V0ldek

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.