> The software has more rights and privilege than actual humans at this point.
That's been true for some time though, right? For example if you have a community notice board in front of your store and someone pins illegal content to it you're held to a different legal standard than if someone posts the same content to a social media platform.
I don’t think that’s right either, but this kind of “tech exceptionalism” has been baked into law for decades. AI is inheriting those privileges more than inventing new ones.
But seriously, I wonder why this happens. My experience of working with LLMs in English and Japanese in the same session is that my prompt's language gets "normalized" early in processing. That is to say, the output I get in English isn't very different from the output I get in Japanese. I wonder if the system prompts is treated differently here.
In my experience it's less about the latest generation of LLMs being better, and more about the tooling around them for integration into a programmer's workflow being waaaay better.
The article doesn't explicitly spell it out until several paragraphs later, but I think what your quoted sentence is alluding to is that Cursor, Cline et al can be pretty revolutionary in terms of removing toil from the development process.
Need to perform a gnarly refactor that's easy to describe but difficult to implement because it's spread far and wide across the codebase? Let the LLM handle it and then check its work. Stuck in dependency hell because you updated one package due to a CVE? The LLM can (often) sort that out for you. Heck, did the IDE's refactor tool fail at renaming a function again? LLM.
I'm remain skeptical of LLM-based development insofar as I think the enshitification will inevitably come when the Magic Money Machine breaks down. And I don't think I would hire a programmer that needs LLM assistance in order to program. But it's hard to deny that it has made me a lot more productive. At the current price it's a no-brainer to use it.
I assume SoftTalker is referring to SWEs not being Professional Engineers.
Professional Engineer (PE) != Engineer (in many jurisdictions)
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems.
> He/she is able to assume _personal responsibility_ for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer.
This hasn't been my experience with English/Japanese translation with Google Translate. For context I used Google Translate for pair programming with Japanese clients 40 hours per week for about 6 months, until I ponied up for a DeepL subscription.
As long as you're expressive enough in English, and reverse the translation direction every now and again to double check the output then it works fine.
This is fascinating to me as an ex-mainframer that now works on a niche hyperscaler. I would love to learn more!
Will you let me know some of the names in the space so that I can research more? Some cursory searching only brings up some questionably relavent press releases from IBM.
My general strategy is to find a community where $domainExperts hang out and figure out how they talk about $interestingThing, then refine my search from there using progressively more professional lingo.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm aware that VMware used to donate to a lot of causes and now Broadcom doesn't (source: I also work there :)).
My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.
I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, one of their large supporters was VMware[0], which was aquired by Broadcom at the end of last year. Although I'm skeptical that the loss of a single 'community partner' would cause the whole organization to fold. There are teirs above community which presumably donate more to enjoy title[1]
I’m not meaning to equate the level of effort or skill involved. And I’ll grant that I know very little about music composition beyond my experience in Middle School band in which the musicians’ personality and skill presents a significant constraint for the conductor/arranger :)
I would readily compare the experience of reading Snow Crash (one of the first SciFi books I read of my own volition) to the output that a LLM may produce from such a prompt. My iPhone informs me that I’ve spent nearly 10 hours playing with Characters.ai in which SF storytelling characters are my favorite to interact with. When I first read Snow Crash I felt like “finally, an author that understands that part of the story that _I’m_ interested in!” and my experiences of AI driven creative writing has felt similar. Certainly it feels less “magical” since I’m aware that I’m customizing the author to my personal taste - is that “magic” of feeling connected to the artist *the* art?
> sounds cool, now what can we do with that to make it into music?
So a human using the tools of sound production is what transforms the function output into music. (Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding you).
I think I see what you’re saying, but that’s already happened here hasn’t it?
I mean, it's not as though an AI made the decision to generate this all by itself, a human had an idea to create this piece and wrote a prompt which created this output.
The order is of events is reversed from your Ableton example, but I would contend that this kind of production is no less musical than what someone could create using a DAW, simply that the tools are more accessible
(and I presume there is less direct control over what the end result is going to sound like, but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.)
Eta: For example, some people in this thread have complained that the AI generated voice falls into the uncanny valley. I agree, and I think that’s part of the art here.
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
That's been true for some time though, right? For example if you have a community notice board in front of your store and someone pins illegal content to it you're held to a different legal standard than if someone posts the same content to a social media platform.
I don’t think that’s right either, but this kind of “tech exceptionalism” has been baked into law for decades. AI is inheriting those privileges more than inventing new ones.