davydm

the ai companies have a problem at the moment: the compute required for inference (especially) costs a metric shit-ton of money - so they're crowd-sourcing the funds (unsuccessfully so far, tbh - for example, a $20/m claude sub that i'm on for work, and I regularly see individual conversations where the tokens cost more than that - even up to $350.

It's a tool tho, not a panacea. With the right guidance, for example, you can get some good code results.

link is broken - should be: https://www.skeptic.com/article/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-dolp...

The title seems to suggest the author is talking about AGI - if the author is just co-opting the latest Trumpism, forget the rest of this...

I don't think we're anywhere near AGI yet. We have some clever models, sure, and outputs are getting better and better, but they're hardly AGI - the biggest missing bit being that they don't learn from experience - even "memories" which are carried from chat to chat are limited (and, in my experience, there's a 50/50 chance they just get ignored - I've had several rounds of "why did you do that, when I explicitly asked you not to?" with a back-pedal from the model).

IMO, AGI will not be achieved via LLMs. There has to be a radical change in how these things are built, and my feeling is that we should be working off of modelling what we understand of neurons in humans and animals. /2c

I guess that would depend on the level of the AI - for instance, no matter how much good press any existing model gets, if nuclear war broke out, and all the humans died, eventually infrastructure would fail (2-6 weeks, I'd guess - just basics like the remaining power plants and water providers being taxed without maintenance), and the AI goes dark.

If the AI had progressed to the point where it's controlling manufacturing, and there are no core professions that it relies on which can't be automated, then it could definitely outlive it's creators by far, but would face some of the same crises: global warming, resource scarcity, and, ultimately, final fates like having your planet swallowed by the system's host sun (like us). The same challenges that uphold the fermi paradox would apply there too, and perhaps we're too early in the development of the universe for the millions of years required for an artificial super-intelligence to have gotten there yet.

The author seems to think that these basic challenges wouldn't apply to an AI, which makes me think that they have far too much faith in AI, likely propped up by the rhetoric around the subject right now.

also, what really changes the game is requiring that one write the tests _first_. Generally, I haven't had to do this with an ai - but it's an interesting idea (get it to write the test(s) first, and vet them - like I would do in real life - except only one test at a time, then the red-green-refactor dance). Writing the test first forces you to narrow down what you want to accomplish and makes you think about how, such that the prod code runs well and tests don't run like treacle.

Anyhoo, 'nuff said: my opinion is that the OP should "git gud" or accept that they will never reap the benefits of a good test suite.

I came here to say something very similar - glad to know that there are other level-headed engineers out there.

As you've pointed out, the problem is literally a skill issue - the OP never really "got into" testing, they don't understand the usefulness, or what makes a test good or bad. This is like hiring a contractor, telling them vaguely "build me a house" and then complaining afterwards that the house they built isn't what you wanted. If you give ai no feedback, you'll get code (and tests) which are the median of what's publically visible in your field. If you want good results, you have to be prepared to teach the agent what you want, which includes feedback about how things should be done, and, ideally, _good examples in your code-base_. So I'd say it's easier for someone without testing fundamentals to get into the "tests are bad" state - they don't know what they did wrong, they don't know how to fix it, and they (boldly, and incorrectly) assume that the ai _does_ know. It knows _nothing_. It's a tool, and you'll spend at least some of your time correcting it.

I couldn't imagine feeling any sense of security without a healthy unit test suite. In particular, when adding a new feature, or updating something somewhere else, having some kind of automation that can tell me I didn't break stuff that wasn't broken before is invaluable.

Where the OP does have a point (albeit by implication) is that: WHEN TESTS RUN SLOWLY, EVENTUALLY, NO-ONE RUNS THEM.

When I joined the company I'm at now, they had about 2k tests on their main product - they couldn't be run reliably as a suite, so no-one did. They were indeed pointless. Now we have 15k tests on that project, and they run on every push, and before every deployment. The reason? My primary task was getting testing working reliably (which also included trying to get other devs to opt into proper testing - which had variable results - some people will push against what they see as "more work" for "no purpose" simply because they don't understand the purpose. The point is: now that they all run within about 5-10 minutes (depending on the host machine), they're run all the time, and they provide useful feedback when dev in one area has unintended side-effects in another area.

That's fine if you're looking at running hashcat or some other computation like that, but tells you nothing about gaming performance.

Is this ai-generated? because statements like this one contradict themselves:

"This group ended up taking 29% fewer sick days compared to the control group (IRR 0.71). Yet the study explicitly notes that there was no significant difference between groups regarding total sick days."

if you take 29% fewer sick days, how is there no significant difference between two groups regarding total sick days? Unless this is taking into account the entire year, not just the study period, in which case, the remedy works whilst using it, as backed by the numbers.

