AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 2,627Joined 2 yr. ago
Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.
The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.
The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven't had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.
Whilst personally this benefits me, I'm totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.
I have the impression that most people (or maybe it's my faith in Humanity that's at an all time low and it's really just "some people") just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.
Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it's ever popular simple explanations of "Deity did it" and "it's the will of Deity")
Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.
Middle and upper management are like little children - they'll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.
Good programmers (and I don't mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.
They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn't invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).
I think that misconception of "good coders do not produce bugs" in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it's at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a "good coder" must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don't get lost or don't forget things (especially for code you don't see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).
I've done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it's a total PITA.
The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.
Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.
It's pretty much the same as AIs do - copy and past random code from Stackoverflow - but they do it automatically.
"Family friendly UI" is "ultra-advanced" stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)
There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of (what was then) non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I'm just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.
That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn't really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn't even seem to have the concept of a user.
I haven't tried Jellyfin but people's talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn't need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it's not quite the same and does things I don't really need.
Having lived in the UK and even participated in a politics there (as a member of the Greenparty, FYI) it seems to me that both the English's power elites' support of an ethno-Fascist regime abroad even while it activelly commits Genocide (reminiscent of Thatcher's support of Apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet in Chile) and their authoritarian solutions to Environmentalism as a "problem" of people demonstrating rather than the Environment being destroyed, are all part of a broader pattern of Rightwing Authroritarianism were also fit things like the extreme Civil Society Surveillance denounced by Snowden (which, curiously, whilst in the US some was deemed unconstitutionally and walked back, in the UK laws were passed to make it all retroactively legal and the Press was shut up using D-Notices) and other general trends in the exercise of power in the country (remember how the Tories passed a law that de facto created minimum £1000 penalties in all criminal cases).
This is not even new - Environmentalist organisations were infiltrated by undercover police back in the 80s/90s who even left some women there carrying their children and things like kettling were used against demonstrators back in the big anti-Finance and anti-Austerity demonstrations in London after the 2008 Crash were even an unarmed and non-violent person got killed by a police officer (a case were the officer in question ultimatelly got out with no meaningful penalty).
Brexit wasn't born in a vacuum and compared with the rest of Europe the UK has been further Right and more Authoritarian, copying the worst bits of the American system rather than the best and mixing them with a heavily and well entrenched classism and the idea that people should know their place, with no tradition of rule by consensus and an electoral system - First Past The Post - that generally results in Winner Takes All outcomes were a mere 35% of votes is enough for absolute majorities which are pretty much all powerful since Britain foesn't have a written Constitution.
Having lived in a few countries in Europe, I came out of over a decade in the UK with the idea that it was the country in Europe most likely to turn Fascist. A posh style of Fascism but Fascism none the less.
Sadly New Labour, who ideologically are something else altogether than (old) Labour, seem just as prone to Authoritarianism as the Tories, which actually makes sense given that it was during New Labour's last period in Government that the most extreme civil society surveillance apparatus in the West was built in Britain.
TL;DR in summary, Britain even under New Labour is very rightwing and riddled with authoritarianism and their unwavering support (once again) for violent Fascism abroad fits the pattern and is a nice reminder of how its power elites think.
That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).
Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.
It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern "media library" interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).
Nice, an Appeal To Absurd Falacy in the wild.
Hadn't see one of those in a day or two.
It says a lot that you went for making fantastical claims about the messenger rather than for disproving the message.
Well, that's the funny bit: the government in the UK aren't the Conservatives, they're New Labour who are Neoliberals, by the standards of the rest of Europe they're even Hard Neoliberals.
Nowadays the difference between Conservatives and Liberals is really just the subset of Morality that's used in Identity Politics. They're certainly not different on Economics, not on Quality Of Life for the many, not on a good Future for our Children (which provides a Selfishness-driven reason be an Environmentalist, which is better than nothing) and certainly not on Environmentalism as a Moral posture.
We get some loud confrontational bullshit from both around various "-isms" all the while they're both doing what's best for the most wealthy of society and screw the rest (both present and future) and definitely screw anybody or anything that has no money and no capability for action, such as Nature.
You see that exact same shit in the US, by they way, as well as (in not quite as extreme form) in most of Europe.
Meanwhile the UK still keeps on sending weapon shipments to an actively Genocidal Israel (they recently stopped but 20 out of 300 kinds of such exports).
It didn't took long to disprove the hopes of anybody who thought New Labour would be anything but a slightly less hard Right than the Tories.
It's wonderful how the expression "humble Arch Linux user" manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.
How much would that be in Libraries Of Congress if written down?
Well, the trend in the last decade or two has been a more or less continuous decrease in people's opinion of America and everything American, in Europe.
That's actually reflected in Europe's Far-Right also: compared to the US version it's way less concerned with Religion, way less concerned with Homosexuality and Transsexuality, way less prone to things like anti-vacination and anti-mask, and so on.
I mean, I've see a couple of times the local far right rabble rousers trying to ape American far right talking points and it just fell flat on their audience.
I mean, absolutely the local far right wants to be as successful as that in the US and they do definitely share the whole Immigration Hate, whilst beyond that the rest of the American far right obcessions don't tend to go down well in European societies (at least not in the countries I lived in: for example the leader of the first successful far right party in The Netherlands was very openly gay, something unthinkable in the US) and since people don't want to be more like Americans anymore (nowadays, it's probably quite the contrary) I don't quite see how those very American Far-Right ideas will find more acceptance in Europe in the future.
Not amongst the crowd that supports him, as they're are all about how they feel about him, not about intellectually judging the quality of his arguments.
The "He was a weak drained old man in that debate" path of attack should be far more effective on that crowd, specifically on the ones who look up to him as being (in their view) strong, assertive and confident, who are probably the majority.
Like every other strongman "leader" out there, Donald's strength in impressing a certain kind of voter - the ability to project an image of being decisive and assured for the more "instinctive judgments" and less intellectual crowd - becomes a weakness with age in situations when they're publicly confronted with a younger and sharper opposing candidate.
I disagree: as a Bachus of Programming I have successfully managed to at the same time both be a God of Programming AND having no clue what's going on.
(The real joke behind the joke is that today I'm doing Shader programming so that's quite close to reality and I could definitelly do with large amounts of wine or at least beer).
I've worked as a freelancer (specifically as a Contractor) in Software Development for over a decade and more often than not I ended up having to work with some existing code base, having to deal with the design choices, coding style and bugs of somebody else, often multiple somebody elses.
There's nothing quite as "entertaining" as having to deal with 3+ different code and design styles in the same code base because all previous developer thought their own way of doing things was the superior way so just added one more layer of their style (not just coding but, worse, software design) on top of what was already there increasing the mess, rather than work within the existing structure and style and doing some refactoring.
Anyway, in my experience having to read, understand and work with existing code that you yourself did not made is way more time costly and less pleasant than actually doing your stuff from scratch.