Oh, oof. But also ... huh. Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy? Dunno if he's an unreliable narrator or was just smart enough to keep the white supremacy out the comics at first.
> Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy?
I'd bet dollars to donuts that (if there is truth at all to him being told what he claims) the superiors making the promotion decisions so that told him he was being passed over because he was a White men were also White men. If he had to justify it, he might say that PHB also became a manager before the wave of political correctness.
So, I had no reason to use "unsafe" for a very long time, and had developed a bit of an aversion to it. Then I actually needed to use it, first to interface with some C code, and then to deal with a device's mmap'd memory as raw `&[u8]`s.
And my discovery (which basically anyone could have told me beforehand) was that ... "unsafe" rust is not really that different from regular rust. It lets you dereference pointers (which is not a particularly unusual operation in many other languages) and call some functions that need extra care. Usually the presence of "unsafe" really just means that you needed to interface with foreign functions or hardware or something.
This is all to say: implying that mere presence of an "unsafe" keyword is a sign that code is insecure is very, very silly.
Money rules everything and if there is one thing the donor class will not lose is their money. They are willing to turn a blind eye to the ripping up of the Constitution but as soon as you rip up the money, phone calls will be made, meetings will be had, and Vanguard and JP Morgan and Walmart will get what they want.
And what is stopping the donor class from simply jumping ship, or at least moving portions of their assets into forms that are shielded from what is going on?
Republican representatives have been very much behaving like cattle, they're scared and they think that there are no other options but to cower and to jump to Trump's every whim. If one of them stands tall and survives (which remains to be seen) and speaks up then quite possibly others will follow.
Republicans are afraid of their base. This is what has been said by republican reps when asked why they don’t break with Trump. Even now, Trump has some impressive Republican approval numbers given the scenario America finds itself in.
He operates on a version of America that is a shadow of the old nation, and in that shadow, it doesn’t actually need the capabilities and complexities it had developed over the past century. It needs to be simple enough to get votes and conversation points on Fox, and everything else can be blamed on some meme of the moment. It’s insane to see, but apparently we have the technology to make Hallucination driven government work.
> Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
This is a very sad, bleak, and utilitarian view of "work." It is also simply not how humans operate. Even if you only care about the product, humans that enjoy and take pride in what they're doing almost invariably produce better products that their customers like more.
I guess everyone dealing with legacy software sees code as a cost factor. Being able to delete code is harder, but often more important than writing code.
Owning code requires you to maintain it. Finding out what parts of the code actual implement features and what parts are not needed anymore (or were never needed in the first place) is really hard. Since most of the time the requirements have never been documented and the authors have left or cannot remember. But not understanding what the code does removed all possibility to improve or modify it. This is how software dies.
Churning out code fast is a huge future liability. Management wants solutions fast and doesn't understand these long term costs. It is the same with all code generators: Short term gains, but long term maintainability issues.
Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do you write code for new features and bug fixes?
The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not mean you should have it churn out 1000x more code. You might have a list of 20 critical features and it have time to implement 10. AI could let you get all 20 but shouldn’t mean you check in code for 1000 features you don’t even need.
I write code. On a good day perhaps 800-1000 "hand written" lines.
I have never actually thought about how much typing time this actually is. Perhaps an hour? In that case 7/8th of my day are filled with other stuff. Like analysis, planning, gathering requirements, talking to people.
So even if an AI removed almost all the time I spend typing away: This is only a 10% improvement in speed. Even if you ignore that I still have to review the code, understand everything and correct possible problems.
A bigger speedup is only possible if you decide not to understand everything the AI does and just trust it to do the right thing.
Maybe you code so fast that the thought-to-code transition is not a bottleneck for you. In which case, awesome for you. I suspect this makes you a significant outlier since respected and productive engineers like Antirez seem to find benefits.
Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.
I feel like this is a forest for the trees kind of thing.
It is implied that the code being created is for “capabilities”. If your AI is churning out needless code, then sure, that’s a bad thing. Why would you be asking the AI for code you don’t need, though? You should be asking it for critical features, bug fixes, the things you would be coding up regardless.
You can use a hammer to break your own toes or you can use it to put a roof on your house. Using a tool poorly reflects on the craftsman, not the tool.
> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting
Right? We don't store nuclear waste where I work ... BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables, basically the same thing. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options. The engineers evaluated the options before purchasing and checked what we received before installing it. There wasn't even a formal process, it's just ... how you do your job?
Obviously organizational dysfunction is a real thing, particularly at LANL, so I can definitely imagine how this sort of thing can fall through the cracks for various processes. But I feel like but requirements verification should be a rigorously enforced formal procedure before storing nuclear waste in perpetuity.
The difference is that in a large organization the people documenting the procedure, the people doing the procurement, the people receiving the order and the people packing the drums are all different people. Potentially in different buildings. You can't expect the original scientist who wrote the white paper based on experiments in a glovebox to be present every time they pack waste into drums.
> AI is not there yet to replace any person's job.
This is of course true, but it has not actually prevented any layoffs. Management generally does not understand this, does not care, or is happy to have a pretext to fire a bunch of workers to make stock go up.
Love this. Both my reason for wanting to replace macos and my biggest blocker to doing so is needing a desktop GUI with some HIG consistency, which is apparently a very old-fashioned idea these days.
Really, anything that can adhere to the old-school HIG well enough to offer A) consistent keyboard shortcuts across the apps that B) use a dedicated, thumb-actuated command key, I'm sold. (The `control` key, and thereby your pinkie finger, should both only be used for sending terminal escape sequences, as god intended [1].)
Without knowing exactly how far the common "debloat" Windows tools go, which every computer-toucher seems to recommend, I'd assume the overlap between "Users that disable, intentionally or otherwise, telemetry" and "Users that use 'Right-click -> More Options'" isn't quite a circle - but it is approaching one
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