For anyone who doesn’t know, the guy in the third panel is Newt Gingrich. 50th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. A man whose high moral character (ha ha) caused him to lead the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair while he himself was also having an affair.
I think you mean, “Mr. god-like smarty pants.”
Whelp, if you can see what I’m thinking on my face, I guess I might as well say it out loud.
Still I wonder what the future holds and suppose it’s still too early to know how this will all turn out. I will admit that I’m more in the naysayers camp, but perhaps that’s from a fear of losing my livelihood?
It’s all just conjecture at this point. I vividly remember how “the cloud” was allegedly going to help organizations eliminate the IT department, dramatically lower operating costs, and basically put every system admin out of a job.
It succeeded at none of those things. It did help some organizations shift costs from CapEx to OpEx. But it also effectively made data centers available to organizations (and individuals) who didn’t have access to that kind of technology before. It didn’t live up to the hype but it has had a major impact.
Personally, I figure a lot of these “AI” companies are going to fold. There’s just not any value in cramming LLM’s into every product. Not to mention we’ve spent the better part of 30+ years trying to get away from users having to type when they want the computer to do something. Moving back away from a “point- and-click” interface, which has hardly reached its general best state, could be a steep uphill battle.
Again, all conjecture.
Context: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750) is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. A musical genius, he composed 1128 pieces in total. Many for the harpsichord and organ, including one for four harpsichords.
Impressive to say the least.
“We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents, told me. “It’s like we’ve been walking our whole lives,” he says, but now they have been given a ride, “and it’s fast as [expletive].” Like many of his peers, though, Yegge can’t quite figure out what it means for the future of his profession. For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job.
Hate to tell them this but if the LLM’s available today are really somehow making you 10 x as productive, then you suck at your job. I suppose the opinion tracks though. I have worked with way too many devs who can pump out lines of bug filled, poor performing code at a rapid pace while seeming to have no idea how it works or how to fix it. These are the same people who are now gleefully hacking together a bunch of LLM generated code that they still don’t know how to read.
You still have to understand the complexities and nuances of the tools that your using because the LLM you’re generating code with does not and it will come back to bite you in the ass.
Himalayan Goose: “Honk! Honk!”
Mountain Climber on Everest:
“Get back here…”
Takes breath of oxygen
“…you son of a bitch!”
In the immortal words of the Ecclesiast, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. …there is nothing new under the sun.”
The state of Texas is being used to hide and smuggle migrants into the US and I hereby call on the Trump administration to secure our border by removing Texas.
This makes me think of a conversation between my wife and daughter a while back.
Daughter is angry with her BF and frustrated that he seems oblivious to that
Wife: “Oh honey, no. It doesn’t work like that. If I’m mad at your dad for something I just have to tell him. If he asks if I’m OK and I say, ‘I’m fine’, he takes that at face value. He’s very literal.”
Daughter: “Ugh. Doesn’t that frustrate you?”
Wife: “It was weird at first but once you get used to it it’s actually really nice. You just have to learn to talk to him.”
Me: “Wait, I did something right?”
Wife: “You do lots of things right babe.”
Yeah, I think she likes me.
I honestly don’t care if we choose permanent standard time or DST. Either one would be better than having to switch twice a year. I’ll even propose a compromise: we can try one for a year, try the other for the next year, and see which one works better.
Not doing either because we can’t agree on which one should be permanent seems like the worst option.
One time I worked in this IT department where, for the first six months, they literally didn’t give me anything to do. The department head would come check on me multiple times per day, to the point of being really annoying, but not give me any tasks even when I asked for work to do. This guy had been Peter Principled a long time ago.
I knew how IT Ops works so I started finding problems that I needed his help to fix and politely hounding him about it until he he got me what I needed. It didn’t take him long to start avoiding me.
I do not miss that place at all.
Edit: They even gave me a promotion with a kind of implicit understanding that I was supposed to somehow manage this guy even though I was one of his direct reports. Turned out management was incompetent all the way up the ladder. If you find yourself in that position, GTFO as soon as possible. It will make you miserable.
If you asked the president of the United States to point to Denmark on a map, you would be lucky if he hit the correct continent so… I’m going with “plausible.”
Any idiot can write code. “Vibe coding” is just the new pasting code from stack overflow. For that matter, a lot of LLM generated code probably came from stack overflow.
Your value as a developer is not in your ability to rapidly pump out code. Your value is in your ability to design and build complex systems using the tools at your disposal.
As an industry, software engineering has not yet been forced to reckon with the consequences of “vibe coding.” The consequences being A.) the increasing number of breaches that will occur due to poor security practices and B.) the completely unmanageable mountain of technical debt. A lot of us have been here before. Particularly on the tech debt front. If you’ve ever been on a project where the product team continually pushes to release features as fast as possible, everything else be damned, then you know what I mean. Creating new code is easy. Maintaining old code is hard.
