I agree, but this works too because AI makes prototyping more rapid. It's common to be stuck with suboptimal solutions because of time constraints. Maybe the feature isn't really what the customer wants, or maybe the code isn't actually very good. But it reaches prod anyway.
But, with AI, the cost of code has gone down more than it already has. Well, cheap things are easy to throw away. So you prototype, prototype, prototype, and close the loop as much as possible with the customer. True agile development, not big A Agile.
The problem is this requires alignment from management, and we're just not seeing it at many company. They can't grasp that things have changed, and that throwing away code is free. They don't trust engineers to close that gap, so customers and stakeholders are still waaaaaay over there and we're delivering features they don't want.
Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.
And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.
I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.
Yes but it was largely built on trust, under the assumption the American president would have the best interest of Americans as heart, even if he and his constituency may disagree from time to time. It was a fair assumption, which is now permanently broken.
We now must consider the possibility that our president is a malicious or foreign actor, intent on destroying the US. Granted, we DID consider this in the beginning after the revolutionary war. But we slowly forgot, and did not build in nearly enough protections. Modern America is nothing like post-revolutionary America. Everything is more complex, and our government bigger and power powerful than ever.
Yes, some states, like mine, had virtually zero lockdown. And we also have some of the highest population of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers, somehow. I still hear people talking about the effects of the lockdown. The lockdown that never happened. And the covid vaccine mandates. Which also never happened.
Broken clock syndrome is very easy to "pull off" in medicine because medicine is incredibly complex and it's all risk calculus. For even the most benign or life-saving drugs, you can conjure up examples of how they've killed people. That includes vaccines, unfortunately.
So these people have a leg to stand on. It's a wooden leg (arrrg) but they have a leg. Of course they, and their supporters, are never doing any kind of statistical analysis or risk calculus. The the "risk" part is the thing that really, really matters. I mean, we have chemotherapies which have a very high chance of fucking your shit up or even killing you. But untreated cancers are fatal, and sometimes very quickly. It's all nuanced.
For businesses that build software (which is more than you'd think, as this includes the entire financial sector), building vs. buying has an entirely new scale.
At work, which I won't say where, we replaced a few SaaS we were using with in-house software. We largely have a culture of in-house software so it made sense. These were not small tools. They were behemoths created by multi-billion dollar software houses. And we replaced them, entirely, in the span of weeks. The reason it worked is we already had many domain experts in those tools.
The advantages don't stop at "money". The biggest advantage is complete control. We can integrate across our other tools, for free. We can add whatever features we want.
Yes, these models are very good at writing code but they absolutely suck ass at prose. The prose is annoying and repetitive. At least we only have to deal with it in prompting if you're writing code.
Oh, and comments. You have to do a good amount of prompting to not get shitty 10-line-long comments everywhere.
Well the messaging we’re told is that the google play store exists for safety - such an app would never exist on there.
Of course this isn’t true, the play store, and yes even the apple App Store to a lesser extent, is riddled with malware.
But what this demonstrates is that, clearly, Google doesn’t care too much about security or safety. It’s a pretense, not a goal. If it was a goal, they’d dump money into fixing the play store, but they won’t and they don’t.
So, we should be highly skeptical when they say something is for “safety” and “security”. At this point, it’s a lot like saying something is for “national security”.
There is no fear or anger. You've completely run out of arguments so you're resorting to plan B: make me out to be a crazy person. Because then, you're allowed to ignore crazy people.
Everything I am stating is fact. These things do happen, and when no accountability is taken, we call that "allowed to happen". They are allowed to happen, any reasonable person will agree.
You can be intellectually lazy and decide to plug your ears and go "lalala not listening!". That's fine, that's your choice. Just know that any reasonable person will look at that and realize you are not a critical thinker, and they will move on.
It goes hand in hand with Linux desktops too, because everything is just so much more scriptable. That used to be intimating, user unfriendly, and maybe it still is. But with AI it enables so many new avenues.
Linux on desktop and Linux on phone hardware are entirely different beasts.
