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Google is an ad tech company that occasionally makes a weird choice to launch other products.

I think it bears mentioning that like sand castles, software engineering has approximately zero building codes.

Try kicking over a building sometime. (Or don't - you'll stub your toe).

This is how we end up with "regulations written in blood", btw.

That and "oh, it's just software for a website that doesn't do anything important that couldn't actually damage anything".

> there's a type of person that clearly is on their last job of their career and knows it

Yup (and it's not ageism).

I'm young and stupid but forced by circumstance to practice a certain degree of respect for my own stupidity.

My philosophy is, "I write code like I expect it to outlive me".

Because sloppy work --AI generated or otherwise-- has a tendency to come back to haunt you.

Yeah, this is making me real glad that I know C well enough to stop being afraid of it.

Pinning certificates in a browser was a brilliant idea for Chrome because web browsers are not made for technical users.

But pinning certificates in a compiler? It's reminding me of that one time where the NSA handed out DES constants to use and said "just trust me, bro". I don't even care that the DES constants ultimately ended up being protections against differential-cryptanalysis SCA (which, btw, the NSA then undermined by arguing for shorter keylengths in "export-grade crypto").

Get off my lawn.

"There's no off-the-shelf option" is not a good reason to trash a preexisting component.

Build another one.

"interesting" in the same way that folks in the south say "Bless your heart".

> By virtue of Claude’s ability to write immense amounts of code much faster than we could ourselves, Scion is among the most well-tested and well-defended codebases we have ever worked on.

made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

> Plus, Anthropic is unique in that our ability to spend tokens for internal use far exceeds what any other business would realistically want to spend.

Wake me up when somebody tells them that they still have to pay for electricity.

Infringing on 4th amendment rights sounds like a crime to me.

LLMs are the ultimate "pin-headed manager who wants to pay programmers by the line and starts yanking cables that they don't understand"

The term "Chesterton's Fence" comes to mind.

There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.

PSA: Do not eat the yellow snow. There are not 15 hot singles in your area looking to meet up. Do not click mystery "Link to download" blobs from strangers.

Yep. It boggles my mind that software engineering is not a "strict liability" field.

Regarding

> The only thing that bothered me is that gender affirming is in fact an amputation, because they gave their clitorises to science.

one of the linked articles reads

> Peters collected samples from one side of dorsal nerve tissue, a small amount of which is typically trimmed during gender-affirming phalloplasty procedures.

which suggests the situation was perhaps less bothersome than you thought. (It sounds like the outcome was identical from the perpsective of the transmasculine individuals getting surgery- the only difference was the choice to analyze medical waste).

[humor]

The studio must've done something worse than introduce new technology, because they found a way to get Nic Cage to turn down a role.

My points of reference are

- Whatever Matthew McConaughey did to protect himself legally against AI-generated use of his likeness

- Whatever Michael Jackson's and Tupac's estates did to handle postmortem work. (Namely, MJ's album Xscape and Tupac's 2012 Coachella hologram).

- Whatever legal and economic shackles were placed on Britney Spears during her conservatorship.

- Terms of "360 deals" in the record industry.

- How SAG-AFTRA handled the introduction of CGI. Tl;dr: there's a distinction between "active performance capture" (e.g. live motion capture) vs. "passive capture" (e.g. photogrammetry scan of a face + CGI to animate it).

On another note: I remember watching BTS for National Treasure (where the treasure room scene in particular was somewhat new technology to be able to render that many reflective objects in one scene through CG alone). I know that Nicolas Cage has also done several CG-heavy films since then. Also, Nicolas Cage is a Coppola.

Overall, I imagine that the man has had enough exposure to the fiddly details of film contracts to know the difference between "the introduction of a new technology" vs. "somebody trying to screw him over".

And my 2c is that it sounds like the studio tried to screw him over.

Somebody bring back the ABET SWE PE exam already.

Serious question, what sort of FAFO timelines did you see?

(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).

Respectfully, I'm sure that there's some exotic usecase that is motivating the question, but

> nobody in decades thought to make this information accessible to the programmer

> otherwise free could not work

I'm inclined to say that you just answered your own question as to why.

I was always taught that "There are parts of a binary that are there for you, the lucky high-level language programmer. And then there are other parts of the binary which are there for the compiler to clean up after the spoiled little high-level language programmer who doesn't have to write their own assembly :)"

and

"If you want to argue with the compiler, that's what `gcc -S -fverbose-asm` and $YOUR_FAVORITE_TEXT_EDITOR` is for".

But I'm curious if this advice is unrealistic for said exotic usecase.

Do tell?

> we would use something called nunununuC

"C++", perhaps? :)

That is because C already worked everywhere even before CPU makers agreed on things like making pointers and words the same size.

Edit: And by "worked everywhere" I mean C did the heavy lifting of being a programming language that was even a little bit portable across architectures.

I'm with you there.

> if they are going to remove compatibility

C as a language has one job, and it is to not do this.

If it's any consolation, I figured that the author was using "Rust programmer" as a shorthand way to say "I know Rust best and that tends to be my point of comparison when learning other programming languages. But there's no particular loyalty there, and it's not like Rust is the only language I know. It's just the systems language that I already tend to think in".

> As such, there are plenty of "Rust for C Programmers" articles on the internet, but little to no "C for Rust Programmers" articles out there.

[obligatory] The original "C for ... programmers" article that convinced the world to make C as pervasive as it is today is K&R's "The C Programming Language".

I know it's in book form (egad!) and if you download a PDF, it's like 80 pages (double egad!). But it makes for surprisingly light reading.

This is rotten but I'm secretly glad that Claude et al are metering by the token.

I'm not sure that folks realize that the purpose of software engineering is to program in a way that doesn't just function, but optimizes for future readability, maintainability, and behavioral change in line with product requirements.

There's a reason why programmers are not paid "by the line", and it's because LoC as an incentive structure is a disaster that leads to brittle and verbose slop code -- and we knew that even before LLMs.

So I'm glad that the (long-term) economics mediate against token-hogging software by making it literally more expensive to deal with.

I just hope that managerial types are smart enough to realize that "time to understand/upgrade/change a codebase" still matters, whether that's expressed in terms of SWE work hours or LLM tokens.

> AI has no "want"

Have you asked it?

I think that software engineering is finally entering the "regulations written in blood" era.

If this broke your tests, they were already broken.

The change just clarified the fact that you were ignoring the guidelines posted on the site that politely instructed you not to do the thing that you did, because it can result in the thing that you got.

> more aligned to the internet in the early days when there was more trust.

please for the love of alan turing understand that trust happens iff there are reasonably-enforceable boundaries, and "oh we're friends, let's opt out of reasonable information-theoretic security primitives" is not a healthy or friendly behavioral pattern.

/ if your PKI is so obnoxiously difficult to set up correctly that people are inclined to skip the crypto altogether, please get help.

sorry for the grouchy tone, I'm just sick of hearing software engineers pretend that shoddy quality control issues and products riddled with security holes is somehow positive.