Everything starts out great. The team keeps blowing through milestones. Everyone on the business side is happy. Then, a couple years into the project, strange things start happening. It’s kind of innocuous at first. Seemingly easy tickets take longer to complete than they used to. The PR change logs get longer and longer. Defect rates skyrocket. Eventually, new feature development grinds to a halt and the product team starts frantically asking, “what the hell is going on?”
A question to which maybe one or two of the more, senior devs respond, "Well, uh, we have a lot of technical debt. I mean A LOT. We’re having to spend tons of time refactoring just to make minor changes. And of course, unplanned refactoring tends to introduce bugs.
The product team gets an expression on their face like Wyle E. Coyote as the shadow of a falling ACME anvil closes in around him. At this moment, they have two choices. Option A.) develop a plan to mitigate the existing tech debt and realign the dev teams objectives to help prevent this situation again by focusing on quality over quantity. Option B.) ignore the problem and try to ram feature development back on track by sheer force of will.
Only one of these options will achieve meaningful outcome and it’s not “B”. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s often the chosen option. The product team does not understand that while Option A impedes feature development, it’s only temporary. Option B impedes feature development permanently.
We’re going to see a very similar cycle with vibe coding. It just takes time to materialize. Personally, I think the tech debt for vibe codes projects will be compounded due to the sheer verbosity of LLM’s and the fact that no one actually understands a vibe coded project well enough to fix it.
That said, these issues are rooted in hubris and ignorance. Failure to appreciate the “engineering” part of software engineering. This is not something you alone can change.
The AI hype is going to disappear. Probably sooner than later. Just like every other tech hype cycle before it. But, LLM’s are probably here to stay so we have to make the best of it. I don’t usually use LLM’s for code generation. There are better tools for that already. I do use them frequently for research. Honestly, using an LLM with search incorporated is often a lot faster than scouring dozens of websites to figure out how to do something. You still have to take the information with a grain of salt as much as you would with anything on the Internet because LLM’s have no understanding of the text they spit out and will feed you incorrect information without missing a beat.
If I were you, I would focus on quality over quantity. Closing tickets faster is pointless if you’re introducing a bunch of new bugs. If your bosses don’t know that already, they will learn it soon enough.
You mean social media in general?
Typically, social media serves one purpose: to make money. This is done primarily in two ways: selling user data and selling advertising. Both of these require user engagement and unfortunately the philosophy of all the major players has been engagement at all costs.
The impact on society at large has been overwhelmingly negative. I could go on at length about the numerous ways I believe social media has been a detriment but that would make for a very long response.
I remember before Facebook started tailoring their algorithms to maximize engagement. Your feed was just in chronological order. It wasn’t too bad. After the first algorithm change – 12ish years ago if I remember right – it started to go downhill very quickly. My feed became extremely negative in a relatively short time. That’s why I ditched Facebook and pretty much every other mainstream social media platform.
So the main problem with mainstream social media is that it’s driven by greed. That has created a whole host of other problems.
If you want to do resource profiling, Visual Studio can do that out of the box.
For simple benchmarking, specifically for seeing how long certain calls take, I just just the Stopwatch class and ouput the result to a log entry. Assuming you’re using C# that is.
If I caught someone, who had already molested my child, in the act of abducting said child, I would probably have done the same thing.
Edit: For anyone who didn’t read the article…
The Wade Knox Children’s Advocacy Center later interviewed the man’s daughter, and authorities obtained a warrant to arrest Fosler for one count of rape and one count of internet stalking of a child – two felonies. Police arrested Fosler, and his bond was set at $50,000. He was released on July 17, 2024.
In October of that year, Heather Spencer, Aaron Spencer’s wife, called 911 to report her daughter missing. She said her bed had been made to look like she was asleep in it, but her daughter was not there.
Aaron Spencer told police he later got into his car to look for Fosler. He spotted his vehicle, a white Ford truck, on the highway with his daughter in the passenger seat. The father then turned his car around and went after the vehicle. He began honking and flashing his lights to get Fosler to stop, court records state.
After following Fosler for 6 miles, Aaron Spencer hit the truck with his car, causing the truck to run into a ditch and strike a wooden entry gate post. Aaron Spencer then got out of his car and started firing a gun at Fosler. He fired 16 times, court records state, noting 15 bullets hit Fosler.
After firing the shots, Aaron Spencer pistol-whipped Fosler in the face, court records state.
The father then called 911 and said, "Michael Fosler is (expletive) dead on the side of the road for trying to kidnap my daughter. I had no choice,
That’s a fair cop.