Phones have literally never been open. Historically telecommunications has kept a tight, tight grip on everything, hardware and software included.
Even android, which is open source and based on Linux, cannot boot on any devices on earth without propriety blobs for the hardware. There is not UEFI or ACPI for phones, it doesn’t exist.
The entire history of IBM PCs and phones are just very different. This isn’t a Linux versus the rest thing. We already HAVE Linux on phones, for decades. That’s not the problem. The problem is the hardware manufactures and firmware. They absolutely will not let it go.
We saw this when Qualcomm entered the PC market. They wouldn’t upstream fuck all, and surprise surprise those chips were destined for the trash bin due to low support. That just doesn’t fly on PC, even on Windows. Say what you will about x86, intel and amd. But at least it’s an open and interoperable ecosystem.
The main threat, and this covers Face ID, is that law enforcement and ICE have a much easier time compelling these auth methods. The legal bar is much, much lower than passwords. You should always turn Face ID off when traveling, and ideally power off the phone.
Social engineering attacks can be thwarted by technical measures.
For example, try to social engineer a sim swap attack or number port attack with sim lock and port lock turned on. Won’t work. These attacks were super common just 5 years ago, now they’re effectively dead in the US.
You have to technically make sure the customer service people can’t break security. If you give them the keys, you’re cooked. So put the keys in a vault and then cover the vault in spikes and a 5 day timer.
Ripped from another comment, I’ve gotten good at advocating for myself:
Do extensive research before hand. AI can aide research, but you have to prompt it right. Tell it to do web searches, and tell it to only use trusted vetted sources and papers.
And the approach here isn’t to take the research at face value. It’s to take the research and derive questions, and then ask your doctor. You can be aggressive.
I had a rare and very complicated surgery for my cancer. I researched it heavily, and going into the appointment I already knew how the surgery should be performed. I asked the surgeon many questions, including how often he performs this surgery, for how many years, and how many complications he has. He was a bit offended. I also asked him how he would do the surgery, and he told me a rarer, more complicated method that is typically reserved for pre-chemo patients (chemo melts your insides, makes some surgery more complicated).
I told him this was unusual, not standard of care, and that I was skeptical. And he methodically laid out why I was a good candidate even though I’ve had chemotherapy. The surgery was very successful, and he was a fantastic surgeon.
But you still have to push. And if you don’t get the answers you need, you go somewhere else.
Right, and the approach here isn’t to take the research at face value. It’s to take the research and derive questions, and then ask your doctor. You can be aggressive.
I had a rare and very complicated surgery for my cancer. I researched it heavily, and going into the appointment I already knew how the surgery should be performed. I asked the surgeon many questions, including how often he performs this surgery, for how many years, and how many complications he has. He was a bit offended. I also asked him how he would do the surgery, and he told me a rarer, more complicated method that is typically reserved for pre-chemo patients (chemo melts your insides, makes some surgery more complicated).
I told him this was unusual, not standard of care, and that I was skeptical. And he methodically laid out why I was a good candidate even though I’ve had chemotherapy. The surgery was very successful, and he was a fantastic surgeon.
But you still have to push. And if you don’t get the answers you need, you go somewhere else.
One thing that really bothers me about agents is they generate excessively long and detailed comments.
This sounds good for review. Except… the comments are never intent or trade-offs, they’re always the “what”, which the code then duplicates right after. Comments should be short, concise “why”. Often I look at code and think “hm this is odd, I wouldn’t have done it this way, is there some constraint I don’t know about?”
The comment should explain that, not what the code is doing. If I wanted to know what the code is doing I’d read the code!
The perfect poster boy is system scripts. They’re not even published usually, but being able to just generate < 500 line scripts for everything is a huge boon.
While windows has containers, I’ve never seen them seriously used and realistically nobody is leaving docker or podman. I include podman in that because Red Hat was smart and made podman almost a direct drop in.
I’m very cynical about windows. Mostly because windows is bad in almost every way software can be bad.