Why would I want a slower moving release cycle for an app I use for banking and other personal stuff, whilst the latest models are finding CVEs left right and center? Get outta here with your slow-moving fork.

"However, managers also had to grapple with a few dozen regressions in the resulting code, pointing to AI’s ongoing challenges in understanding Rust. "

The problem isn't rust or understanding rust. Agents make plenty of mistakes in mainstream languages like JavaScript and C#. The off-hand deflection signals, to me, that whoever came up with that excuse has far too much faith in the bots. We do have to check their code, and we will find errors.

some good lessons in there

on the PR topic tho: my latest challenge is putting out my rage fires after people lazily post a claude (or other aigen) review without any understanding themselves, forcing me to defend the code against agent errors. Yes, there are also useful things in there, but people are getting lazy - since "coding is solved", they seem to think PRs are also solved :/

because they're trained off of human data, and we lie, cheat, and co-ordinate to do so

ha, ironically, the average person will say the blog post is ai-generated because of the liberal usages of actual emdashes. I was literally shooed as a bot for using regular dashes recently :/

What makes this effective is the tagging (when done - it's not always done, and that could be a problem) - apparently the tagging process involves the stalker being court-ordered to wear a tamper-resistent ankle bracelet, a little like the ones people have to wear when under house arrest, but with a much farther reach: instead of being wirelessly tethered to a radio receiver in their home, the stalker tags upload GPS co-ordinates continuously, from wherever the wearer is.

yep, this is why people just chuck Claude reviews on my PRs, and why I bothered to set up sandboxing for Claude, so I can make the agent run a review before I take it to PR, so that at the very least, I can add commentary that steers Claude away from bad assumptions when it doesn't seem to understand the business domain, or how things are generally done. Tho, to be fair, it's also found some nifty edge cases in review, so there is some value there - things just fall over when someone can't be arsed to do more than point claude at it and copy-paste the results to the PR. And the people who were bad at review before (ask stupid questions, fight about stuff they don't understand) are just as annoying now, but they feel vindicated because they got Claude to do it, and they will take no responsibility for the time they waste (not that they ever did).

is it really prompt injection to just muddle currencies on the page? I'd argue not - though it _is_ a clearly disingenuous quote.

It's windows with some preinstalled stuff. Big deal.

AI is a tool. Your brain is only ruined if you allow your intelligence to be permanently outsourced to it.

I have an older Nothing phone. It's great.

Review is the bottleneck in those scenarios - and it's a _good thing_.

AI-gen code is often subtly (or obviously) incorrect. Human eyeballs are the cure. There is no way to go faster without compromising the value of the review.

What I've been super annoyed about recently is the number of times I've seen a completely stupid question on a PR - eg "why are you doing this?" when there's a comment right above that line about the why. Or "where else is this used?" - we all have IDEs and reviewers obviously have access to the code - stop being a lazy potato and check out the code locally.

I try to avoid adding these lazy people to PRs as they create more work than they help. But sometimes they end up on there anyway, because they're "important".

you could try linking to it if you actually want anyone to check it out :D

sudo for downloads? Are you bananas?

"Ubuntu is growing faster on Windows than on Linux" - how, when the virtual machine running under WSL is literally running a Linux kernel. If anything, it's just another Ubuntu installation. Alternatively, perhaps we should call Windows hosted in a vm on a Linux machine a Linux installation of Windows? I can't even with this nonsense.

hi, just wanted to let you know that I experienced continuous reload on the page, and captured this in the console:

Uncaught (in promise) Error: Unable to preload CSS for https://ocelot.lol/_app/immutable/assets/1.n1T2vemw.css Immutable 6 async* https://ocelot.lol/blog/2026/08/07/site-making-of:42 promise callback* https://ocelot.lol/blog/2026/08/07/site-making-of:41 HclGiUj8.js:1:921

can't wait for the YT vid showing one of these muppets tazing their own balls when they have an itch

Seriously, I'd like the new york times to die in a fire.

Apart from the paywalling, the stupid site has decided that I'm a bot - but I can load pages in a private window. I've tried clearing all storage for the site, but no-go.

So I'll apply the logic I do everywhere: if you're going to block me from reading it, it's not important, and I don't care.

I'd disagree: models a year from now will still be trained on public code - of which there's a rapidly rising percentage of aigen code, meaning it should, without specific guidance, degenerate, not improve. That's the real gamble here, and I'm hardly the first person to bring it up.

Some people don't. A lot of people just see a trillionaire whacko who can do whatever he wants because that's how society works - money talks.

You'd have to be well dear not to notice it. And our ears are more than good enough to home in on it to the point of seeing it. I recommend an ig nobel.

great until something goes wrong and you can't get your own data back :/