Yes, this perhaps happens better in some (very large and very small) organizations, but most often it only happens with the inclusions of horrendous layers of protocol, bureaucracy, more time, more emotional exhaustion, etc.
In other words a very costly process to produce excellent code, both in real capital and human capital. It literally burns through actual humans and results in very bad health outcomes for most people in the industry, ranging from minor stuff to really major things.
The reality is that probably 80% of people working in the tech industry can be outperformed by an AI and at a fraction of the cost. AIs can be tuned, guided, and steered to produce code that I would call exception compared even to most developers who have been in the field for 5years or more.
You probably come to this fallacy because you have worked in one of these very small or very large companies that takes producing code seriously and believe that your experience represents the vast majority of the industry, but in fact the middle area is where most code is being "produced" and if you've never been fully engaged in those situations, you may literally have no idea of the crap that's being produced and shipped on a daily basis. These companies have no incentive to change, they make lots of money doing this, and fresh meat (humans) is relatively easy to come by.
Most of these AI benchmarks are trying to get these LLMs to produce outputs at the scale and quantity of one of these exceptional organizations when in fact, the real benefits will come in the bulk of organizations that cannot do this stuff and AI will produce as good or better code than a team of mediocre developers slogging away in a mediocre, but profitable, company.
Yes there are higher levels of abstraction around code, and getting it deployed, comprehensive testing, triaging issues, QA blah blah, that humans are going to be better at for now, but I see many of those issues being addressed by some kind of LLM system sooner or later.
Finally, I think most of the friction people are seeing right now in their organization is because of the wildly ad hoc way people and organizations are using AI, not so much about the technological abilities of the models themselves.
Most of the noise opposed to this release is generated by wildly ignorant or malicious people who don't even live in Colorado to wind up other reactionary, low-information people and make it look like liberals are releasing dangerous predators into a "red" part of the state to harm them.
Nothing could be further from the truth.